Zombocalypse Now Page 10
THE END
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113
Billy turns out to be an excellent shot. He grumbles a little at first, but even hanging halfway out of a moving car, he keeps your path clear of zombies as you drive as fast as you can through the city streets. And Prudence has a keen eye. “Um, can I talk to you about something?” she asks. “Turn left ahead.”
You’d rather she didn’t. “I can’t help you with your boyfriend problems,” you say.
“Now make a right,” she continues. “And Billy’s not my boyfriend. He just kind of fixated on me and decided he wanted to bring me to his dad’s creepy bunker. I think he’s harmless, though. No, I wanted to talk to you about religion.”
Of course you do. “So, I’m supposed to marry the Prophet, right? But he’s really old and I’m not sure about it.”
“Please, just watch the road,” you say.
There’s no diverting her. “He might die soon,” she says between driving instructions. “And lately he’s been having all these visions. It’s like, all the stuff I’m interested in is suddenly part of our religion. We’re all supposed to anoint each other with glitter. And there never used to be a sacred unicorn prayer.”
Class act, this prophet of hers. “Do you know what I’m getting at?” Prudence asks. She looks at you and pauses for a moment. “Do you think I might be the new prophet?”
With that, you break free of the zombie throng and the freeway onramp comes into view. You’re definitely going to have to drop these kids off separately. Which direction first?
If you head south first to drop Billy off at his bunker, turn to page 42.
If you head north toward Prudence’s religious compound thing, or whatever it is, turn to page 181.
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114
You see a lone soldier hunkered down behind an overturned jeep, frantically shooting at a group of zombies that have him pinned down. The gunfire is slowing them a bit, but they’re still coming. “Aim for the heads!” you yell. Ernie seems pretty sure that you have to separate a zombie from its brains, either by beheading it or just smashing it up real bad, in order to put it out of commission.
The soldier stops firing for a moment, and you run behind the jeep with him. “Who the hell are you?” he asks.
“It doesn’t matter,” you say. “I’m backup.”
Your new friend offers you an automatic weapon, and you develop a strategy of running up to a zombie, shooting its face all to hell and then running back to cover to check if it has any measurable amount of head left.
“That’s nice thinkin’ there, Rabbit Ears,” the soldier says after you’ve cleared the immediate vicinity. “I’m Velasquez, but the guys call me ‘Frenchie.’ I know, I know. Once you get a nickname around here, it kind of sticks. We should try to find the rest of my unit—actually, why don’t you grab some cammo or something so you fit in a little better?”
You find a jacket and hat inside the jeep, and figure they’ll do the trick. Velasquez just chuckles when he sees you, and once you track down some of his compatriots you find out why. They kick up their heels and salute. “Sir!” one barks. “We’ve lost contact with central command. What are your orders, sir?”
“Yeah, sir,” Velasquez says. “What are your orders?” You decide that a little organization beats a lot of anarchy, so you run with it and, using a similar strategy as before, start attacking small groups of zombies and gathering stray soldiers where you can. It gets ugly, and you lose a lot of good men over the course of the day, but eventually the tide turns. You corral the bulk of the remaining zombies around a munitions tent, where Velasquez tosses in a grenade and blows them all to kingdom come.
Hmm. You could get the hang of this army commander stuff.
It’s dusk by the time you and your platoon (you have no idea if “platoon” is the right term, but whatever) finish clearing the perimeter. Upon returning to the command center, though, you’re in for a shock. The place is packed with zombies. It seems that every living thing inside is not so much alive.
That explains the communications blackout, you suppose. It also puts you in charge. The platoon, grimy and exhausted from fighting all day, looks at you expectantly.
If you tell them that they’re relieved of duty, and to get back home and check on their families, turn to page 193.
If you decide that, exhausted or not, you’re going to march their sorry asses right into town and try to clean this zombie mess, turn to page 242.
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You drive south on the strangely empty freeway until you get to the beach and the surrounding town of pricey restaurants and vacation homes. There are a number of private islands not far off the coast, and you figure that any of them might make a good spot to wait for the whole zombie situation to blow over.
A large crowd is lined up by the marina, and at first you fear that it’s a zombie outbreak. Closer inspection, however, reveals protest signs, folk singers, and plush-covered figures of all shapes and sizes. Oh, no—it’s one of those stuffed animal rights groups. Part of you would rather see the decomposing flesh of the undead.
It’s not that you aren’t bothered by the shortage of positive stuffed animal role models on television, or disagree that Roger Rabbit is an offensive racial stereotype. You just find most of the protester-types insufferable. After all, you can legally marry whomever you want. You don’t have a difficult time finding work. The popular image of stuffed animals as harmless and cuddly may be irritating, but that doesn’t mean that you would compare your “plight” to the civil rights movement or anything. You had hoped to commandeer a small boat and make your way out to sea, but it looks like you’ll have to get through the crowd first. At least you won’t stand out.
As you get out of the car, you see a college-aged stuffed giraffe frantically painting over his carefully-crafted protest banner. It piques your interest. “What’s going on?” you ask.
“Oh,” he replies. “Hey, I’m Josh. We were going to do our usual SA awareness schtick, but these guys were already out here rallying for the rights of Undead Americans. It seemed like a better protest, so we decided to join up with them.”
“Undead what, now?”
A small, middle-aged man with glasses and a jaunty cap approaches. “Undead Americans,” he says proudly. “We’re the regional chapter of the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. And reports of civil rights abuses against this new and little-understood community are nothing short of horrifying.”
His earnestness catches you off guard. “It’s not . . . they’re not . . .” you stutter. “They eat your brain.”
“And no one is disputing that brain eating is wrong. But we already have anti-brain-eating laws on the books. To engage in violence against an entire community because of the actions of a few isolated individuals goes against everything America stands for. It’s genocide.”
Now you’re just confused. “We got word of a sizable Undead American rights march coming this way,” he continues, “and we’re here to show solidarity.” Sure enough, just up the street a mass of zombies approaches, moaning with hunger.
Josh is eagerly unfurling his banner, which now reads, “Genocide = Bad News.” This is going to get ugly, you think.
If you want no part of this and make a run for one of the boats in the marina, turn to page 275.
If you stick around in an effort to convince as many of these well-meaning but horribly deluded protesters as possible to abandon their plans and escape with you, turn to page 120.
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It seems to you that if the undead can smell the toothpaste in a sealed tube inside the glove compartment of your locked car, watering it down a little isn’t going to be an issue.
You contemplate waiting for morning (because, seriously, a wall-to-wall mass of undead is just that much scarier at night), but decide that the zombie plague is only getting worse, and time is of the essence. You drive to a mostly-gutted convenien
ce store you passed on the way in that still has a selection of berry-mango flavored iced teas so foul-tasting that even the looters passed them up. You dump out the contents of one, fill the glass bottle up with water from the restroom, and squeeze in a tiny bit of toothpaste, shaking up the concoction.
“I’m still not sure about this,” Candice worries. “We should test it first.” Glancing outside, you spot a pair of zombies making a beeline for the mini-mart. You open the front door and toss your toothpaste bomb over their heads. “Braaaiiins!” one of them moans excitedly when it hits the pavement and shatters.
Both zombies turn immediately and hurry to the spot with the broken glass, falling to their knees and trying to lick the mixture up from the pavement. Then they start to roll around in it. After a minute, they both fall into some sort of lethargic, grinning trance.
This might work even better than you’d hoped.
You fill up a few dozen bottles and head back to Crogaste, where the undead horde reacts in much the same way. Once they get a whiff of toothpaste water, the entire zombie herd completely ignores the three of you. The most challenging part, in fact, is aiming your cocktails so that the swarming crowd doesn’t impede your progress toward the building. The throng out front finally gets so thick that you can’t even see the entrance, so you go around back and discover the rear hallways to be much more sparsely populated with the living dead.
The second most challenging part is dealing with the stench. Candice leads you through the corridors, which are dripping with blood and zombie goo. “Where to now?” she asks. “We could check out Research and Development or head straight to the top floor where the executive offices are.”
R&D sounds like the place where you could find out what the hell is in this stuff, which for zombies is apparently like crack cocaine. If you check there first, turn to page 164.
On the other hand, we’re talking about something that kills people and then brings them back from the grave, so there might be something a little bigger going on here. If you think you’ll find more answers in the CEO’s office, turn to page 198.
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The protesters raise their signs and banners and start marching directly into the cadaverous embrace of the undead. You grab Josh by the arm and try to very quickly talk some sense into him. “Josh. Dude. This isn’t what you think it is. These zombies are going to kill you all. They’re going to chew on your flesh and either eat your brain or convert you into one of them!” He just looks at you like you’re the most racist, horrible person in the world. “No,” you say, “this isn’t one of those things where you substitute the word ‘Jew’ for the word ‘zombie’ and reveal your dark, subliminal prejudices. They’re a rainbow of different races, sexual orientations and nationalities, but they all died and came back to life with a mindless hunger for the flesh of the living.” You’re not getting through to him. You need to change tactics.
“Also,” you add, “they’re walking, decaying corpses. There are no cute girls there who want to hook up with you.”
“What?” he says, incredulous. “Dude, it’s not about that.” You’ve clearly hurt Josh’s feelings a little. He pauses for a moment. “Really? None?” Taking a closer look at the crowd in front of him, your message starts to sink in. “Oh, my God,” he says. “Those aren’t people, are they?”
Josh drops his banner and starts convincing his group that this march might not be their scene after all. The SA-Human Alliance (or SAHA), never super-committed to Undead American rights to begin with, is fairly easy to divert from the cause. Alas, the ACLU is not so easily swayed.
“It’s not just the rights of . . . ghah,” their leader says, choking a little at the stench of the oncoming crowd. “This is America, and . . .” You don’t have time to argue. The stuffed animals and their allies are fleeing to the marina, and you hurry to join them, risking a glance backward just in time to see the regional chapter of the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union devoured as one by the ravenous zombie tide.
A stuffed pelican in a sea captain’s outfit (really?) has a yacht moored there, so you pile on board and set sail. He knows these waters well and sails to a large private island that features several posh vacation homes. The sheer numbers crowded into the boat make it difficult to pilot, however, and you wind up crashing it on the shoreline. You’ve become castaways.
You make the best of it. The group is eager to work together for the common good, and the island has a fresh water well, and ample room for farming. Decades later, the community is thriving. And out of all the enclaves of humanity that survive the worldwide zombie outbreak, yours is the only one that endures. In a few centuries, every living person on the planet is a descendant of your island community.
Which is to say that they’re all stuffed animals (SAHA had a good number of human members as well, but the demographics of protest groups being what they are, they all turn out to be lesbians). It would be nice to think that an all stuffed animal world would be a more tolerant, more peaceful one, but after generations of re-populating the globe, mankind is still warring, amassing wealth, and doing battle with the darker aspects of its own nature. The planet is more or less the same as the one we know today.
It’s freaking adorable, though.
THE END
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You dip a finger into a hole that has been conveniently gouged in the top of your head and have a taste—sure enough, delicious, mouthwatering brains! What luck! You shamble off to a quiet area away from the crowd and settle down in a nice shady spot under a tree.
There’s still quite a bit of bone up there, but with some effort you manage to break it to pieces and clear most of it away. As you gorge yourself on the delicacy, all the problems of the world seem to melt away. It’s as if with every bite you have less worry, less anger, less despair. You’ve never been so happy and content in your entire life (at least as far as you can remember, which, granted, is less and less). Before long you’re down to one last delectable scoop, and one final snippet of thought before the blissful embrace of blackness finds you once again.
Brrrrrraaaaaaaaiiiinnnn . . . nnnn . . . nn . . . n . . . s . . . .
THE END
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123
The zombies out on the street were crazy about this stuff. You scan the shelves and find a blue, sparkly box labeled “Crogaste Total Complete Extreme Whitening.” That sounds right, you think. And it had better be, because now another bunch of them are approaching from the far end of the aisle.
You squirt a glob of paste at your new attackers, but it doesn’t faze them. Crogaste’s competitor also sells a sparkly-blue branded toothpaste, but the zombies don’t seem to care for that one, either. You start opening any tube you can get your hands on, and in a moment of desperation even try that all-natural stuff from Maine. But none of the zombies show the slightest interest in any of it.
Which is terrible news for you. Maybe you can climb over the shelving and escape to another aisle? Not a bad plan, but your immediate surroundings are now completely covered in fluoridated goo, and you slip and fall while attempting to gain purchase.
Then the zombies are all over you the moment you hit the floor. You never do find out what the deal was with the toothpaste.
THE END
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“We have to bring it home with us!” you say to Ernie.
“That’s just what I was . . . wait, what?” he replies. “Are you sure? It still seems kind of evil to me.”
“It saved our lives, Ernie,” you insist. “At the very least, we owe it the benefit of the doubt.” When you get back to Ernie’s place, you’re pleased to see that the dog has shaken off its limp. You prepare a soft bed of pillows in Ernie’s basement and thaw out a ham from his freezer to offer the dog for supper. It may take some time, but you’re sure you can eventually earn the dog’s trust.
You and Ernie are both exhausted from the day’s activity,
and he’s more than a little wary of the dog, so you compromise, locking the basement up tight for safety. Then you fall asleep thinking about how much easier it’s going to be fighting off zombies with your trusty new companion by your side.
Of course, for a dog that chewed through a steel cage and jumped right through a car windshield, a little basement lock isn’t likely to present much of a problem.
Princess, needless to say, devours you both in the middle of the night.
THE END
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125
Whatever else she may be, this girl’s a zombie, and if the afternoon’s adventure has taught you anything, it’s that people like her eat people like you. And anyway, it doesn’t feel right to go around basing life and death decisions solely on cuteness. Running for your life has worked okay so far, so you stick to the game plan.
You manage to lure your undead neighbor away from the stairwell and climb up to your second-floor apartment, relieved to find the walkway empty. You’re surprised to find something small and fuzzy on your welcome mat, scratching at your apartment door. Good lord, is that a cat?
Sure enough, a tiny, fluffy white kitten, barely bigger than a good-sized cheeseburger, is camped out on your doorstep. “Aw, what are you doing here, little guy?” you coo. It sees you, does a funny little hop, then flops over, rolls over on its back and . . . moans?