Zombocalypse Now Read online

  You did good work out there last night, rescuing helpless survivors and putting an end to countless abominations. With any luck, some brave soul will saunter by and do the same for you.

  THE END

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  152

  You’re sick of running, so you grab the rifle and a box of bullets conveniently left on the shelf beneath it and march right back into town to kick some zombie ass.

  Actually, you’ve already been marching all day, and it’ll be dark by the time you get back if you leave now. So you take a nice, hot bath, get some sleep on a surprisingly comfortable bed, wake up the next morning around eleven, cook up some sausages for breakfast, and then march right back into town to kick some zombie ass.

  When you get there, you discover that the suburbs are completely overrun. That’s okay—this time you’re ready for them! You load your rifle, take careful aim at an approaching zombie, fire . . . and miss. Hmm. You try again, and miss again. You’ve never shot a rifle before. It’s hard! Now the thing is almost upon you, and you reload frantically, this time nailing it right in the chest. Direct hit!

  It doesn’t even slow down. A zombie won’t fall unless you completely debrain it, and that would be tricky to do with a hunting rifle at any kind of distance even if you were a decent shot. You finally take the thing out by ramming your barrel into its mouth and firing right up into its skull, but now you’re surrounded and resort to using your gun as a makeshift club. You take down more zombies by pummeling them than you did by shooting them, but it’s a losing battle. There are too many to fight. Good effort, though.

  THE END

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  153

  The dead rising from their graves is spooky stuff. There’s got to be something more going on here than government conspiracies and fluoridation.

  After a few hours of digging through files (internet service is down, but Ernie has the slightly terrifying habit of obsessively printing hard copies of everything), no freaky cults turn up with more zombie connections than garden variety Christianity, which worships a guy who came back from the dead after three days, and seems fairly confident that everyone else will rise from their graves at some point for the second coming. Catholics, in fact, have vampires as well as zombies, since they also teach that sacramental wine literally turns into Christ blood while you drink it.

  Ernie does, however, come up with a couple of non-Jesus related leads that he thinks sound promising. One is a well-documented case a few years back of a little girl whose dead dog returned to life after being buried in a pet cemetery on ancient Indian holy land. Ernie’s definition of “well-documented” is less strict than yours, but the undead zombie dog could be patient zero in the current infestation. The other lead is a local Haitian voodoo expert who seems to spend a lot of time trying to pick up girls on alternative medicine message boards. His brochure has a mention of the voodoo zombie tradition—perhaps he’ll have insight into whatever’s going on.

  If you try to track down the voodoo guy and hope he can shed some light on this zombie apocalypse, turn to page 191.

  If you decide to investigate the resurrected dog and pet cemetery, turn to page 227.

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  154

  You give the command. Most of the survivors come willingly, since at this point they’re frazzled and eager to have someone tell them what to do. There is some resistance, however. “You can’t do this!” one man screams, spitting at the soldiers who are trying to get him inside a transport. “I have rights! If you take away our humanity, the zombies have already won!”

  What? “They’re not terrorists,” you say. “They’re not fighting us because they hate freedom. They’re fighting us because our brains taste delicious. If the zombies win, there is no more humanity. Now get in the damn truck!”

  Over the coming days you round up everyone you can find and start to focus on the important task of actually fighting zombies. At first you let the civilians come and go as they please, but mostly they go, making things just as chaotic as before you started rounding them up. So you’re forced to lock them up for their own good. Soon managing the prison turns into a full-time job in itself, and you have to start splitting your manpower between zombie fighting and prison guarding. There are grumblings among your men about the way you’re handling things, and finally, with the help of some renegade soldiers (et tu, Velasquez?), the prisoners organize a breakout.

  Unfortunately for you, their plan hinges upon killing you in your sleep. The civilians battle their way through the remainder of the platoon and secure their freedom.

  Then zombies come and eat them. You really made a mess of that one.

  THE END

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  155

  “Leeeeeroy Jeeeenkins!” you yell, throwing yourself into the fray. You saw this on the internet once, and never thought you’d get the chance to do it in real life. Your tire iron connects with the first zombie’s head and the thing splits like a cantaloupe. Two more zombies are right behind it, but fall to your wild, flailing, automotive repair-style fury.

  As a fourth abomination shambles up, you feel clammy hands grabbing you from behind. You quickly turn and shove the zombie away, but by then more have swarmed around you. They grab at both your arms, making it impossible to swing your weapon. More undead hands grasp at your legs, and suddenly you’re being lifted off the ground.

  You get torn apart and devoured by zombies, somehow managing to stay alive through a considerable portion of it. The pain is excruciating.

  What did you think was going to happen?

  THE END

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  156

  You scan the driveways and spot a brand new sports car halfway down the street. Aha! You walk up to the house’s front door and knock loudly. “Uh, zombie exterminator!” you holler. No response, and the door is locked. You pick up a big rock on the porch, thinking that it might be one of those fake things that hides a spare key. But it’s just a rock.

  So you toss it through the bay window. What the hell—it’s the end of the world, right? As you carefully kick shards of glass out of the way and step inside, the stench hits you immediately. Whoops. Right in front of you, on the kitchen counter, you see a set of car keys. Unfortunately, while walking over to grab them, you get a full view of the kitchen.

  Sitting on the floor is an 8-year-old girl, staring at you with blank white eyes and gnawing on what appears to be the remains of her family. You’re not proud of it, but your first reaction is to scream like a small child. Your second (and slightly more productive) reaction is to snatch the car keys and dash out the front door.

  You jump in the car and drive like a meth-adddled long-haul trucker, making it to the freeway before your heart even stops pounding. Now you’ve got a straightforward decision to make: northbound or southbound?

  You’re about an hour and a half from a major metropolitan area. If you head north toward the big city, turn to page 83.

  The city might have more resources to deal with a zombie outbreak, but then again, it might just have more zombies. If you head south toward the ocean instead, turn to page 116.

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  157

  You march your group away from the town center, hoping to find somewhere slightly less infested with undead to hole up for the night. Unfortunately, you run into a pack of zombies on the very next block. You backtrack to an intersection, but now the market zombies have caught up, and even more are approaching from the cross street. You’re completely surrounded!

  Daryl shouts out a battle cry that you think is probably from the movie 300, and the rest of the group manages a surprisingly valiant fight to the death, with some being infected and joining the horde’s numbers, and others just being consumed outright. As for you, a small nibble on your left ear is enough to do the trick, and you wind up zombified and wandering off after the commotion dies down on the search for brains, brains, brains.

  In the coming years, zombies cover the entire planet. Scattered pockets of h
umanity survive the initial outbreak, but in time all of these are compromised by the undead, turn on themselves, or just plain descend into madness. Eventually, the plague runs its course. With tasty human brains gone, the zombies grow lethargic, and various infected animals never develop the same level of voraciousness as their human counterparts did. In time, the zombie masses just rot away.

  The planet survives, although humankind has gone the way of the dinosaur. Millions of years later the dolphins give it a solid effort, but their apocalypse winds up being even crazier.

  THE END

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  158

  “You tell her,” Daryl says.

  “I’m not going to tell her,” you mutter back. “You tell her.” Daryl just shakes his head. “Alright,” you sigh. “Let’s go back to the freaking zombie polar bears.”

  You drop the young mother at the stadium gates and stumble back to your ice cream truck. Daryl is clearly as tired as you are, because as you get back into the thick of things, he’s running over more zombies than he’s avoiding. Still, with all the spikes and armor plating, the truck has been transformed into the ultimate zombie smashing monster jam, so perhaps this approach works just as well.

  You bash your way through zombie after zombie, but before you get anywhere near the zoo, something unseen pummels your truck, breaking the windshield. White smoke comes billowing out from under the hood, and the engine starts making a high-pitched squeal. Now you can’t even see the road.

  “We have to abandon ship!” you yell. “Maybe we can find shelter out there somewhere!”

  “No,” Daryl says, strangely calm. “We were never getting back from this one alive, anyway.” His eyes are peeled open wide, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Now it’s about taking as many of those sons of bitches with us as we possibly can.”

  He’s right. If you’re going to die, you’re going to die fighting. If you buckle in for one last suicide run, turn to page 216.

  He’s wrong! If you’re going to die, you’re going to die hiding! If you bail out now and pray that you find somewhere safe to hunker down, turn to page 151.

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  159

  Your journey to the gated community is fraught with peril, but with every fallen enemy your confidence swells. You are a warrior. And the geekweapon hungers for the fetid flesh of the zombie masses. This is fortunate, because the zombie masses seem to be growing exponentially. By the time you reach the main entrance, there’s an army of undead behind you, and some guy armed with a taser stands at the gate. Though you doubt the zombies would even notice 25,000 volts coursing through their already-dead carcasses.

  “St . . . Stay back!” he stutters. “There’s a lot of unsavory characters hanging around, and we don’t want any part of that business in Pleasantvalley Hills!”

  “They’re not ‘unsavory characters,’ ” you insist. “They’re the living dead. And that taser is useless against them. If you let me in, I can help you fight them off!”

  “I’m the captain of the neighborhood watch!” he squeals, apparently unconvinced. “You and your friends just go back where you came from!”

  “The situation is dire,” you say, raising the geekweapon above your head. Time for an inspirational monologue. “This is the moment of truth! Together, we can fight the invasion and keep Pleasantvalley Hills safe. Together we can—”

  Aaaaaand he tases you. You had several strategies worked out for fending off the approaching zombie horde, but flopping around on the ground unable to control your extremities was not one of them. They make short work of you.

  Needless to say, after that the captain of the Pleasantvalley Hills neighborhood watch is on his own.

  THE END

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  160

  You’ve got a chainsaw and what’s left of a Toyota Celica—not the ideal makings of a big damn zombie apocalypse action hero, but nevertheless you figure you’ll stick around and do what you can to rid your city of the slouching dead. It may be a fool’s errand, but you feel that you need to do what you can.

  And you know what else you need? A freakin’ cigarette. You swipe a pack from the gas station convenience store—although you’ve held off on smoking since this whole undead business started, at this point, why not? After everything you’ve seen today, lung cancer is actually one of the more pleasant ways you can think of to die.

  Alas, one of the least pleasant is still going up in an enormous ball of flame, and a lit match plus all the gasoline you’ve been slopping around for the last half hour equals bad news all around. Seriously, the resulting mushroom cloud consumes you, your car and most of the gas station before you even get your cigarette lit.

  Mom always said those things would kill you.

  THE END

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  161

  You thank Billy for his offer, but decide that holing up for who knows how long with a group of survivalists doesn’t sound like your cup of tea. His dad is kind enough to let you lock yourself in his garage for the night, however, and gas up from his fuel stockpile. By the time morning rolls around, he and Billy have disappeared, hidden away somewhere underground.

  You take the scenic route on the way to Ernie’s place, doubling back again and again as you run into groups of undead. It’s late in the day when you finally arrive, but the suburbs around his house seem zombie-free. Maybe the outbreak isn’t so bad after all.

  Ernie is thrilled to see you and clearly hasn’t slept in a week (which is curious, since the business with the zombies didn’t start until yesterday). “I have some theories,” he says. “All day yesterday, I was sure it was fluoride. That’s crazy, though, right? Fluoride is terrifying stuff, but after going over and over it in my head, I don’t think it could turn people into zombies.”

  Oh, Ernie. “I agree,” you say. “The culprit is probably not fluoride.”

  “That leaves the military/industrial complex and magical forces beyond our understanding,” he continues. “I think they’re both worth looking into. What do you think we should focus on first?”

  Magical forces. Why not? If you tell Ernie you think it’s probably evil witchcraft, turn to page 153.

  Then again, maybe with Ernie’s help you can find some real answers, and Big Brother sounds like a good place to start. If you tell Ernie you want to look into the government conspiracy angle, turn to page 90.

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  162

  “I think he’s full of crap, too,” you say. “Catholic church or not, something here doesn’t add up.” Mittens agrees and starts poking around Fat Jimmy’s office. As she fiddles with a curtain that obscures a large portion of the back wall, Jimmy starts becoming noticeably upset.

  “What’s this?” she asks, pulling the curtain down to reveal a locked door. “You got a key to this thing, Jimmy?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with you!” the mobster stutters. “You just stay out of there.”

  “Bingo,” Mittens smiles. Inside is a large room with wood paneling and a group of mannequins in cheesy ’70s attire. Wait a minute . . . four blond female figures and four dark-haired males of various ages. Suddenly you recognize the room, and the family that goes with it. Is this the freaking Brady Bunch? The only thing missing is a ninth mannequin dressed up as . . .

  Sure enough, a large, powder blue maid’s outfit is hung up on the wall. “What the hell, Jimmy?” Mittens says, astounded. “You dress yourself up like Alice?” His face turns crimson with rage, but Mittens just laughs. “We don’t care about any of this,” she says. “Jesus, we thought you had zombies in here or something.”

  “I told you to leave it alone!” Jimmy yells, producing a handgun from somewhere and firing before Mittens knows what hits her. He keeps pulling the trigger until his clip is empty, and you and Mittens both fall to the ground with a thud.

  “It’s okay Jan, Marcia, Bobby,” you hear Fat Jimmy weeping softly to himself as you lose consciousness. “Alice will take care of you.”

  THE END


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  163

  The downtown farmer’s market is only twenty minutes away on foot, so getting the crowd there will be a lot easier than trying to find a way to haul them across town to the sporting goods store. Nevertheless, the group starts to complain about the walk almost immediately. In addition, a spirited discussion breaks out about the zombies being a plot by Republicans and Democrats to wipe out librarians (you assume they mean Libertarians, although this still makes almost no sense). The conspiracy gibberish actually reminds you of your friend Ernie, who has always suspected that a global meltdown or paranormal apocalypse was only moments away.

  Come to think of it, Ernie might be a good person to consult with in a situation like this. You check your cell phone, but service has been down since you left the restaurant.

  After the second longest twenty minutes of your life (still not as awful as that blind date at the bowling alley), you reach the market. Alas, the zombies beat you to it, and a dozen of them are roaming the otherwise abandoned stalls. It seems a shame to pass on all the fresh food and various sundries—perhaps you can create a distraction to draw them away while your wards raid the market for supplies.