Zombocalypse Now Page 14

  On the other hand, that plan might be dangerous. And, you think as you look back at your wide-eyed followers, possibly way too complicated.

  Supplies from the market could prove invaluable. If you try to acquire them, turn to page 110.

  Then again, the gang has proven worse than useless so far. If trusting them to carry out part of any plan sounds like a bad idea, turn to page 13.

  Back

  164

  Since the elevators are out of service, Candice leads you up six flights of stairs to the floor where the research department works. Out of breath, you push open the door from the stairwell and are surprised to see a woman in a lab coat sitting on the floor disassembling an office chair. Not nearly as surprised as she is to see you, however. She looks up, leaps to her feet, and runs screaming down the hall.

  “Wait!” you yell after her. “We’re not zombies!” You see a speaker phone propped up on a filing cabinet with office supplies arranged around it in what appears to be some sort of shrine. A moment later the woman returns with several other technicians, one of whom is a man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a clipboard. You start to explain that you know about the toothpaste, but they are unwilling or unable to listen to you.

  “There is no toothpaste!” the clipboard guy shouts, as much to the heavens as to you. “The Voice is mighty and commands all! Lionel! Prepare the sandwiches!”

  “Don’t touch me!” Lionel yells back from the other room. “I can’t feel my skin!”

  Things seem to have deteriorated rapidly on the sixth floor. The clipboard guy spouts some more gibberish of a vaguely threatening nature, but you’ve been fighting zombies all day, so a handful of geeks in lab coats doesn’t seem terribly intimidating at this point. You search for a computer that might contain some relevant information, but the offices nearby are in shambles. All the computers seem to be unplugged and stacked up in the main hallway, built into a rudimentary fort.

  Candice walks toward the speaker phone shrine. “Maybe the office intercom system is still working,” she says, reaching for the handset.

  “No!” Clipboard Guy screams. “Do not disturb the Voice! Its wrath is infinite! It will kill us all! Stop them!”

  A few more lab-coated crazies rush into the room. What are they going to do, science you to death? They’re followed by several more, then about a dozen, and then a whole slew. You notice that a couple of them are carrying long pikes with the impaled heads of their enemies, and realize with a shock that you’ve made a horrible mistake. The scientists wash over you, beating you to death with keyboards, flat screen monitors, the aforementioned head-pikes, and their bare hands.

  You did not see that coming.

  THE END

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  166

  It’s possible that this horrific nightmare is not bringing out the best in you. You feel guilty, but step on the accelerator and keep driving. If these are the end times, then it’s every man, woman, and stuffed bunny for him- or herself. Directly in front of you is more zombie insanity, so you hang a right, hoping to find an easier route. Just as you peel around the corner, a woman steps in front of your car, holding out one hand like a traffic cop. You screech to a halt, and before you know it, she’s opening the driver’s side door.

  “I’m a police officer,” she says, “and I’m commandeering this vehicle.” You start to protest, but she grabs you by the collar and pulls you unceremoniously out of your seat, dumping you on the pavement, where you smack your left knee hard on the curb. You roll over and open your eyes, watching the woman drive off in your car.

  What the hell just happened?

  You stumble to your feet, but your knee goes out and you collapse in pain. Yowtch! You think it’s broken. To make matters worse, up walks the young couple from the previous block whom you abandoned to meet whatever fate awaited them.

  That fate, apparently, was to be bitten, die, and rise from the dead as flesh-hungry zombies in the two minutes it took you to lose your car and bust your leg. You desperately try to crawl away, but it’s too late.

  Karma’s a bitch.

  THE END

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  167

  Well, fortune favors the bold, they say. Hopefully also the stupid. You grab a baseball bat, a rollerblading helmet, and a full set of football pads and get ready to make the plunge. Daryl is decked out in an umpire’s uniform and is wielding what appears to be a kayak paddle with a hunting knife duct-taped to it. There are no other volunteers.

  You light one last Pall Mall and toss the rest of the pack to the woman in the pink track suit. You have a hunch she’ll be needing them more than you will.

  “Lock up behind us!” you bark as you throw open the door, immediately bashing in the head of the zombie that was pressed up against it. Daryl follows right behind, screaming like a banshee. The first few zombies fall to your well-placed blows, but now you have the crowd’s full attention. They swarm around you, making it difficult to swing your bat properly, and you feel clammy hands grabbing at you all over. This isn’t working! “Retreat!” you yell. “Back to the store!”

  “No!” Daryl shouts back. “The queen! That’s her! Look!”

  You can’t see where Daryl’s pointing, but you glance over your shoulder and the wall of zombies behind you now seems as impenetrable as the one in front. Should you turn around? Or could there be something to Daryl’s harebrained theory after all?

  If you attempt to retreat to the relative safety of the store, turn to page 58.

  If you follow Daryl’s lead and press on to the theoretical zombie queen, turn to page 177.

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  168

  If you’ve learned one thing over the past months, it’s that the soulless, drooling creature in front of you is not Phillip. You won’t let your grief twist you into a mockery of the stuffed rabbit you once were. First you decapitate your former assistant and give his remains a proper burial. After that, you set about leveling the place you’ve come to call home.

  You don’t want any of your subjects to escape, so you board up all the windows, and after spreading kerosene liberally throughout the house and environs, you carefully lead the zombies inside and up to the second floor. When the house burns, they’ll burn with it. Smitty is the last of them—you stare into his big, empty eyes, and somehow you can hardly bring yourself to say goodbye. You’re overcome with emotion and rush to give him a big, parting hug.

  Smitty, it goes without saying, bites you on the head.

  You feel the life draining out of you. No! You’ve got to finish here before it’s too late! You stumble back down the stairs, where you’ve left some kerosene soaked rags. You manage to get one lit and throw it onto the wall, which goes up in flames. Your vision is fading, and there’s no time to finish the arson properly, but with time it should spread throughout the mansion on its own.

  Alas, you hear moans coming from the stairs. You didn’t get the door shut before Smitty bit you—the zombies are escaping! With your dying breath, you throw yourself at them, hoping this last meal will keep them busy long enough for the flames to do their work.

  It works like a charm.

  THE END

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  169

  “Okay, Daryl,” you say. “Take the ice cream truck. We’ll get to the bus and follow you. Try to find a route that’s as clear as possible, and drive slowly so we don’t fall behind, okay?”

  That shouldn’t be too complicated, right? You herd your crew to the vehicle, pile on board, and start the thing up. It takes you a few moments to master driving the enormous thing, and while you’re doing this, Daryl zooms off in the ice cream truck at full speed. He takes a left at the signal ahead and disappears.

  You never see him again.

  The bus handles like a pregnant whale, and it doesn’t help that you have jittery, confused passengers shouting at you while you try to steer. It takes all of your concentration to maneuver around the undead that are now filling the streets. One of the passengers asks
you for a transfer, and suddenly you plow right into a zombie pedestrian, smooshing it like a cockroach. At first you think head-on collision might be a reasonable way to kill the things, but it gets caught up in your wheel well, and the bus screeches to a halt, careening onto the sidewalk and tipping over on its side.

  Your passengers are in various states of disarray, and in moments the zombies start forcing their way through the shattered windshield. You don’t actually witness this, since you hit your head hard when the bus toppled over, which killed you on the spot.

  You’re one of the lucky ones.

  THE END

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  170

  You know what? To hell with this place. From Clarence’s story it sounds like everybody in there is a zombie by now, anyway, and who knows what’s getting into the water supply? Better that the city has no running water than running water fortified with the living dead. You help Ernie wire up the plant, and for the record, your friend has all kinds of crazy stuff in that bag of his. Plastic explosives? Dynamite? A hand grenade? Where does he even get this stuff?

  You’re just finishing up the job when you hear shouting behind you. You turn to see Clarence, his co-worker, and four police officers with their guns drawn. “Step away from the detonators and lie face down on the ground,” one of them yells in a voice halfway between an authoritative bark and a panicked squeal. “Don’t make us shoot you!”

  You do as you’re told. “Believe it or not, there’s a reasonable explanation for all this,” you say as they handcuff you.

  “The fluoride is turning everyone into zombies!” Ernie hollers. “We have to blow it all up before it’s too late!”

  Sigh. “Just get in the car, Ernie,” you say. When he says it like that, it does sound pretty crazy. You resign yourself to a long stay in a nice, secure jail cell, which actually might not be the worst place to wait out the zombie apocalypse.

  Unfortunately, you never make it that far. The cop car runs into a mob of undead on the way back to the station and winds up flipped over on its top, leaving you handcuffed, upside down, and helpless when the zombies start crawling through the shattered windows and into the back seat.

  Rough day.

  THE END

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  171

  Your monkey wrench should be reasonably effective for cracking zombie heads, but those soldiers have guns. You’re not sure what you’re going to be able to do for them that they can’t do for themselves.

  You drive to the spot where Ernie’s notes tell you to cut through the fence and put your bolt cutters to use. This area seems a lot calmer, at least. On foot now, you come across a small mound of gore on the pavement, which upon further inspection turns out to be the decapitated head of a soldier with its brains unceremoniously scooped out. You immediately regret inspecting the small mound of gore.

  Not far from that spot you find the rest of the soldier’s body. This supports Ernie’s theory that a zombie victim only becomes a zombie himself if he retains his head and/or brains (it’s nice to have confirmation, since you suspect that most of Ernie’s theories are based on pure speculation).

  You also notice that the soldier’s clothes are surprisingly blood-free, which gives you an idea.

  If you put on the dead soldier’s uniform to blend in better while searching the base, turn to page 60.

  If that sounds morbid and creepy, so you just take his gun, turn to page 29.

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  172

  You scootch the thing out of your way, hurry inside, and lock the door tight behind you. Ah, home sweet home. After some leftover pizza, a nice cold beer, and about three showers, though, you get to thinking. Even if you bust open the canned goods way in the back of the cupboard and the legacy ramen, you don’t have enough food here to last more than a few days. And you can drink tap water, but with zombies filling up the city, how safe will that remain? One of them could have fallen in the reservoir already, for all you know. Now it’s getting dark, and you’re getting paranoid. Can you afford to just wait here and hope the zombie situation blows over? And is that undead kitten still sitting on your doormat? Waiting for you? You crack open the front door and poke your head outside.

  That’s when you see your neighbors, all 30 or 40 of them, drooling away and stumbling toward you.

  Of course! You left the two most irresistible zombie traps conceivable roaming free out there—whatever hapless victims the super hot zombie siren didn’t lure in, the adorable zombie kitten must have picked up on the rebound. Now the building is lousy with undead. And they know where you live.

  Terrified, you slam the door, turn out the lights and hide in your bedroom closet, but you can still hear them trying to force their way inside. It won’t be long before they manage to break through the glass window. You try in vain to prepare for the inevitable, but the only thing you come up with to use as a weapon is a plastic video game guitar peripheral.

  Needless to say, it’s not enough.

  THE END

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  173

  You come to your senses and can’t believe you were considering even getting out of your car. What are you, nuts? Is the madness around you driving you out of your freaking mind? Those things are the living dead. You don’t dick around with stuff like that.

  You turn the car around and start looking for the best route out of town. On the very next block, though, you spot a young, unkempt-looking couple trying to make their way through the zombie pandemonium. The boy sees you and sticks out his thumb in a kind of desperate little hitchhiking gesture.

  Maybe you should stop and pick them up.

  A zombie apocalypse means we all have to pull together and watch each other’s backs. If you stop your car and tell the kids to jump in, turn to page 84.

  Are you kidding? You’re not slowing down for anything! What if a zombie climbs into your car? What if these kids are already infected? You’re freaking the crap out, and this is no time for compassion. If you ignore them and just keep on driving, turn to page 166.

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  174

  Khenan takes your money and slips it into his pocket. “The first zombies were created in Zimbabwe, many hundreds of years ago,” he starts. “These zimbabwies were gentle creatures who spent their days . . . baking. And weaving. They were phenomenal weavers.” You don’t know how much of this you can sit through.

  “Um, what if we just look through your library?” Ernie asks, picking up a dusty leather tome that winds up being titled How to Pick Up Hippie Chicks by Pretending You Like Aromatherapy. “Or can you skip to the part about how to kill them?”

  Khenan explains that to undo the spell animating a zombie corpse, you pour salt in its mouth, sew the mouth shut with a needle and thread, and light white candles in a circle around it. “That’s if it’s inactive,” he adds. “If it’s already active, you also have to strangle it.”

  “You know,” Ernie says, “that actually sounds right to me. I think maybe I read it in a book somewhere.”

  The ingredients aren’t included in the forty-dollar consultation fee, and zombie apocalypse or not, there’s no way on earth you’re giving this guy your credit card number. After eventually settling on a price, you open the door to discover a zombie waiting patiently in Khenan’s front hallway. The perfect chance to try your new ultimate zombie fighting technique?

  My new ultimate zombie fighting technique is unstoppable! If you attempt the whole business with the sewing and the candles, turn to page 79.

  If you just hit it over the head with something heavy instead (the aromatherapy book presents itself as a viable option), turn to page 187.

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  175

  “Throw me the mop!” you yell. The old lady tosses something long and green out the window and it clatters to the ground at your feet. It turns out that by “mop,” she actually means “Swiffer Sweeper.” The thing weighs all of a pound and a half. It’s too late to do anything about it now, though, since the zombies are right on top
of you. You pick it up and use it to smack an undead construction worker who’s just about to grab you by the head.

  The sweeper snaps in two. You desperately try to poke your attacker with the sharp point of the broken rod, but it doesn’t deter him in the slightest. More hands are grabbing you from behind now. Then come the teeth.

  “Oh, dear,” you hear, just as everything fades to black.

  “Do you want me to throw you the hammer?”

  THE END

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  176

  First things first. “They could zombify thousands of people in days,” you say. “Fat Jimmy can wait. We need to take care of these morons now.”

  The morons in question don’t take criticism particularly well, and draw their guns. Mittens dives behind a steel drum (which may or may not be filled with zombie pus) and when they open fire, she fires back. You duck behind a pile of junk, but by the time you get your bearings, the shooting has stopped and hoodlum insides are splattered all over the place.

  “Now for the asking questions part,” Mittens says, seeing your slightly terrified expression. “That was a joke. Hopefully, they haven’t put their idiotic scheme into action yet, and the pills haven’t hit the streets. You want to help me set fire to this stuff?” Before you have a chance to start, however, you hear sirens on the street. “Crap!” she swears.