Zombocalypse Now Page 16

  You’ve only been battling zombies for a couple of hours, but you’ve certainly never seen anything like this before. What have those monsters done to your poor car? You feel so violated. You flip out more than a little and just let loose with the chainsaw—by the time you’re done, you’ve made something like a zombie salad, and the Toyota now sports a patchwork of saw marks to go along with the rest of the body damage. It still starts like a dream, though. And the missing windows may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, since your car is definitely going to need to air out a little.

  You drive back to the gas station and fill every suitable container you can find with petroleum. Now you’re ready to roll. Part of you wants to keep driving around the city carving up as many zombies as you can, but something tells you that maybe you should take this opportunity to just split town.

  If you think you can do the most good by staying in the city and using your chainsaw to thin the zombie herd, turn to page 160.

  If you decide to hit the open road instead, turn to page 228.

  Back

  189

  You take off down the alley and—miraculously—make it past the undead loiterers unmolested. Alas, the burst of activity doesn’t do much for your delicate constitution. They say that fortune favors the bold, but nobody favors the violently hung over, and right now you just want to curl up and die. Except not literally. Which, unfortunately, is kind of the default option. Then you spot a rusty fire escape ladder that leads up about four stories. Zombies can’t climb, can they? Maybe if you get up to the rooftops, you’ll be safe, at least until you feel well enough to travel. You grab the first rung of the ladder and slowly start to pull yourself up, rung by rung. You’re dizzy but hanging on for dear life.

  You make it about thirty feet. Then you lose your footing, slip off the ladder, and plummet to the ground below. Your legs and back explode in pain as you hit the asphalt. You’re going to die here, you think. At least the zombies seem to have wandered off.

  Unable to move, you look up and see a formation of birds soaring above you in the clear blue sky. They’re majestic, beautiful things, and they give you hope. Not for yourself, but for the world at large. If those birds have escaped the zombie plague, surely there are people out there who did as well. They’ll come and clean all this up before the infestation can spread too far. You might not make it out alive, but humanity will endure. Hey, are those birds getting closer?

  You’re overwhelmed by the stench as the first one lands right on your belly.

  You get eaten by a flock of zombie seagulls.

  THE END

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  190

  “Leave no soldier behind!” you shout at Daryl. “Ramming speed!”

  You’re pretty sure you’ve mixed army and navy references there, but Daryl seems okay with this and puts pedal to metal, crashing through the non-shattered side of the storefront for maximum effect. If this were a movie, the action would freeze right at this moment, and you’d be left with the bittersweet reality that your heroes probably never made it out alive, but the tiniest glimmer of hope in your heart. Fade to black. Roll credits.

  Unfortunately, it’s just a crappy choose-your-own-whatever book. Daryl plows through a whole mess of zombies and crashes into the back wall, throwing your unseatbelted ass right into the truck’s front windshield. The velocity isn’t enough to kill you, but compounded with your earlier injuries, you’re in no shape to battle the undead horde. You make a few sort of pathetic swings with your bat, but if there are any still-living survivors here, you can’t even pick them out, let alone save them. Soon the zombies overwhelm you and have easy access to your brain through your already softened noggin.

  In your head, you pictured that going differently.

  THE END

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  191

  The Haitian Voodoo guy’s business office is in the suburbs on the other end of town, at the end of a long hallway in the back of a liquor store. You knock on the door, and a good-looking man with dreadlocks and a silk shirt unbuttoned to the waist answers.

  He introduces himself as Khenan, taking care to indicate that it’s spelled with an “h” in there somewhere. When you ask him if he knows anything about zombies taking over the city, your host’s eyes grow wide. “Ah, the dead, they rise up from their graves,” he says. “My Jamaican ancestors have many tales of these happenings.”

  Ernie lifts an eyebrow. “Your brochure said you were from Haiti,” he says.

  “Right, my Haitian ancestors,” Khenan continues. “What did I say?” His accent still sounds Jamaican to you. “I can tell you everything I know . . . for a small consultation fee,” he continues, lowering his voice to sound all mysterious and spooky. “The price for piercing the veil that separates the living from the dead is . . . forty dollars.”

  Now you’re certain this guy is a charlatan. “Just pay him,” Ernie says. “It’s the zombie apocalypse out there. What else are you going to spend the forty bucks on, anyway?”

  It’s not the money. It’s the principle. If you refuse to give Khenan a dime, turn to page 108.

  Actually, Ernie might be right. Most of the stores must be looted or filled with zombies by now, and you realize that even if you skip rent entirely at this point, the world probably won’t end any more than it already has. If you fork over the cash, turn to page 174.

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  192

  “Sign me up,” you say. You figure that abuse of government power at this stage will have to take a back seat to fighting the infernal zombie outbreak.

  “Excellent,” the officer says. “Our problem is that nothing we do even gets their attention—their brains no longer seem to be controlling their actions in any meaningful way. We just keep shocking them, and eventually the brains just sort of fry out and they drop dead.”

  “Hmm,” you say. “So what can I do to help?”

  “Well,” he continues, “we’re wondering if we might have more luck with the unique physiology of a stuffed animal.”

  You realize you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake as the guards come and strap you down to an operating table. The last thing you remember is a technician coming at you with a syringe full of something that looks like it was drained from one of the test subjects in the other room.

  You spend your short zombie existence being shocked, prodded, and, occasionally, beaten with sticks.

  THE END

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  193

  “Go home to your wives,” you say. “Or your husbands. Or your life partners, or whatever. I don’t think I’m supposed to ask about that. But things are going to hell out there, and your families need you.” They seem reluctant to abandon their post. “Go, all of you—that’s an order!”

  Your platoon disperses, and Velasquez stops to speak with you on his way out. “Thanks for that,” he says. “You turned out to make an okay lieutenant colonel after all.” Is that what you were? He gives a crisp salute, climbs into a jeep, and leaves with the others.

  Now you’re alone, and you realize that the soldiers have taken all the vehicles with them. “Uh, guys?” you say loudly. Your voice echoes through the base. They’ve taken all of the weaponry as well, from what you can see. Well, your car should still be out there where you parked it. Then you notice a stream of zombies pouring out of the command center, and it dawns on you that you didn’t remember to clean up that particular detail. “Guys!” you repeat, this time shouting as loud as you can. “Wait for me!”

  It’s too late. You’re overwhelmed. The guy who eats you, in a funny twist of fate, was actually a real lieutenant colonel.

  THE END

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  194

  Mittens is sprinting for her car, but before the zombie horses can start after her, you pick up a stray traffic cone and throw it at them. To hell with it, you think. No one lives forever. And if you’re going to die, you’d just as soon die in a blaze of cone-throwing, cop-rescuing glory.

  Ther
e are three more cones surrounding an open manhole cover, and by the time you’ve thrown them all at the zombie horse brigade, you seem to have gotten their attention. Manhole cover? Maybe you’ll be safe if you climb down inside! Before you have a chance, though, the bigger horse bounds after you and plants its front hooves right in the hole, falling spectacularly and throwing its rider forward. It hits you full force, and you tumble to the ground with the zombie cop in a heap on top of you.

  You struggle to keep his gaping maw away from your face—his breath is even worse than your date’s was!—but soon the smaller horse and its rider have joined in, and all looks lost. You’re kind of disappointed with the relative lameness of your final blaze of glory.

  With a sudden, thunderous bang, the zombie cop is blasted away from you. Three more shots follow, and bits of zombie man and animal are splattered everywhere. Granted, now you’re completely covered in undead goo, but you’re still glad to see Mittens standing over you with a sawed-off shotgun. “I have to admit, that was ballsy,” she says, throwing you her coat. You attempt in vain to wipe off some of the gore with it. Ew, it’s in your fur.

  “Maybe I misjudged you,” she says. “What do you say we go lean on the criminal element until we find out what’s going on here?” Lean on the what? Is she living in a 1970s Clint Eastwood movie?

  “Uh, I’m not sure if this really seems like an organized crime thing to me,” you say diplomatically.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Mittens says with a wink. “I’ve got another shotgun. Plus, even if they don’t have anything to do with this mess, if you smack ’em hard enough, they always confess to something.” You’re not sure how you feel about the look in her eyes when she says that—it’s something bordering on glee. On the other hand, its not like you’re bursting with ideas yourself, and she is offering firepower.

  If you suspect that Mittens is a little off her rocker and let her go break criminal kneecaps on her own, turn to page 265.

  If you decide that running with an insane police officer is a fair trade for getting your hands on a sawed-off shotgun, turn to page 52.

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  196

  If the people on those reality shows can eat live dung beetles and flatworms, then you can do this, since it might just save your life. It’s rough, but you do it. Isabelle follows suit, along with a few of the others, although most of them don’t even want to get near the concoction.

  “Look out the windows!” Daryl says, entering the room. “Dude, I am not eating that. Seriously, though, hella zombies.” You peer outside and sure enough, the street is packed with them. Your decision to collapse the stairs appears to have been a good one. You wish you could say the same thing about your breakfast choice. Suddenly, you feel a sharp pain in your belly, and double over in pain.

  “I told you.” Daryl says. “That organic stuff is nasty. Check it out, though. I made explosives from all that fertilizer! And I think it’s time we take care of those zombies once and for all.”

  You try to get up, but immediately collapse again from the pain. “No,” you grunt as comprehensibly as possible. “Escape . . . roof . . .” It’s no use. Daryl has assumed command. You notice that Isabelle and the other stew-eaters are faring as badly as you are, and catch snippets of Daryl rallying his troops as you fade in and out of consciousness. At one point you hear him explaining that zombies can be killed efficiently with silver bullets or garlic. Then he’s giving demonstrations on how to light a Molotov cocktail.

  The next time you come around, needless to say, the room is filled with black smoke and you see flames enveloping the hallway. You’re not even sure if they’ve started fighting any zombies yet, but Daryl’s minions all seem to be running around screaming. You try to pull yourself to your feet, but it’s no use. You were planning to get to the roof and try to cross over to the next building, and you hope maybe some of the group has enough sense to think of this on their own. If the fire hasn’t spread too far yet . . . wait a minute. Fire? Didn’t Daryl say something about explosives?

  Sure enough, the blast kills you instantaneously, along with the rest of the folks you’ve worked so hard to keep alive. At least you managed to avoid the eternal damnation of wandering the earth as a half-dead animated corpse by exploding.

  The rest of the world, however, is doomed.

  THE END

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  198

  You almost change your mind once you discover the elevators are out and the executive offices are way up on floor fourteen. In fact, Candice and Ernie make a compelling case for stopping at the R&D department as you pass it on floor six. But your gut tells you that whatever’s going on here goes straight to the top. Eight floors later, you emerge from the stairwell into complete darkness, panting. The light switch does nothing, but eventually your eyes adjust to the dim glow coming from a computer screensaver in the large, open reception area. You jiggle the mouse, and a bright white spreadsheet comes up, providing a little more illumination.

  Suddenly a shrill voice cuts through the darkness. “Who’s there?” it barks from an adjoining office. “The stairs are forbidden! The fourteenth floor is forbidden! The speaker phone commands and you obey!”

  “Gary?” Candice ventures, peeking into the open office door. “I think that’s Gary, our CEO,” she says quietly. The voice continues ranting, reciting a list of more things that are forbidden, including asking the speaker phone questions and making personal calls on company time. “He’s not usually frothing at the mouth like that,” Candice adds.

  Frothing or not, it’s time to get some answers. You storm into Gary’s office with Candice and Ernie right behind. The switch here functions properly, flooding the office with harsh fluorescent light and sending a small, haggard-looking man scurrying under the desk with a shriek. “Relax, pal,” you say, more exasperated than reassuring. “We’re not going to eat you.”

  “Gary, what happened here?” Candice starts, not waiting for her boss to emerge from his hiding place. “It’s the new paste, isn’t it? It’s the Total Complete Extreme Whitening Plus.”

  Gary’s voice comes from beneath the desk in a whisper. “We did too much. The smartening crystals passed ADA testing by themselves, but when we added them to Total Complete Extreme Whitening, something went wrong.” He pauses, whimpering. “Tartar control. Baking soda. Whitening. Minterfresh gel. A single toothpaste was never meant to do so much. We touched the sun, Candice. We played God.”

  “What’s in the smartening crystals?” Ernie asks, his voice steely. You realize that to your friend this isn’t some random, bizarre turn of events. The world ending due to reckless actions of an evil toothpaste conglomerate is exactly the sort of thing he’s always assumed would happen.

  “What? Oh, mostly ground-up animal brains. A lot of dog and cat, I think. We get them in bulk from rendering plants.” He quickly returns to his ranting. “It’s the tower of Babel! We built it too high! The speaker phone commands and you obey!”

  Candice turns white, no doubt thinking of potentially brushing her teeth with ground up animal brains. “Gary is still alive,” she says, “so there might be some research people holed up somewhere, too. If we rescue them, maybe they can help us figure out how to reverse this.”

  “I don’t know,” Ernie says. “If they’re as far gone as he is, I can’t imagine they’ll be too much help. I’d like to get on Gary’s computer and see what I can find out for myself.”

  “Uh, no offense,” Candice says, “but it’s not like you have a chemical engineering degree. And while we sit here waiting for you to come up with another one of your intricate theories, zombies could be eating all the people who do.”

  “I’ve spent my life studying the poisonous effects of your products!” Ernie counters, his voice rising. “You’re part of the problem! Your part of the machine! You people did this!”

  “All right, calm down,” you interject. “Fighting isn’t going to get us anywhere.” You’d better step in and decide what to do next be
fore one of these two throws a punch.

  Time may be of the essence. If you follow Candice’s advice and seek help from qualified professionals, turn to page 222.

  On the other hand, your friend hasn’t let you down yet. If you decide to let Ernie have a crack at it, turn to page 48.

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  201

  Wow, you’re quite the hero, aren’t you? You peel out and leave the two of them to their fate, be it peaceful reconciliation, zombie infection, or murder-suicide. Actually, you immediately start to feel guilty about those last two possibilities.

  That guilt quickly turns to panic when you rear windshield shatters and you realize that Billy is shooting at you. His next shot takes out a tire, and your car swerves off the road, overturning itself into a ditch.

  Then it explodes.

  As for Prudence, she makes the carefully-considered decision that life in an underground bunker with Billy is probably better than no life at all, and over the next couple of days they manage to get to Billy’s place on foot. His folks turn out to be decent folks and take her in, keeping her safe from the undead and from Billy’s unwelcome advances as well. The whole clan survives for decades in the post-zombocalyptic wasteland to come.

  You, on the other hand, die in about seven seconds in the burning wreckage of your own shame.

  THE END

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  202

  “I know these people are friends of yours,” you tell Candice. “We’ll get them through this, somehow.”