Zombocalypse Now Read online

  “Meh,” she replies. “I don’t really hang around with the lab folks. Still, we should try to keep them alive, I guess.” With that ringing endorsement of your humanitarian efforts, you set off toward the toothpaste factory. There are far too many in your group to squeeze into your poor, battered Toyota, so you’re forced to hoof it. The long march does give Ernie ample time to pore over printouts he made of the toothpaste manufacturing process.

  You discover that even though the Crogaste Crazies are pretty removed from reality—you have to wave the speakerphone around in the air in order to get them to do anything—they can be directed to carry out small tasks with a fair amount of efficiency. Sending a whole group of them to overwhelm a single, roaming zombie, for example, proves surprisingly effective. You’re starting to think that they might prove useful after all.

  By the time you reach the plant, daylight has broken, and you’re shocked to see what looks like dead bodies strewn all over the landscape. Upon closer inspection, they turn out to be zombies, and they aren’t actually dead—well, no deader than usual, anyway—but just sort of . . . resting. They’ve apparently gorged themselves on available stores of toothpaste and are now sleeping it off.

  The piles of hungover zombies only get thicker as you approach, until you literally have to climb over them to get into the plant. You hold your breath as you step gingerly on the first one, and it moans softly but otherwise ignores you. You haul yourself up a little higher on the undead mound, doing your best to avoid mouths and any gaping wounds. The pile remains inert, so you wave to the others to follow.

  Once on the factory floor, Ernie gets to work while you organize your crew to remove the catatonic undead from the immediate vicinity. By the time you have them all pushed out into the hallways, Ernie is using equipment on hand to very carefully add ingredients to an enormous vat, big enough to provide paste for literally thousands of tubes. As he adds the final component, however, you hear moaning coming from outside. The zombies that you very carefully hauled away are beginning to stir.

  “Barricade the doors!” you yell at your crew, waving the speaker phone above your head. “Your god commands you!” There are five separate entrances to the factory floor, and the Crogaste employees just barely get to them as zombies start trying to force their way in. They throw themselves against the doors, keeping them shut, but as the minty fresh aroma of toothpaste gets stronger, the undead outside get more aggressive. You fear that your human barricades won’t hold much longer.

  “They want the paste,” Candice says. “So let’s give it to them!” She scoops some glop into a bucket and runs toward one of the doorways, yelling at the barricaders to get out of the way and tossing the bucket into the undead crowd as the door opens. The zombies in front get covered in goo and drop to their knees, trying to cram as much of it into their mouths as possible. Then the ones behind them dogpile on top like a school of hungry piranha. You and Ernie scoop up buckets of your own and follow Candice’s lead, throwing toothpaste out all five doors until the zombie masses are sated.

  You rustle up a group of phone worshipers and start beheading spaced-out zombies one by one—something which, come to think of it, you probably should have done before you started mixing toothpaste to begin with. Over the next few days, armed with this all-purpose zombie pacifier, your group spreads out over the city, killing whole crowds of the ravenous dead and recruiting survivors to help with the effort.

  It’s a long and often ugly process, but slowly you organize groups of volunteers to bring shipments of toothpaste to other cities, first in trucks and then in planes. Casualties are massive, but as your efforts expand, survivors all over the world pull together, not just to stamp out the zombie infestation but also to repair catastrophic damages to infrastructure and to bring aid to pockets of refugees everywhere. Although populations are devastated, people everywhere show the bravery and generosity that humanity is truly capable of, and ultimately the plague is stamped out.

  The world is saved. And, as a hero of the zombie-fighting revolution, your dating prospects improve immensely.

  THE END

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  205

  In order to acquire guns, you have to deal with people who already HAVE guns. It’s kind of a catch-22. This is a very delicate situation, but you’ve always considered yourself to be extremely charismatic and clever. “Listen,” you say in a calm, reassuring tone, your hands still up in the air. “I don’t even know what the BATF is, but I can prove to you that I’m not . . .”

  Before you get the chance to finish, the Freedom America Citizens’ Militia opens fire and mows you down like cheap crabgrass. That’s an awful analogy, but you’re currently being filled with hot lead, so your literary skills are a bit compromised. The amount of gunfire is truly remarkable—several of them may in fact be using fully automatic weapons.

  One voice quietly asks if stuffed animals are good eatin’, but to their credit, his companions seem horrified by this idea and start lecturing him on what sorts of game are and aren’t okay to bring home for supper. None of this matters to you, however.

  You’re really, really dead.

  THE END

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  206

  What the hell. You direct Daryl to set up his explosive fertilizer as quickly as possible and keep herding the rest of the group through the pass. Daryl joins you on the other side as he finishes, just as the zombie legion comes into sight. There are hundreds of them now, at least. “Okay, how do we set them off?” you ask. It doesn’t seem likely that Daryl has any detonator caps with him, considering that he doesn’t even have a shirt.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Daryl says. “Just get them all as far away as possible. This mountain is coming down!” He runs back toward the explosives and the approaching undead army. Suddenly you understand that he intends to set the charges off by hand.

  “Daryl!” you yell after him.

  “Let me do this!” he hollers back. Beside you, Isabelle is struggling to get down the hill—if you don’t help, she could be buried in the landslide as well. You pick her up and carry her over your shoulders like that Hobbit at the end of the Lord of the Rings movies. Just as you clear what you guess is the blast zone, you hear the first of three explosions, and the mountain pass collapses in a thunderous fury.

  “I’ll be damned,” you mutter to yourself, wiping a tear from your eye. Daryl has saved you all.

  You hear voices and turn to see a crowd of people rushing toward you, surprised to discover that it’s not only your crew, but several dozen more as well. In fact, you recognize one face at the front of the crowd. “Ernie?” you say, surprised to see your conspiracy theorist friend.

  “You found the valley!” he says, as shocked to see you as you are to see him. “This place is my contingency plan. I always thought it would be an alien invasion or biological warfare, but this valley can support at least a hundred people indefinitely if the resources are properly managed.”

  He explains that they’ve just finished sealing off the valley at the other end, and now that you’ve taken care of the mountain pass, nothing can get in or out without climbing gear. Ernie and his crew are mostly engineers, scientists, and survival experts. They’ve been actively recruiting the best and the brightest in case the zombie infestation doesn’t abate and they’re forced to remain in the valley indefinitely.

  “I brought, um . . . people, too.” you say kind of lamely.

  “We can use the numbers,” a woman chimes in. Ernie introduces her as Mittens. “We met yesterday,” he says. “She’s a cop. And she’s right—we lost some of our best people back there.”

  “So did we,” you say softly, looking back at the collapsed mountainside. “Now, you mentioned something about mountain climbing gear?” You have an aunt still out there in the city somewhere, and you’d like to try to rescue her, along with as many additional survivors as the valley can sustain. For tonight, though, you’re satisfied to simply collapse and get some rest.

/>   Whatever happens to the rest of the world, this pocket of humanity will survive.

  THE END

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  208

  Candice and Ernie are right—the biblical end times are no place for foolish heroics. You sneak over to Candice’s car while the zombies ignore you completely. They really, really want that toothpaste.

  You decide that the safest plan is to check out the UPS hub first—if Crogaste is ground zero for the plague, the undead concentration there could be overwhelming. Candice gives a wide berth to various roaming zombies, going so far as to take an alternative route if she sees one anywhere on the road ahead. Your aunt is a youthful fifty-something, but the truth is she drives like an old lady, even under the best of road conditions.

  “Uh, are you sure this is the way to the highway?” you ask gently. Her constant direction changes are bringing you deeper into the city, which is only making zombie issues worse. Soon they’re everywhere. “Just drive through them!” you say, with more panic in your voice than you should probably let creep in. “No, don’t turn here! It’s a—”

  Dead end. Candice jerks the wheel at the last minute but only succeeds in sideswiping a dumpster. At this point she confuses the gas pedal for the brakes, loses control of the vehicle, and careens down the alley, slamming the car directly into a telephone pole. Thanks to your seat belts, you all survive the impact—safety first!—but the car is wrecked, and the undead are now pouring into the alley behind you.

  You’ve driven with your aunt before. You should have known better than to let her drive in a zombie apocalypse.

  THE END

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  209

  You see a zombie crack open its victim’s skull and scoop out the insides. Somehow, the idea of defending yourself from these things with a screwdriver or a monkey wrench seems ludicrous. Fortunately, although terrifying, they don’t seem particularly focused. There are five or six of the things surrounding your car, which rules out driving, but by keeping calm and sticking to wide-open areas you manage to avoid being cornered and navigate your way to the gun shop on foot. Once there, however, you find that it’s been hastily boarded up. As you approach for a closer look, you hear what sounds like twenty or thirty guns being cocked at the same time.

  “Stop right there!” a wild, panicked voice shouts from inside the shop. “Back away nice and slow, or we open fire!”

  You stop in your tracks, raise your hands and take a cautious step backward. “I’m not a zombie,” you say as calmly as possible. “I’m just looking for a way to defend myself.”

  “You’re trespassing on property of the Freedom America Citizens’ Militia!” the man shouts back.

  “Like in Red Dawn,” someone else yells helpfully.

  “We know you’re with the BATF! Now walk away and tell your bosses that we’re not leaving!” Whoever these folks are, they sound like they’ve been awake for about three days. “I mean it! “ the voice continues. “One more step and we shoot!”

  Surely you can reason with these people. If you try to prove that you’re not a federal agent and just want to help fight off the zombie invasion, turn to page 205.

  If you suspect that getting into an argument with a crowd of jittery, unseen gun enthusiasts might be a bad move and simply walk away, turn to page 138.

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  210

  Monumentally bored as you may be, the best possible outcome of scientific experiments would entail spending a lot of time with a reeking, reanimated corpse and the worst would entail becoming one, so you decide to do the humane thing and just put the poor guy down. He’s still there, hopelessly stumbling on the steps when you get back from the kitchen with a long-handled broom, so you unceremoniously smack him with it.

  You pummel him for a good minute or two, but even with its head dangling from its shoulders, the thing keeps trying to get at you. Is he really that hungry, or could some remnant of humanity inside the soulless creature still be trying to deliver the mail? You pause, actually starting to feel sorry for the guy. Then he slips on the stairs one more time, and the resulting impact finishes the job of separating zombie head from zombie body.

  Zombie Postman is finally at rest.

  You bury the remains, because somehow this seems fitting (and because, honestly, who wants decaying corpse on the veranda?). As you’re digging, you notice that Zombie Postman had been carrying a full mail bag.

  If you decide that neither rain nor snow nor zombie apocalypse shall stay this courier from its appointed rounds, and attempt to restore a smidgen of humanity to whoever might still be alive out there (and, dammit, to yourself) by delivering the mail, turn to page 46.

  If that doesn’t really sound like you, and you settle for opening the mail and reading it, turn to page 33.

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  211

  Forget the toothpaste. Your chief concern right now is trying not to collapse. People are running around like headless chickens, and you limp up to a man fumbling with the keys to his minivan, but he just stares at you and drives off. You can’t truly blame him—to the layman, a zombie and a profusely bleeding stuffed rabbit probably look more or less the same. Although your vision is blurring, you see a steady stream of zombies trickling out of the grocery store, and even more approaching from the street.

  Suddenly what looks like an ice cream truck covered in scrap metal and wooden spikes comes careening down the road and flattens the zombies in front of you. A wiry guy with no shirt and an AC/DC cap reaches out his hand from the driver’s seat.

  “Come with me if you want to live,” he says.

  On a normal day, no force on Earth could get you inside that thing. But you have to admit, you do want to live. “I’m Daryl,” he says. “I also have throwing stars.”

  “Damn, you look horrible,” he adds as you climb aboard. “I was going to drive around trying to save more people, but if you want, we can just get the hell out of here.” It would be nice to find somewhere safe to not die, you think, and maybe head back out to look for more survivors tomorrow morning.

  If you tell Daryl to step on it and get as far away from this madness as possible, turn to page 253.

  If you think you’ll be okay, and tell him to keep searching for others who need help, turn to page 126.

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  212

  Half an hour later you’re on the way home, and Ernie is still sulking. “In the name of science,” he says, “don’t you think we should have at least . . .”

  “No.” That place was evil with a capital E, you think. You glance into the back seat, where the devil dog is locked inside a pet carrier emblazoned with a picture of a cartoon puppy and caked in several years worth of dried blood. You feel canine eyes burning into the back of your head and can barely concentrate on the road. A few minutes later, the car sputters and rolls to a stop. Creepy cemetery, dog from hell, and now a possessed car? You’re pretty sure someone is about to drop a bucket of pig’s blood on your head, because this is like every Stephen King movie ever.

  “We forgot to get gas!” Ernie moans. Fortunately it’s mostly downhill to a station that you passed on the way out, and you coast the car there with minimal effort. The place is abandoned, and after dispatching a zombie in the outside restroom (you’re not sure how it even got in there, since the key is still attached to a two-by-four behind the register), you fill up on gas, grab some beef sticks and Twinkies, and hit the road.

  As you peer over your shoulder to back out, you see Princess sitting free on the rear seat, gnawing on the mangled remains of the pet carrier’s metal door.

  The dog just looks at you and growls.

  If you calmly continue driving, pretend nothing is wrong, and hope to make it back to Ernie’s house alive, turn to page 259.

  Screw that noise. If you stop the car, lock the dog in, and run like hell, turn to page 238.

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  213

  After raiding the kitchen pantry for supplies, you forge out into the wilderness. Several hours
later, you start to notice familiar landmarks from your childhood. Wasn’t there a ranger station or something out here?

  Sure enough, by mid-afternoon you find it—a cabin about a six hour hike from the city. At this point, breaking and entering seems like the least of your worries, so you toss a can of soup through a window and crawl inside. The phone is dead, but to your delight the cabin is well-stocked with a hunting rifle, and enough food and bottled water to last one person at least through the winter.

  This would be an ideal place to hole up and wait out this zombie apocalypse, or whatever it is. You take another look at the rifle, though, and wonder if maybe you should hike back to town and put that thing to better use.

  If you decide to make the cabin your new home and settle in for the winter, turn to page 56.

  If you grab the hunting rifle and head straight back to town to play action hero, turn to page 152.

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  214

  The good news is, a locked room inside an army installation is probably the safest place in the world right now. The bad news is that the army seems to have forgotten you. After more than two days, you’re starving and desperate for water. None of your attempts to break through the door are of any use.

  You hear moaning coming from the hallway and realize that zombies must have completely overrun the complex. When they discover that someone is left alive, they start piling up outside the door to your cell but they never do figure out how to work the lock.