Zombocalypse Now Page 19
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You add the gas station’s soda and junk food supplies to your provisions and get the hell out of Dodge, sticking to back roads and seeking out the least populated regions on the map. You’re hoping to just sort of wait the zombie apocalypse out, and your decision to hoard gasoline turns out to be a good one. What little is left of society degenerates into roving bands of desperate outlaws with mohawk haircuts and bits of scrap metal welded to their dune buggies inside of about three weeks.
You travel the countryside for a couple of months and have any number of crazy adventures along the way—that Thunderdome place, in particular, is wack—but your supplies only last so long, and replacements get harder and harder to come by. Eventually you’re left wandering alone in the desert, hoping beyond hope to encounter a generous stranger with a bite to eat and a jug of water.
Alas, that generous stranger turns out to be long since dead, and the bite to eat turns out to be you.
THE END
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You decide that if you were standing out by the mailboxes, hungering for human brains, you’d want your fellow tenants to give you the benefit of the doubt before smacking you in the face with a blunt object. But then you start to wonder. You haven’t made an attempt to save any of the other zombies you’ve run into so far. Why the sudden compassion? Is it possible that your willingness to abandon or even kill these things isn’t because they’re dangerous, but because they’re unattractive? You look back at your neighbor, thinking about the way beauty is just an arbitrary construct. Also, you think, as a corpse she can only continue to decay to the point where eventually she won’t even be cute anymore.
You may be the worst person in the entire world.
This sends you into something of an existential crisis, pondering the shallowness of your true nature, and on a further tangent regarding the manner in which body image issues have affected your life to this point. Fortunately, you don’t have to fret about it for long. Lost in thought, you don’t notice your neighbor plodding up behind you, and when she drags you to the pavement in a full-body tackle, it’s too late. You do catch a whiff of her reeking zombie breath as her teeth sink into the back of your head, though.
Not hot.
You get devoured by the sexiest zombie ever.
THE END
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“The zombies seem more interested in human brains than stuffed animal ones,” you lie. “Give me the tube and tell me where I’m going and what I’m looking for.”
Candice and Ernie protest, but you won’t budge. You start making the case that you need the two of them alive in case they have to repopulate the planet after the zombie plague, but realize how ridiculous that sounds. After all, their chances of survival aren’t any higher than the rest of the yet-to-be-zombified population, which you certainly hope includes more likely hook-ups than these two.
You smear some toothpaste on a stick and head down the hill toward the building. Zombies spot you and start staggering your way, so you throw the stick off to the side, and sure enough, they follow it like sheep dogs. You grab a handful of rocks from the ground and dab them with paste, and repeat this tactic until you’re inside.
Once there, however, dozens more zombies rush you. You’re out of pebbles, so you frantically empty your tube, squirting paste all over them. They turn on themselves, but the crowd outside smells this, too, and crashes in like a wave from behind. The good news is, you don’t ever reawaken to the tortured half-life of the undead, because the zombies don’t even bite you. They just trample you to death.
The bad news is, Candice and Ernie also fall to the zombie menace before their unlikely romance has a chance to blossom. Humanity is lost.
THE END
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You can’t remember any reason to continue swimming against the tide, so you follow the other zombies toward the building. As you approach, you see people huddling in terror, and something inside you stirs. Who are they? You feel vaguely protective toward them for some reason.
Then it slips away, and now they just look like lunch. Your last conscious thought is that if you hit the glass doors with enough force, you should be able to shatter them, so you pick up a big rock and start pounding away. Several other zombies follow suit, and although soon you can’t remember why you’re even doing it, you’ve managed to teach them a new trick. Without your help they might never have gotten in! When the glass finally shatters, you all pile through and begin feasting. There’s plenty to go around.
THE END
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“Wait!” you yell. “Ernie, I need help!”
Your friend finds you sitting on the cold garage floor, clutching your leg next to the remains of an extremely dead raccoon. You explain what happened, and Ernie seems perhaps a little too interested in trying amputation as a first resort. After discussing it, though, you both agree that whatever is going to enter the bloodstream already has by now, and there’s nothing to do but wait it out.
Ernie brings you inside and tries to make you as comfortable as possible, but it’s a losing battle. Although the area around the bite has gone completely numb, you’re queasy, shaking, and cold all over, even with the heat cranked up. After a couple of hours, you’re sure of it. “I think I’m fading,” you mutter to your friend. “You have to get out of here. Go find that valley with the river. You’ll be safe there.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he insists. “Like I know you wouldn’t leave me. Now try to get some rest.”
Sleep is the last thing on your mind. In fact, Ernie’s presence is starting to prompt some terrifying feelings. You look at him, and part of you knows that he’s your friend and that he’d do anything for you. But a growing part of you just sees a meal. It’s in there, you think. It’s delicious. And I want it.
“Ernie, don’t let this happen to me,” you say. “You have to stop it.” Your friend is horrified. He knows what you’re asking of him but tells you that he can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t have the strength.
“Please,” you say, desperate now. The darkness is coming. “I don’t want this . . .”
Ernie disappears for a moment and returns with something small and heavy. He presses it tightly into your hands and gently pulls out the pin. One of your last conscious thoughts is where did Ernie get a live hand grenade? “Hold on to this as tight as you can,” he says between tears. “For as long as you can. When you let go, it’ll all be over.”
Ernie is long gone by the time you slip away. The grenade falls from your lap, and the unthinking monster you’re about to become is splattered all over his living room.
You may be gone, but you’re not forgotten. Inspired by your courage, Ernie starts by tracking down your Aunt Candice—she’s been hunkered down in a drive-thru espresso hut—and together they seek out other survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Their group grows to include a renegade police woman, a shirtless and enthusiastic AC/DC fan, several spunky college students, and a Haitian voodoo expert who turns out to be Canadian, among others. Ernie leads them to his spot in the mountains, and they seal themselves in, blocking out the zombie menace and starting the long, hard work of making a home there.
Tomorrow is another day.
THE END
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Relax, you think. You don’t know exactly how the zombie thing spreads. Maybe you’ll be okay? You find some clean rags and bandage yourself up as well as you can with just your left hand. You’re tempted to grab another bottle from the bar, but things just got real serious, and you suspect that you may need your wits about you if you’re going to get through this alive. The restaurant is clearly not safe, so you leave out the back door and through the alley.
The streets outside are madness. Zombies are everywhere, and the still-living seem to have degenerated into screaming, panicked lemmings. You carefully navigate the city, trying to avoid
the worst of it. Things are getting hazy, though, and soon your hands and feet have gone numb.
Then you feel the hunger come on. By the time you’ve made it to the freeway overpass, you’re sure of it: you’re becoming a zombie. You can feel your humanity slipping away, and your thoughts are getting more and more muddled, replaced by an all-consuming desire for human brains.
Anything but this, you think! You’re right in the middle of the freeway bridge now, and you look down at the eight lanes of abandoned cars below. The fall from this height would most likely kill you.
If you leap over the side of the bridge, preferring oblivion to the wretched, eternal damnation of the living dead, turn to page 135.
Then again, maybe wretched, eternal damnation is overselling it. Who knows what zombiehood might bring? If you accept your fate and wait for the change to come over you, turn to page 260.
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You’re not sure if you could shoot yourself, but you certainly don’t want to wind up like those things. “I’ll save one for you if you save one for me,” you say.
“There you go,” Vinny agrees. He gives you a weary smile and goes back to blasting zombies away. You do, too, albeit with a little less efficiency, because the truth is that you’re not a very good shot. Things start getting desperate, but after a few minutes you see a gap open up in the wall of undead. It looks like with some fancy gunplay and a little luck, you might actually be able to get back to the station in one piece.
“You ready?” Vinny asks, interrupting your train of thought. “I’m on my last round!”
“Hold on,” you say. “I think maybe we can make it back.”
“I’m not making it anywhere,” Vinny insists, wild-eyed. “Not without ammunition. You said I could shoot you!”
“Don’t shoot me!” You’re hysterical now. “That plan didn’t even make sense! At least one of us can make it out of here—shoot yourself if you have to!”
“A deal’s a deal,” Vinny says, pointing his shotgun between your eyes. “Sorry, but you can’t play an apocalypse by the book, right?” He fires, and your brains fly right out the back of your head.
The silver lining is, there’s no chance you’ll be getting undead from that.
THE END
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It sounds like Crogaste corporate headquarters is zombie central, so if there’s a chance that some of this stuff has already shipped, you’d just as soon check that out first. You drive to the shipping center, which is a large fenced group of buildings surrounded by a fleet of big brown trucks (which you’re thinking about trying to commandeer on the way out). The place is locked up tight, so you give Ernie a boost over the fence and then climb up yourself. Once at the top, you take Candice’s hand to help pull her over as well.
Suddenly, though, Ernie starts screaming, and you see a pair of dobermans running toward him. “Zombie dogs!”
The dogs start to bark and growl as they approach, and look pretty healthy as they come into the light. Whew—just regular dogs. Then they both attack your friend, and you realize that regular dogs might be trouble, too. You jump off the fence and try to give Ernie some help, but now the dogs attack you. These things are vicious! One of them sinks its teeth into the flesh of your leg and won’t let go. You scream bloody murder and see two figures approaching. Zombie security guards?
“There’s two more over there!” one of them yells. “Quick, shoot ’em before they infect the dogs!”
Nope, regular security guards. You get shot trying to break into the UPS center.
THE END
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Forget the gated community, you think. The more you consider it, the more you realize that throwing your lot in with a bunch of pampered suburbanites probably isn’t the surest path to survival. You fight your way to the city zoo, and your replica Star Trek whatever-it-is handles like a dream. Once there, however, you’re disheartened to find that scattered zombies already roam the premises. Well, it’s nothing you and your whirling blade of doom can’t handle. You figure you’ll scout the premises, find a safe spot to use as home base and then formulate a plan to clean up the zoo environs and make it your permanent home.
Before you get far, though, you hear a high-pitched scream that comes from way on the other side of the zoo. Perhaps you should head over there to see if you can help. Of course, by the time you find whoever it is, the chances that they’ll still be human are slim. And you don’t know how bad things are out there—if you don’t come up with some kind of safety to retreat to, you could find yourself trapped and overwhelmed at the zombie zoo.
If you rush to the aid of whoever is screaming their fool head off, turn to page 272.
If you stick to the plan and find safe haven before waltzing off to clean up the zombie infestation, turn to page 106.
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You slam on the brakes, screaming at Ernie to get out of the car and run for his life. Ernie, now spotting the dog on the back seat, doesn’t need any more encouragement and is free of the vehicle before you are.
“Lock the door, lock the door!” Ernie yells.
You’ve already broken into a run. “I don’t think it can work the door handles, Ernie,” you pant between gulps of air. You don’t stop running until you’re both ready to collapse from exhaustion. You’re now several hours from town on foot but still fairly confident that you made the right decision. Fleeing in blind terror just felt right, even if you did pass up an opportunity to learn more about the zombie plague.
“You know, I’m less and less convinced that the dog has anything to do with the zombies,” Ernie says as you walk. “It doesn’t behave like they do. And you’d think that if there was a zombie dog out here for the past four years, the full-scale outbreak would have started before yesterday.”
You continue marching, and as night falls you’re almost back to Ernie’s neighborhood. Before you get to safety, though, a familiar growl comes from behind you. You stop in your tracks and turn to see the hell spaniel, bits of broken windshield now matted into its fur, glaring at you like it’s ready to go for the throat. It dawns on you that you’re weaponless, having left your giant wrench in the car before fleeing the scene. To make things worse, you spot a pair of zombies approaching from up the street.
You resume walking, much more briskly now, even though your legs are like putty from the day’s travel. Princess paces you. Now you spot several more zombies plodding toward you as well—if you don’t find shelter soon, you’re in danger of being surrounded.
Ernie panics, breaking into a run. Before you can join him, though, Princess flies by you at alarming speed. “Ernie!’ you yell. “Watch out!” The dog, however, continues past him and leaps up on an approaching zombie, knocking it to the ground. In a few grisly moments the thing’s neck has been chewed straight through. The dog then lifts its leg to pee on the severed zombie head, proving once and for all that Princess is definitely not a girl dog. Then it throws itself at the next zombie in line.
Soon all the undead are re-dead, although Princess is looking a little worse for wear. His already horrifying coat is now also covered in zombie gore, and by the way he limps toward you, one of his legs may be broken. Nevertheless, the cocker spaniel of the Baskervilles has saved your lives.
“You’re not such a bad little guy, are you,” you murmur, carefully reaching out your hand, and then pulling it back with a start as the dog tries to bite you. Hmm. Maybe it’s just jealous of the evil competition.
No way! Princess is like a terrifying, zombie-devouring Lassie! If you take the dog with you in hopes that he can somehow be domesticated, turn to page 124.
Then again, all the rescuing in the world can’t erase the pure waves of evil emanating from that thing. If you decide that attacking now, while it’s weak, might be your only chance to get rid of the demon dog, turn to page 12.
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Fortunately, you took a
big, heavy monkey wrench along when you left Ernie’s house. “Back away slowly,” you say to Madison and Ernie. “But don’t go far! Who knows what else is out there.”
Screaming, Madison scampers down the hill. Well, you did your best. She knows the way home, and hopefully she’ll make it there safely. The zombies lunge at you, but you leap away—whatever these two have been through, they’re not in top undead shape. Your wrench connects with the first zombie’s head and knocks it almost completely off. The second one is all chewed up on its left side and thus suffers from balance problems. It’s every bit as easy to dispatch.
The first zombie is still moaning a bit, so you take a step toward it to finish the job. “Hold on—I just had an interesting idea,” Ernie says. “This pet cemetery seems unrelated to the whole zombie situation. What would happen if we buried this thing in the dog’s grave? Would it come back alive? Regenerate? Maybe it would turn human again! Maybe nothing would happen, but I think we need to find out.”
You think about the zombie, then look at Princess the Demon Hound from hell, and shudder. Something tells you this is a bad idea. If there’s a chance it could reverse zombification, though, could it be worth a shot?
Maybe Ernie’s right. If you try burying the zombie in Princess’s grave, turn to page 38. What’s the worst that could happen?
No, no, a thousand times no. No good can possibly come of this. For the love of God, don’t do it! If you don’t do it, turn to page 212.