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  241

  “Okay, Billy, you’re my navigator,” you say. “Prudence, you take the gun.” She immediately sticks her upper body out the window and starts firing. The girl might not have any skill, but she’s certainly not hurting for enthusiasm.

  “Hey, you’re a stuffed bunny, right?” Billy says as you start the car. You swerve to avoid a zombie in front of you, since Prudence misses it by a city block. “So you know about love and stuff. How do I make a girl fall in love with me?”

  Is this why he wanted to ride up front? Love advice? You’re not sure what makes Billy think that stuffed bunnies know about anything. “Watch the road,” you say.

  “Uh, turn up there at the donut place,” he mumbles. “I mean, I know that she loves me. But how do I get her to know that she knows?” You try to block him out and concentrate on your driving.

  “She acts like she doesn’t know how I really feel about her,” he continues. “Even though I tell her all the time.”

  A zombie torso smashes into your windshield, largely obscuring your view. Damn! “Which way at the light, Billy?” you ask frantically.

  “Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t even listen to me at all.”

  “BILLY, WHICH WAY AT THE LIGHT?”

  “Left!” he yells, and you yank the wheel in that direction. Tires screeching, you run the car right into an overturned cement truck. Your head hits the windshield and everything goes black.

  You never find out if Billy and Prudence survived the crash, because by the time you wake up, you’re already dead.

  THE END

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  242

  “The first thing we do is march into town and take back the city,” you say with all the authority you can muster.

  “Uh, sir?” Velasquez asks, gesturing at a handful of zombies filtering out of the command center.

  Right. Those guys. “The first thing we do is burn down the command center. The second thing we do is to march into town and take back the city!”

  After making sure all of the undead former officers are no longer roaming (they take a considerable time to burn, but that’s okay—burning things is fun!), you organize a convoy and take your soldiers to war. The city is completely overrun, and the horrors on the streets make this morning’s scene at the army base look positively serene by comparison. As tough as it is to put down the zombie hordes, one of your biggest problems turns out to be crowd control. You can’t have frothing citizens running all over the place like headless chickens. You need to get these people somewhere safe! But where?

  “It might not be an ideal solution, but we could cart them off to the military prison,” Velasquez says. “You know, until things blow over.”

  Good enough! Desperate times call for desperate measures, and you can sort out the moral implications after you rid the city of undead. If you round up the survivors and bring them in, turn to page 154.

  Wait, what? Did you just declare martial law? If you think Velasquez’ plan goes just a little too far, turn to page 82.

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  243

  You hope Madison finds her way to safety, but the truth is, you never liked that girl much, anyway, and you’re not about to leave Ernie to his fate. “No chance, buddy,” you say. “If you die here today, so do I.”

  Big talk, and you wish you had a little more to back them up with. You brought a big, heavy monkey wrench with you from Ernie’s house for just such an occasion as this, and as the first zombie rears his ugly head, you let him have it right in the kisser. The downhill path is not an ideal spot to fight off the undead, but you lash out wildly, and manage to beat the thing down. Take that! Unfortunately, the second zombie is following closely behind the first.

  Its clammy hand grips your shoulder, but suddenly Ernie makes a diving tackle, landing on top of it in a heap. You’re not sure how he even managed to get himself off the ground with that busted foot, but he saved your life, and you return the favor by smashing the zombie’s skull in and pulling your friend away from its battered remains.

  The two of you lie on the ground for a moment, panting. “We did it!” Ernie exclaims. “I knew you wouldn’t abandon me!” Your moment of victory quickly turns to dread, however, as you hear a low growl coming from the bushes nearby.

  “Princess?” Sure enough, the dog emerges, and it looks pissed. You’re not sure if it’s upset that you destroyed its fellow denizens of evil, or if all the commotion has simply riled it up. But it dives right at you, and in your weakened state you don’t stand a chance.

  THE END

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  244

  Zombie outbreaks are scary enough in broad daylight, so you’d rather avoid the risk of getting caught in one after nightfall. The first building you check looks abandoned. “Condemned” might even be a better description, you think as the stairwell creaks beneath your weight, threatening to collapse beneath you.

  Collapsed stairs? That might be a brilliant idea. You don’t trust the rickety front doors to keep out the undead, so you herd the group to the second floor and start tumbling various pieces of furniture down the stairwell in an attempt to create a zombie-proof barricade. Your plan works like a dream; a particularly solid entertainment center takes out several of the wooden stairs, and by the time you’ve emptied the floor of cabinetry there’s little chance of anything that shambles surprising you during the night.

  “Uh, so how do we get back down tomorrow morning?” Isabelle asks.

  You hadn’t thought of that. “Don’t worry,” you say. “I’ve thought of that. Just focus on mixing up that zombie cure you were talking about.” Can’t hurt to try, you think. You settle in for the night, and are pleased to discover that the power in the building is still on, and the lights are working. The plumbing, alas, isn’t.

  Two dozen people and no working toilets. This is going to get ugly.

  You eventually settle down in one of the apartments to rest after directing people to use the bathrooms as far upstairs as possible to avoid stinking up the floor, and repeatedly assuring one elderly lady (who, if you’re not mistaken, is wearing dentures, anyway) that you’ll find her somewhere to brush her “teeth” tomorrow. Although the restless night seems to drag on forever, you finally awake to sunlight pouring in through the open window shade. You bolt upright, your nostrils assaulted by the overwhelming stench of death.

  A look into the hallway reveals no zombie activity, and you start to wonder if the smell is from people ignoring the no-pooping-on-this-floor rule. However, further investigation reveals the true culprit: Isabelle’s cooking.

  “It’s ready!” she says with an ear-to-ear grin. “I don’t know how much it will help the folks who are already sick”—even Isabelle, it seems, has begun to doubt the powers of organic cooking to repair rotted flesh and severed limbs—“but it might prevent any of us from catching it. It has echinacea!”

  You take another whiff and immediately regret your decision. There’s no way something that smells that bad can be good for you. Still, if there’s any chance at all that it will keep you unzombified, it might be worth a shot.

  If you plug your nose and try to get down some of what Isabelle charitably calls “stew,” turn to page 196.

  If you decide you’d rather rely on your own immune system, your wits, and anything else that will keep you from having to put that stuff in your mouth, turn to page 64.

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  246

  You tell Clampy Pete to take a flying freak at a rolling doughnut. “Sideways,” you add. You know, because he’s a crab.

  Mittens drives you back to the church, and you find the skittish young priest waiting outside. “I saw you watching last night,” he stutters. “I’m Father Tim. Please tell me you’ve come to end this madness.”

  Tim tells you that Cardinal D’Amato and most of the congregation have gone insane. When a church member first died and came back to life, they heralded him as the second coming of Christ and now believe they are living in t
he biblical end times. The grounds are filled with poor souls who, desperate to understand the horrifying events of the past week, have lost their grip on reality. Many, attempting to find salvation, enter the church cathedral to seek guidance from their “savior,” and now it’s packed with literally hundreds of ravenous zombies. Shipping a few in crates to D’Amato’s business associates was just part of a particularly ill-conceived outreach program.

  “The Cardinal thinks that we’re being judged,” Tim says. “But I’ve devoted my whole life to the Lord’s work, and His hand is not in this. It’s the Devil. I know it is.”

  Mittens opens her trunk and starts strapping on weapons. Tim, however, has other ideas. He insists that if you want protection from the supernatural, he can load you up with holy relics. “These abominations are truly Satan’s work,” he says. “Bullets and grenades will be of no use in there.”

  If you raid Father Tim’s stash of relics to ward off zombie evil, turn to page 261.

  If you follow Mittens’s lead and stick with good old-fashioned firepower, turn to page 148.

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  247

  You decide to go ahead and hit the showers. They’re the living dead, right? They’re not going to be able to wrap their rotting minds around a complicated mechanism like a door knob. At any rate, whatever decision lets you wash all of this mutilated corpse out of your fur feels like the right one at the moment.

  You start the water and lather yourself up with the special bunny shampoo you retrieved from your locker. Mmmm, lavender and jojoba. You close your eyes, and just for a moment you relax fully, all of your troubles melting away. Man, that feels good. You’re not sure how long you stand there with the warm water cascading over you, but at some point the spell is broken when you realize that there are at least a dozen zombies in the shower room with you.

  Yeah. You’re going to have to learn to suffer through more than a thin coating of zombie gore if you want to survive this book, my friend.

  THE END

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  248

  You were never convinced that this zombie business was mob-related, anyway. “Maybe you’re right,” Mittens says. Then she turns back to Fat Jimmy. “Don’t leave town or anything,” she growls at him. “We might be back.”

  Cardinal D’Amato makes his residence on the grounds of a massive Catholic church out in the suburbs, so you drive over and park yourselves discreetly around back for a stakeout. It appears to be serving as a safehouse for the congregation, with people trickling in throughout the day and nobody coming back out. Daylight starts to wane, and the boredom becomes palpable. “So, why do you go by your last name, anyway?” you ask Mittens after a long lull in an already lackluster conversation.

  She pauses for a moment and sighs. “I was married once. To a stuffed animal. I don’t know what it was about, really. I guess I thought he wasn’t like all the other guys. I loved him, I think. In the end . . . it just wasn’t right.” Another pause. “We wanted different things.”

  She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment and lights one, silently offering you another from the pack. You haven’t smoked for almost a week now, but what the hell. It’s the end of the world out there, more or less, and you have bigger things to worry about than emphysema.

  “Hmm,” you say, taking a long drag. Damn, that’s good. “Thanks for sharing and all. I just meant, why don’t you tell people your first name, though. It can’t be goofier than ‘Mittens.’ What is it, ‘Kitten’ or something?”

  “Go screw,” she grumbles.

  “Oh my god! It is, isn’t it?”

  “It’s Katherine.”

  “Your name is Kitty Mittens!” You have to laugh. That’s the best thing you’ve heard since this whole zombie thing started.

  “You see this gun?” she says, visibly angry. The shotgun hasn’t left her side since the incident with the horses. “I will take this gun and I will shove it so far—”

  Before she can finish the sentiment, you hear the back door of the church slam shut and you and Mittens—Kitty Mittens!—both hunker down in your seats. Three men are hauling out big burlap sacks and piling them in an overflowing dumpster on the back corner of the lot. One of them is a jumpy kid in a priest’s collar who can’t be a day older than 22. He shivers, makes the sign of the cross, and heads back inside with the others.

  Once it’s clear, you sneak over to the dumpster to investigate, but the smell tells you everything you need to know. It turns out the bags are filled with corpses. Headless, zombie corpses. At least ten or fifteen of them.

  You and Mittens walk back to the car, stunned and more than a little sickened by the odor. “This is big, isn’t it?” you say. Mittens just nods. “I mean, too big for us. I know you’re on suspension, but don’t you think we should call this in, anyway? With everything that’s going on, they might bend the rules a little.”

  “You don’t know my captain,” she says with a groan. “I think it’s a waste of time, but if you want, we can go down to the station and try to rustle up some help.”

  She lowers her eyes and stares at the church door. “Or we could storm in there right now and find out what the hell is going on.”

  If you suspect you’re going to need all the help you can get with this and decide to head to the police station, turn to page 104.

  If Mittens’s plan to storm the gates with guns blazing sounds more appealing, turn to page 226.

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  251

  No good can possibly come of this. Still, Daryl is as enthusiastic as ever, and Chuck and Marjorie seem willing to follow orders without question. The fourteen-year-old girl is a spitfire. The five of you plan a sneak attack and manage to liberate the supplies with a minimum of casualties, and wind up barricaded inside the concession stand.

  “The fries are ours,” you say triumphantly. You look at Daryl, Chuck, and Marjorie. Two bags of french fries and a bucket of syrup. It’s not going to last long, and you can see in their eyes that they’re doing the math as well. Wait a minute. Where’s the girl?

  “Caitlin, no!” someone yells, but as you turn around it’s already too late. You see a giant soccer trophy thing bearing down on you, and with a crack everything goes dark. You never find out what happens to the others, or the rest of humankind for that matter.

  But it doesn’t look good.

  THE END

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  252

  Frankly, the kid’s a little weird, and you’re not sure how long you want to be stuck out in the wilderness with him. After walking for about an hour, you cross a bridge over a little stream and stray from the road for a drink. As you cup your hands and take a long, cool gulp, you spot a deer upstream on the water’s edge, here for the same reason you are.

  Hey, what’s that sticking up out of the water next to it? A decomposing, severed human hand. You spit out your mouthful and then start uncontrollably puking up the liquid you’ve already swallowed. Drinking this stuff could get you zombied!

  “Man, that can’t be good for the deer,” Billy adds. You stumble back to the road, forcing yourself to continue on. Night falls and you contemplate setting up camp, but then you see headlights and frantically wave your arms, trying to flag down the driver. “Hey, I know those guys!” Billy says.

  “Billy!” the driver howls, jumping out of his truck and hugging the boy. “How come you’re not at the bunker?”

  “I had to fetch my girlfriend,” he says. Billy’s friends stare at you. “Not the rabbit,” he mutters, turning red. “That Prudence girl. She kind of stole the car and left.”

  “Well, that sucks,” the driver says, looking you over. “So, you got any cash on you, rabbit?”

  They hold you up at gunpoint, and since you’re not carrying anything of value, steal your shoes and drive off.

  After all you did for those kids? Son of a bitch.

  You never do make it to town. And when you collapse, it’s not from anything in that stream. It wasn’t the zombie plague t
hat did you in, but good old reliable humanity.

  THE END

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  253

  “I think we’d better . . . head for . . .” you start to mumble. Then you pass out, having lost much more blood than you even realized. When you regain consciousness you’re lying on a hard, scratchy surface, and Daryl is hovering over you with a wooden stake. “I had to be ready,” he says sheepishly when he sees that you’re awake. “In case you turned.”

  Wooden stakes? You know what—never mind. “Where are we?” you ask.

  “The soccer stadium!” Daryl proclaims, obviously proud of himself. You realize that the surface you’re lying on is fake grass, and you’re in the center of an indoor arena.

  Suddenly you remember how you got here and suffer a twinge of guilt over all the others who certainly didn’t make it. You peel yourself off the astroturf. “Come on,” you say. “We’ve got work to do.” You head out in the truck to look for survivors, and it turns out that you and Daryl make a decent zombie fighting team. He’s got some strange ideas about the undead and about life in general, and has rigged it so he can blast ’80s metal through the truck’s loudspeakers, but his enthusiasm is definitely contagious. By nightfall you’ve brought more than a dozen people back to the stadium.

  “It’s getting dark,” Daryl says, clearly exhausted. “Maybe we should call that good for the day.”