Zombocalypse Now Read online

Anybody left alive out there might not make it until morning, you think. If you decide to push on through the night, turn to page 128.

  No, Daryl’s right. You’re still wounded, and won’t do anyone any good if you get yourself killed. If you rest up and go back out in the morning, turn to page 66.

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  254

  “Throw me the hammer!” you scream. “Throw me the hammer!”

  The old lady pushes something huge and heavy out the window, and you immediately understand that this isn’t an ordinary hammer. It’s some kind of enormous construction tool. What is this woman doing with a sledgehammer in her apartment? How does she have the upper body strength to even move it? The first thing you realize is that this is a much better instrument for smashing zombie heads than a mop.

  The second thing you realize is that it’s too late for you to get out of the way. As you stare up at it with your arms outstretched, the sledgehammer drops from the third story window and hits you right smack in the face.

  Now the zombies don’t even need to kill you. Your corpse is still awfully fresh, though. So they eat you anyway.

  THE END

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  255

  You look at the Zombie Lord, who is now actually levitating a few feet above the ground. At this point, kneeling before your master just makes good sense. Ernie follows your lead and gets on his knees, taking it a step further and actually groveling a bit. “What can we do to serve you, my lord?” he says. You think it’s a little much, but, you know, whatever works for Ernie.

  “Serve me?” the Zombie Lord mutters, chuckling. “Pathetic. What possible use could I have for worms such as these?” He taps your friend on the head, and Ernie screams. You see his flesh turn gray and begin to rot before your eyes. In seconds, his eyes go white and he turns toward you, moaning. “Braaaaiiinnnnnnnns,” your friend says.

  “No, little one,” the Zombie Lord laughs. “This one is also mine.” You jump to your feet and attempt to run, but smack into some sort of invisible barrier. With a flick of his hand, the Zombie Lord lifts you off the ground and spins you to meet his gaze. He looks into your eyes, and you can feel the undead sickness start to take hold.

  As your flesh rots on the bone and the life slowly seeps out of you, your last thoughts are of regret. The rest of the world will soon join you in your undying, eternal nightmare.

  THE END

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  256

  The mystery of the ever-increasing zombie population outside the bathroom door can primarily be explained by two factors: limited zombie mental capacity and basic human greed. First off, all of the store’s windows and doors are covered in posters and other advertisements, so no one can see the zombies inside. And since the zombies can’t see out, there’s nothing to draw them away from the place. They don’t even realize there’s a door there. So the whole thing functions as a zombie roach motel.

  Meanwhile, the store remains a shining beacon of consumerism, and the living just keep coming. Whether they’re hoping to stock up on emergency supplies, engage in some good old-fashioned looting, or are simply popping down to the corner for a pack of smokes, the more zombies there are milling about inside, the less likely that a terrified shopper will escape once he discovers what’s behind door number one. The throng of undead, therefore, keeps on growing.

  Why are we telling you all of this? Honestly, to fill up space. They don’t call it a “last-ditch, desperate sprint” because your chances of survival are terribly good. You get roughly eight feet before the groaning mob closes in on you.

  It was a noble effort, though.

  THE END

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  257

  Fat Jimmy turns out to be the least Italian-looking guy ever (in fact, you guess he’s probably Swedish), but he’s pretty fat alright, and talks with a stereotypical movie-mobster Gambino accent. It seems zombie scare has put a sizable dent in mafia thug availability, because you and Mittens get into his office with minimal trouble. She kicks in the door, and you follow behind her, trying your best to look tough. “We found your boys manufacturing zombie pus pills,” Mittens says, waving her shotgun around for emphasis. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here, Jimmy.”

  “Whaddaya, stoopid?” Jimmy responds. He seems unintimidated by Mittens, and waves his chicken leg right back at her. “We didn’t create dose things. We’re just tryin’ to make a buck off ’em, capisce?” Mittens points her weapon right between the Scandinavian gangster’s eyes. He drops the bravado and the phony accent. “Listen, you don’t want to go where this thing leads,” he says.

  “Try me.”

  “You know what? Fine. It’s the church. The first one we saw came in a crate from Cardinal D’Amato. He thought we might find it useful. You want to go lean on him? Be my guest.”

  “Do you know what?” Mittens asks. “I think you’re full of crap.” She gives you a look. He might simply be lying to get you out of his office. Or there might be something to this zombie/church connection.

  Fat Jimmy seemed genuinely scared there for a minute. If you tell Mittens you believe him, turn to page 248.

  If you think it would be better to keep pushing and see if there’s something more he’s hiding, turn to page 162.

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  258

  You trust that Mittens wouldn’t have given the order to hold fire unless she meant it. “Look out—Broflosky!” you mutter, hoping this will be warning enough.

  The cop pulls something out of his coat, but it isn’t a gun, and when he tosses it on the pavement you get a better look. It’s his badge. Several other officers follow suit, and finally Clampy Pete speaks up.

  “You muttonheads want to play cowboy? Fine. You go shoot as many zombies as you like. I want no part of it.” He throws his badge down with the rest, turning to march silently off into the sunset. About a dozen others follow him, with the remainder deciding to surrender and join Mittens’s renegade crew.

  When you storm Cardinal D’Amato’s church the following day, all you find inside are zombies, packed in like sardines. You kill them, but never find out what secrets the church may have held. In time, Mittens’s brand of frontier justice wipes the streets clean, although you do have to construct a wall around the city to keep out the growing hordes of undead from the outside world. She makes you her second-in-command and as a team you manage to keep the peace in your little island of surviving humanity for decades to come.

  THE END

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  259

  You pull onto the road and continue driving toward town. “Ernie,” you whisper. He seems preoccupied with gas station junk food, so you repeat yourself in the loudest whisper you can manage. “Ernie! Don’t make any sudden moves. I think everything will be okay if we just stay calm, but the dog is loose.”

  Ernie cranes his neck, looks in the back seat, and immediately screams bloody murder. You try to calm him down, but he responds by screaming louder, right in your face. His freakout, in turn, freaks Princess out, and the dog leaps into the front seat. Ernie, naturally, takes this opportunity to open the passenger door and leap from the moving car, and in the tumult you veer off the road and into a ditch. The car loses purchase and flips onto its side at about 30 miles per hour.

  Your seatbelt keeps you in the driver’s seat but pins you there, and you hear a growl that sounds like it’s coming straight from the pits of hell. The dog peels itself off the dashboard, and now it’s pissed. We’ll save you the play-by-play, but what happens next is not at all pretty.

  Next time, Ernie, throw the possessed evil dog from the moving vehicle.

  THE END

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  260

  Viewed from the inside, it turns out that being a zombie isn’t so bad. You don’t have the power of conscious thought, so you can’t sit around moping and pondering how your life turned out this way. In that regard, you’re actually better off than you were at that restaurant waiting for your blind date to show up before this whole business b
egan. And the only blunt emotions that break through the haze are “Man, I’m hungry” and “Yay, dinner!” In that respect, it’s not all that different from being a labrador retriever, except that nobody ever rubs your belly or scratches you behind your ears.

  You stumble off looking for food, preferably in the form of human brains, which you instinctively understand are attached to human beings, somewhere inside like the filling in a Twinkie. Sometimes you get the good stuff and sometimes you don’t, but when you fail you just get right back on that horse and try again. Tomorrow is always another day for the living dead.

  Zombies are inspirational like that.

  THE END

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  261

  Father Tim takes you to a small, cluttered room next to the cathedral and loads you up with rosaries, a 10-pound crucifix, something that he claims is the finger bone of Saint Aquinas, and one of those big, swinging balls with smoke coming out of it. Mittens has her trusty shotgun, plus a collection of smaller weapons and four hand grenades.

  The cathedral is surrounded by weeping masses, and as you approach it, you see an older man in robes running toward you with a wild look in his eyes. “Bar the doors!” Mittens shouts to Father Tim. “Don’t let anyone follow us in there!”

  The scene inside is straight out of a nightmare, with the undead packed together like Christmas at Wal-Mart. Mittens lobs grenades toward the far corners of the room and a few zombies are blown to bits, but there are too many left, and those only partially exploded are still crawling toward you. You swing your big smoke ball, but the zombies ignore it. You hit one with your crucifix, but this only makes it angry. You hold out the finger bone of St. Aquinas. A zombie bites it out of your hand and swallows it.

  Holy relics may have been a bad idea. You yell at Mittens to toss you a sidearm, but see her being overwhelmed herself. You’re helpless as the undead tide washes over you.

  You get torn limb from limb by a mob of mindless zombies.

  THE END

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  262

  “I’m here about the zombies—they’ve taken over the whole town!” you say, although it’s hard to tell how much of this is getting through to the guards, since your face is still smashed up against the pavement. “I’ve been researching them. I think I know where they come from!”

  That last bit is pure bluff, but if the government is worried that you might be on to them, perhaps they’ll at least hear what you have to say. Frankly, anything that keeps you from getting a bullet between the ears at this point would be an improvement. After radioing something in on their walkie-talkies, the guards haul you off the ground, drag you inside and stuff you into a small, windowless holding room. They take your shoes, everything in your pockets, and, for some reason, your belt.

  After what feels like an eternity, a middle-aged man with a serious look on his face shows up at the door. You don’t know the exact meaning of all his stripes or bars or medals or whatever, but there are a lot of them, so you figure he’s some kind of general. “So you think you know where these things come from, do you?” he says.

  “Um,” you retort cleverly. Despite sitting here in the dark for a couple of hours, you haven’t really thought this far ahead. “You guys, I figured?”

  “Strike one,” the officer says with what might be humor or might just be impatience. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He brings you to a room where zombies are hooked up to electrodes on the other side of a plexiglass wall. Two technicians on your side of the glass are fiddling with dials and marking things in notebooks. One zombie is trying desperately to get at the techs through the glass, completely ignoring the occasional sparks coming from the electrodes on its temples. You notice that the electrodes on another zombie aren’t on his forehead but . . . significantly lower.

  “We didn’t make them,” the officer says. “Honestly. We just found them this way. But if we can learn to somehow control them . . . well, we could clean up this whole mess right quick, for starters.”

  The officer has an odd gleam in his eye that seems to communicate something like “and then, the world!” It turns out what he wants from you, however, is your cooperation. He offers you a chance to help the military with their undead rehabilitation program.

  If you are horrified by the moral and political ramifications of the United States military creating an army of undead soldiers and refuse to help, turn to page 137.

  If you aren’t really that shocked by it (honestly, if you were them, it’s pretty much what you would do), turn to page 192.

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  264

  Since you only survived your last postal delivery attempt with the help of Brad’s well-seasoned group of zombie avengers, you figure that pulling him away from his crew will only increase his chances of being eaten. Seeing his reaction to news from home does inspire you to check in on your own loved ones, though. You have an aunt who doesn’t live too far from the college, so you pay her a visit.

  There’s no answer at her house, which doesn’t bode well. Perhaps she’s hunkered down at work, you think. It’s already mid-afternoon, but you decide that there’s time to get to the Crogaste Toothpaste office where she works before nightfall.

  Unfortunately, you misjudge the time it will take to cross town on foot. The sky is pitch black by the time you approach the office park, but if the stench is any indication, the area hasn’t fared well. You need to find shelter, and soon. Crogaste appears to be inhabited—light is coming from just about every window in the building. Your delight quickly turns to dread, however, when you see what’s illuminated in that light.

  The parking lot is absolutely lousy with the undead, and literally thousands of the creatures are shambling about, emitting soft moans. You turn to run, but these things picked the area clean of the living days ago and seem quite motivated to get something fresh to eat. You trip in the darkness and skid across the asphalt, and the zombie feeding frenzy washes over you like a school of piranha.

  They skeletonize your body in about thirty seconds.

  THE END

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  265

  The two of you did make a decent team, but whatever brand of crazy this broad is selling, you don’t need any. What you do need is a shower and a change of clothes (also, possibly a cigarette). Your apartment is way on the other side of town, but you have a membership at a gym nearby. Did you leave a set of workout clothes in your locker there? It’s been like four months since you’ve visited, so it’s difficult to remember.

  You navigate the zombie-filled streets and find that the gym is open and looks empty. Perfect. Inside your locker you find a track suit that’s crusty with months-old sweat—that might be worse than what you’re wearing already! You look down at your gore-soaked duds, sigh, and take the workout clothes.

  On the way to the shower, you notice some activity coming from inside the yoga studio. You sneak a peek through the glass door and are confronted with a scene straight out of a horror flick. The walls are covered in blood, and zombies in unitards are milling about, chewing on bones and intestines and stuff. Zombie yoga class! Your first instinct is to make a break for the streets outside. You look back over your shoulder, though, and realize that they’re not actually leaving the studio, just moaning at you and pressing against the door. They don’t know how to work the knob, you realize. It seems like they’ll probably figure it out eventually, though.

  On the other hand, you really need a shower.

  If you play it safe and head for the front door, turn to page 75.

  Then again, who knows when you’ll get another chance? If you risk a shower (just a quick one), turn to page 247.

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  266

  “God speed, my old friend.” You turn away to hide the tears welling up in your eyes, and start to follow Madison down the hill.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!” Ernie screams.

  “What?” This stops you in your tracks. “I’m protecting the . . . you said to go on
without you!”

  “You HAVE to say ‘go on without me!’ I didn’t MEAN it!” He’s completely livid. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re leaving me here to die.”

  Your shambling pursuers are almost upon you now. Also, you feel like a complete jerk. “I thought I was supposed to protect the kid—I’m sorry!” You keep apologizing as you try to find a way to carry your friend. Ernie is not a little guy.

  “You know what,” he says petulantly, “never mind. Now I don’t even want you to try to save me from the zombies.”

  “I said I was sorry!” You pull him over your shoulders, hoping to kind of piggyback him down the hill. Unfortunately, gravity is not your friend, and you’re unable to find your balance with the extra load. You go toppling right over, and Ernie cries out in pain.

  His broken foot, however, is the least of your worries. The stench of rotting flesh overwhelms you, and soon you’re crying out in pain yourself as you feel zombie teeth bearing down.

  THE END

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  267

  Lush. The liquor store has ceiling-to-floor windows and an automatic door, so you start clearing off shelves to use as a barricade. Then you see it: a big, mountainous undead guy in a housecoat, standing there as if mesmerized by the vodka. He must be six and a half feet tall, and weighs at least as much as three of you. Not ready to give up on your boozy paradise quite yet, you grab a bottle of something and crack it over the giant zombie’s head. This just makes him angry, but it does cover him in alcohol, which gives you an idea.