Zombocalypse Now Read online

  The mop definitely has more reach. If you think it would make a better weapon, turn to page 175.

  On the other hand, the hammer might actually do more damage. If you ask her to drop that, turn to page 254.

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  76

  “I’m sure it won’t come to that,” you say, trying to sound more confident than you actually are. Anyway, it was self-defense, right? Before Mittens can protest, the door is thrown open and two officers enter the room. Her eyes light up. “Vinny! Carlito!” she says, jubilant. “You have no idea how good it is to see you guys!”

  After brief introductions the cops get down to talking shop. “Clampy Pete is worse than ever,” Carlito says. “There’s rumor of a bunch of zombie activity at this big church outside town, but I think Cardinal D’Amato has something on him, because the chief won’t let us go near it.”

  Wait a minute. “Clampy Pete?” you ask. “Stuffed crab? Gruff exterior?”

  “That’s the captain, all right,” Vinny says. You and Clampy Pete have a long history, and not much of it is good. You’re surprised to hear that he’s running a municipal police department these days. From the sound of things, though, he might not be for very long. The officers tell Mittens that much of the force is ready to rebel against Pete’s by-the-book response to the zombie invasion, and if she’s willing to stand up and challenge his authority, they could put together a full-scale mutiny.

  “Police Chief Mittens,” she says, tapping her chin with a finger. “I like the sound of that.” She offers you a spot on her new renegade police force if you want to come along for the ride.

  If you join Mittens and the other cops in their attempted takeover of Clampy Pete’s precinct, turn to page 94.

  If you want no part of a police mutiny and politely decline, turn to page 97.

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  77

  You turn the engine off and slowly step onto the road. As tempting as it may be, you can’t leave these two here to die. “Just calm down, Billy,” you say as gently as possible. “Why don’t you give me that shotgun?”

  “You know what?” Billy says, somehow becoming even more agitated. “I think this is all your fault. With your big ears and your fancy Toyota Celica. I think you’re confusing her.”

  Over his shoulder, you see a large group of zombies coming up the street. You need to end this quickly.

  “Billy,” Prudence says softly.

  “THIS is what I think of your Celica!” he shouts, blasting away at the front hood. Ouch. You wish he hadn’t done that.

  Prudence tries again. “Billy, there’s zombies.”

  “I know there’s zombies!” Billy screams. Clearly he doesn’t, because they’re approaching very quickly now. “You think those zombies can love you as much as I do?” He reloads and fires again, taking out two of the tires for good measure.

  “Billy, they’re right behind you,” you say, grabbing him and turning his head forcibly as he fumbles for another round.

  “Oh,” he says lamely. “Okay, now I’m out of buckshot.”

  It’s too late to run as the zombies pin you down and immediately start chewing. They manage to devour you whole before the infection sets in, but both Billy and Prudence turn before the crowd can finish with them. The two stumble off together with their new peers, worry free, content to be two undead companions eternally in search of their next meal.

  Ah, young love.

  THE END

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  78

  “Just let me check things out,” you say. “If it’s really that bad in there, we’ll go with your plan. But don’t go blowing anything up until I get back!”

  You find the door to the main building unlocked, and the place seems to be abandoned. Could Clarence have made up his whole story about the zombies? You look for a room labeled “fluoride conspiracy” or “zombification area” or something. Needless to say, you don’t find it, and within minutes you’re hopelessly lost.

  Eventually, you stumble upon the main water processing machinery. It’s behind heavy, locked doors with little porthole windows, and from what you can tell there’s nobody in there, dead or alive. That’s a relief—at least there aren’t a bunch of zombies dripping goo into the water supply. That’s a lot of running water, though . . . now you have to pee. You wander back out into the hallways and are lucky enough to find a bathroom.

  Upon opening the door, though, you immediately realize that your luck has run out. Half a dozen zombies are crowded inside, huddled around a picked-clean corpse. You turn to run, but slip on something sticky that you don’t even want to recognize. The things are all over you in a heartbeat, and all you can do is pick up a stray clipboard, proving once and for all that it can’t be used as a weapon.

  You feel your humanity slip away from you as the zombie infection takes over. Fortunately, you don’t have to suffer the hellish torment of the living dead for long, because in about twenty minutes the whole building explodes.

  THE END

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  79

  “Get the salt, Ernie!” you shout. “We’ve got a live one!” Technical accuracy of that statement aside, your challenge now is to perform the ritual without getting chewed on. “Khenan, get its arms!” you bark. He grabs the zombie from behind and manages to immobilize it. “Okay, I’m going to pry its jaw open—get ready with the salt and the needle!” The zombie’s mouth is slick with gore, making it difficult to get much purchase. Also, it’s squirming like mad. “Hold it tighter!”

  “Oh my God, I remember why this seems familiar,” Ernie mutters, taking a step back.

  What’s he talking about? There’s no time for that now! “I saw it on TV,” he continues. “When I was a kid. This is from Kolchak the Night Stalker.”

  Your hand slips and jabs the zombie right in the teeth, breaking the skin. Crap! “I’m not really Haitian!” Khenan cries. “Or Jamaican! I’m from Ottawa, and my name is Steve! I don’t want to die!”

  He lets go of the zombie’s arms, and suddenly the thing is grabbing your head and biting down hard. You manage to shove it away and free yourself, but already the room is fading to black. You pass out for a moment, and then awake with no emotion, no sense of self, and no desire except an all-consuming one for the delicious taste of human brains.

  The first thing you see is Ernie and Khenan standing over you with a bag of salt and a bunch of candles. “Screw it,” Khenan says, dropping the salt and hitting you over the head with the aromatherapy book.

  Everything fades back to black.

  THE END

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  80

  You glance down the street and see a handful of zombies wandering directly toward your car (naturally—where else would they be heading?). If you’re going to do this thing, it has to be now. You screw up your courage and sprint toward the driver’s side door, push a zombie that’s blocking your way to the ground, jam your key in the lock, and leap inside. Smooth! You’ve got the car locked and the motor started by the time the creatures even know you’re there.

  Once they catch sight of you, however, they swarm. Left with no alternative, you step on the gas, even though the zombies splayed across your windshield have reduced visibility to zero. You accelerate and swerve back and forth in an attempt to shake them off, but smack into some unseen obstacle, which sends you veering toward the sidewalk and into a telephone poll. Seatbelt safety was not priority one, and your head smacks against the windshield.

  Even worse: your drivers’ side window has shattered in the wreck. The zombies that were thrown from your hood upon impact immediately peel themselves off the street and drag themselves toward you. Desperate, you rummage through the glove compartment for something to use as a weapon, but all you find are oil change receipts and the promotional tube of toothpaste that your aunt sent you. One zombie is at your window now, so you pop the top and squirt toothpaste right in its eyes. You’re not sure what you hope to accomplish by this, but you’re bleeding profusely from a gash in your forehead, s
o your thinking might not be one hundred percent clear.

  The zombie grasps at its face and starts to shudder, then wipes the toothpaste messily with its hands and crams as much of it as it can manage into its maw. You squirt another stream out onto the pavement, and the zombie dives for it, frantically licking it off the street. So you throw the rest of the tube out the window, and the remaining zombies turn and hurry toward it, ignoring you and the car.

  These things love them some toothpaste. Huh.

  You climb out of the car and flee the zombie toothpaste orgy, but you’re lightheaded from the blood loss and can’t move too quickly. Down the street you pass a flock of people running madly out of a corner grocery store.

  And you can guess what they’re running from.

  If you risk going into the market to stock up on more zombie-distracting toothpaste, turn to page 133.

  If you’re concerned that you might pass out soon, and try to get help from some of the fleeing store patrons, turn to page 211.

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  82

  You can’t bring yourself to give the order. You’re not sure what an actual military commander would do in this situation, but if it’s round up all the survivors and throw them into a concentration camp, then you’re not fit for command.

  “Not on my watch,” you tell Velasquez. “We can try to get them away from the thick of things, but other than that, we’re just going to have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

  The best you can do with what you’ve got, it turns out, is not actually all that great. The screaming chaos, combined with the fact that a good deal of the equipment you need to deal with it was inside that command center you burned to the ground, make this a losing battle. The undead forces keep growing, and your platoon, or whatever it’s called, keeps shrinking. Eventually the zombies overwhelm you.

  You go down leading your troops in one last desperate push. As far as military commanders go, you could have done worse.

  THE END

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  83

  With the exception of a few abandoned cars, the freeway is empty. As you get closer to the city, the opposite side of the highway becomes more and more congested with empty vehicles until it appears as though an entire bumper-to-bumper rush hour crowd simply gave up and walked away. The lanes heading into town, however, are completely clear.

  Convenient! You exit downtown and find the city streets as abandoned as the freeway. The whole place is probably on lockdown, you think. As you drive further in, though, the zombies slowly start coming out of the woodwork. At first they’re in groups of two or three, but soon they clog the streets. And they’re all headed right for you.

  You turn the car around, but they’re filling in behind you as well. Suddenly something falls from the sky, hitting your hood like a load of bricks. Crap in a hat! Did that zombie just throw himself off a building at you? Sure enough, another one hits, shattering the windshield, followed by two more smacking the street right behind you.

  It’s raining. Freaking. Zombies.

  They keep pummeling your car until you’re completely buried under a dogpile of mostly-flattened undead. Your windshield disintegrates under the assault, but multiple lacerations are the least of your worries. The shattered bodies of fallen zombies shimmy and twist their way into biting position.

  It’s all over before you know it.

  THE END

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  84

  You slam on the brakes and throw open the passenger door, telling the kids to climb inside. The boy, who’s wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt with a chewing tobacco logo on it, hops in the front seat and motions for the girl to join him. She climbs into the back instead.

  “Okay, where are you kids headed?” you ask. “Is there someplace I can take you where you’ll be safe?”

  “Head south on highway 16,” the boy says. “My dad has a totally awesome underground bunker—I was supposed to meet him back at the gun shop, but Prudence took forever, and they left already.”

  The girl winces, catches your eye, and shakes her head when he mentions the bunker. “Um, I live up north on highway 16,” she says quietly. “Out by Zebediah Creek.”

  Either way, to reach Highway 16 you’ll have to drive further into town, through a veritable morass of zombies. “There are too many of them in that direction,” you say. “I don’t think we can even get to the highway.”

  “Oh, I think we can handle them,” Billy grins, pulling an enormous gun out of his duffel bag. “What?” he says defensively when he sees your stare. “It’s hunting season.”

  If you think a teenage boy with a shotgun is exactly what you need to navigate the streets of zombie town and make it to the highway in one piece, turn to page 89.

  If you suspect that plan will get you and both of your young wards killed, and instead seek safety by driving AWAY from the zombies, turn to page 150.

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  85

  Must . . . kill . . . queen, you think. Then you think a lot about brains. Mmm, brains sound really good right now. You should try to get some of those.

  You squirm through the now uninterested zombie crowd looking for the queen, but it’s getting more difficult to tell them apart as the hunger makes it impossible to concentrate. As your humanity slips away completely, your last conscious thought is that in this condition you couldn’t possibly take any kind of orders from anyone. There’s no zombie queen. The reason zombies act together is simply because they all want the same thing.

  Brrrraaaaaiinnns. You can smell them. There’s some guy lashing about frantically in an umpire’s uniform nearby. He might have some. On the other hand, something right here near your face smells delicious. Could a delightful lunch possibly be leaking out of your own head?

  If you press forward and try to muscle in on some of the umpire action, turn to page 61.

  If you back off and investigate the snack that smells like it’s right on top of you, turn to page 122.

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  86

  You know, Ernie’s a sweet guy, but the dead are rising from their graves and feeding on the flesh of the living. At this juncture it might be more appropriate to seek help from somebody with a badge.

  You drive a few blocks to the police station, but find it completely overrun with zombies. It looks like a lot of people had the same inclination as you, and the ravenous dead are swarming on a crowd of screaming, panicking still-living. It’s utter chaos. Maybe you should turn the car around and just keep driving.

  The more you consider the police station, though, the more you’d like to find a way inside, where they have trained officers, guns, Kevlar body armor and stuff. You’re pretty smart. Is it possible you could figure out a way to get in there? Besides, what’s your alternative plan? To burn rubber and keep driving as far away as you can until you run out of gas or something?

  Uh, yeah. If you burn rubber, then keep driving as far away as you can until you run out of gas or something, turn to page 173.

  If you think your best bet is to park the car and find a way inside that police station, turn to page 20.

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  87

  You step forward. “Let’s carve this turkey,” you say, disemboweling the first zombie with one deft motion. That was awesome! Granted, you have to go back and behead the thing as well, since zombies continue to function more or less at full capacity without their bowels, but now you’re all juiced up. The oncoming monstrosities don’t stand a chance.

  Your new-found confidence comes with a realization: people are running around in a mad panic, and they need someone to lead them to safety. Someone with a plan and a calm, soothing demeanor. Someone armed with a chainsaw. You nominate yourself for the position, since you fit all of the above criteria (except for the part about having a plan, but you figure that part you can just wing), and start the process of saving some lives.

  Over the course of an hour, you gather together a group of fifteen or twenty people. Now it’s getting dark, and m
any of your crew are worried about surviving the night. They’re also eying your chainsaw with more than a little envy—perhaps you should scrounge up some more weapons and spread them around. Others are starting to grumble about being hungry. Organizing dinner for twenty people seems like it would be a pain in the butt even under the least apocalyptic conditions.

  Your crew is looking to you to lead the way. Where to, Cap’n?

  If you think that the most urgent need is to find food, turn to page 109.

  If you think that right now arming the group is more important, turn to page 184.

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  88

  “Ernie, there are people still alive in this city, and I’m fairly sure they need water. Let’s head for the mountains. Or we could still go look for my aunt. Maybe she can tell us more about the fluoride thing before we just rush in there half-cocked.” Or full-cocked. Any kind of cocked, really.

  “That’s right,” Ernie says, narrowing his eyes. “Your aunt. It’s funny that I’ve known you all these years and you’ve never mentioned that your aunt works for them.”

  “Ernie, look out!” you yell, and when he turns around, you hit him over the head with your shoe. It was all you could think of. Instead of passing out like they do in the movies, though, he lets out a yelp and grabs his head with his hands. So you hit him a couple more times until he goes limp.