INFECTED (Click Your Poison) (41 page)

Guillermo and Cooper rush in to help you. Sims staggers backward, leans against a shelving unit, then slowly sits down. “I just need a minute,” he says. Blood pours down over his knuckles, trickling in thick streams down his forearm. Guillermo pants heavily, his arms at their limit from thrashing the shovel with enough power to deal a killing blow. Combined with the blade dulling after each kill, his effectiveness is sharply dropping off. His next swing only batters the zombie away, peeling off some of its scalp.

You go on a brief but glorious killing rampage and deal real damage with your axe, slamming a skull with a leftward blow using the bladed side, then reversing and slamming the pike end into a fiend on your right. And yet it’s not enough. The fire outside must be drawing them in from all over the city, where they fall in line toward the store like craven lemmings.

Cooper has taken her muscles to their limit with the crowbar. You’re feeling the strain with your axe as well. Everyone’s just getting exhausted, and yet the flow of undead is relentless. Sims has lost consciousness. A zombie that was only wounded grabs Guillermo around the legs and trips him down to the floor. With Cooper’s help, you free him from the ghoul, but with each setback like this, the horde comes closer.

Then it happens all at once. There’re five zombies for each human, and the numbers don’t add up to your favor. Then Cooper goes down, unable to combat so many foes with merely a crowbar. It’s impossible, there’s too many of them, and that adds one more zombie for the rest of you to deal with while taking away a good fighter.

You hear Guillermo’s screams just as you let out your own. It was a valiant effort, but a foolhardy one in the end. You took quite a few of them down with you, and you won’t add to their ranks either—there’s enough undead eating you alive, that there won’t be enough left to rise again.

THE END

S
plitting up is not your favorite idea, especially when you’re the third wheel on a badass bicycle, but time is scarce. Plus you have your shotgun now. You’ll be okay, right? You ensure a round is chambered, but you’re not allowed the satisfaction of a
pump,
as this is a semi-automatic combat shotgun.

You push the door to the farmhouse open with the gun barrel, wincing at the loud creak of the hinges. Okay, seeds. If you were a seed, where would you be? You head into the kitchen, looking for a large pantry, but find nothing more than a few foodstuffs and certainly nothing you can plant.

At the back of the kitchen is a thin stairwell leading up. Might as well check out the rest of the house. You slowly ascend, shotgun at the ready, and come out into a hall with an open door ushering you inside. It’s the master bedroom, and within is a grisly sight. The bed is ruffled and soiled, stained yellow from some mixture of sweat and vomit. There are ropes along the bedposts, evidence that someone was once bound here. The pieces of flesh on the bloody, discolored knots show that they escaped.

A whistle pierces the air from outside, and you poke your head through the open window. Down below, Rosie looks up at you. “Come on down, we found plenty in the barn!” You nod and duck back inside, just in time to meet face-to-face with the farmer’s wife.

She’s in a grisly state, having escaped from the ropes, and lunges at you.

Without thinking, you raise the shotgun and pull the trigger. After a loud
boom
, she no longer has a head. Your heart pounding, you quickly make your way out of the farm house. “Everything okay?” Rosie asks.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” you say, feeling super-cool.

“Good. Grain-o-plenty in the barn; give us a hand.”

You follow her into the barn, and the first thing you notice is a gigantic combine harvester sitting at the ready. Past that, Lucas works feverishly, filling a wheelbarrow. One full wall is covered in shelving filled with oversized glass jars of seed. On the side of the shelves are mountains of stacked seed sacks the size of sandbags.
Jackpot
!

Running to and fro with your arms full is even more terrifying than searching with the shotgun. You’re essentially defenseless when you’re weighed down with seeds, so you jog to make the process faster. The undead are almost certainly closing in, but this delivery could get the prison fortress through the winter, so you push hard. Fifteen excruciating minutes later, the jeeps are filled to the gills.

You arrive outside and are preparing to leave, but you’re blocked. A veritable zombie army marches down the dirt road, diverted from their tributaries in the fields and forest and funneled out onto the main road. This might prove too difficult for the jeeps. If only you could somehow cut them down, chew through them like wheat at harvest…

“I’ve got an idea,” Rosie says. “Lucas, take the wheel.” She hops out and runs back into the barn.

After a moment, a diesel engine roars to life and the combine harvester emerges, with Rosie at the controls. The threshing wheel begins spinning and she lowers it down to ground level. You pull your jeep off the road and Lucas does the same, allowing Rosie full access to the horde approaching the farm.

In a disgusting confabulation of wet slicing and dry crunching, the combine rips through the crowd. It’s slow going, but Rosie’s in no danger, as the cab is enclosed and there’s no access to it without being ground up by the rotating blades. After a full five minutes of driving, she’s destroyed several hundred zombies and turned the road from dirt to red muck.

Once she’s clear of the farm road, she shuts off the blades, but leaves the engine running. She’s panting heavily when she jumps into your passenger seat. “That. Was. Disgusting.”

“Why’d you leave it running?” you ask.

“It’s louder than the jeeps. Oughta help prevent us from being followed. Let’s go. I need another shower.”

•
 
Return to Salvation.

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

Y
ou sprint over to the window, slide the pane up, and jump out like you’re in an action movie. And yet you tumble to the ground and break your ankle like you’re a normal person.
Crack!
You instinctively reach for the wound, gritting your teeth and mashing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to prevent yelling out in pain.

Your foot looks like something you’d see in a YouTube compilation of extreme stunts gone bad. Bones are sticking out at weird angles, where previously there were none. You look around to ensure your safety; luckily no ghouls are within eyeshot.

Backing across the moistened grass and into the bushes, you hear a commotion within the house. Someone is killing a zombie… or vice versa. Then come the familiar sounds of a body slumping to the floor, and two men talking as they run away.

•
 
Call out for help.

•
 
Crawl around to the front to ensure the coast is clear.

MAKE YOUR CHOICE