INFECTED (Click Your Poison) (97 page)

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

Y
ou fall to the floor, tucked into the fetal position, just as you’ve been told to do when encountering a bear. Clasping your hands around the back of your neck and tucking your knees into your chest to protect your vital organs, you expect to wait out the attack with minimal injuries.

Here’s why this won’t happen: this is not a chance bear encounter, where the animal is merely posturing his dominance. This, as far as the bear is concerned, is a kill site. His food is here and you’re a threat. Your supplication won’t work this time.

Not only does the animal want you dead, you get to be the dessert. He chews on you like you’d expect, but then he doesn’t stop. He finds a soft spot right around your kidneys and digs in. In short, he eats you while you sit huddled in a little ball.

Looks like you play dead a little too well.

THE END

Y
ou follow Phoenix and the escort up the stairs, a feat that proves difficult in your chemically-affected state. You’re barely in control of your body, but you’re in good company in that arena. Your drug-addled partners have little motor control either.

Into Phoenix’s bedroom, where the party begins. “You two kiss,” he says. The girl grabs you before you have time to react, presses her face against yours, and the mere feeling of her soft lips on yours proves almost orgasmic. Every sense is heightened to the max from the substances in your system.

Phoenix sits back in bed, pulls out a baggie of the coke, and rubs the powder around his lips and gums while watching you with arousal. The girl takes off your shirt for you. She grabs a handful of the drug from Phoenix, rubs it on your stomach, snorts what she can and licks off the rest, moving up to your nipples.

Blood rushes between your legs when she reaches to help you take your pants off. This is going to be an interesting night.

“Oh, shit,” Phoenix says. Suddenly the prostitute falls to the bed convulsing with spasms, her body instantly slick with sweat. Vomit spews forth from her mouth, and she’s choking it back down.

You look to Phoenix for help, but he just shakes his head. “Not that kind of doctor!”

He’s up now, frantically pacing around her. Then she stops moving. He looks to you, then turns back and examines her perfectly-still body. No chest rise or fall. A foamy stain is on the pillow next to her.

“Tell me you didn’t O-D.” He picks up her limp, insipid wrist and checks for a pulse. “You were going to live forever, you stupid bitch.”

You see the topless prostitute in the doorway to the room, but Phoenix doesn’t see her yet. She’s standing oddly still, her perfect-10 body pale and emaciated. There’s vomit caked around her mouth and her hair is plastered to her face. Her eyes are oddly glazed.

“I didn’t let you try it first so you could die in my penthouse,” he says to the girl on the bed. Then, almost as if on cue, she sits up in one fluid movement. He sighs out, “Oh, thank God.”

The girl from the hallway lets out a breathy, barely audible,
moan
—commanding both of your attentions. She raises her arms, opens her mouth, and moves toward you.

The girl on the bed scrambles at Phoenix, clawing and reaching. He backs away and slams into you in an effort to escape, knocking you into the arms of the topless zombie in the hallway and falling to the floor himself.

The undead escort bites down on you hard. She’s oddly strong and ferocious. You try and defend yourself: punching, kicking, shoving, screaming. None of it works. She keeps biting and clawing; she’s trying to eat you alive!

The bottomless zombie pounces from the bed atop Phoenix. He tries the fetal position as defense, covering his face with his hands. She bites into the back and sides of his neck, spraying blood across the floor. He gurgles his screams of death.

You’re still alive, but strips of viscera are ripped off your flesh with every passing moment. You squirm to get out from under her, and you’re almost free—when the bottomless zombie shifts her focus from the limp Phoenix to your flailing and thrashing.

Realizing you’re no match for the two of them, your body gives you an extra shot of adrenaline and you manage to get out from under the zombie. Two steps backward and you tumble down the stairs. The final blow comes from the crack of your skull at the bottom. This doesn’t instantly kill you, but it’s bad news nonetheless: if there’s one thing zombies love, it’s brains, and yours are now exposed.

The two escorts calmly walk down the stairs toward your paralyzed body and, easy as an open walnut, they scoop out and eat your brain. Together they devour you. Phoenix will rise again, but without a brain; the
Gilgazyme®
cannot affect you.

THE END

W
elcome to the first day of your afterlife. You’re not exactly dead, but you’re certainly not alive either. You are the in-between. You don’t need to breathe and your heart doesn’t pump, but you’re okay with that. The
Gilgazyme
 ® has changed you in ways zombie fiction could never have predicted. True, your body is only a tool you’ll use in your never-ending quest for human tissue, and so long as your brain remains intact, whatever damage the rest of you sustains is irrelevant. But the change in your genetic code, which causes your body never to age, also prevents it from decomposition.

When you get wounded in the upcoming millennia, your body will simply be opened like a med school cadaver. No blood will emerge. Your wounds will not fester nor rot. Yet you’re no longer breaking down nutrients, so you won’t heal either. You’ll simply incur a debt of flesh, until it proves enough to dismantle you.

Stay young and beautiful forever with
Gilgazyme
 ®.

You’re no longer skilled, nor coordinated. But what you lack in grace, you make up in persistence. You don’t sleep or rest. You’ll never feel pain or cold or emotion. The only need you have now is hunger. You don’t have memories per se, but certain feelings have given way to instinct. You know where you should go to feed.

•
 
Mom and Dad aren’t far away, and they’re always saying I should visit more often.

•
 
My friends will be worried; I’d better see how they’re doing. Maybe they’ll want to join my Walking Club?

•
 
I think I was in love at some point; let’s find my sweetheart so we can be together forever.