Zombocalypse Now (25 page)
Mittens returns your glance with a nod—whatever is happening here is happening behind those doors. Another man runs toward you, and you recognize him as the young priest who was tossing zombie corpses in the dumpster. Mittens shoves D’Amato to the side and pushes open the cathedral doors before Dumpster Boy can reach you.
You’re not sure what you were expecting, but the cathedral is packed wall to wall with hundreds of zombies. Before your brain can process this horrific sight, however, something smacks you hard in the back of the head. You catch a glimpse of D’Amato standing over you with an oversized, bloody candlestick as you hit the floor and your vision fades to black.
You totally got killed by a pope.
THE END
227
The girl and her resurrected cocker spaniel live in a small town not too far away. Although the freeways are a mess of accidents and abandoned cars, the following morning you and Ernie take rural side roads and arrive in one piece. It dawns on you that you’ll need to get gas on the way back, though. Who knows how that might go.
“Oh my GOD,” the girl says when you knock on her door and ask about the dog. She’s about 13, and her thumbs fly madly across her cellphone keypad while she talks to you. She barely looks up, and if she’s noticed that the world is crawling with undead, she doesn’t let on. “I hate that thing. Take it if you want it.”
The spaniel in question peers around the corner from inside the house, shaking, staring at you with unblinking eyes, and growling softly. It’s fur is slick, and matted with something that might be blood. “Uh, is your dog okay?” you ask.
“Princess is ALWAYS like that. I was nine when we buried that stupid thing, and it hasn’t stopped growling in four years. SO gross. Seriously, take it.”
You look at Ernie. “I had planned on checking out the cemetery, too,” your friend says. You look at the dog and shudder. You have what you came for—it might be safer to take it and get as far away from this place as possible.
If you think Ernie’s right and check out the pet cemetery while you’re here,
turn to page 54.
Seriously, though, that dog creeps you out. You’re trying to figure out how you can get it into a crate for transport without touching it. If you just take the little monster and go,
turn to page 212.
228
You add the gas station’s soda and junk food supplies to your provisions and get the hell out of Dodge, sticking to back roads and seeking out the least populated regions on the map. You’re hoping to just sort of wait the zombie apocalypse out, and your decision to hoard gasoline turns out to be a good one. What little is left of society degenerates into roving bands of desperate outlaws with mohawk haircuts and bits of scrap metal welded to their dune buggies inside of about three weeks.
You travel the countryside for a couple of months and have any number of crazy adventures along the way—that Thunderdome place, in particular, is
wack
—but your supplies only last so long, and replacements get harder and harder to come by. Eventually you’re left wandering alone in the desert, hoping beyond hope to encounter a generous stranger with a bite to eat and a jug of water.
Alas, that generous stranger turns out to be long since dead, and the bite to eat turns out to be you.
THE END
229
You decide that if you were standing out by the mailboxes, hungering for human brains, you’d want your fellow tenants to give you the benefit of the doubt before smacking you in the face with a blunt object. But then you start to wonder. You haven’t made an attempt to save any of the other zombies you’ve run into so far. Why the sudden compassion? Is it possible that your willingness to abandon or even kill these things isn’t because they’re dangerous, but because they’re
unattractive
? You look back at your neighbor, thinking about the way beauty is just an arbitrary construct. Also, you think, as a corpse she can only continue to decay to the point where eventually she won’t even be cute anymore.
You may be the
worst person in the entire world
.
This sends you into something of an existential crisis, pondering the shallowness of your true nature, and on a further tangent regarding the manner in which body image issues have affected your life to this point. Fortunately, you don’t have to fret about it for long. Lost in thought, you don’t notice your neighbor plodding up behind you, and when she drags you to the pavement in a full-body tackle, it’s too late. You do catch a whiff of her reeking zombie breath as her teeth sink into the back of your head, though.
Not hot.
You get devoured by the sexiest zombie ever.
THE END
230
“The zombies seem more interested in human brains than stuffed animal ones,” you lie. “Give me the tube and tell me where I’m going and what I’m looking for.”
Candice and Ernie protest, but you won’t budge. You start making the case that you need the two of them alive in case they have to repopulate the planet after the zombie plague, but realize how ridiculous that sounds. After all, their chances of survival aren’t any higher than the rest of the yet-to-be-zombified population, which you certainly hope includes more likely hook-ups than these two.
You smear some toothpaste on a stick and head down the hill toward the building. Zombies spot you and start staggering your way, so you throw the stick off to the side, and sure enough, they follow it like sheep dogs. You grab a handful of rocks from the ground and dab them with paste, and repeat this tactic until you’re inside.
Once there, however, dozens more zombies rush you. You’re out of pebbles, so you frantically empty your tube, squirting paste all over them. They turn on themselves, but the crowd outside smells this, too, and crashes in like a wave from behind. The good news is, you don’t ever reawaken to the tortured half-life of the undead, because the zombies don’t even bite you. They just trample you to death.
The bad news is, Candice and Ernie also fall to the zombie menace before their unlikely romance has a chance to blossom. Humanity is lost.
THE END
231
You can’t remember any reason to continue swimming against the tide, so you follow the other zombies toward the building. As you approach, you see people huddling in terror, and something inside you stirs. Who are they? You feel vaguely protective toward them for some reason.
Then it slips away, and now they just look like lunch. Your last conscious thought is that if you hit the glass doors with enough force, you should be able to shatter them, so you pick up a big rock and start pounding away. Several other zombies follow suit, and although soon you can’t remember why you’re even doing it, you’ve managed to teach them a new trick. Without your help they might never have gotten in! When the glass finally shatters, you all pile through and begin feasting. There’s plenty to go around.
THE END
232
“Wait!” you yell. “Ernie, I need help!”
Your friend finds you sitting on the cold garage floor, clutching your leg next to the remains of an extremely dead raccoon. You explain what happened, and Ernie seems perhaps a little too interested in trying amputation as a first resort. After discussing it, though, you both agree that whatever is going to enter the bloodstream already has by now, and there’s nothing to do but wait it out.
Ernie brings you inside and tries to make you as comfortable as possible, but it’s a losing battle. Although the area around the bite has gone completely numb, you’re queasy, shaking, and cold all over, even with the heat cranked up. After a couple of hours, you’re sure of it. “I think I’m fading,” you mutter to your friend. “You have to get out of here. Go find that valley with the river. You’ll be safe there.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he insists. “Like I know you wouldn’t leave me. Now try to get some rest.”
Sleep is the last thing on your mind. In fact, Ernie’s presence is starting to prompt some terrifying feelings. You look at him, and part of you knows that he’s your friend and that he’d do anything for you. But a growing part of you just sees a meal.
It’s in there
, you think.
It’s delicious. And I want it.
“Ernie, don’t let this happen to me,” you say. “You have to stop it.” Your friend is horrified. He knows what you’re asking of him but tells you that he can’t bring himself to do it. He doesn’t have the strength.
“Please,” you say, desperate now. The darkness is coming. “I don’t want this . . .”
Ernie disappears for a moment and returns with something small and heavy. He presses it tightly into your hands and gently pulls out the pin. One of your last conscious thoughts is
where did Ernie get a live hand grenade?
“Hold on to this as tight as you can,” he says between tears. “For as long as you can. When you let go, it’ll all be over.”
Ernie is long gone by the time you slip away. The grenade falls from your lap, and the unthinking monster you’re about to become is splattered all over his living room.
You may be gone, but you’re not forgotten. Inspired by your courage, Ernie starts by tracking down your Aunt Candice—she’s been hunkered down in a drive-thru espresso hut—and together they seek out other survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Their group grows to include a renegade police woman, a shirtless and enthusiastic AC/DC fan, several spunky college students, and a Haitian voodoo expert who turns out to be Canadian, among others. Ernie leads them to his spot in the mountains, and they seal themselves in, blocking out the zombie menace and starting the long, hard work of making a home there.
Tomorrow is another day.
THE END
234
Relax, you think. You don’t know exactly how the zombie thing spreads. Maybe you’ll be okay? You find some clean rags and bandage yourself up as well as you can with just your left hand. You’re tempted to grab another bottle from the bar, but things just got real serious, and you suspect that you may need your wits about you if you’re going to get through this alive. The restaurant is clearly not safe, so you leave out the back door and through the alley.
The streets outside are madness. Zombies are everywhere, and the still-living seem to have degenerated into screaming, panicked lemmings. You carefully navigate the city, trying to avoid the worst of it. Things are getting hazy, though, and soon your hands and feet have gone numb.
Then you feel the hunger come on. By the time you’ve made it to the freeway overpass, you’re sure of it: you’re becoming a zombie. You can feel your humanity slipping away, and your thoughts are getting more and more muddled, replaced by an all-consuming desire for human brains.
Anything but this, you think! You’re right in the middle of the freeway bridge now, and you look down at the eight lanes of abandoned cars below. The fall from this height would most likely kill you.
If you leap over the side of the bridge, preferring oblivion to the wretched, eternal damnation of the living dead,
turn to page 135.
Then again, maybe wretched, eternal damnation is overselling it. Who knows what zombiehood might bring? If you accept your fate and wait for the change to come over you,
turn to page 260.
235
You’re not sure if you could shoot yourself, but you certainly don’t want to wind up like those things. “I’ll save one for you if you save one for me,” you say.
“There you go,” Vinny agrees. He gives you a weary smile and goes back to blasting zombies away. You do, too, albeit with a little less efficiency, because the truth is that you’re not a very good shot. Things start getting desperate, but after a few minutes you see a gap open up in the wall of undead. It looks like with some fancy gunplay and a little luck, you might actually be able to get back to the station in one piece.
“You ready?” Vinny asks, interrupting your train of thought. “I’m on my last round!”
“Hold on,” you say. “I think maybe we can make it back.”
“I’m not making it anywhere,” Vinny insists, wild-eyed. “Not without ammunition. You said I could shoot you!”
“Don’t shoot me!” You’re hysterical now. “That plan didn’t even make sense! At least one of us can make it out of here—shoot yourself if you have to!”
“A deal’s a deal,” Vinny says, pointing his shotgun between your eyes. “Sorry, but you can’t play an apocalypse by the book, right?” He fires, and your brains fly right out the back of your head.
The silver lining is, there’s no chance you’ll be getting undead from that.
THE END
236
It sounds like Crogaste corporate headquarters is zombie central, so if there’s a chance that some of this stuff has already shipped, you’d just as soon check that out first. You drive to the shipping center, which is a large fenced group of buildings surrounded by a fleet of big brown trucks (which you’re thinking about trying to commandeer on the way out). The place is locked up tight, so you give Ernie a boost over the fence and then climb up yourself. Once at the top, you take Candice’s hand to help pull her over as well.
Suddenly, though, Ernie starts screaming, and you see a pair of dobermans running toward him. “Zombie dogs!”
The dogs start to bark and growl as they approach, and look pretty healthy as they come into the light. Whew—just regular dogs. Then they both attack your friend, and you realize that regular dogs might be trouble, too. You jump off the fence and try to give Ernie some help, but now the dogs attack you. These things are vicious! One of them sinks its teeth into the flesh of your leg and won’t let go. You scream bloody murder and see two figures approaching. Zombie security guards?