Zombocalypse Now (29 page)

“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.

Molotov cocktails, baby.

You tear some liquor store employee vests to shreds, stuff them into the tops of bottles (starting with the gross, weird liqueurs), light one with the butane lighter you still carry even though you’ve supposedly been a non-smoker for three days, and chuck it. A direct hit! The enormous zombie bursts into flames. You turn to see several more coming through the automatic door, so they get a face full of flaming booze as well.

You’re quite pleased with yourself until you realize that all of the zombies are still coming at you, and now instead of defending yourself against regular zombies, you have to defend yourself against
zombies on fire
. They don’t feel pain, and it takes forever to char them to the point where they’re immobile. In fact, the only thing you’ve managed to do is inconvenience them, and only because they prefer their meals uncooked.

One of them knocks over a shelf, and the whole building goes up in flames. Smoke gets in your lungs, and you discover that being eaten by zombies while simultaneously burning to death is perhaps the worst imaginable way to go.

THE END

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Although the ranger station has a roof and possibly even a refrigerator, if you’re going to create a long-term base for a large group of people, the campsites are still your best bet. You hike into the woods, following the stream that runs to the valley. Traveling with the group is much slower than it would be alone, and Isabelle in particular becomes increasingly queasy throughout the day. She didn’t wind up eating much of her stew, but even the small taste she managed to get down doesn’t seem to agree with her. Late in the afternoon you decide to stop and break camp. Since the weather is nice, you might as well encourage the group to get used to sleeping under the stars. You’ll start worrying about permanent shelter tomorrow when you arrive at your destination.

The little old lady with dentures looks at you with big, puppy dog eyes, and you tell her to go ahead and brush her teeth in the stream. After organizing a light meal from the market supplies, you sit down for a well-earned rest. Almost immediately, though, you hear a commotion coming from the river. Daryl is there with a few of his compatriots, and the denture lady appears to be pitching a fit.

“Dude, all I did was try to borrow her toothpaste, and she freaked out,” Daryl says, holding up a sparkly purple tube that you recognize, oddly enough, as the same brand that your aunt sent you in the mail. “Then she started, like, swallowing the stuff, so I took it away from her.”

Denture Lady looks pale, and you wonder if she might also have sampled this morning’s stew. “Toothpaste!” she yells at the top of her lungs. “Toothpaste! Toooothpaaaaste!” Her eyes go white, and her voice deadens to the low moan you’ve heard many times in the past two days.

“Braaaaaaaaaaains!”

Daryl screams, pushing her into the river. Then he looks down at the toothpaste in his hand, screams again and throws that downstream as well. “What the hell!” he shrieks. “Now toothpaste turns people into zombies?”

Before you can respond, you see Zombie Denture Lady pulling herself out of the river behind Daryl, about to lunge at him. It’s one of the least pleasant things you ever have to do, but you grab a big stick from the ground and put the poor old woman out of her misery. Suddenly, you hear a scream from the far end of camp.

“Zombies!” a man is yelling. “They found us!”

Sure enough, several moaning corpses are making their way out of the woods up the trail. And, even more shockingly, one of them is wearing a pink sun hat. Could these things have followed you all the way from the apartment building this morning?

“Screw this!” somebody says. “We need to get to that ranger station thing!”

“No,” someone else insists. “If they’re out here, we should go back to town! It’ll be safe now!”

Several voices pipe up in agreement, but Daryl has his own plan. “Guys! All we have to do is hide in the woods and pick them off one by one. Gorilla warfare!” You can hear him misspelling “guerrilla” just by his vocal inflection. The housewife in the tracksuit who lent you her cigarettes yesterday seems to think this is an excellent idea.

“I don’t care what you guys do,” the first man says. “I’m heading to the ranger place. Who’s with me?” The station, though, is back the other way, past the zombies coming toward you. And who knows how many could be following? You’re certain that, left to their own devices, nobody here will survive until morning.

If you try to persuade the group to stay together and continue on to the valley,
turn to page 6.

You only joined up with the group in the first place because they asked you to. If they don’t want your help any longer, why should you force it on them? If you let the group do what it wants and wash your hands of the whole lot of them,
turn to page 218.

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271

Come to think of it, the more densely populated areas seem to be the most infested with zombies. If the plague has hit the big city, they’re probably falling from the skies. You take Prudence’s group up on their offer (“The Congregation,” they call themselves) and settle down for the night.

Over the coming weeks you get to know the community, getting over your initial skittishness. Prudence takes to her new role as Prophet with surprising grace and soon the whole compound has accepted her as its leader. You’re not sure what life was like when men ruled the roost, but only a few old-timers are left now, and the women Prudence gathers around her to help organize things seem level-headed and peaceful.

If any of them find Prudence’s new religious “visions” odd, they’re happy enough with the way things are being run to keep quiet about it. Weeks turn into months and then into years. What starts as an entirely unicorn-based theology slowly changes to focus largely on sparkly vampires, then shooting really arty photographs, and eventually hardcore environmentalism (for a few months in college, the religion also experiments with its sexuality, but this is more of a phase).

Prudence puts you in charge of defending the settlement against zombies. Small groups of them never stop wandering out to the compound, so the rest of the world doesn’t seem to be faring particularly well. But you build the fences into walls, and your new community keeps itself safe.

It’s not an easy life, but all things considered, it’s a good one.

THE END

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Fate didn’t plop you down in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and then hand you the ultimate, epic weapon of undead destruction because it wanted you to sit on your ass. If there are people here who need rescuing, you’re damn well going to rescue them. These scattered, stumbling former zoogoers probably weren’t particularly impressive in life, and in death they’re easy enough to dispatch. Just get their attention, sever their rotting corpse heads from their rotting corpse shoulders, and down they go. You’re in balls-out Klingon warrior mode now. The zombie crowd thins out as you approach the source of the screams, and by the time you find it, there isn’t a walking dead person to be seen.

What you do see is a young woman standing by the polar bear habitat. “My baby!” she yells. “My baby’s trapped inside the bear pit!”

Really, you think.
Really?
You look down, and, sure enough, some kid is dangling from a stunted tree while three polar bears of various sizes loom underneath it. “Calm down,” you say. “They’re as scared of us as we are of them.”

“I don’t know,” she says, still panicking. “They’re walking all funny, and I think the big one is
moaning
.” ZOMBIE FRICKIN’ POLAR BEARS? Aw, hell no.

Today is a good day to die.

You leap into the pit, swinging your weapon at the largest of the bears. It connects, but these things have necks like SUV tires—you barely seem to scratch it. You do get its attention, though, and lure the three drooling, moaning monstrosities away from the tree just as the toddler loses her grip and tumbles to the ground.

You have only one chance at this. Breaking into a sprint, you scoop the kid into your arms and keep running to the spot where her mom waits above you. “Catch the baby!” you yell, and chuck her as hard as you can up over the wall. I know—throwing babies is almost never a good idea. In this case, though, it was all you could think of, and she lands in her mother’s arms, knocking both mother and child backwards.

You never find out what happens to them after that, because although Goldilocks may have made it to safety, the three bears are upon you. You get a few good swings in, but this was never going to end with you climbing out of the zombie bear pit alive. You don’t. They eat you. But as they do, you’re somehow heartened by the feeling that you died honorably, battling to save the life of a helpless child.

Stupid balls-out Klingon warrior mode.

THE END

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It’s all downhill from here. There’s an elaborate scheme to draw human survivors into your lair, and an ever-growing battalion of zombie test subjects. The experiments themselves get more and more bizarre—what is grafting a zombie arm onto a human host supposed to prove? But it doesn’t even matter at this point. Reality blurs and you start to feel at home with your undead compatriots, forgetting that Phillip, Smitty, and the others weren’t always reeking corpses.

You wanted to see what balls-out, zombie-experimenting insanity looks like, and this is it.

It can’t last forever, of course, and ends in true mad scientist fashion, with an angry mob of townspeople armed with honest-to-god torches storming the manor. You set the zombies loose on them, but they slowly hammer their way through the legions of undead and you’re forced to barricade yourself in a third-floor bedroom. You smell smoke and know it’s only a matter of time before the whole house goes up. You did know that this was going to end in flames one way or the other, didn’t you? But you won’t let it come to that. You pull a syringe from your lab coat, knowing that you’d rather join your noble undead brethren that give these yokels the satisfaction of killing you. After injecting the zombie pus into your neck, you fling yourself out the window to your death.

Moments later, you rise again. You never do find out how the rest of the battle goes, since the towering inferno behind you doesn’t hold your attention, and you stumble off aimlessly across the land. You blend in with the faceless zombie masses, looking for fresh meat and delicious, delicious brains.

THE END

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Turning on your heel and sprinting from the undead procession and hapless protesters, you hit the docks and find a small fishing boat that has an ignition key in it. You’ve never actually driven a boat before, but after starting the motor, testing the throttle, smacking the boat all up against the dock, then untying it and trying again, you slowly master the controls. Your first instinct is to pilot away from shore as quickly as possible.