Stumbling, you dump more vodka on your mangled hand—ow, ow, ow!—and find some linen napkins to bandage yourself up with. But now you’re all slick with your own blood, and you didn’t consider how hard this part would be with only one hand. Slowly, though, the pain subsides. Your mind starts to wander. It dawns on you that you haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. Hey, you know what you could really go for right now?
Brains.
Alas, the infection, once in your bloodstream, isn’t hampered by various heroics with meat cleavers and Finnish vodka. Thanks to the severe blood loss, the life leaves your body, to be replaced by a mindless hunger for one thing and one thing only. You shuffle to your feet, wander out the back door, and, as a one-handed zombie, are almost immediately beaten back to death by a shirtless guy with a pair of homemade nunchucks.
THE END
187
You’re not sure you’ve worked out how to sew a zombie’s mouth shut while it’s actively trying to bite you, so you go with plan B, picking up something wrought-iron and pointy off the coffee table and whacking the thing with it. The zombie falls back, moans indifferently, and then lunges at you. You try to dodge, but there’s very little room to maneuver in the cramped space, and you lose your balance. You, Ernie, Khenan, and the zombie all go toppling to the floor in a pile.
This isn’t over yet! You wiggle free, pull the zombie off your companions, and keep beating it with your makeshift weapon until its head is a pulpy mess. There! That wasn’t so hard.
“Is it dead?” Ernie asks, pulling himself off the floor. “Should we try the salt thing now? It doesn’t actually have a mouth anymore—what do you think, Khenan?”
The Haitian and/or Jamaican voodoo expert stumbles to his feet behind Ernie. “Braaaains,” he mutters, sinking his teeth into your friend’s shoulder.
No! Ernie falls to the ground and you rush to him, taking your weapon and striking Zombie Khenan with all your might. You knock him halfway across the room and take Ernie in your arms, only to see that your friend’s eyes have gone white. He starts to moan in an all too familiar manner.
You panic, bolting for the door, and discover two more zombies coming down the hallway. Now you’re trapped between the two in front and the two—
oh, Ernie
—coming at you from behind.
In moments you’re a group of five.
THE END
188
It takes a while to walk back to the restaurant, but your chainsaw makes killing zombies such a pleasure that you don’t mind. When you finally find the Toyota, however, it’s in rough shape. It’s dented up, the windows are broken, and your personal items are strewn about all over the street. They even seem to have rooted through the glove compartment. And the zombies responsible are just sort of listlessly lying around—several of them, in fact, appear to be passed out on your hood.
You’ve only been battling zombies for a couple of hours, but you’ve certainly never seen anything like this before.
What have those monsters done to your poor car?
You feel so violated. You flip out more than a little and just let loose with the chainsaw—by the time you’re done, you’ve made something like a zombie salad, and the Toyota now sports a patchwork of saw marks to go along with the rest of the body damage. It still starts like a dream, though. And the missing windows may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, since your car is definitely going to need to air out a little.
You drive back to the gas station and fill every suitable container you can find with petroleum. Now you’re ready to roll. Part of you wants to keep driving around the city carving up as many zombies as you can, but something tells you that maybe you should take this opportunity to just split town.
If you think you can do the most good by staying in the city and using your chainsaw to thin the zombie herd,
turn to page 160.
If you decide to hit the open road instead,
turn to page 228.
189
You take off down the alley and—miraculously—make it past the undead loiterers unmolested. Alas, the burst of activity doesn’t do much for your delicate constitution. They say that fortune favors the bold, but nobody favors the violently hung over, and right now you just want to curl up and die. Except not literally. Which, unfortunately, is kind of the default option. Then you spot a rusty fire escape ladder that leads up about four stories. Zombies can’t climb, can they? Maybe if you get up to the rooftops, you’ll be safe, at least until you feel well enough to travel. You grab the first rung of the ladder and slowly start to pull yourself up, rung by rung. You’re dizzy but hanging on for dear life.
You make it about thirty feet. Then you lose your footing, slip off the ladder, and plummet to the ground below. Your legs and back explode in pain as you hit the asphalt. You’re going to die here, you think. At least the zombies seem to have wandered off.
Unable to move, you look up and see a formation of birds soaring above you in the clear blue sky. They’re majestic, beautiful things, and they give you hope. Not for yourself, but for the world at large. If those birds have escaped the zombie plague, surely there are people out there who did as well. They’ll come and clean all this up before the infestation can spread too far. You might not make it out alive, but humanity will endure. Hey, are those birds getting closer?
You’re overwhelmed by the stench as the first one lands right on your belly.
You get eaten by a flock of zombie seagulls.
THE END
190
“Leave no soldier behind!” you shout at Daryl. “Ramming speed!”
You’re pretty sure you’ve mixed army and navy references there, but Daryl seems okay with this and puts pedal to metal, crashing through the non-shattered side of the storefront for maximum effect. If this were a movie, the action would freeze right at this moment, and you’d be left with the bittersweet reality that your heroes probably never made it out alive, but the tiniest glimmer of hope in your heart. Fade to black. Roll credits.
Unfortunately, it’s just a crappy choose-your-own-whatever book. Daryl plows through a whole mess of zombies and crashes into the back wall, throwing your unseatbelted ass right into the truck’s front windshield. The velocity isn’t enough to kill you, but compounded with your earlier injuries, you’re in no shape to battle the undead horde. You make a few sort of pathetic swings with your bat, but if there are any still-living survivors here, you can’t even pick them out, let alone save them. Soon the zombies overwhelm you and have easy access to your brain through your already softened noggin.
In your head, you pictured that going differently.
THE END
191
The Haitian Voodoo guy’s business office is in the suburbs on the other end of town, at the end of a long hallway in the back of a liquor store. You knock on the door, and a good-looking man with dreadlocks and a silk shirt unbuttoned to the waist answers.
He introduces himself as Khenan, taking care to indicate that it’s spelled with an “h” in there somewhere. When you ask him if he knows anything about zombies taking over the city, your host’s eyes grow wide. “Ah, the dead, they rise up from their graves,” he says. “My Jamaican ancestors have many tales of these happenings.”
Ernie lifts an eyebrow. “Your brochure said you were from Haiti,” he says.
“Right, my Haitian ancestors,” Khenan continues. “What did I say?” His accent still sounds Jamaican to you. “I can tell you everything I know . . .
for a small consultation fee
,” he continues, lowering his voice to sound all mysterious and spooky. “The price for piercing the veil that separates the living from the dead is . . .
forty dollars
.”
Now you’re certain this guy is a charlatan. “Just pay him,” Ernie says. “It’s the zombie apocalypse out there. What else are you going to spend the forty bucks on, anyway?”
It’s not the money. It’s the principle. If you refuse to give Khenan a dime,
turn to page 108.
Actually, Ernie might be right. Most of the stores must be looted or filled with zombies by now, and you realize that even if you skip rent entirely at this point, the world probably won’t end any more than it already has. If you fork over the cash,
turn to page 174.
.
192
“Sign me up,” you say. You figure that abuse of government power at this stage will have to take a back seat to fighting the infernal zombie outbreak.
“Excellent,” the officer says. “Our problem is that nothing we do even gets their attention—their brains no longer seem to be controlling their actions in any meaningful way. We just keep shocking them, and eventually the brains just sort of fry out and they drop dead.”
“Hmm,” you say. “So what can I do to help?”
“Well,” he continues, “we’re wondering if we might have more luck with the unique physiology of a stuffed animal.”
You realize you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake as the guards come and strap you down to an operating table. The last thing you remember is a technician coming at you with a syringe full of something that looks like it was drained from one of the test subjects in the other room.
You spend your short zombie existence being shocked, prodded, and, occasionally, beaten with sticks.
THE END
193
“Go home to your wives,” you say. “Or your husbands. Or your life partners, or whatever. I don’t think I’m supposed to ask about that. But things are going to hell out there, and your families need you.” They seem reluctant to abandon their post. “Go, all of you—that’s an order!”
Your platoon disperses, and Velasquez stops to speak with you on his way out. “Thanks for that,” he says. “You turned out to make an okay lieutenant colonel after all.” Is that what you were? He gives a crisp salute, climbs into a jeep, and leaves with the others.
Now you’re alone, and you realize that the soldiers have taken all the vehicles with them. “Uh, guys?” you say loudly. Your voice echoes through the base. They’ve taken all of the weaponry as well, from what you can see. Well, your car should still be out there where you parked it. Then you notice a stream of zombies pouring out of the command center, and it dawns on you that you didn’t remember to clean up that particular detail. “Guys!” you repeat, this time shouting as loud as you can. “Wait for me!”
It’s too late. You’re overwhelmed. The guy who eats you, in a funny twist of fate, was actually a real lieutenant colonel.
THE END
194
Mittens is sprinting for her car, but before the zombie horses can start after her, you pick up a stray traffic cone and throw it at them. To hell with it, you think. No one lives forever. And if you’re going to die, you’d just as soon die in a blaze of cone-throwing, cop-rescuing glory.
There are three more cones surrounding an open manhole cover, and by the time you’ve thrown them all at the zombie horse brigade, you seem to have gotten their attention. Manhole cover? Maybe you’ll be safe if you climb down inside! Before you have a chance, though, the bigger horse bounds after you and plants its front hooves right in the hole, falling spectacularly and throwing its rider forward. It hits you full force, and you tumble to the ground with the zombie cop in a heap on top of you.
You struggle to keep his gaping maw away from your face—his breath is even worse than your date’s was!—but soon the smaller horse and its rider have joined in, and all looks lost. You’re kind of disappointed with the relative lameness of your final blaze of glory.
With a sudden, thunderous bang, the zombie cop is blasted away from you. Three more shots follow, and bits of zombie man and animal are splattered everywhere. Granted, now you’re completely covered in undead goo, but you’re still glad to see Mittens standing over you with a sawed-off shotgun. “I have to admit, that was ballsy,” she says, throwing you her coat. You attempt in vain to wipe off some of the gore with it. Ew, it’s in your fur.
“Maybe I misjudged you,” she says. “What do you say we go lean on the criminal element until we find out what’s going on here?” Lean on the what? Is she living in a 1970s Clint Eastwood movie?
“Uh, I’m not sure if this really seems like an organized crime thing to me,” you say diplomatically.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Mittens says with a wink. “I’ve got another shotgun. Plus, even if they don’t have anything to do with this mess, if you smack ’em hard enough, they always confess to
something
.” You’re not sure how you feel about the look in her eyes when she says that—it’s something bordering on glee. On the other hand, its not like you’re bursting with ideas yourself, and she is offering firepower.
If you suspect that Mittens is a little off her rocker and let her go break criminal kneecaps on her own,
turn to page 265.
If you decide that running with an insane police officer is a fair trade for getting your hands on a sawed-off shotgun,
turn to page 52.
196
If the people on those reality shows can eat live dung beetles and flatworms, then you can do this, since it might just save your life. It’s rough, but you do it. Isabelle follows suit, along with a few of the others, although most of them don’t even want to get near the concoction.
“Look out the windows!” Daryl says, entering the room. “Dude, I am not eating that. Seriously, though, hella zombies.” You peer outside and sure enough, the street is packed with them. Your decision to collapse the stairs appears to have been a good one. You wish you could say the same thing about your breakfast choice. Suddenly, you feel a sharp pain in your belly, and double over in pain.