Get Zombie: 8-Book Set (12 page)

Pepper
licked Jackson's face and threw her head back and howled like a wolf.

“Hot
damn!” she said. “Let's go back to my place, baby!”

She
ran away with him. Her speed was
amazing
. I gave chase. The
lights all over the place were flickering. I was disoriented. It felt
like I was in a rat maze. I followed Jackson's screaming into another
hallway. The place looked like Hell. People were screaming all around
me.

I
ran by nurses that were wiggling on the floor like snakes with their
tails cut off. Many of the nurses were missing hands for some reason.
The walls were bloody. Pepper had written, in blood, “Janice!
You Whore!” I was offended. All that blood – all that
stinging odor of blood, of rusty pennies – made me vomit in my
throat a little. A male nurse with no feet grabbed my ankle. He
begged for help. I was speechless, and horrified. Against my better
judgment, I kicked him in the face, and I ran off screaming with my
arms waving in the air.

“Jackson!
Jackson! Jackson! Where are you?”

“Pepper's
room!” he said.

Glass
breaking.
A wave of inspiration shot through me. My legs were
lighter. I impressed myself by jumping over body after body. The
floor of Pepper's room was covered in a queer liquid. The stench was
terrible. A giant, black pot of some kind was on the ground, on its
side, steaming.
Jackson's scream again.
I ran to the busted
window. Pepper ran through the night with Jackson over her shoulder.
She jumped over an unimpressed cat. I yelled at her something I don't
remember and climbed out the window and ran after them. I was
exhausted. My chest and the left side of my waist hurt. Pepper made
for the street. A car almost ran over them. It squealed to a stop and
honked. The driver got out – this real mountain of a man –
and shoved a shaking fist in front of her face. He was cursing in
what sounded like Swahili. Pepper flicked her head forward and bit
the man's fingers off. At first he was just rather surprised, but
then he started yelling and praying on his knees. Pepper laughed and
laughed and then giggled little teehee's and kicked the man right in
the mouth – with her foot bursting clear through to the other
side. The man's brains blew out right quick and all his red tinted
the headlights. Pepper grinned and put her hand to her mouth.

“Oopsies,”
she went.

Jackson
seized the moment and bit into her ear. She dropped him.

“Baby,”
she said, “why did you do that?”

Another
car drove up and hit her and sent her flying UP into a tree. I ran to
Jackson and we embraced. The driver of the car got out.

It
was Clair.

Her
faced was covered in stitches. She ran to the tree and looked up.

Pepper
was gone.

The
man on the ground with missing fingers and a destroyed brain was
dead, although his eyes fluttered nonstop. We heard sirens. The
police were coming.

How
was I going to explain this?

CLAIR

Red
and blue police lights filled the home. It felt like I was in a dance
club. As the ambulances were filled with complaining nurses, Lt.
Humuhumunukunukuapua'a asked us questions and wrote in his little,
pink notebook. Embarrassed by his name, he wanted us to call him Lt.
Humu, so we did. His radio went off, and he answered it. The woman on
the other end was hysterical.

Lt. Humu told her to calm down, then said, “Did you say a
100-year-old man just robbed a convenient store...with his
bare
hands?”

“Yes!”
said the woman on the other end. “Many of them are shouting
“God” over and over again!”

Many
cops were around us – interrogating bleeding nurses and the few
remaining old people. The cops looked very serious. All at once their
radios came alive. Hell was going down. Total panic set in. The
island of Oahu was getting screwed. The voices came yelling out from
their radios. From what I could gather, the old people were going ape
shit – breaking into stores, stealing buses and taking them on
joy rides, destroying zoos and letting the animals run free,
attacking surfers, basically just doing whatever they wanted. So that
was enough for me. I got Janice and Jackson out of the home.

I
stuffed them into my car and zoomed off. I could've done without that
Jackson fellow, though. I didn't trust him. How did I know he didn't
take the Kilt pill? Driving through downtown Honolulu – where
many tall, business buildings stood – was a confusing sight.
The police were all over the place, tasering and throwing nets over
all these quick, senior citizens. An old woman with a walker passed
in front of our car. I hit the brakes. She growled like a crazed dog
and attacked our car, hitting it with her walker. I stepped on the
gas and HIT her, and she went tumbling over the car. Looking into the
rear-view mirror, I saw her get right back up and throw her walker at
us. The thing broke our rear window.

My
house was on a mountain, on Tantalus, overlooking the city. As we
drove up, I clicked through the radio stations. No music played. Only
talks on how the elderly were going crazy and trashing every-THING in
sight, killing any-ONE that stood in their way. The radio DJ spoke in
a serious tone.

“Healthy
people are taking the pills out of curiosity...” she said,
“...and are spontaneously combusting.” She paused. “This
just in. Oh, my Jesus, God,
no
. Children are simply exploding.
A woman, who shall go unidentified, just witnessed an 8-year-old boy
eat the pill, and he BLEW up.”

I
changed the station. I didn't want to hear any of it. There HAD to be
a station playing music – even rap music would've been fine. I
caught a conversation with the creator of the Kilt pill, a man named
Dr. Kilt Ann. I listened.

Dr.
Kilt said that it clearly says on the bottle “Keep away from
children ages 79 and below”. He would not be held responsible
for shoddy parenting. He sounded like he was begging.

As
we were about to pull into the driveway, I looked in the rear-view
mirror and saw, running out from the dust, that woman that tried to
run off with Jackson. She was snarling and dressed in a gorgeous
white dress and had a purse swinging from her shoulder. She jumped
onto the top of the car and punched down and tried to grab at them.
Mom screamed out, “It's Pepper!”

Jackson
ducked down in his seat.

“She's
a witch! Don't let her touch me!”

Pepper
jumped on the hood of the car, called my mom a “whore!”
and punched through the already-damaged windshield and grabbed my
face, blinding me. I distinctly remember her hand smelling like
vomit. Her fingers were in my mouth. The car crashed into my mailbox.
Pepper ripped out the back door and pulled Jackson out and kissed
him, molesting him, her hands sliding up his shirt and down his
pants. She slapped him and begged him to love her again like he did
before. Jackson summoned all the energy he had left and
scissor-kicked her in the face. She fell to the ground with her purse
flying through the air, the crap inside spraying out. I ran out and
stomped on her head multiple times, screaming, “DIE, DIE!”
Pepper grabbed my foot and bit into it, tearing away so many strings
of meat. We wrestled on the ground. Mom yelled for me to get off her.
Mom had a crowbar (must've got it from the trunk). Pepper saw the
weapon. “No, not the face!” she cried, and tried to crawl
away. Mom hit her on the back of her head, and it sounded like
someone thumping on a watermelon. I jumped into the car, drove toward
them, and screamed for my mom to, “Move the hell outta the
way!” Mom couldn't hear me – she was too lost in her
rage. She kept pounding on the back of Pepper's head, begging her to,
“DIE, DIE!” I honked, and my mom jumped away at the last
minute. Pepper leaped up, looked over her shoulder, and I sent her
ass flying – right off the mountain. She tumbled, tumbled down,
and I could hear her bones snapping.

Mom
and I hugged. We dragged Jackson into the house. Mom said, “One
minute,” and ran back out. She picked something from off the
ground and ran back in the house.

“Dropped
my glasses.”

Before
closing the door, I looked outside and scanned the scene.

Deep
down in me, I was fighting a nervous image of Pepper on the side of
the mountain, above all those city lights, holding on to a loose
root, grinning, happy to still be alive...and climbing her way back
up.

JACKSON

A
bright light blinded me. It was Heaven! This was
it
. I was
finally dying. That soccer move I put on Pepper's face took
everything I had left in my brittle body. But no, I was still alive.
The morning sun was just in my eyes. I was in Clair's room. Pictures
of her and Janice were all over the walls. She worshiped her mother.
The girls were in the living room, watching TV, and I could hear the
nervous news anchor.

“Kilt
has been pulled,” she said. “Anyone with the pill must
deliver the drug to the authorities for proper disposal. Anyone who
has
taken
the pill must stay indoors and call the police to be
dealt with in a lighthearted manner. Extremists have burnt the
factory that manufactured Kilt to the ground. The creator of the
pill, Dr. Kilt, is missing and hoped dead. Many elderly people have
runaway from their “homes” and are committing crimes to,
as one captured old man said, “live life to the fullest.”
Prisons are filling up fast with these so-called supelders beating up
prisoners. Governor Ria Mahony held a contest this morning for
someone to come up with a solution on how to contain the crazy old
people. The winner was Tasha Illupa, a 6th grade girl. Contractors
began work on her plan immediately, creating a giant balloon castle
complete with a slippery floor to contain the supelderly. Tasha's
prize is a free bus pass for life.”

Someone
changed the channel. More nervous talk. A psychologist specializing
in the inner workings of the elderly mind theorizes that the super
elderly have no option but to “get crazy on life” due to
Kilt's potent energy. “The pill has, in a sense, released years
– decades – of bottled up yearnings,” the
psychologist said. “They believe that Kilt is giving them the
energy to live life to the fullest, and they have to keep pushing
themselves, pushing their life-experience. It's like people who have
gone bored with sex. They have to always make it weirder. If they do
not, then boredom quickly sets in. This is exactly like that. There
is no turning back.”

I
had to see what was going on. I rolled out of bed. My body sizzled
with pain. I stood in the doorway and looked into the living room.
The girls were sitting on the floor, holding each other.

A
scientist was on TV, holding a chart and drawing diagrams on a
chalkboard. The scene changed to a padded cell. Ten military police
officers held a supelder, trying to get him – an old Chinese
man – to stand still. It was impossible. The supelder was tough
and busy. Scientists watched from behind a thick wall of glass. The
old man demanded to be let go, because he had many projects to attend
to. The MPs sat the man down on a school desk. A scientist in a white
lab coat, wearing black gloves, hooked an electrocardiograph to the
man. His heart beat was off the charts! The scientists
oooh'ed
and
ahhh'ed
. The graph paper coming out of the ECG was a
solid, black block. The supelder yelled, “I must attend to my
various projects!” and turned into a furious brute and threw
the MPs against the walls and onto the ceiling. He attacked the
scientist and tried to run through a padded wall, running headfirst
into it, trying over and over again.

The
MPs laughed at his useless efforts, but then the wall gave out a
large, cracking sound, and the military police stopped laughing and
began shooting at this Chinese man. The bullets only made him angry.
The supelder brought his hands up in front of his face and made claws
and snarled and gave a big leap toward the MPs. He yanked off ALL
their limbs and tore off ALL their clothes for some special reason,
and then he struck the sad soldiers with their own shoulders and
thighs. The mad zombie ripped open its shirt like Superman, gave out
a manly shriek, and its chest exploded. The heart flew out and went
SPLAT! against the glass wall, beating like crazy. And then it blew
up, punching a hole in the glass. The scientists gasped and held each
other. A lady scientist pulled out a machete and screamed and ran
into the room, ready to kill. She held the rusty machete out in front
of her and charged toward the monster and cut his head off. The
creature ran around here and there, bumping into furniture, knocking
over desks, picking them up and throwing the desks against the glass
wall. The supelder wouldn't
die
.

The
television screen went back to the scientist at the blackboard.

“The
supelder's head died of blood loss the next day,” he said. “The
female scientist, now in a mental institution, says that the only way
to kill these things is to destroy the head. The body continues to
twitch, and it is unknown when, if ever, it will be at rest.
Scientists can't figure out what the pill, Kilt, is made of. We have
done a variety of tests on Kilt, and the results were always the
same. Kilt seems to just be cane sugar, Hawaii's finest,” he
said. “The elderly are walking – but are
dead
.
They are the walking
dead
.
Zombies
. Their hearts have
exploded
long ago. Pure, hyperactive energy keeps their bodies
alive
.”

Janice
changed the channel. Every news station showed video of these old,
excitable zombies wrecking havoc all over Oahu. Many of them drank
energy drinks. The camera was very shaky at times. The police and
military had their hands full, running around with machetes and
trying to chop off zombie heads. Many of them fail and are eaten.
That footage was censored due to graphic content, a yellow happy face
covering the gore.