The Zombie Chasers #4 (6 page)

The jabbering nitwits thrashed around the store, barking and snorting, grunting and flailing in an all-consuming state of madness.

Suddenly Zack heard an ear-piercing screech coming from deep in the store. “Zoe! Madison!” He jogged toward the sound of the girly shriek, pushing the cart in a thick smog of zombie BO and men's perfume.

Just then Zoe sprinted around the corner with Madison. “Yo, little bro!” yelled Zoe. “We gotta peace out! They got some messed-up-lookin' ladies in the lingerie department!”

“Yeah, for real! Good thing we went shoe shopping first,” Madison said. “Check these out.” She curtsied, showing off her new kicks. “They're from this really cool company call Bio-Wear, made from one hundred percent vegan-friendly materials. They're local, too. Made in Brooklyn by real live Brooklynites. Isn't that cool?”

“Sorry, Madison,” Zack said. “I don't care about that right now. Where's Ozzie?”

“I'm here!” Ozzie shouted, charging in with Twinkles. “We gotta bounce!” he said, pointing at the zombie swarm pouring in through the broken door.

“Yeah,” Zack said. “No kidding, Sherlock!”

“Come on. This way!” Zoe yelled, and took the lead running. “There's another exit over here.”

Zack grabbed the handlebar of the shopping cart–turned–zombie stroller, and hurried to the other side of the store. They pushed through the exit, back out into the chaos on the sidewalks of New York.

T
he New York City buildings towered above them like the walls of an inescapable labyrinth. Zack stood on the sidewalk and looked both ways down the darkened street. The zombies raged through the city top to bottom. High up in offices and apartment buildings, the windows were a shadow-puppet horror show of brain-sick mayhem and mindless destruction. Gaggles of rancorous undead brain gluttons howled like rabid chimpanzees in locked laboratory cages.

“Which way are we supposed to go?” asked Madison.

“We gotta get back to Central Park,” Zack yelled. “Which way is north?”

“Hold on,” said Ozzie as he calculated due north.

Zoe opened up one of the umbrellas and held it over Ozzie's head. “You're welcome,” she said.

“For what?” Ozzie asked. Then a bucketload of zombie slime rained down from seven stories up, where an undead apartment dweller upchucked off his balcony. The putrid bile splattered on the umbrella, sparing Ozzie a slime shower.

“Thanks,” Ozzie said, and then pointed to one end of the street. “Down there! We've gotta make a right at the next intersection.”

They raced down the street and hung a right. Ozzie and Zoe sprinted off the curb and into the street. Madison ran slightly ahead of Zack, and Twinkles trailed through the puddles of sludge as they raced north up Seventh Avenue, dipping and dodging through the jam-packed mishmash of flesh-hungry mutants.

Zack hopped onto the hood of a parked car, ran up the windshield, and paused, standing on the roof. From there, he had a much better viewpoint, but it did them no good. They were caught in a bobble-headed sea of slime-dribbling zombie noggins. Looking farther ahead, Zack could see a colorful array of neon lights dazzling at the end of the block.
Times Square
, Zack thought with a shudder. He ran down the back of the automobile and bounded off the bumper. His feet hit the pavement and he dashed away from the riptide of slime-splattering ghouls pushing up the rear.

When they reached the next intersection, the cityscape changed.

The buildings in Times Square scraped the sky, flashing with huge video billboards that dazzled the zombie nightlife with a flickering digital glow. It was the personification of carnage. Zombies' faces bubbled and ruptured with boils. Their hands dangled at their sides, chins jutting forward as they bit at the air with such ferocity that their grinding teeth began to crack and crumble until all that was left were jagged shards of enamel rooted in their decaying gums.

A perfect storm of zombie mobs filled the streets, converging on the intersection where Zack and the gang now froze undead in their tracks. All around him, Zack saw nothing but a blur of slack-jawed faces, walking blobs of rotting goo swaying side to side on rubbery legs.

Over to Zack's left, two wicked zombies from a nearby Broadway musical tottered out from an alleyway still in full stage makeup. The undead performers circled Ozzie in their winged monkey costumes. Ozzie lunged forward and whapped a monkey man with his nunchaku, then danced back easily before clashing with the other rezombified actor.
Whap-whap!

“Ozzie, look out!” Zoe called as a third wicked flying monkey staggered out from behind a hot-dog stand. She took a running start and blasted the other zombie with a blow from her handbag that sent him reeling off balance headfirst into a mailbox on the curbside. Ozzie and Zoe high-fived and swiveled back to Zack and Madison, who stood shell-shocked in the eye of the zombie maelstrom.

The diverse zombie crowd was dressed in every imaginable fashion: T-shirts and jeans, shorts and tank tops, suits, ties, sundresses, polo shirts, khakis, postal uniforms, construction helmets, bike helmets, and spandex, all dragging their sneakers, sandals, and loafers through the streets.

Ozzie took a step and leaped straight up, grabbing the bars underneath a
DON'T WALK
sign. Hanging by his arms from a street pole, Ozzie swung back and pumped forward with both legs.
Pow!
He landed a powerful two-footed kick into the chest of a thickset, middle-aged zombie tourist sporting an entire outfit made out of blue denim. The denim-clad zombie flew back into the impenetrable horde.

As the undead mob continued its slow-footed rampage, Zack felt the bass-heavy thump of pop music coming from a nearby nightclub.

The walking corpses began to twitch in unison, closing in on Zack, Madison, Zoe, Ozzie, and Twinkles. The zombies' feet began to shuffle in step to the beat, and their undead shoulders started to swivel.

The King of Pop's voice taunted them: “And no one's gonna save you from the beasts about to strike!”

As the thickly packed zombie flash dancers corralled them tighter into the neon nightmare of Times Square after dusk, Zack felt a kick of panic in his gut. He looked all around, but there was no escape from the undead flash mob homing in on them from all directions.

Ozzie charged into the crowd as two college-age girls in miniskirts and bright yellow-and-lime-green halter tops latched onto his arms. Ozzie raised his nunchaku to take them out, but as he did, their boyfriends stepped to the forefront of the crowd. The two zombie juiceheads wore tight black muscle shirts that hugged their torsos. The
Jersey Shore
wannabes shimmied forward, protecting their zombified dates, moonwalking simultaneously between Ozzie and the girls and clobbering him with a synchronized pop of their overtanned arms. Ozzie hit the ground with a
thunk
, but jumped back to his feet in time to retreat to the rest of the group.

“Guys,” Madison said, her lower lip beginning to tremble. “I really, really don't want to get eaten by these things!”

“We're not going to,” Zack said. “I've got an idea.”

“What?”

“Something about this song makes all people want to dance,” Zack explained. “Even zombies.”

“So?”

“So we just have to groove with the music and maybe we can get to the other side of this crowd while they're distracted.”

“That might work,” Zoe said. “But there's just one problem, little bro. . . .”

“What's that?”

“You're, like, the worst dancer I've ever seen!”

“Forget about that,” Ozzie said. “This song's almost over. We've got less than a minute!”

With that, Zack grabbed the handle of the shopping cart. Zombie Rice wiggled his hips to the beat of the music and bounced his shoulders. As they all busted out their best zombified dance moves, they tried to pinpoint the least congested spot in the most lopsided game of Red Rover any of them had ever played.

Zack carted zombie Rice through the zombie flash mob, keeping his steps in time with the song's rhythm. On either side of the shopping cart, Madison raised the roof, while Zoe twisted and shouted as the zombified boogie monsters hand-jived around them.

“It's working,” Ozzie said, shaking his booty at an undead moonwalker gliding his feet across the sludge-coated blacktop.

Suddenly the familiar pop song ended and a different song drifted out from the nightclub. The zombies stopped dancing for a moment and snapped out of their trance. Now the four of them were stuck in the middle of a massive herd of flesh-craving gluttons. But they had made it far enough.

“Look!” Zoe cried, pointing across the street. “The subway!”

And with no other choice but down, they raced over to the steps of the subway station and descended underground, lugging Rice's shopping cart into the bowels of the city.

T
he walls of the subway were grime-black and smeared with mucus-y green and yellow driblets oozing through the cracks in the concrete ceiling. The smell down there was suffocating, and Zack covered his mouth and nose, inhaling through the fabric of his shirt. Madison and Zoe did the same, gasping and coughing through the thick, hot underground stench.

As they reached the turnstiles of the subway station, Zack peered over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the massive throng of undead brainmongers waddling down the subway steps behind them.

Ozzie bounded over the turnstiles and hurled open the emergency door. The alarm shrieked and Zack pushed Rice through. Madison and Zoe ducked under the turnstiles and the four of them halted on the platform.

Twinkles lapped his tongue happily at a puddle of zombie slime.

“Ew, Twinkles, gross!” Madison cried, picking up her pup.

On the other side of the tracks, a mass of zombies tottered on the opposite platform, groping through the air frantically, moaning in agony for a bit of live human flesh.

Standing on the edge of the subway platform, Zack swiveled his head in all directions. “Quick,” Zack said. “We need a plan.”

“Down there!” Madison shouted, pointing toward another exit at the opposite end of the subway platform.

They raced toward the exit, but as soon as they reached the bottom step, a dense bunch of undead cannibals came crushing down the staircase, heading right for them.

The kids retreated and stopped dead in their tracks, trapped between two converging zombie mobs.

“We could take the tunnel . . . ,” Ozzie suggested. “The trains probably aren't running.”

They peered over the edge, looking down on a stream of dirty garbage water flowing down the train tracks. Near the threshold of the tunnel, a roiling herd of undead rats and cockroaches churned relentlessly in the pit of subway filth.

“Are you kidding?” Madison squealed. “I'd rather get my brains eaten!”

“What other choice do we have?” said Ozzie.

The first zombie mob struggled to fit through the turnstiles behind them, no thanks to a bloated zombie at the head of the pack stuck firmly in the center lane. His midsection was so gigantic that it looked like he had swallowed a wrecking ball, and he wore a blue triple-XL T-shirt that gave him the appearance of a walking piece of M&M's candy. The sumo-size zombie's lips retracted back in a broad psychotic smile, showing off a crooked row of chompers blackened at the root.

Zoe ran forward, pushing the shopping cart into the zombified turnstiles. The big blue M&M's monster man thrashed in a burst of zombie superstrength.
Pow!
The metal turnstile snapped off, unleashing a surge of undead subway dwellers onto the platform. Zoe jumped back and the shopping cart tipped onto its side. Zombie Rice spilled out, rolling past the yellow caution line and over the ledge to the tracks below.

“Rice!” Zack yelled, rushing to keep his friend from falling, but Rice had already landed in a rank puddle of muck.

Zack and Ozzie jumped down fast and pulled Rice up to his feet, while the girls fended off the oncoming zombies.

“Madison, Zoe!” yelled Zack, standing on the tracks below. “Come on. We don't have a choice!”

Just then, Twinkles made a little whinnying sound as the tunnel began to vibrate with a distant rumble.

“There's a train coming!” Madison screamed. “Get off the tracks!”

“Grab his arms!” Zack shouted, lifting Rice up with Ozzie. The girls crouched down on the platform and reached over, gripping Rice by his wrists, while Zack and Ozzie pushed Rice back up to safety.

Ozzie planted the palms of his hands on the platform edge and hoisted himself back onto the platform. He stood up and reached a helping hand down to Zack just as a pair of headlights appeared from the depths of the subway tunnel.

Zack moved forward to reach for Ozzie's hand, but his foot was wedged between the rusted metal rails of the track.

“Zack!” yelled Zoe. “Come on!”

“I can't,” he cried desperately. “I'm stuck.”

The subway train screeched its brakes, honking its horn.

“Somebody do something!” Madison shrieked.

Zack pulled his leg up again, but the sneaker wouldn't budge. He froze like a deer in headlights.

Ozzie jumped back down onto the tracks and crouched by Zack's feet to loosen his shoelaces. Zack wriggled free of the shoe completely and they hopped back onto the zombifying platform as the train sped toward them. Zack wiped the sweat from his brow and sucked in a long, beautiful breath of rank-smelling air, thankful to be alive.

The train halted and the conductor slid his window open and stuck his head out. “What the heck are you waiting for?” he said. “Get on!”

The doors popped open and Ozzie and Zoe shoved zombie Rice inside. Madison hopped on the train car with Twinkles, holding the door for Zack. “Come on, Zack!” Ozzie yelled.

“One sec!” Zack shouted, and sprinted back to their tipped-over shopping cart. He sneaked between two zombies clawing for his head and snatched up as much of their bootleg weaponry as he could.

“Coming through!” Zack yelled, elbowing his way through the zombies and diving between the closing doors. Madison and Zoe jumped out of the way as Zack landed on the floor of the train. He breathed a sigh of relief as the cadaverous brain hounds smacked the outside of the moving subway car.