Zombocalypse Now (22 page)
“I told you.” Daryl says. “That organic stuff is nasty. Check it out, though. I made explosives from all that fertilizer! And I think it’s time we take care of those zombies once and for all.”
You try to get up, but immediately collapse again from the pain. “No,” you grunt as comprehensibly as possible. “Escape . . . roof . . .” It’s no use. Daryl has assumed command. You notice that Isabelle and the other stew-eaters are faring as badly as you are, and catch snippets of Daryl rallying his troops as you fade in and out of consciousness. At one point you hear him explaining that zombies can be killed efficiently with silver bullets or garlic. Then he’s giving demonstrations on how to light a Molotov cocktail.
The next time you come around, needless to say, the room is filled with black smoke and you see flames enveloping the hallway. You’re not even sure if they’ve started fighting any zombies yet, but Daryl’s minions all seem to be running around screaming. You try to pull yourself to your feet, but it’s no use. You were planning to get to the roof and try to cross over to the next building, and you hope maybe some of the group has enough sense to think of this on their own. If the fire hasn’t spread too far yet . . . wait a minute. Fire? Didn’t Daryl say something about explosives?
Sure enough, the blast kills you instantaneously, along with the rest of the folks you’ve worked so hard to keep alive. At least you managed to avoid the eternal damnation of wandering the earth as a half-dead animated corpse by exploding.
The rest of the world, however, is doomed.
THE END
198
You almost change your mind once you discover the elevators are out and the executive offices are way up on floor fourteen. In fact, Candice and Ernie make a compelling case for stopping at the R&D department as you pass it on floor six. But your gut tells you that whatever’s going on here goes straight to the top. Eight floors later, you emerge from the stairwell into complete darkness, panting. The light switch does nothing, but eventually your eyes adjust to the dim glow coming from a computer screensaver in the large, open reception area. You jiggle the mouse, and a bright white spreadsheet comes up, providing a little more illumination.
Suddenly a shrill voice cuts through the darkness. “Who’s there?” it barks from an adjoining office. “The stairs are forbidden! The fourteenth floor is forbidden! The speaker phone commands and you obey!”
“Gary?” Candice ventures, peeking into the open office door. “I think that’s Gary, our CEO,” she says quietly. The voice continues ranting, reciting a list of more things that are forbidden, including asking the speaker phone questions and making personal calls on company time. “He’s not usually frothing at the mouth like that,” Candice adds.
Frothing or not, it’s time to get some answers. You storm into Gary’s office with Candice and Ernie right behind. The switch here functions properly, flooding the office with harsh fluorescent light and sending a small, haggard-looking man scurrying under the desk with a shriek. “Relax, pal,” you say, more exasperated than reassuring. “We’re not going to eat you.”
“Gary, what happened here?” Candice starts, not waiting for her boss to emerge from his hiding place. “It’s the new paste, isn’t it? It’s the Total Complete Extreme Whitening Plus.”
Gary’s voice comes from beneath the desk in a whisper. “We did too much. The smartening crystals passed ADA testing by themselves, but when we added them to Total Complete Extreme Whitening, something went wrong.” He pauses, whimpering. “Tartar control. Baking soda. Whitening. Minterfresh gel. A single toothpaste was never meant to do so much. We touched the sun, Candice.
We played God
.”
“What’s in the smartening crystals?” Ernie asks, his voice steely. You realize that to your friend this isn’t some random, bizarre turn of events. The world ending due to reckless actions of an evil toothpaste conglomerate is exactly the sort of thing he’s always assumed would happen.
“What? Oh, mostly ground-up animal brains. A lot of dog and cat, I think. We get them in bulk from rendering plants.” He quickly returns to his ranting. “It’s the tower of Babel! We built it too high! The speaker phone commands and you obey!”
Candice turns white, no doubt thinking of potentially brushing her teeth with ground up animal brains. “Gary is still alive,” she says, “so there might be some research people holed up somewhere, too. If we rescue them, maybe they can help us figure out how to reverse this.”
“I don’t know,” Ernie says. “If they’re as far gone as he is, I can’t imagine they’ll be too much help. I’d like to get on Gary’s computer and see what I can find out for myself.”
“Uh, no offense,” Candice says, “but it’s not like you have a chemical engineering degree. And while we sit here waiting for you to come up with another one of your intricate theories, zombies could be eating all the people who do.”
“I’ve spent my life studying the poisonous effects of your products!” Ernie counters, his voice rising. “You’re part of the problem! Your part of the
machine
! You people
did this
!”
“All right, calm down,” you interject. “Fighting isn’t going to get us anywhere.” You’d better step in and decide what to do next before one of these two throws a punch.
Time may be of the essence. If you follow Candice’s advice and seek help from qualified professionals,
turn to page 222.
On the other hand, your friend hasn’t let you down yet. If you decide to let Ernie have a crack at it,
turn to page 48.
201
Wow, you’re quite the hero, aren’t you? You peel out and leave the two of them to their fate, be it peaceful reconciliation, zombie infection, or murder-suicide. Actually, you immediately start to feel guilty about those last two possibilities.
That guilt quickly turns to panic when you rear windshield shatters and you realize that Billy is shooting at you. His next shot takes out a tire, and your car swerves off the road, overturning itself into a ditch.
Then it explodes.
As for Prudence, she makes the carefully-considered decision that life in an underground bunker with Billy is probably better than no life at all, and over the next couple of days they manage to get to Billy’s place on foot. His folks turn out to be decent folks and take her in, keeping her safe from the undead and from Billy’s unwelcome advances as well. The whole clan survives for decades in the post-zombocalyptic wasteland to come.
You, on the other hand, die in about seven seconds in the burning wreckage of your own shame.
THE END
202
“I know these people are friends of yours,” you tell Candice. “We’ll get them through this, somehow.”
“Meh,” she replies. “I don’t really hang around with the lab folks. Still, we should try to keep them alive, I guess.” With that ringing endorsement of your humanitarian efforts, you set off toward the toothpaste factory. There are far too many in your group to squeeze into your poor, battered Toyota, so you’re forced to hoof it. The long march does give Ernie ample time to pore over printouts he made of the toothpaste manufacturing process.
You discover that even though the Crogaste Crazies are pretty removed from reality—you have to wave the speakerphone around in the air in order to get them to do anything—they can be directed to carry out small tasks with a fair amount of efficiency. Sending a whole group of them to overwhelm a single, roaming zombie, for example, proves surprisingly effective. You’re starting to think that they might prove useful after all.
By the time you reach the plant, daylight has broken, and you’re shocked to see what looks like dead bodies strewn all over the landscape. Upon closer inspection, they turn out to be zombies, and they aren’t actually dead—well, no deader than usual, anyway—but just sort of . . .
resting
. They’ve apparently gorged themselves on available stores of toothpaste and are now sleeping it off.
The piles of hungover zombies only get thicker as you approach, until you literally have to climb over them to get into the plant. You hold your breath as you step gingerly on the first one, and it moans softly but otherwise ignores you. You haul yourself up a little higher on the undead mound, doing your best to avoid mouths and any gaping wounds. The pile remains inert, so you wave to the others to follow.
Once on the factory floor, Ernie gets to work while you organize your crew to remove the catatonic undead from the immediate vicinity. By the time you have them all pushed out into the hallways, Ernie is using equipment on hand to very carefully add ingredients to an enormous vat, big enough to provide paste for literally thousands of tubes. As he adds the final component, however, you hear moaning coming from outside. The zombies that you very carefully hauled away are beginning to stir.
“Barricade the doors!” you yell at your crew, waving the speaker phone above your head. “Your god commands you!” There are five separate entrances to the factory floor, and the Crogaste employees just barely get to them as zombies start trying to force their way in. They throw themselves against the doors, keeping them shut, but as the minty fresh aroma of toothpaste gets stronger, the undead outside get more aggressive. You fear that your human barricades won’t hold much longer.
“They want the paste,” Candice says. “So let’s give it to them!” She scoops some glop into a bucket and runs toward one of the doorways, yelling at the barricaders to get out of the way and tossing the bucket into the undead crowd as the door opens. The zombies in front get covered in goo and drop to their knees, trying to cram as much of it into their mouths as possible. Then the ones behind them dogpile on top like a school of hungry piranha. You and Ernie scoop up buckets of your own and follow Candice’s lead, throwing toothpaste out all five doors until the zombie masses are sated.
You rustle up a group of phone worshipers and start beheading spaced-out zombies one by one—something which, come to think of it, you probably should have done before you started mixing toothpaste to begin with. Over the next few days, armed with this all-purpose zombie pacifier, your group spreads out over the city, killing whole crowds of the ravenous dead and recruiting survivors to help with the effort.
It’s a long and often ugly process, but slowly you organize groups of volunteers to bring shipments of toothpaste to other cities, first in trucks and then in planes. Casualties are massive, but as your efforts expand, survivors all over the world pull together, not just to stamp out the zombie infestation but also to repair catastrophic damages to infrastructure and to bring aid to pockets of refugees everywhere. Although populations are devastated, people everywhere show the bravery and generosity that humanity is truly capable of, and ultimately the plague is stamped out.
The world is saved. And, as a hero of the zombie-fighting revolution, your dating prospects improve
immensely
.
THE END
205
In order to acquire guns, you have to deal with people who already HAVE guns. It’s kind of a catch-22. This is a very delicate situation, but you’ve always considered yourself to be extremely charismatic and clever. “Listen,” you say in a calm, reassuring tone, your hands still up in the air. “I don’t even know what the BATF is, but I can prove to you that I’m not . . .”
Before you get the chance to finish, the Freedom America Citizens’ Militia opens fire and mows you down like cheap crabgrass. That’s an awful analogy, but you’re currently being filled with hot lead, so your literary skills are a bit compromised. The amount of gunfire is truly remarkable—several of them may in fact be using fully automatic weapons.
One voice quietly asks if stuffed animals are good eatin’, but to their credit, his companions seem horrified by this idea and start lecturing him on what sorts of game are and aren’t okay to bring home for supper. None of this matters to you, however.
You’re really, really dead.
THE END
206
What the hell. You direct Daryl to set up his explosive fertilizer as quickly as possible and keep herding the rest of the group through the pass. Daryl joins you on the other side as he finishes, just as the zombie legion comes into sight. There are hundreds of them now, at least. “Okay, how do we set them off?” you ask. It doesn’t seem likely that Daryl has any detonator caps with him, considering that he doesn’t even have a shirt.
“I’ll take care of that,” Daryl says. “Just get them all as far away as possible. This mountain is coming down!” He runs back toward the explosives and the approaching undead army. Suddenly you understand that he intends to set the charges off by hand.
“Daryl!” you yell after him.
“Let me do this!” he hollers back. Beside you, Isabelle is struggling to get down the hill—if you don’t help, she could be buried in the landslide as well. You pick her up and carry her over your shoulders like that Hobbit at the end of the
Lord of the Rings
movies. Just as you clear what you guess is the blast zone, you hear the first of three explosions, and the mountain pass collapses in a thunderous fury.
