DEDICATION
For Annie, Digby, and Toby
—J. K.
For Nody
—D. D.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Excerpt from Galaxy’s Most Wanted
Acknowledgments
Back Ads
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Florida sky was pitch black and speckled with sparkling stars. The warm air hung thick with the stink of rotting flesh. It was a smell Zack Clarke had grown used to, a fact he wished wasn’t true.
The whole scene was all too familiar. Zack and his friends were zooming down the highway toward the ocean to escape the undead hordes. They hoped to find Bunco’s cruise ship and sail off the mainland. They needed a safe place to regroup and figure out a new antidote for the super zombie virus now spreading through Florida.
Zack’s sister, Zoe, floored the gas pedal, and the engine vroomed as she wove the Jeep around zombie hitchhikers staggering across the asphalt. Her BFF, Madison, rode shotgun with her dog, Twinkles, sitting on her lap. The little Boggle pup stuck his head out the side of the moving vehicle, his ears pinned back, tongue flapping in the breeze. Zack sat scrunched in the backseat between his best friends, Rice and Ozzie, on his left and Olivia on his right.
He nudged Rice with a sharp elbow. “Dude,” he said. “Quit hogging the seat.”
“I’m not even,” Rice said, taken aback. “Besides, you’re way skinnier than me.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to smoosh all up on me,” he said.
“Could we just get along for a few minutes, please?” Olivia asked politely. “Thanks.”
Olivia Jenkins was Madison’s Canadian cousin, the original Vital Veganite and the last remaining zombie antidote after Madison had inadvertently ingested a pepperoni during their school trip to New York City.
After the entire country rezombified, they had to track Olivia all the way to Bunco’s Fun World, an amusement park in Orlando where she was on vacation with her family. Once they’d saved Olivia from the undead masses, they attempted to unzombify her parents, Conrad and Ginny, as well as her older brother, Ben. Unfortunately, Rice accidentally turned them into super zombies by adding Spazola Energy Cola to the antidote formula.
Not a good move.
The super zombies her family transformed into were smarter, stronger, faster, and more coordinated than any other zombie they had ever encountered. Even worse, Olivia’s antidote didn’t work on them. Now they needed to find a way to reverse the super zombie virus before the slime really hit the fan.
How did everything get so messed up? Zack wished they could just go back in time and do it all over again. But wishing wasn’t going to solve anything. At least they hadn’t been eaten by a pack of super zombie maniacs.
“Are we there yet?” Rice asked in a whiny little-kid voice.
“I swear if you ask that one more time, Rice,” said Zoe, “I’m going to revoke your speaking privileges.”
“You can’t stop me from talking, Zoe.”
“Try me,” she said.
“Are we there yet?” Rice asked with a smirk.
Zoe’s arm shot into the backseat, reaching for him with one hand. Rice squealed and flinched away.
“Zoe!” Zack snapped. “Focus on the road, will you?”
Zoe glared at Rice in the rearview and then calmed herself with an exasperated sigh.
“Don’t let him bother you,” Olivia said. “He’s just trying to get under your skin.”
“Ew,” Zoe said. “I don’t want him anywhere near my skin. Might get a nerd infection.”
“Just ignore the little super-zombifying doofus,” Madison said. “It’s easy. I do it all the time.”
Ozzie ignored the pointless back-and-forth and instead studied a map on his smartphone. “We should be there any minute.”
Any minute, Zack thought. Any minute and we’ll be off the mainland and away from the super zombies Rice accidentally created.
Zack squinted through the windshield. He could see the coastline in the distance. A large cruise ship anchored at the marina towered over the rest of the boats in the port. Behind the cruise ship loomed a massive pirate ship.
“Whoa!” Rice exclaimed at the sight of the pirate ship. “I know what that is!”
“Well, are you going to tell us?” Madison asked. “Or are you just going to geek out privately?”
“That’s the Jolly Roger! It’s one of Bunco’s Fun World rides. You actually get to go out on the high seas and live like a pirate for a day.”
“Sounds cool, Rice,” Zack said. “But our cruise ship awaits.”
“Come on, dude, cruise ship, schmooz-ship,” Rice said. “Let’s take the pirate ship.”
“No way,” Olivia said. “If we’re going to un-super-zombify my family, we’re not taking some stupid pirate ship.”
Zoe hit the brakes a little too hard and Zack shot forward in his seat as the Jeep jerked to a stop. It was time to ditch their ride and make a run for the cruise ship.
“Let’s roll,” Zoe said, throwing the gearshift into park.
“No time to play pirates, Rice. Looks like we’ve got some stragglers about,” Ozzie warned them. His head swiveled as he assessed the nearby danger.
A horde of undead Floridians amassed in the seaport parking lot. Waves of zombified figures staggered across the pavement, blocking the dock leading out to the cruise ship.
“Where are they all coming from?” Madison asked.
Zack glanced to his left, where a long stream of elderly zombies stumbled out of a retirement community across the street. “Uh-oh,” he said. “We’ve got some serious cheek-pinchers, eight o’clock.”
The gang flung open the doors and hopped out of the Jeep. Rice and Olivia each grabbed one of the two buckets of antidote gumballs they’d managed to salvage from Bunco’s factory.
As they took off through the rampaging swarm of old-timey brain-gobblers, Zack quickly doubled back for his trusty baseball bat. He raced to the Jeep and snatched it out of the trunk.
Zack ran to catch up with the rest of the gang, but an elderly zombie lady shambled toward him. The undead grandma hobbled on her walker. Her sun-scorched skin was caked brown and in the process of chipping away like an old paint job. The zombie bared hideous bloodstained dentures as it snarled and gargled green bile in the back of its throat. Dodging and weaving through the undead sludge, Zack swung his bat at the thing’s head, but the rezombified senior staggered out of the way. Zack whiffed hard and lost his balance. He fell to the pavement, right in the path of an old zombie codger in a wheelchair. The undead old-timer overreached for Zack and flopped to the ground next to him. Thick dark slobber like black tar ran out of its mouth. Strands of rotting flesh hung off its chin like pulled taffy.
Zack scrambled to his feet and leaped over the old geezer.
“Blargh!” Before Zack could make his escape, the zombie grandma lunged in front of him. He was trapped.
BLAOW! Ozzie came out of nowhere and delivered an aerial roundhouse kick to the zombie woman’s temple. “Phlarckgh!” The zombie grandma spun around, spewing dark flecks of infectious matter into the air like an automatic sprinkler. The zombie then let out a defeated groan and dropped to the cement. “Blarghklph!” The growing mass of sun
burned zombies groaned and yacked up bodily fluids as they closed in on Zack and Ozzie.
Zack dodged the swiping arms of an undead beach bum wearing nothing but a tank top and a Speedo.
“Run!” Ozzie shouted.
“Hurry!” Olivia yelled, pointing toward Bunco’s cruise ship, the Fun World. “This way!”
Hustling through the thickening throng of brain-craving mutants, Zack and Ozzie caught up to Zoe, Rice, and Madison. Olivia sprinted up the platform after Twinkles, leading the pack. They quickly raised the boarding staircase and gathered safely on the Fun World’s main upper deck.
“Can you steer this thing out of here, Oz?” Zack asked.
“Does a zombie eat brains for breakfast?” Ozzie responded with a chuckle, and then took off to the cruise ship’s control room. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
Not more than a minute later, the ship’s horn let out two low, bellowing honks that sounded like a tuba’s. At the stern of the ship the propellers started to churn slowly. The MV Fun World pulled away from the dock and began to point its snout out at the vast Atlantic.
Zack gazed back at the dock, wondering how long it would be until they could return. The words maybe never popped into his head, but he shook the thought from his brain. In the distance, a long convoy of vehicles streamed into the seaport’s parking lot. Zack recognized those undead faces. Cousin Ben and his super zombie minions were hot on their trail.
“We’re being followed.” Zack shuddered.
“Are you kidding me?” Rice said. “They figured out how to hot-wire those cars? They must be getting smarter!”
Down below, the super zombies jumped off their vehicles and lumbered hurriedly toward the docks. There were at least two dozen of them, maybe more. Their eyeballs glared fiercely at Zack. Cousin Ben stood at the forefront of his super zombie crew, grunting heavily and shaking his fist as the MV Fun World set sail just in the nick of time.
“So long, suckers!” Rice let out a loud whoop before high-fiving Zack.
Zack watched the super zombie horde get smaller as the megaship cruised out onto the ocean. The sun rose over the horizon. He breathed a sigh of relief that at least for the time being they were safe from any undead peril.
“Come on, Zack,” Rice said. “Let’s get a little R and R, man.”
“Okay.” Zack nodded. “Wait, where’d the girls go?” He looked around the empty deck as Rice shrugged his shoulders. A few moments later, Olivia, Madison, and Zoe emerged from one of the ship’s sundeck stations.
Madison held a portable satellite radio in one arm and her little pup, Twinkles, in the other. As Olivia and Zoe set up the deck chairs, Madison fiddled with the radio, flipping through the channels.
“Ugh,” Madison groaned, trying to find some music on the radio. “This thing has, like, zero reception.” As she turned the dial, Zack could hear nothing but static. Then a voice came over the airwaves.
“Wait,” Rice stopped her. “Go back.”
She rolled her eyes and turned the radio back to the voice. It was a newscaster for a Canadian broadcast.
“It has been confirmed. America has rezombified. Anyone affected by the BurgerDog virus from the outbreak six months ago has mysteriously transformed back into a brain-craving lunatic. . . .”
Tell me something we don’t know, Zack thought.
“This just in: the newest outbreak is not confined to American soil. Zombie attacks are popping up all over the globe. London, Paris, Madrid, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong. Every major city around the world is under attack!”
Okay, Zack thought. I guess we didn’t know that.
Zack’s mouth gaped at the radio. “Did you guys just hear that?” he said as Ozzie returned from the ship’s control room.
“What’s going on?” Ozzie said. He shot them all a funny look.
“Looks like we’ve got a worldwide zombie epidemic on our hands, bro!” said Rice.
Ozzie’s eyes bugged out of their sockets. “That is not cool,” he said. “Do they know why?”
“They didn’t say, but it was probably tourists,” Zack surmised. “You know, unzombified people who traveled outside the country after the first outbreak.”
“Nobody had any idea they were going to rezombify,” Madison said. “It must have all started with them.”
“What’re we gonna do?” Ozzie said, scratching his chin, deep in thought.
“I think we should definitely stop the super zombies before we worry about unzombifying everyone else,” Olivia said.
“Yeah,” said Zoe. “If we don’t figure out an antidote for these super zombie freaks, we’re all totally doomed!”
“That’s why we need to find the jellyfish,” Rice said.
“Will you stop talking about jellyfish, nerdbrain?” Zoe said. “Let us please all remember what happened the last time we listened to old Ricey-poo.”
“We’re going to need a zombie expert for this,” Madison said.
“Ahem,” Rice cleared his throat and gestured to himself. “Right here.”
“Not you, sludge-for-brains,” Zoe said. “A real expert.”
“I am a real expert,” Rice said.
“You call creating an entire new race of super zombies being an expert?” Olivia scoffed.
“I mean, kind of,” said Rice. “Who else can really say that?”
“All in favor of never listening to what Rice has to say ever again say aye,” Zoe said.
“Aye aye,” Madison said.
“Chill out, guys,” Zack chimed in. “It wasn’t Rice’s fault. He was just trying to help.”
“Thanks, bro,” Rice said, sounding a little hurt. “I knew you’d have my back.”
“Well,” Zack said, “I hate to say it, buddy, but you might actually be a little out of your depth here.”
Rice scoffed at his BFF.
“I mean, maybe we should try to find someone else out there with more expertise before it’s too late,” Zack explained.
A long pause followed.
“Fine,” said Rice, pouting a tad that his friends no longer considered him zombie expert extraordinaire. “Supposedly there’s this one guy who might be able to help us out.”
“Who is it, dorkbrain?” Zoe said. “Spit it out.”
“His name is Nigel Black,” Rice told them. “Duplessis was friends with him in college. He used to have his own TV show where he explored uninhabited regions searching for the most rare and bizarre creatures in the world. He became obsessed with zombies after he discovered signs of an ancient zombie attack during an archaeological expedition in China. And rumor has it he once encountered the undead while excavating an Egyptian tomb. But there wasn’t any substantial proof, and everyone thought he was crazy. He dropped off the grid after that. No one’s seen him in years.”
“Okay,” said Madison. “So how are we supposed to find this guy?”
Zoe whipped out the smartphone from her back pocket. “Gimme a sec. I’ll see if we can pull him up.” A few seconds later, her eyebrows angled down into a scowl. “All it says is stuff about his dumb TV show.”
“Aw, man!” Rice said. “This guy could be anywhere—”
“Wait!”
“Wait what?”
“The Wikipedia entry says he retired to Nassau.”
“That’s awesome,” Ozzie said. “Nassau’s not that far from here.”
“Come on, guys, seriously?” Rice said. “Wikipedia is not exactly a solid lead. Are we really going on some wild-goose chase to find this guy? I mean, how do we know he’s even still alive?”
“I’ll admit it’s a long shot,” Zack said. “But he may be our only hope.”
“Yeah, we have to give it a try,” said Olivia. “Unless someone has a better plan.”
Rice raised his hand.
“Except for you.” Olivia glared at him. “Last time you had a brilliant plan you super-zombified my whole family.”
Rice put his hand down slowly and stuck out his bottom lip.
“Then it
’s settled. I’ll go reset the auto captain for Nassau.” Ozzie ran up to the control room to punch in their new course and reroute the ship.
Now that they were safe on the ocean waters and away from the zombie hordes, Zack took in the beautiful view and breathed easy. The sun had begun to peek over the horizon, and the seascape shimmered with reflections of the pinkish orange morning light.
Strolling around the upper deck of the Fun World, Zack noticed a bocce ball court, a badminton net, two shuffleboard courts, and an Astroturf driving range that allowed guests to hit golf balls into the ocean. A large swimming pool sat at the center of the sundeck, surrounded by an outdoor café and a health spa. A staircase ran above the café and into the captain’s control room.
Ozzie and Rice were currently getting their behinds whipped by Zoe and Madison at one of the shuffleboard courts.
“Over the line!” Rice protested as Zoe shot the puck across the board.
“Was not!” Zoe shouted back.
“Was too!”
Zack walked away from the argument and wandered by one of the glass elevators that led to the lower deck. He pressed the button to call the elevator.
“Hey, guys,” Zack said. “I’m going to go check out the rest of the ship.”
“Wait!” Olivia called to him across the deck. “It’s almost our turn to play!”
The button lit up as Zoe yelled victoriously behind him, “Winner, winner. Chicken dinner!”
“Hold on,” said Madison with a sour look on her face. “Why does it have to be chicken?”
“Zack!” Olivia shouted. “Get over here. We’re up!”
Forgetting about the elevator, Zack jogged back across the deck to the shuffleboard court. Ozzie and Rice were sulking off to the side after losing to the girls.
Zack shot the puck across the waxed cement surface. Before the puck reached the other side of the board, there came a loud and punctuated thump from across the deck. They all turned, looking with confusion in the direction of the noise.
“Could just be one of the turbines clunking,” Ozzie wagered a guess.
The kids went quiet and listened. Twinkles growled in the sea-swept silence.
Zombies of the Caribbean Page 1
