The Zombie Chasers #5
Page 10
Aunt Ginny power walked through the floor of eyeball gumballs, gurgling black bile in the back of her throat with her mouth wide open.
The brain-flavored popcorn antidote gumballs whizzed by her head as Zack and Rice fired away until one of the gumballs made a direct hit and nailed the little ding-dong thing at the back of the super zombie’s throat.
“Yes!” Rice pumped his fist. “One to nothing!”
“No way,” Zack protested. “I totally shot that gumball!”
“In your dreams,” said Rice. “One zip.”
“Glugh-glugh-glargh!” Super zombie Aunt Ginny whirled around, squawking and choking before falling face-first into the pit of eyeball gumballs.
Zack and Rice lowered their slingshots and prepared to reload.
“Take a break, fellas,” Ozzie said. “I think this sucker’s going to need to get force-fed.”
Ozzie approached super zombie Uncle Conrad, and the two of them squared off like boxers at the starting bell. Uncle Conrad’s clammy, white, pupil-less eyeballs bulged out of his sunken yellow cheeks.
Ozzie made the first move and bum-rushed Uncle Conrad, trying to slam the gumball into the super zombie’s mouth. The ghoul gagged and spat it out, then slammed Ozzie to the ground and roared, fangs of spittle hanging from his toothy maw.
Zack pulled back the slingshot and lined it up to Olivia’s pop’s wide-open gullet. He plucked his fingers like an archer launching an arrow from his bow and let the gumball fly. The brain-flavored antidote gumball sailed through the air and right into the zombie’s mouth.
“All tied up,” Zack said to Rice, who then gave him a respectful fist bump.
Uncle Conrad glugged down the gumball antidote with a confused look on his super zombie face. Ozzie hopped up off the ground and clocked the super ghoul in the noggin. Uncle Conrad crumpled in the waist-high pit of eyeball gumballs.
Over the cranking of the factory’s machinery they could still hear the never-ending zombie onslaught coursing through the hallways of the factory like an infection through the bloodstream.
“You guys, we got Aunt Ginny and Uncle Conrad,” Zack said. “Where’s Ben?”
“Blargh!”
Olivia’s super zombie brother rose out of the gumball pit directly behind Zack.
Zack spun a hundred and eighty degrees and faced off one-on-one with Cousin Ben. “Easy, tiger.”
Olivia’s super zombie brother chuckled to himself with animal glee and faked a lunge at his prey. Zack flinched and stumbled backward as the maniacal super-freak cackled once again and then pounced in a flash.
Zack dropped his shoulder at the oncoming hellion, bracing for the hit. Cousin Ben raised his pale white forearms popping with purple veins high in the air and wrapped Zack up in a super zombie bear hug. They both went toppling sidelong into the waist-level gumball quicksand.
Zack squiggled free from the super zombie’s tight arm-flexing grip around his waist and kicked back behind himself like a perturbed donkey. He kicked a second time, and the sole of his sneaker made a direct hit on super zombie Ben’s undead forehead, imprinting a waffle-iron pattern into his pale, wrinkly flesh. Zack scrabbled to his feet as Olivia’s super zombie brother grumbled and slunk into the pool of eyeball gumballs.
They all breathed a sigh of relief until Aunt Ginny suddenly rose back up and started groaning and lurching like a zombie, even though she had swallowed the antidote.
“Mom?” Olivia asked.
Then Uncle Conrad, who had just swallowed the antidote, rose up again, too. “Dad?” Olivia turned to her super zombie father.
Conrad breathed heavily, his eyes seething with furious delirium. He opened his gangrenous mouth and let forth a cantankerous roar.
“What the heck?” Rice said, his eyes wide with fear.
“The antidote isn’t working on them,” Zack said.
“What do you mean the antidote isn’t working?” Zoe quickly scrambled up from the eyeball-gumball-covered floor. “It worked on Ozzie, so it should be working on these guys.”
“Okay, so maybe it only works on regular zombies?” Madison guessed.
Immune to the effects of the antidote, Aunt Ginny and Uncle Conrad marched through the gumball pit toward Ozzie, who stood in his kung fu stance between them and his friends.
“I’ll handle the super zombies,” said Ozzie. “You guys start using the antidote on the regular zombies. Let’s try to save some lives, people.”
As Olivia’s undead parents approached, Ozzie dove down and disappeared beneath the sea of gumballs. Before the super zombies could make sense of it, Ozzie emerged behind them then grabbed both of their heads at the same time and clunked them together as hard as he could. Uncle Conrad and Aunt Ginny slumped into the gumball heap and sank below the surface once again.
“You guys,” said Zoe, pointing toward the factory door where a densely packed herd of zombies were pouring in. “We’ve got bigger problems than a couple of super zombies not un-super-zombifying.”
The Fun World zombies from the hallway stormed in through the door to the production floor, slowly but surely wading through the swamplike volume of eyeball gumballs.
As Ozzie rejoined the gang, Zack and Rice scooped up a few buckets full of antidote gumballs and lugged them to within range of the zombie swarm. The others quickly formed an assembly line starting at the tank of antidote gumballs and started passing industrial-sized buckets full of gumballs back and forth to the boys.
The undead beasts gazed at Zack and the gang with looks of pure insatiable gluttony on their revolting faces. As the zombies lumbered toward the kids, they stuck their decaying arms into the pit, plucking up as many of the eyeball gumballs off the floor as they could and cramming them into their mouths.
“Nom nom nom.”
The air around the zombies’ heads was now visibly blurry with fumes of shimmering hot stench emanating from the zombie open-mouthed chewing.
Yet before the undead swarm could reach Zack and Rice, and their buckets of antidote gumballs, the zombies began to drop one after the other, collapsing face-first into the pit of candy eyeballs.
“What’s going on?” Olivia cried. “They haven’t eaten the antidote yet!”
A few moments later, the zombies began to rise again, stretching their arms widely as if they were waking up grumpily from naps and making sounds like they were sucking their own brains through their nostrils and down the backs of their throats. The zombie closest to Zack and Rice had a mean underbite about its muzzle and it glanced around at the kids with a strange glimmer in its eye.
“Oh, man,” Zack said. “That’s not normal.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Madison asked.
“That depends,” said Zoe. “Do you think it’s a super zombie?”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded.
“But how is that possible?” Olivia asked.
“You guys,” said Rice, picking up one of the eyeball gumballs from the floor and biting into it. “Bad news. These things aren’t just eyeball gumballs. . . . These are the ones infused with Spazola Energy Cola.” The words fell off Rice’s tongue like gumballs out of a candy machine.
Zack gasped, realizing what his friend meant. He looked around at the accumulated spillage of eyeball gumballs they’d been standing in the entire time and that the zombies, including the one now staring them down, had been munching on.
“Spazballs” was all Zack could say.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ozzie said, interrupting their trains of thought. “There’s more of those super zombie things waking up!”
“What about my parents?” Olivia asked.
“We’ll get you some new parents!” Zoe shrieked, moving away from the super-zombifying horde.
“We can’t help them when they’re trying to get us,” Zack said. “The only way to help them is to leave them behind until we can figure out the new super antidote.”
Zoe, Madison, Ozzie, and Rice shouted for Zack and Olivia as the new batch of
super zombies waddled and lurched across the production floor’s pit of eyeball gumballs. Then they grabbed as many of the popcorn/ brain-flavored antidote gumballs as they could carry and retreated toward the back fire escape.
With Twinkles tucked in Madison’s arm, they scaled the fire escape ladder to the platform above.
As they reached the top, Zack saw that the emergency-exit door was torn off its hinges and a dense pack of undead brain-gobblers was shuffling and lurching toward them along the catwalk.
“There’s nowhere to go!” Zack shouted.
“Yes there is!” Ozzie said, pointing at the gargantuan staircase of undead freaks still climbing over one another beneath the high arching window of the factory. “That’s how Uncle Conrad came in!”
Olivia, Madison, and Zoe peered through the busted window at the gigantic flight of zombies leading from the sill to ground level. “Yeah,” the three of them all agreed. “That’s like the worst idea of all time!”
“It’s better than getting devoured by those dudes!” Rice shouted, pointing toward the thick horde of zombie cretins still lumbering behind them on the narrow catwalk.
Zack stood on the ledge of the broken window and took a deep breath. Below him, a squirming staircase of undead bodies contorted and churned. “Here goes nothing!” he said, and sprinted down the heap of zombies first.
Zack jumped from zombie noggin to zombie noggin, careful to avoid the bright yellow bile dribbling from their slack-jawed mouths. Each ghoul was coated in zombie grime, and Zack had to catch his balance as he wobbled on one zombie’s double chin and then bounded off down the writhing mountain of ghouls.
Halfway to the ground, his foot slipped into one of the open-mouthed zombie faces, and before he could take it out, the undead brute chomped down on a whole piece of his sneaker, just missing his toes.
“Aww, man!” Zack yelled, pulling his foot loose. “Watch out for that dude!” he yelled back to his friends behind him.
Zack’s pant cuffs were now sopping wet with zombie slime, and he was doing his best to navigate his way, but as he neared the ground, a hand shot out from the heap and caught his ankle. Zack toppled forward and face-planted into the base of the zombie steps, his head dunking straight into a puddle of zombie slime that had accumulated on the ground.
“Yuck!” Zack pried his leg free and then jumped to his feet. He wiped his face clean on his grimy T-shirt and turned around to see how the rest of his friends were doing.
Up above, on the back wall of the factory, a large banner read: COMING SOON! SPAZOLA ENERGY GUMBALLS! On each side of the banner was a graphic of two spazzed-out eyeballs.
Would’ve been helpful five minutes ago, Zack thought, watching his friends work their way down the humongous hill of contorted flesh-eaters.
Ozzie hopped nimbly from zombie head to zombie head while Rice half slid, half crab-walked down the slippery slope. The girls emitted a constant series of high-pitched squeals as they tumbled and rolled down the zombie incline. Twinkles disappeared midjourney, sliding into a slimy crevasse in the steep zombie slope, but as the rest of them reached the ground, the little pup trotted out covered in sludge. He shook himself clean, sending slime everywhere.
“Okay, now I’m like totally disgusted!” Madison shook the zombie slime off her hands and wiped it on Zoe’s shirt.
“Yo, dude,” said Zoe. “Don’t wipe that zombie slime on me.” Zoe then lunged and wiped her slimy hands off in Madison’s hair. “No backs!”
“OMG,” Madison said. “You so didn’t just do that!”
“Ladies!” Zack shouted, gesturing to the roving packs of rezombified flesh-eaters stumbling all across the Florida landscape. “Can we please go now?”
“Fine,” said Madison. “I call truce.”
“Normally I don’t like truces,” said Zoe. “But in this case, I’ll make an exception.” Madison then pulled out a handful of zombie sludge from her back and smeared it all in her BFF’s face. Madison laughed hysterically and took off running for the Jeep.
“Hey, guys,” Rice said, looking at his smartphone once they were all in the car. “Bunco has that cruise ship not that far away.”
“Rice, this is no time to start planning a vacation,” Madison said.
“Yeah,” Olivia said. “You super zombified my parents and half of Fun World and now you want to go on a cruise?”
“I have a plan,” Rice said. “In order to figure out the super zombie antidote, we have to go to the source. We have to find a live jellyfish specimen so we can do some more tests and figure out how to unzombify these super zombies once and for all.”
“A cruise ship might be just what we need,” Ozzie said. “There’s lots more of those super zombie freaks now, so it’s probably a good idea to get off the mainland until we can figure things out.”
Zack liked the sound of that. It was time for a break. The zombies weren’t going anywhere. That much was certain.
“To the SS Fun World.” Rice pointed down the road leading toward the Atlantic Ocean.
The moonlight glimmered over Orlando as the Jeep cruised away from the super zombie horror they had created and toward the Florida coast.
Zack slunk down in the backseat and sighed heavily.
The super zombie war had only just begun.
About the Author and Illustrator
JOHN KLOEPFER began his writing career at five years old with a one-sentence short story: “And then one day the monsters came.” He lives in New York City, where he is preparing for a massive zombie invasion.
DAVID DEGRAND has been drawing cartoons since he was a kid. When he’s not drawing goofy pictures of gross stuff, he plays video games, watches old cartoons and weird movies, and collects toys and books. His biggest goal is to create something his son will find cool someday. He lives with his wife and family in Texas.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
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KEVIN BREWER. Science genius. Physics, biology, chemistry—you name it, Kevin can do it. He’s the brains of the operation, leader of the crew. And he’s not about to let Alexander Russ win this year’s Invention Convention.
WARNER REED. Kevin’s best friend and resident cool dude. He’s the guy to see if you’ve got a 2 a.m. junk-food craving—but you’ll pay top dollar for his top secret stash. Despite his low-key attitude, Warner will go toe-to-toe with the baddest science nerd around any day of the week . . . and totally dominate.
TARA SWIFT. Not only is Tara supersmart and great at building things out of next to nothing, she’s also in an all-girl punk band and the best drummer in the universe. (It’s true, just ask her.) But seriously, she’s probably Kevin’s best friend at camp—aside from his BFF Warner, that is.
TJ BOYD. Computer problems? He’s your man. TJ’s a regular computer-programming prodigy. He’s not much of a talker, though. Word around the campfire is that he damaged his voice box in a botched robotics experiment (but Kevin knows that’s only gossip).
MIM. This is his first time on earth, and he’s discovering so many exciting things: candy bars, spiders (which are pretty tasty), and some great human pals! But an extraterrestrial army is out to kidnap him for his thick, purple fur. Can the kids save their new furry friend before he finds himself on the wrong end of an alien poacher’s de-atomizer?
Many thanks to my editors, Emilia Rhodes and Rachel Abrams, for making me a better writer; to Josh Bank and Sara Shandler for their much appreciated guidance; and to Ryan Harbage and Jim Hahn for all of their hard work and sound advice.
—J. K.
Credits
Cover art by David DeGrand
Cover design by Ray Shappell
Copyright
The Zombie Chasers: Nothing Left to Ooze
Copyright © 2014 by Alloy Entertainment and John Kloepfer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the none
xclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kloepfer, John.
Nothing left to ooze / by John Kloepfer ; illustrated by David DeGrand.
pages cm. — (The zombie chasers ; #5)
Summary: “After the country rezombifies, Zack and the Zombie Chasers head out in search of a new antidote”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-223098-0 (hardback)
EPUB Edition DECEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062231000
[1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. DeGrand, David, illustrator. II. Title.
PZ7.K8646Not 2014
2013032808
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
13 14 15 16 17 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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