The stench was gut-wrenching. Zack’s nose crinkled. Dr. Scott’s eyes widened with excitement. Twinkles’s snout twitched wildly, catching a whiff of the rank hot-doggish scent.
“Okay, let’s let this brave little lady rest. We need to go run a couple tests.”
They left Madison alone and walked to a lab table equipped with a microscope, test tubes, and scales, all sparkling in the white fluorescent light. Dr. Scott snapped on a pair of latex gloves. She took the BurgerDog specimen and scraped off some samples into a petri dish. She then added a green liquid. She added some of Rice’s ginkgo biloba and mixed it all together.
They listened intently as Dr. Scott explained her hypothesis.
It was all antibodies, T cells, base serums and vaccines, passive immunization and cell cultures, recombinant vectors and mutagenic strains—Zack had absolutely no idea what this lady was talking about.
A short while later, Dr. Scott looked up from her microscope. “All right,” she said. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Let’s start with the bad news, doc,” Zack said.
“The bad news is that we can’t formulate a cure from the BurgerDog specimen alone,” she said.
“What’s the good news?” Rice asked.
“The good news is that through the recombination of the mutated virus with the antiserum, we should be able to cultivate once the phytotoxins morph with the antibodies…and blah blah blah.”
Zack’s eyes glazed over as Dr. Scott’s medical jargon turned into a series of droning blahs.
“…blah blah…but if one of us ingests the original virus, then we could potentially harvest the antigenic protein complex from the biogenetic mutation, which is blah blah blah, and could save us all.”
“So…someone here has to actually eat that stuff?” Zoe asked, gleaning the gist.
“Precisely.” The doctor jotted something down in a logbook.
Zack furrowed his brow in confusion. That’s the good news?
“Well, I can’t do it,” Zoe asserted.
“Why not?” Zack said.
“Because I can’t turn back into a zombie,” she said. “Hah!”
“And I can’t eat it,” said Dr. Scott. “I’m the only one who knows how to concoct the antidote.”
“Looks like it’s just you and me.” Rice clapped a hand on his buddy’s shoulder.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. “There’s only one way to settle this,” Zack announced.
“Best of three?” Rice asked.
Zack nodded.
And so commenced the highest-stakes game of Rock-Paper-Scissors ever played. “One-two-three, shoot!” Both of them threw Rock. Followed by another Rock…and another.
“Stop doing Rock!” Zack shouted.
“You stop it!” Rice yelled back.
“One-two-three, shoot!”
Zack’s Paper covered Rice’s Rock.
“One-two-three, shoot!”
Rice’s Rock smashed Zack’s Scissors.
“One to one,” Rice said.
There was a long hesitation, as the two friends stared at each other, flaring their nostrils.
“One-two-three, shoot!” They did the two Rocks thing, three more times.
“Shoot!”
Zack threw Rock for the fourth time, caught up in the quadruple-reverse psychology. Rice held his hand flat over his buddy’s fist—Paper. Rice dropped to his knees and threw up his arms as though he had just won a Grand Slam tennis tourney. “Eat that!”
“No.” Dr. Scott handed the BurgerDog to Zack. “Eat this.” The good doctor stood close at hand, ready to administer the last available dose of Madison’s blood.
Zack’s stomach dropped as he looked down at the diseased piece of disgusting fast food. The bun was soggy and growing mold, and a spiral clump of hair clung to the patty. The clumpy pistachio-green mayo relish smelled like rotten raw chicken.
“Doc, are you sure about this?” Zack asked skeptically.
“It’s our only chance,” she told him.
Zack looked at his sister helplessly. She shrugged. “He won fair and square, Zack.”
Zack lifted the lethal sandwich slowly to his mouth and sunk his teeth into the burbling meat patty. He chewed as fast as possible, trying hard not to gag it back up. Tears streamed down his face as he choked down the viral fast food.
He gulped a second time and then a third.
A massive head rush made him immediately nauseous.
Zack looked at the skin on the back of his hand. It grew rough and crinkly, aging eighty years in an eyeblink.
All of a sudden his vision became blurry, and he could barely see. He could hear the blood beating through his head. He started to hyperventilate. His lungs stopped pumping air. He couldn’t breathe. There was a flash of red, and then everything went completely black as his eyeballs rolled back into their sockets.
Zack’s final thought before he collapsed was, I should have thrown Scissors.
CHAPTER 20
Zack woke up sitting in a wheelchair. He was rolling fast down a long corridor. The White House was raging out of control, teeming with undead fiends. He blinked his eyes a few times to rule out the chance that he was dreaming.
“Code blue, code blue,” a walkie-talkie crackled. “All White House personnel are instructed to evacuate immediately! The enemy has invaded. Repeat: The enemy has invaded!”
Zack felt a fat, swollen lump on his cheekbone, and the skin on his hand had a pale green tint. Crazed zombies staggered out of doorways, pouring around every corner.
Five yards directly in front of him, Ozzie hopped along on a pair of crutches, rocking a big cast on his right leg. Zack turned around in the rollicking seat. Rice was pushing the wheelchair through the gurgling zombie chaos.
“Yo, Zack…you’re back!” Rice shouted happily.
“What’s going on?” Zack asked, shouting over the noise.
“Watch out!” Rice swerved the wheelchair, dodging a flailing zombie construction worker in a yellow hard hat.
Ozzie whacked the zombie down with the rubber butt of his crutch. He spun, one-footed, and unleashed a staggering roundhouse kick with the cast on his leg, bashing another undead ghoul in the dome.
Zack looked to his right. Madison was drifting in and out of consciousness as Dr. Scott pushed her in a wheelchair. Zoe ran next to them carting the IV stand.
“Did it work?” Zack asked his buddy.
“Yeah, it worked.” Rice chuckled.
Dr. Scott reached into the breast pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a test tube of red serum corked with a pink rubber plug.
Ozzie bashed through a couple more zombies as they reached the elevator, the only exit. Zack leaned over in his wheelchair and pushed the UP button three times, fast. They waited, huffing and puffing, for the elevator to arrive.
Bing! The doors opened, and they piled into the elevator car. Just then, Dr. Scott let out a terrifying screech. A zombie secretary had latched on to her back and was gnawing at her neck cords.
“Oww!” Dr. Scott spun around in a circle, trying to shuck the crazed mutant off her back.
The zombie flew off Dr. Scott’s shoulder and smashed into the wall. The doctor jerked back, reeling in pain, which sent the vial of antidote springing out of her pocket.
“Nooooooo!” everyone shouted, eyes wide, mouths frozen in ovals of disbelief.
Time slowed as the precious serum floated up, hung for a moment, and then fell back down.
Rice dove in slow motion out of the elevator car, his hands outstretched as if he were a wide receiver diving for an overthrown football. The antidote dropped out of reach, just past his fingertips, and went crashing to the floor.
Zack grabbed his forehead involuntarily.
But the test tube didn’t smash. It wasn’t made of glass.
Rice wiped his brow and crawled on hands and knees toward the plastic serum vial, but not fast enough. A zombie foot kicked the antidote down the hall, sendi
ng it into the shuffling riff-raff.
Zack leaped out of the wheelchair and ran past Rice, jumping up to kick the zombie’s noggin like a soccer ball. The beast collapsed in a pile of slimy, decomposing mush.
Zack darted forward into the zigzagging zombie madness and snagged the vial as the zombie horde bulldozed up the hallway. He raced away from the undead swarm and pulled his buddy to his feet.
Zack and Rice sprinted back toward the elevator, which Ozzie held open with his crutch. Dr. Scott leaned down on one knee, clutching her collarbone. A deep red bloodstain was spreading over the shoulder of her white lab coat.
“Come on!” Zack slung her in the empty seat of the wheelchair and hit the CLOSE DOOR button. The zombies were only three feet away, jolting and sputtering flecks of infectious goop. A fat zombie man fell forward, stretching its arm out of its socket to reach them. Its liver-spotted wrist dropped into the gap between the closing doors.
The doors reopened.
Zack kicked the rotting zombie hand back into the hallway and hit the button once again. The ghoul rose to its feet slowly. Behind it, a sickening duo—two zombie women with tattoos and shredded black leather jackets—growled and lunged for the packed elevator. The biker chicks collided with the pot-bellied brute and tumbled in a gruesome heap of puckered flesh.
The doors finally closed, and the elevator rose.
Sitting in the wheelchair, Dr. Scott pressed the wet, bloody wound on her shoulder.
“Here.” Zack handed her the vial. “Just take a tiny sip.”
“Save the others first,” she whispered sternly. The veins on her face bulged and pulsed. Her skin was pale and ashen. “It’s up to you kids.”
“What are we gonna do with her?” Rice asked as Dr. Scott’s eyes rolled back in her head and her skin began to bubble with boils.
“Bring her,” Zack said. “We’ll save her as soon as we can.”
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out onto the roof of the White House. The sky was black and spangled with twinkling stars. The storm had cleared, but the zombies raged on, pouring out of a stairwell door on the other side of the roof.
“Now what?” asked Zoe.
“There!” Ozzie pointed to a chopper.
The helicopter that had brought Madison to the White House was halfway across the deck.
“Can you fly that thing, too?” Zack asked.
Ozzie furrowed his brow. “Please….” He scoffed then smiled.
The zombies on the roof grabbed greedily at the air, making nom-nom noises, and Zack noticed General Munschauer and Agent Gustafson thrashing in the zombified bunch.
“Come on!” Rice shouted. “Quick!”
Rice and Zoe raced across the roof deck and loaded Madison, Twinkles, and the zombifying doctor into the executive helicopter, and climbed in after them. Ozzie hopped behind the navigation controls. Zack sat in the copilot seat.
Ozzie pressed a few buttons and hit a few switches. “Helicopters are a piece of cake,” he said.
Cake? Zack thought about the pulsing BurgerDog sandwich, and for the first time all day, he wasn’t the least bit hungry.
The propeller rotated slowly, and the rotors started to chop, churning the air into a wild wind that flattened the treetops.
The helicopter leaped off the rooftop in one smooth whoosh and they rose at an angled tilt over the rain-drenched streets of Washington, D.C. The zombie footsloggers raged furiously through the monuments, memorials, and museums below.
Zack pulled the vial of serum out of his pocket and stared at it. He turned around, looking in the back of the chopper. Madison rubbed noses with Twinkles. Zoe had tied up Dr. Scott and put a gas mask over her face. Rice looked excitedly at Zack.
“Dude.” He smirked. “You were a freakin’ zombie!”
“Nom nom nom,” Zoe gurgled, making zombie noises. “Braaaaains!” She laughed.
“What can I say, Zo?” Zack shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to be just like you.”
“Who doesn’t?” The unzombified siblings smiled at each other.
And the chopper shot low through the East Coast night, chasing the westward sunset on its way back to Phoenix.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, Rachel Abrams, Elise Howard, and Lucy Keating for all of their hard work and indispensable zombie wisdom; Steve Wolfhard for his wonderfully gory illustrations; and Kristin Marang and Liz Dresner for putting together a fantastic website.
I would also like to thank my friends and family for their support, and for not turning into zombies during the writing of this book.
—J. K.
About the Author and the 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.
STEVE WOLFHARD lives in Toronto, Canada, with a fat cat named Haircut. The first zombie movie Steve ever saw was Return of the Living Dead, and it still scares the crud out of him.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Credits
Jacket art by Steve Wolfhard
Jacket design by Andrea C. Uva
Copyright
THE ZOMBIE CHASERS: UNDEAD AHEAD. Copyright © 2011 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 non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kloepfer, John.
Undead ahead / John Kloepfer; [illustrations by Steve Wolfhard].—1st ed.
p. cm.—(The zombie chasers; #2)
Summary: While trying to survive after zombies take over Phoenix, Arizona, Zack, Rice, and Madison discover an antidote and embark on a mission to save the nation from the zombie invasion.
ISBN 978-0-06-185307-4 (trade bdg.)
[1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Phoenix (Ariz.)—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. Wolfhard, Steve, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.K8646Un 2011 2010033581
[Fic]—dc22
CIP
AC
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-207727-1
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