“There it is,” Zack whispered excitedly.
“It’s beautiful . . . ,” Olivia said.
Zack scanned the grounds for danger. The super zombies were nowhere in sight. Just the lone watchman at the top of the steps.
Still camouflaged, the kids knelt down in a semicircle. Ozzie picked up a stick and drew a triangle in the dirt. He pointed the stick at the ginkgo tree and then drew the letters ZO and pointed to Zoe. On the right side of Zoe’s initials, he wrote M and Z. And then he scribbled the letters O, R, O, and drew arrows showing which way everyone would go to cover Zoe. She was supposed to sprint directly to the ginkgo tree and retrieve the root.
“Wait a second, I don’t get it,” Rice whispered. “What are all the letters for? Is that some kind of code?”
“The letters are us, nimrod,” Zoe said, shaking her head.
“The plan’s simple, Rice,” said Zack. “We watch Zoe’s back and make sure none of the super zombies gets close to her.”
“Oh . . .” Rice nodded. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Shhh!” they all said in unison.
As they proceeded with the plan, Zoe crept out from the underbrush, flanked on her left by Ozzie, Rice, and Olivia, and on the left by Madison and Zack.
Zack clutched a bo staff in his hands, his eyes searching for kung fu super zombies. Madison walked behind him, holding her rattan sticks. She looked over her shoulder as they crossed into enemy territory. Rice and Ozzie held their nunchaku at the ready. Olivia crept behind them, walking backward, keeping an eye out, geared up with her own rattan sticks.
Zoe sprinted toward the tree and then stopped. Zack saw why Zoe had halted. A trip wire was set up, encircling the ginkgo tree. There were also Spazola Energy Cola cans, filled with rocks, which hung from wires off the tree—if she hit them, they’d make enough noise to alert the super zombies. It was a trap.
“See?” Rice whispered as Zoe stepped over the primitive alarm system. “They’re not that smart.”
Now past the trip wire, Zoe climbed over the fence and neared the ancient ginkgo. She stepped around the base of the tree and suddenly a series of thumps shook the ground. The kung fu super zombies appeared out of nowhere, surrounding them. Their heads were shaved, and their scalps were pale white and crinkly, like the rest of their skin. Their eyes were ink black and soulless. They looked like they meant serious business.
“Okay, guys,” Ozzie said. “I think it’s time for plan B. . . .”
“What’s plan B?” Olivia asked.
“Fight!”
In a mad rush forward, Zack and the gang clashed with the super zombies.
Zack twirled his bo and thrust the wooden staff at a zombie’s midriff. The super zombie blocked the opening gambit and then hit Zack in the chest with a counterblow that sent Zack flying.
Zack shook off the shock of the hit and looked up. The rest of his friends were fighting fearlessly, using all the moves they had learned over the past few days, but there were too many kung fu super zombies for them to deal with all at once.
“Retreat!” Ozzie shouted as five super zombies came at him together, fighting as one unit.
Zack scrambled up to his feet and tried to run away, but someone tripped him from behind and he fell face forward to the ground. The super zombie pounced on Zack’s back as he tried to get away. Zack felt himself getting pulled back at the waist.
He twisted his body as Zhang had taught him and clenched his legs around the zombie’s neck, putting it in a headlock with his knees. Zack felt the super zombie lose its grip and twisted his hips in a quick swivel. The monk spun in the air and landed in a heap. Zack scrambled to his feet, but a searing pain ripped through his waist. Another super zombie had come up from his blind side and bitten down hard on his hip.
A chunk of Zack’s skin ripped off in the undead freak’s diseased and rotten mouth.
As the group sprinted away from the temple, Zack hobbled behind. He was trying to keep up, despite the sharp pain shooting down his leg and up his rib cage. He glanced over his shoulder, but he couldn’t tell if the monks had given chase. It didn’t seem like it. They were smarter than that. They must have been under strict orders not to leave the tree unguarded. But Zack guessed there would still be a few who came after them, once they realized they had just had a brush with Olivia Jenkins, the vital vegan, the zombie antidote.
Zack’s limp worsened as he ran down the mountain, and he tripped, collapsing in the dirt. The rest of the group doubled back and gathered around him.
“Come on, little bro,” Zoe said. “Get off your butt. . . .”
“ACK!” Zack gasped as he lifted his shirt to check out his wound.
“OMG, Zack, are you okay?” Olivia stopped and crouched down next to him.
“Ooooh,” Rice said with horrified fascination. “That looks nasty!”
“It bit me!” was Zack’s delayed response. “It took a huge bite out of me!”
“Shhhh!” Ozzie said. “Do you think we lost them?”
“I haven’t seen any,” Madison said. “I think so. . . .”
Olivia grabbed Zack under his arms. “Help me get him over there.”
They dragged Zack off the track and laid him down under a thick cover of leaves. Zoe and Ozzie stood lookout, while Madison, Olivia, and Rice crouched down at Zack’s side.
The kung fu super zombie had chomped into Zack’s hip, through the fabric of his waistband, and ripped off a huge flap of skin in the process. A dark red stain ran down the side of his pant leg. He didn’t want to look at it, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Zack could see the white fatty tissue around the rim of the bite wound. He was mesmerized by how deep it was. Pure curiosity overtook him as he stared at his hip. He extended his pinky finger and pressed his fingertip on the exposed bone. Then he poked and prodded at the jagged gash in his side. It stung like nothing he’d ever felt before and the pain made him nauseous.
“Don’t do that,” Madison said. “You’re going to infect it.”
Zack thought he was going to puke.
“Zack, man, are you okay?” Rice asked.
“He doesn’t look okay,” said Olivia.
Zack was not okay. If he still had the ability to speak, he would have told them so, but they would figure it out on their own. Zack listened to his friends. His head felt like a watermelon on a toothpick. His eyes glazed over.
“Is he going to zombify?” Olivia’s voice said.
Rice made a skeptical noise. “Zack can’t zombify—he’s immune, like the rest of us.”
“Yeah, but that was only the regular zombie virus,” said Madison. “He just got bitten by a super zombie. . . .”
“What, you think he’s going to turn into—”
Zack could feel the turbocharged super zombie mutation shooting through every vein, artery, and capillary, taking over his entire body. He tried to say something, but all that came out was a choked gargling sound. He felt his muscles starting to spasm involuntarily. Zack swallowed and gasped. He couldn’t breathe. He was dying.
Or rather undying. Zack knew the feeling. He had been a zombie once before, but this felt different.
The last thing he remembered before giving up on the impulse to breathe were the two super zombies jumping out of the bushes and his friends springing into action. Zack’s vision blurred and he could feel his heart skip a beat, each one getting farther apart from the last, until finally his heart stopped altogether. His head lolled to the side as he collapsed in the dirt.
Zack’s eyes flicked open and he could see no color, only black and white. He was still lying down and his hip didn’t hurt at all anymore. He sat up slowly, a command that his body did on its own—his mind seemed to have little or no control over his movements. He glanced down at his hands. The skin was already starting to crinkle and whiten. His stomach roared with hunger.
He heard a rustle in the leaves and his neck craned toward the sound. In his newly color-blind field of vision, five p
eople came into view, dragging two unconscious bodies across the ground.
One of the people turned toward Zack, the plump one with eyeglasses. “Dude!” he called out. “You’re alive!” He ran toward Zack, and Zack leaped off the ground, took two running steps forward, and tackled the chubby person to the ground.
“Ahhhhh!” the chunky one yelled. “He’s a super zombie! Get him off me!”
Zack gnawed at the air, trying to clamp down and bite into the skull of this shrieking human. All he wanted to do was consume whatever living brains he could. The hunger in his belly demanded it.
“Dude, chill, it’s me, Rice!” the chubby one screamed, squirming on his back. “It’s me, man! Stop it!”
Suddenly, Zack focused really hard on controlling the unstoppable hunger inside him. He regained control of his motor functions for a moment and looked at the boy whose brains he was about to eat. He saw his best friend underneath him. Disgusted, Zack jumped up to his feet and backed away from him. The rest of the people circled around him—his sister, Zoe; Madison; Ozzie; Olivia—they all stood around, holding their martial arts weapons. Zack felt like a frightened animal, backing away, then lashing out, snarling as they closed in.
“Easy, Zack,” Ozzie said, whirling his nunchaku around slowly. “We’re your friends. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“Can you understand what we’re saying to you?” Zoe pronounced each syllable very clearly, as if she was talking to a baby.
“Snarl once if you can understand us,” Rice said, getting to his feet and brushing the dirt off his pants.
Zack let out one hideous snarl and bared his teeth, hissing.
“Whoa!” Madison said. “Look, he can understand us!”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Zoe said. “He could’ve just been snarling.”
Rice then held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
What—do they think I’m some kind of idiot? Zack thought inside his super zombie brain and then snarled three times.
“See?” Rice said. “He can understand!”
“I think he’s trying not to eat us, but it’s hard for him,” Olivia said. “Poor little guy.”
Zack didn’t know how long he could keep control of his impulses. It was getting more difficult by the second. The hunger was about to take over when something happened.
Zack’s friends’ voices faded out and he heard another voice. It was like someone was sending a signal directly to his brain. It was Zhang Wu, uttering his mantra over and over again: You must BE the zombie. . . . You MUST be the zombie. . . . YOU must be the zombie!
Then Zack’s eyes flipped from black and white back to color and everything became clear.
He knew exactly what he had to do.
I must BE the zombie! Zack thought to himself. He breathed in deeply, wheezily, and grunted, flexing all his muscles at once. The hunger still raged in his stomach, but he was certain he could control it, at least for a short while. To do what he needed to do. What the whole world needed him to do.
“Check it out.” Rice pointed excitedly at his buddy. “He’s not attacking us anymore.”
“Don’t go near him, Rice,” Madison said. “He might be suckering us.”
“Yeah, he’s smarter than he looks,” said Zoe. “Always has been.”
“No, I can tell,” Rice said. “He’s not going to hurt us.” Rice stepped closer to his undead friend and stuck his hand out like a stranger saying hello to a dog.
“Rice,” Ozzie said in a commanding voice, “please step away from the super Zack!”
But Rice didn’t listen. He stuck his hand right in front of Zack’s mouth. “See?”
Zack’s stomach growled violently. It took every ounce of effort not to sink his teeth into Rice’s meaty arm.
“He’s not gonna bite us,” Rice said. “He knows who we are.”
If Rice had any idea how close he was to getting his face ripped off and his brains eaten out of his skull, he would have stood back at least a few feet. Zack had to get out of there quick. He turned his back on his friends and walked away.
“Super Zack, wait!” Olivia called.
“Oh, please don’t call him that,” Zoe groaned. “It’s exactly what he wants you to call him.”
“Where are you going?”
Zack grunted and pointed to the base of a nearby tree. “Rrr-oot!” He struggled to say the monosyllabic word. He wasn’t even going to try to say ginkgo.
“Hold on,” Madison said, picking up her kung fu sticks. “We’ll come with you, Super Zack!”
“Okay,” said Zoe, losing her patience. “The next one of you who calls him that is going to get smacked.”
Zack looked at his friends, then shook his head. He turned around, leaving them behind.
“Wait!” Ozzie called after him. He was stripping off the orange robe from the smaller of the two zombies. Ozzie jogged over to Super Zack and handed him the monk attire. Ozzie looked into Zack’s eyes. Zack wanted nothing more than to eat his friend’s brains, but fought back the urge. Ozzie bowed respectfully and backed away as Zack went off to finish what they had come here to do.
Back atop the mountain, Zack watched from the shadows as the entire super-zombified monastery walked around the ginkgo tree. He put on the orange robe to blend in. Zack walked out into the moonlit courtyard of the temple and lumbered through the crowd. I must BE the zombie, Super Zack kept thinking. I must BE the zombie. He went around the back of the tree where he would be hidden from view.
Super Zack then reached his hand underneath the base of the tree trunk. He could feel the power of the ancient ginkgo in his hand as he gripped the rough bark. He could feel the super zombie strength in his own arm as well. Zack pulled as hard as he could and broke off a large piece of the root above the surface of the dirt. Quickly, he moved back from the tree.
When he looked up, Super Zack found himself surrounded by two dozen super zombie monks. They glared at him, snarling and flaring their nostrils. The super zombies formed a ring around him and tackled Zack.
Zack forced his mind to go blank.
Time seemed to slow down, like freeze-frames in a movie, as Zack lost control of his body. Zhang’s voice filled his mind’s ear once again. You ARE the zombie!
Zack’s arms jabbed and punched with tremendous speed and power as he peppered the first wave of super zombie attackers with sharp, lightning-quick blows. His legs flung round and kick-flipped over three more super zombies, and he took them down with a single back-heel roundhouse. It was as if he was being controlled remotely by a video gamer, hitting combos for the next move.
When Zack regained control, he was standing in a sea of broken bodies, all lying on the ground.
He couldn’t believe that he was still alive. Well, not technically alive, but still in one piece.
“Whoa!” Rice shouted, almost laughing at the scene before him. “That was insane, Super Zack!”
Zoe then appeared behind Rice and smacked him in the back of his head. “What did I tell you?”
“Ow!” Rice yelled. “Not cool!”
The rest of them came out from hiding behind the temple—Ozzie, Madison, Olivia, and Twinkles—and looked on, completely in awe of what Super Zack had done.
Zack was exhausted. He felt like he could lie down and go to sleep for a thousand years. He stumbled toward his friends and dropped to his knees, letting the ginkgo root fall to the ground.
The hunger was back, and worse than ever. He wanted to eat brains very badly. Zack lunged at Ozzie when he bent down to pick up the root.
“Braaiiins!” Zack cried, clawing at his friend. Ozzie snatched up the root and jumped back.
“Easy, boy!” Rice shouted, pulling out a bottle of ginkgo biloba pills that he still had in his backpack. Madison, Zoe, and Olivia held Zack by the wrists and ankles. Rice stood over him and opened the bottle, pouring the ginkgo pellets into his mouth. Ozzie put Zack in a headlock and forced his mouth closed until he swallowed them all.
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As he faded out of consciousness, he could feel his friends hoist him up and start to carry him down the mountainside. He heard Olivia say, “Let’s get out of here before those kung fu freakazoids wake up.”
Zack woke up to his friends standing over him, their eyes gazing down at him. They were back in Zhang’s hut. Zack lay flat on his back on the bottom bunk. His hands and feet were tied to the bedposts. Zhang undid the rope and Zack sat up.
“What’s going on?” Zack asked. “I just had the weirdest dream. . . . I dreamed I was a super zombie.”
“Dude,” said Rice, “you were. You don’t remember?”
“From what I hear, you handled yourself like a true master.” Zhang gave Zack a knowing wink and smiled.
Zack blinked as he wrapped his head around what they were telling him. “So . . . I was really a super zombie?” he said. “But I’m not now. . . .”
Madison explained. “We mixed the mayfly larvae with the piece of the ginkgo root you got. Then we added some of the frilled shark enzyme and some of Olivia’s blood. Then we just dropped a little in your mouth and voila!”
“No more Super Zack,” Zoe said, and made a little celebratory woo-hoo sound.
“The antidote worked, Zack!” Olivia said, holding a piece of gauze over the spot on her arm where they had taken her blood sample. “Now we can get the ingredients back to Nigel so he can figure out a way to mass-produce it and save my brother and my mom and my dad and everyone else!”
Zack could hardly believe it, yet he knew it was true. The whole episode seemed like a bad dream he could barely remember. He looked up at Zhang. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” Zack told him.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Zhang said. “You were ready when it counted most.”
Ozzie walked up to Zhang. “Well, I have something to apologize for. I’m sorry for the way I acted when we first met. . . .”
World Zombination Page 8