There was only one way out. And that was up.
One by one they climbed up the waterpark’s mega-slide. Twenty feet in the air, Zack gulped, looking over at the two twisting slides of the Double Helix. It was a long way down, but the landing pool was well away from the zombie hordes below.
Ozzie was the first to reach the top. “See ya later, alligators!” he said as he dove down the slide headfirst.
Next in line, Rice was gathering his courage to jump, readying himself with a little song. “One for the zombies. Two for my bros. Three to get ready. And four to— Whoa!”
Zoe gave Rice a good shove in the rear. “Ahhhhhh!” Rice screamed like a baby as he went flying down the Double Helix waterslide.
Zack looked down the ladder behind him. Olivia’s super-zombified dad was climbing after them, scrambling up the rungs as fast as he could.
“Hurry up, guys,” Zack said to the girls. “Uncle Conrad’s a climber.”
The girls slid down one by one—first Zoe, then Olivia, then Madison, who was carrying Twinkles, leaving Zack alone at the top.
Zack took one more look behind him and then leaped off the platform, spiraling down the slide. He twisted and turned, shooting down the slick, hard plastic chute. He spun down the Double Helix, catching flashes of Fun World in a wild, dizzy blur. Then, as the water slide approached the dreaded drop, Zack’s stomach sank to his ankles and he shot straight down into the massive pool below.
Zack bobbed to the surface and sucked a shock of air into his lungs. Ozzie, Rice, and the girls were all treading water around him. Twinkles was doggy-paddling and barking incessantly.
“Everybody okay?” Zack asked, trying not to get any of the slimy zombie water in his mouth.
“Yep!” the gang said in unison, and they started to swim to the edge.
“Yo,” Ozzie said, pointing down to the bottom of the deep pool. “Keep your feet up everybody. There’s zombies on the bottom!”
Zack glanced below the surface, and the waves bobbed with the distorted images of submerged zombie bottom-feeders shimmering through the pool water’s dark prism.
As they continued to cautiously make their way to the edge, two waterpark zombies slid out of the adjacent waterslides at rapid speed. Swimming next to Olivia, Zack quickly ducked as one of the airborne ghouls belly-flopped over him into the water.
“Eeek!” Olivia shrieked as the other zombie landed directly on top of her.
“Olivia!” Zack cried, stopping mid-swim and turning around to see if she was okay.
The zombified waterslider plunged Olivia underwater, and she started splashing wildly in the middle of the pool. Olivia kicked the waterslide zombie away from her, and it sank to the bottom, unable to swim. But another zombie on the bottom of the pool now had her by the ankle, yanking her down. Zack swam over and caught her by the wrist. He pulled up, trying to keep her head above water, but the underwater zombie had all the leverage. Zack’s hand slipped from Olivia’s wrist, and she gurgled the pool water before disappearing in a sinkhole of air bubbles.
Zack took a massive gulp of air and dove down after her.
The chlorine stung his eyeballs something fierce as he looked around desperately underwater. Then he spotted her, struggling to free herself from the zombie’s death grip. Zack dove deeper and stuck his fingers between Olivia’s ankle and the zombie’s grasp. He wedged his own grip around the zombie’s thumb as the rest of the undead bottom-feeders tugged at his clothes, pulling him down farther.
Zack felt the burn in his lungs, running out of air. He pulled back the zombie’s thumb as hard as he could and heard an underwater pop that released Olivia from her zombie anchor. Olivia kicked wildly and shot upward above his head. Zack planted the sole of his shoe on the face of the undead underwater beast tugging at his pant leg and propelled himself upward as well.
A second later, Zack exploded to the surface, gasping for air.
“That was a pretty close one,” Olivia said, treading water next to Zack. “You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Zack said, knocking some excess water out of his ear.
“Okay, guys,” Rice called from the pool deck. “Free swim’s over!” He pointed skyward to the top of the Double Helix. Up above, Uncle Conrad was already spiraling down the enormous mega-slide.
Zack and Olivia swam frantically for their lives to the side of the pool where Zoe, Madison, Ozzie, and Rice cheered them on and then helped to lift them out of the water onto the cement deck.
SPLASH!
Uncle Conrad torpedoed into the pool and floundered for a moment before doggy-paddling slowly toward the edge of the zombified landing pool.
“Ha!” Rice scoffed. “Look at him. He can hardly swim!”
“Rice!” Madison shouted. “We gotta get out of here!”
The main plaza of the theme park looked like the eye of a zombie hurricane. All around, the zombie hordes were marching like drones back toward the epicenter of Fun World.
“Over here!” Olivia pointed to the hotel facade shaped like a gumball machine rising out of downtown Fun World. “If we can make it up there, we can hitch a ride on the monorail!”
At the other end of the thoroughfare, Cousin Ben was now scooting around in one of the Fun World golf carts, herding the zombie hordes toward the kids.
The kids beelined for the entrance of Hotel Bunco and raced through the silver doors. Inside the zombified lobby, they rushed past the front desk and veered left until they came to a bank of elevators.
As they waited for an elevator to arrive, a pack of elderly zombies stormed around the corner, shuffling toward them along the black-and-white-checkered linoleum.
“Too-day,” Zoe said, tapping her foot impatiently while she watched the elevator numbers above the door light up.
“It’s here!” Madison squealed when the elevator dinged. Zoe stepped in front of the elevator next to her as the doors slid open.
“Blargh!” A dense cluster of undead elevator riders charged out at them.
“Ahhhhh!” the girls screamed and turned to run away.
“Come on,” Zack cried over the wailing zombie moans. “We have to take the stairs!”
Racing through the door to the darkened stairwell, Zack looked back and caught a glimpse of super zombie Cousin Ben and his legion following hot on their trail.
The door closed securely behind Zack, but he couldn’t see a thing in the pitch-dark stairwell. The lights had blacked out and the smell of rotting zombie flesh saturated the heavy air.
“Hurry up, guys.” Ozzie’s voice echoed off the walls. “We got zombies coming.”
Cloaked in darkness, Zack followed the sound of Ozzie’s voice, walking blindly up the steps. “We need to get to the seventh floor for monorail access,” Olivia said.
“I can’t see where I’m going,” Madison complained.
“EEEK!” Zack heard Olivia squeal, followed by two loud smacks and a booming thwack.
“What just happened?” Zack asked.
“I think Ozzie just took down a zombie on pure ninja sense alone,” said Rice with awe in his voice.
“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “That and it also helps to have night-vision goggles handy.”
“Well played, Oz,” said Zack.
“Okay, buddy,” Ozzie said to Zack. “You’re going to need to duck right now.”
“Huh?”
“Duck!” Ozzie shouted.
Zack crouched down fast and heard Ozzie blast the zombie behind him in the stomach with his Slugger. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. The zombie stairwell dweller went tumbling down the steps. With the zombie out of the way, Zack shot up the stairs but slipped on a trail of slime coating one of the steps. About to flail backward, he felt Ozzie’s hand grab him by the wrist and drag him after the others on their way to the seventh floor.
“Nice save,” Zack said, putting his arm on Ozzie’s shoulder. “Thanks.”
“It was nothing,” Ozzie’s voice said out of the darkness.
A flight abo
ve, Zoe hustled up the darkened steps. “Go, go, go!” she yelled to Rice.
“Stop pushing me!” Rice yelled back.
“Stop yelling!” Madison and Olivia both shouted.
“Through that door!” Ozzie yelled.
“What door?”
“This one.” The door flung open, casting a bright triangle of moonlight into the stairwell, shining from a hallway window. A herd of shadowy zombies rounded down from the staircase above them. Zack and the gang followed the light onto the seventh floor and shut the door behind them. Ozzie took off his night-vision goggles and slipped them back in his pack.
In front, Zack ran through the halls, dodging through a gauntlet of hotel zombie freaks rampaging in and out of the demolished hotel rooms. He made a left underneath a sign overhead directing them to the waiting deck for the Fun World monorail. A digital board dripping in slime told him the next train would be coming in three minutes, but they had only about thirty seconds before the hotel zombies would converge on them in the close quarters of the corridor.
With Madison, Zoe, Rice, Olivia, Twinkles, and Ozzie right behind him, Zack sprinted past the monorail platform and through the melee to the stairwell on the other side of the floor.
They tried to go down, but the zombies were already coming up, so they quickly turned the other way. Climbing the last flight of stairs, they burst through the access door into a short hallway with two elevators and a single locked door marked with a P on the wall above the lock.
Behind them, the elevator doors dinged shut and the elevator cars descended to the lower floors.
“The super zombies must be calling the elevators back down!” Madison shouted.
“We’re trapped!” Zoe yelled. Madison banged on the double doors of the penthouse, screaming for someone to let them in.
Suddenly, the door to the stairwell flung open and a stray, mammoth zombie man plowed right into Ozzie. It was shirtless and blubbery, sweaty and savagely snarling with slime-caked fur all over its bare, flabby torso.
“Oomph,” Ozzie huffed, and put his hand up to shield himself from the undead monster’s chomping maw, but the zombie shifted his head to the left and bit down hard on Ozzie’s fingers with a crunch.
“Yow!” Ozzie howled an awful, pain-stricken yowl and struck down the ghoul with a swift leg kick to its stomach. “It got me! The sonofagun got me!” He waved his arm around, showing off his bloody finger.
Ozzie groaned, clutching his zombie-bitten pinky, and collapsed on the ground as the zombie virus moved quickly through his bloodstream.
“Let’s try to get him inside there!” yelled Madison, and she and Olivia moved to drag him toward another penthouse door at the end of the hall.
Zack pulled hard on the door, but it too was locked tight.
Ozzie lay on the floor, slipping in and out of consciousness.
“Ozzie!” Rice shouted as he held him by the collar with two hands. “You have to tell us how to pick this lock.”
“That’s all right, Santa,” he said woozily. “All Ozzie wants for Christmas is a new set of nunchucks.”
“Nunchaku,” Zoe corrected.
“Have some compassion, Zoe,” Rice said. “He’s zombifying!”
At the end of the hall, the elevators reopened and a flock of sweaty, undead goons stumbled out. The other elevator car dinged, too, and another pack of zombies stormed into the hallway.
“Get out of the way, Zack.” Olivia pushed him aside, plucking an ATM card out of her wallet and a bobby pin out of her hair. “I’ve only done this once before so no promises, but here goes. . . .” She slid the plastic card in the crack of the door by the lock and jiggled the bobby pin inside the lock itself.
Behind them, the mass of misshapen corpses limped lamely up the hallway.
“Al-most got it,” Olivia said, jiggling the pin in the lock.
The gangly procession of undead maniacs howled bloody murder, their lips stained rum-red with blood. Zack ran up to the first wave of zombies staggering off the elevators and wielded his bat, conking out two undead noggins with a single mighty swing.
“There!” Olivia shouted, and the door to the hotel suite flew open at the last second.
Zack backed away from the oncoming herd of zombies while Zoe and Madison dragged Ozzie into the plush foyer of the penthouse suite and laid him out on the living room floor. Then Zack, Rice, and Olivia all piled in next and pushed the doors shut on the converging swarm in the hall.
“Quick!” Zack shouted. “We have to barricade the door!”
Zack, Zoe, Madison, and Olivia began to pull over as many sofas and chairs as they could find and push them up against all the doors to make solid barriers. Rice went over to check on Ozzie, whose head was slumped to the side with a little blob of drool dripping from the corner of his mouth.
Behind them, a tall lanky figure hobbled out of the shadows and looked down at the kids.
“Aww, man, I thought they were all out there!” said Olivia, turning around.
Rice gazed up at the man. “That’s not a zombie,” he said with awe in his voice. He turned to the rest of the gang. “That’s a Bunco!”
A loud cough reverberated through the office as the big Bunkowski stepped into view. He was tall, nearly six foot six, and had a thinning head of white fluffy hair and a thick white mustache that connected to his white muttonchop sideburns. Bunco had on leather sandals and khaki shorts with a pink polo shirt. One of his legs was the kind of regular appendage you’d expect from a man his size and breadth, but the other was a mechanical prosthetic that gave him a hitch in his step. His shoulders were narrow and his hips were wide, giving him the appearance of a pear or some kind of Halloween gourd, skinny side up.
“Greetings,” he said, standing before them. “My name is RJ Bunkowski, but you can call me Bunco.”
“Mr. Bunco.” Rice stepped forward, putting his hand out to shake. “It’s a real honor to meet you, sir! I’m a big admirer of your life’s work.”
“The pleasure’s all mine, Johnston,” Bunco said.
Rice’s eyes widened. “He knows my name?”
“Big whoop,” said Zoe as she turned to address Bunco. “Have you been up here the whole time?”
“Well, I wasn’t going down there. Look what happened.” Bunco laughed nervously and pointed at Ozzie sprawled on the floor. “I don’t want to become one of those things again.”
“You used to be a zombie?”
Bunco nodded yes.
“Join the club,” Madison said.
“But you haven’t rezombified?”
“What does ‘rezombified’ mean?”
“That’s what’s happening,” Zack informed him. “Everyone who got unzombified by the original popcorn antidote is rezombifying back to their previous undead state!”
“Wow,” said Bunco. “That’s heavy, man! All I know is that before the last outbreak, I took a bite of a BurgerDog and woke up with two busted wrists and a leg missing, but that one bite was the single most delightful flavor-tasting experience of my life. I even did a tribute to the popcorn/brain flavoring that saved us all. Would you like to try one? I have a sample in my study.”
“Does a zombie eat brains in the woods?” Rice asked as they all followed him into the next room.
The funny-looking fellow walked behind his desk to one of the many glass jars on the shelves lining the walls top to bottom, each one seeming to be filled with a different flavor gumball, and selected one for each of the kids.
Madison and Olivia both squinched up their faces in revulsion. “No thanks.”
“I’m good,” said Zack.
Rice took one of the gumballs from Bunco’s hand and popped it in his mouth. “Mmmmm,” he said, chewing the brain-flavored popcorn ball. “You know,” he said. “People throw the word ‘genius’ around a lot these days. But you, sir, are a true visionary. Your own amusement park. Your own bubble gum factory. Your own cruise ship. Your own brand of energy drink—”
“We even have gu
mballs infused with that, too! Our new Spazola flavors are raspberry-lemon, kiwi-strawberry, and blackberry-cherry. Ooh, and we now have a specialty line of flavors for the practical jokers out there: gumballs that taste like the inside of an old shoe, ones that taste like dirty laundry. . . . Would you care to try one?”
“Uh . . . let me try one of those Spazola-infused ones,” said Rice, eyeing the multicolored glass jars. “Blackberry-cherry, please.” Bunco handed Rice a gumball and Rice popped it in his mouth. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted—”
“Oh, please,” Zoe said. “How can you be thinking about gumballs at a time like this?” She smacked Rice in the back of his head, making him choke and swallow the yummy gumball he was chewing.
“Not cool, Zoe,” he said. “Do you know how long it takes chewing gum to get out of your system? Like seven years!”
“I’ve heard you can never get it out,” Madison said, stretching a piece of chewed gum out of her mouth until it snapped.
A light bulb flashed in Zack’s head. “That’s it! We want to make the antidote permanent, right?” he said. “Well, what if we put the antidote in the gumballs? It’ll last at least seven years.” He turned to Bunco. “You have a factory around here, right?”
“Yes,” said Bunco. “It’s less than a mile from here. I’ll take you myself. With your antidote and my gumballs, we can unzombify everything for good. All we have to do is add the antidote into the mixer. The rest is automated.” Bunco pressed a special button on his desk and turned back to the kids. “I just called the monorail to come pick us up. We can access it through my secret passageway.” He pressed another button and the study wall opened, revealing a small corridor. “Man, is anyone else hot in here?”
Bullets of sweat streamed down his brow, and Zack could see the great bubble gum baron’s eyes start to dilate and his skin begin to turn a shade of mucus green.
The Zombie Chasers #5 Page 8