Highway to Hell

by Max Brallier

  There are five people atop the float. The man in front holding the bullhorn looks to be the leader. He’s in his late seventies and wears a blue track jacket and oversized slacks.

  He holds a cigarette between his fingers and he alternates between dragging on the cigarette and yelling into the bullhorn. A white cowboy hat about three sizes too large sits on his head. Every few moments, it drops down over his eyes, and he has to push it back up. When he does, he ashes on his track jacket, and he curses into the bullhorn.

  His speech comes out a little like: “THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA HAS—shit—BROUGHT ABOUT THIS—cough—RISING OF—damn it!—SATAN’S SPAWN!”

  A middle-aged woman—the wife, you guess—stands proudly at his side, holding a rifle, at attention.

  Two teenage boys, grandkids, maybe, walk around the float, hurling garbage at the zombies. One has a rattail. The other wears round sunglasses. Zombies reach up for their feet, but the undead hands are blocked by chicken wire.

  A girl, maybe nine, sits at the rear of the float, atop a large papier-mâché structure depicting two men engaged in an explicit and, you think, intriguing act. She kicks her heels gently against the papier-mâché men and reads a comic book, not seeming to care about any of this.

  There’s someone underneath, too, driving. That makes six total: the old man, his wife, the two teenage boys, the young girl, and the driver.

  As you watch the float roll down Bourbon Street, you suddenly know exactly how you’ll get those generators back to Dewey’s.

  It’s time to wreak a little havoc . . .

  Confront the float head-on? Click here.

  Use the element of surprise instead? Click here.

  BACK FOR THE BOY

  You race back toward Billy. The closest zombie to him is a football player, still wearing its helmet. You charge forward and throw your shoulder into it, bringing it down, then grabbing the face mask, wrenching it, twisting hard, cracking its weak neck, and then finally ripping its head off entirely.

  You stand over Billy, holding the helmet—the zombie’s head still inside, dripping gore.

  A dozen zombies shuffle forward, blood pouring from their lips. Eyes dark and dead. You swing the helmet wildly, each strike cracking a skull.

  A resilient one leaps forward. You swipe the helmet up, connecting with the thing’s jaw. Its mouth clamps shut and its tongue is severed and you continue through with the swing, until the head inside the helmet finally slips out, soaring through the air. The attacking monster drops and the player’s severed head rolls across the grass.

  “Let’s go!” you say, bending down to scoop up Billy.

  But there, ahead of you, is a runaway undead elephant. It slams into the goalpost and there’s a tremendous crack.

  You see it happening, in slow motion. The goalpost breaking. Falling. Plummeting toward you. You try to dart to the side, but it’s too late.

  You hold Billy tight as the post slams into you. Billy cries out, then his cry is silenced as the heavy pole shatters his spine.

  Everything goes dark.

  Your eyes flicker open. Billy is on top of you, staring at you. It looks like he’s attempting to speak but can’t. Can’t move his facial muscles or his jaw.

  You try to tell him it’ll be all right, that it’s going to be okay, but you can’t. Nothing happens. Your mouth doesn’t respond to your brain’s commands. You can blink your eyes. Nothing more.

  With sudden, overwhelming terror, you realize your neck is broken. You’re pinned beneath the pole, but it doesn’t matter—you could be lying in an open field, and you still couldn’t move.

  Looking up, you see shadows fall over you. Zombies shuffling toward you. Two of the monsters in black-and-white referee uniforms.

  They drop to their knees and begin. First pulling the flesh from your face. Wet teeth biting into the bridge of your nose. Killing you. And you don’t feel any of it . . .

  AN END

  COOL BEANS

  You eye the rear of Stu Bean’s fat old Ford van, then reach down to the dash and tap it twice, a series of red switches appearing. Triggers. It’s like the Aston Martin in Goldfinger—but with a helluva lot more firepower. And it’s driven by you, red-blooded American Jimmy El Camino—not some martini-sipping Brit.

  Hell, most of the Brits are dead now, far as you know. From what you saw on the TV, London fell quick.

  Your eyes snap back to the road. You thumb the trigger, the armored van directly in front of you, and—

  KRAKA—BOOM!

  A rocket fires from the launcher on the side of the Jeep Wrangler and slams into the Ford, blowing open the rear doors and sending it careening across two lanes. The van goes up on two wheels as it turns off the avenue.

  You follow.

  The announcer: “One of Boss Tanner’s patented zombie traps is ready to be revealed. But where is it? Which driver is it targeting?”

  The announcer mentioned booby traps earlier, but you don’t know what to expect. Don’t know the extent of this absurdity. And then, turning onto Madison Avenue—

  SPLAT!

  SPLAT! SPLAT!

  Zombies, slamming into the ground, pounding the street. One, then two, then five, then so many you lose count.

  “ZOMBIE SUICIDE!” the announcer calls out. “Boss Tanner’s favorite! And if it’s Boss Tanner’s favorite, then it’s our favorite, too!”

  You look to the rooftops. A man is herding zombies off a ledge. The undead bastards plummet to the ground, the impact taking out the first few . . . but the others landing on the wet pile. Their bones might be shattered and their insides liquefied, but unless the brain is destroyed, they keep on coming.

  SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!

  The zombies rain down from both sides of the street, body after body, like a lemming mass suicide.

  You hit the brakes just as one monster drops onto the rear of the Jeep, crashing through the hard top, rocking the vehicle.

  Instantly, cold hands reach for you, grabbing hold.

  The zombie, once a woman, is now putrid and unrecognizable. One eyeball gone. No lips. Legs shattered, folded underneath it at impossible angles. Eyes mustard colored and hungry—hungry as hell, as it lets out a ferocious moan and its fingers dig into your shoulder.

  You lunge across the car, reaching for the sawed-off, double-barreled Remington on the floor.

  “No hitchhikers,” you say, grabbing the big gun, spinning, raising it, and squeezing. The stowaway’s head is blown off, leaving a cloud of red mist over Madison Avenue.

  You blink away the blood, turn back to the streets, and—

  Stu Bean’s old Ford van is gone. All you see now is the Desert Fox and his Afrika Korps Panzer tank rumbling toward you.

  BOOM!

  You spin the wheel. The KwK fires and the massive shell rockets past you as the Jeep scrapes against a Duane Reade, bouncing off and slamming into a fire hydrant.

  You throw it in reverse. The tires spin. That big Panzer tank barrel is turning toward you.

  The tires spin again.

  The Panzer rumbles.

  Fuck it.

  You open the thick, reinforced door and scramble out of the Jeep. You hear the heavy crank of the Panzer’s cannon being repositioned. Need to hurry. Need to get away from the Jeep before it’s blown to shit. You reach into the back of the overturned vehicle.

  C’mon, c’mon.

  CRANK CRANK CRANK

  There.

  Grenades. You stuff one into your pocket. You take the fire ax and the sawed-off, then you’re sprinting away from the Jeep, into the middle of Madison.

  The announcer screams: “And Jimmy El Camino is out on the streets, on his own, running!”

  But where are you running to? Everywhere you look, zombies are shuffling toward you . . .

  Charge the Desert Fox! Click here.

  Do anything but run toward the giant tank? Click here.

  A NOSY FELLA

  You bring Iris inside. In the rear of the museum is a l
arge industrial freezer, previously used for storing wax. Igor sets her inside, flips some switches; a generator rumbles to life, and the freezing begins.

  “Return with [REDACTED, LEGAL],” he says, handing you a map of the Hollywood Hills, “and I’ll return your friend, in Popsicle form.” You march out of the museum, slide inside the El Camino, and begin the hunt . . .

  You follow the route on the map, driving past famous landmarks, most either destroyed or overrun with the undead. Zombies shuffle along the walk of fame.

  It’s strange, not having Iris in the seat next to you. It feels like you’ve abandoned her. Abandoned your mission.

  And it would be so easy to leave it all now. You’re close. You could hop on the Pacific Coast Highway and burn rubber to San Francisco—be there before sundown, maybe. Tell the scientists that bandits took Iris’s body. Call Eigle, tell him, too. Demand the antidote. You’d get it, for sure. You’d force them to hand it over.

  But you owe it to Iris to press on. Hell, you owe it to yourself.

  In movies, characters always ask some villain or some cheating husband, “How do you sleep at night?” In the past, when you’ve asked yourself that question, you’ve always answered, “Like a goddamn baby.”

  But now you’re asking yourself, “How will you sleep for all eternity?” After you’re dead and gone, on the off, off, off fucking chance that some sort of consciousness remains—how will you sleep then? How would you sleep if you had the chance to save humanity, and you just turned your head, looked the other way?

  Not well.

  But you’ll snooze wonderfully, you think, if you just do everything in your power to get Iris’s body to San Francisco.

  You hug the turns around Mulholland, charging up through the hills. It’s a treacherous drive. Nature has teed off on the road in the four years since the Los Angeles sanitation department last tended to it. Fallen trees block the cracked roads and growing moss makes the turns slick.

  You find the house at the peak of the Hollywood Hills. You can see the Hollywood sign, off in the distance, across the thick, tree-covered range.

  The house is gated, but the gate has been destroyed. A truck sits in the front yard, pieces of wrought iron wrapped around the grille.

  You park the El Camino and walk the drive, gripping the sawed-off. Nudge open the front door with the barrel, and immediately one is upon you. A monster in a once-white tuxedo, now torn and blood-splattered and dirty. It gets its arms up on your shoulders, like some emotional drunk trying to hug you.

  You press the barrel against the monster’s throat, just above its Adam’s apple, pointed skyward, and pull the trigger. You turn and shut your eyes as it splatters your face.

  You move further into the house. A thick layer of dust and dirt covers everything. Bottles of champagne on granite countertops. An Oscar statue lies on the floor. You pick it up. Feel its weight—surprisingly heavy.

  Moaning from across the room. More men in tuxedos. Women, some in long dresses, some in short dresses, come stumbling through a shattered patio door. You swing, burying the Oscar statue in the head of a slobbering monster of a man.

  And then you unload with the sawed-off. It’s a quick slaughter. The heavy slugs tear through their strange, rotting faces. The rotten skin hangs oddly off some—too many filler injections—but the bullets end all that.

  With the undead party guests finished, you’re free to explore. You peer outside, through the patio door. Dead bodies in the swimming pool. Skeletal bodies scattered around—those that were never zombified simply died and were left to nature.

  Stepping over the detritus of a four-year-old party-turned-massacre, you feel something crack beneath your feet. A retro Polaroid camera. Beneath it, a small pile of photos.

  You bend down. And shit—you hardly believe it—there she is. [REDACTED, LEGAL], right there, in the first photo. Mugging for the camera, holding a glass of red wine in one hand with her arm around some hipster boob.

  So she was here, in this house.

  In a large bathroom—all granite and sparkly white—you find a note scrawled on the bathroom mirror in lipstick. “B. Going to the sign. My agent says helicopters are coming there. Come quick. xoxo.—[REDACTED, LEGAL].”

  The sign.

  The Hollywood sign?

  From the back patio, you can see it—maybe five hundred yards away, through the sloping, wooded hills.

  You walk that way. There once was a rough path, but it’s overgrown. The hill pitches steeper upward, and you’re forced into a climb. Panting, coming through the thickness, exiting the brush, the big letter H towers over you. A few monsters stumble around. You move quietly.

  Could she be here? Still alive?

  No. Not possible.

  But her zombified body?

  Maybe.

  Or who knows, maybe the helicopter did come, and she’s long gone.

  Only one way to find out. You whistle, loudly, and the beasts come at you.

  You check their faces, look for any sign it’s her, clear them, and fire.

  A man, an actor you recognize, not her. BLAM! The sawed-off slug blows its face apart, tearing flesh from skull.

  A woman, rotted away, hard to make out—you check its neckline—no diamond. BLAM!

  You continue around the thick base of the letters, firing, reloading, leaving a trail of undead corpses behind you. But no sign of [REDACTED, LEGAL].

  Coming to the end, the final letter, the towering D—you see a pile of zombies at the bottom. And a discarded shoe—a high heel.

  You look up.

  What would you do, if you were surrounded by zombies, waiting for a helicopter? With no weapon?

  You’d climb.

  Did she?

  You’ll find out.

  It’s forty-five feet. You climb it in three minutes.

  Coming over the top, you feel a human bone. You hoist yourself up.

  A body lies there, atop the big letter D, curled up in the fetal position. It’s nothing but bones and tattered shreds of clothing now. The dress, though pounded by four years of weather, was clearly white.

  You pull it aside, examining her clavicle, and there it is. The diamond necklace from the photo.

  So that’s how it went down. The zombies came. She ran from the house, through the hills. Climbed the D to escape them. There, she waited for a helicopter that never came.

  She couldn’t climb back down—there was an army of hungry monsters waiting below.

  So poor little [REDACTED, LEGAL] stayed there until she likely died of dehydration.

  Mystery solved. Good work, Marlowe.

  You take the necklace and climb back down. You move quickly, back through the hills, through the house, to the El Camino, racing back to Madame Tussauds.

  You’ve had enough of Hollywood.

  Click here.

  FULL CAPACITY

  They found you.

  You saw Mr. King chasing the train earlier, but you didn’t think he’d make his assault here, in the stadium.

  The Lincoln races through the thick smoke, guns blazing.

  Behind him is Buzzy in the 1981 Chevy pickup, indiscriminately firing rooftop-mounted rockets.

  The first rocket slams into a mass of undead beasts, vaporizing them.

  The second rocket hits the stands behind you. Bodies explode. A piece of shrapnel stabs into your leg, hot and sharp. Blood running. You’ll deal with it later.

  The third rocket hits the scoreboard at the front end of the stadium, above the gate where you entered. There’s a deafening crash as it slowly tumbles over, landing in the stands, that section of the stadium beginning to break, hundreds of bodies crushed by the impact. The entry gate cracks open and you wonder if—hope that—Ring is dead now, too.

  But there’s no time to go back and look.

  You’re closer to the visiting team’s exit. It’s still aflame, and smoke still billows out, but if you can make it, then you can lose the cars, lose the monsters.

  The Lin
coln rips across the field. The cannons don’t let up. Bullets slam into the monstrous animals and the undead humans and it’s now bedlam unlike anything you’ve ever witnessed: the stadium collapsing, bodies being blown to pieces, the heavy smell of gunpowder so thick in the air you can barely breathe.

  Billy coughs and chokes and grips your jeans.

  You can see the visitor’s entrance—your exit. Forty yards. But Mr. King’s Lincoln is turning, coming toward you.

  And those forty yards will be the longest goddamn run of your life.

  If you’ll run for the exit, click here.

  Attempt a leap into the stands? Click here.

  STORMING MOUNT RUSHMORE

  Try to flee and the sniper will cut you down. If there’s any hope of continuing this mad mission, you need to take him out.

  When the next two zombies come shuffling around the side of the car, you shoot them point-blank with the sawed-off, splattering brain matter across the highway. You stack their bloody, lifeless bodies atop the car’s undercarriage.

  Iris, peering around the side, says, “Lot more coming. Whatever you’re doing, fuckin’ hurry.”

  The bodies function as a sort of makeshift sandbag wall, allowing you to grab a tire iron and begin removing the El Camino’s front right tire. The sniper gets a glimpse of your head and a shot rings out. The bullet punches the zombie sandbag, hitting it with a meaty THWACK.

  Moments later, you’ve removed the tire—then you’re removing your undershirt, jamming it into the tire, sparking your Zippo, and setting the whole thing ablaze. You kick it out so it rolls across the highway and bounces into the Mount Rushmore parking area.

  In moments, a torrent of black smoke fills the air, obscuring the sniper’s view.

  You grab Iris’s hand, pain shooting through your shoulder, and rush out from around the car, pushing through the mass of zombies crowding the highway. You hold your breath, charging into the smoke, past the flaming tire.

  A shot echoes as you come racing through the blackness and down into the sprawling parking lot. Behind you, a car window shatters. You duck behind a rusted van.