by Max Brallier
You don’t pull the sawed-off. Beyond twenty feet, it’s near useless.
An old Winchester Model 100 is mounted above the fireplace. You pull it down. Check the magazine. Loaded. You yank open a window, set the stock down on the sill, and aim down the sight.
It’s worse than you imagined. Two hundred monsters. Some already past the El Camino now, nearing the fence.
You fire steadily. BLAM! One hooded face erupts in a shower of red fluid and gray matter. BLAM! A hooded child crumples. BLAM! A round spirals through two of the monsters, drilling through their skulls, killing them both.
You glance back, see that Walter has his fingers intertwined, helping Suzie-Jean up to the gun rack on the far wall. “What are you doing?” you shout.
“We can shoot!” Walter says.
And they can shoot. Their bigoted, survivalist family taught them well. They each grab a .38 and take up spots at windows on either side of you. They’re slow but accurate. Shoot. Reload. Breathe. Shoot. Reload. Breathe. Each shot takes about fifteen seconds. Two out of three shots hit a zombie in the head.
But the onslaught doesn’t slow, the monsters keep on coming, and there’s no rear exit, just swamp and gators behind you.
“Dewey,” you say as you reload, “you got traps out there, anything like that?”
“Course I do,” he says—and as he says it, there’s a deafening blast. An explosion in the woods. Four zombies, blown apart, clumps of meat raining down.
“Russian land mine!” Dewey calls out.
“Gonna need a lot of land mines,” you say, squeezing, killing one so it drapes over the fence and its hood falls off and its brain oozes down onto the lawn.
Dewey sets down his gun, quickly crosses to a large leather trunk. You follow. Inside: an old Al Capone–style tommy gun and a collapsible RPG.
Take the RPG? Click here.
Choose the old tommy gun instead? Click here.
THE DREAM IS DEAD
You pull the trigger, blowing Iris apart, ending her and, in this dreamscape, all hope for a future free of monsters. And as Iris’s face shatters and blood splatters your face, your eyes open.
You’re back in the tent. Smoke fills the air. The healer leans over you.
“You are cured,” the healer says.
You groan.
“Your blood,” the healer says. “It is better now.”
“Impossible . . . ,” you mutter.
You sit up. Then stand and take a few steps. There’s still pain in your side from the gun wound, but it’s true . . . you feel different. Alive.
And you realize then that you can abandon all this.
You killed Iris in the dream because you felt it was right—that a world of death and destruction was better than the one you’d been living in: a world of drones and attack helicopters and rat races.
And now you can live in that world. Permanently. You no longer need to finish your mission to stay alive. The poison is gone.
You smile. Fuck you, Eigle. I win.
You don’t say much to the healer. You simply walk back to the El Camino and climb inside. You’re groggy, slightly, but you feel good.
Turning the key, the leader appears at the car window. He hands you a bottle. “Mescal,” he says. “It’s very strong.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You drink. Some men change. Some don’t. You won’t. Accept that, and I bet you’ll be happier.”
You reach out and shake his hand. “I wouldn’t worry about those monsters out there,” you say. “I don’t think anyone’s going to stop this apocalypse. Not for a long time.”
He nods. He seems to be quite okay with that.
Click here.
COMING FOR THE KING
The Lincoln bursts through the vines and into the clearing.
You don’t run. You don’t hide. You simply raise the heavy Smith & Wesson, arm extended, and squeeze.
You put five bullets into the Lincoln’s reinforced glass. It spiderwebs and cracks.
One bullet left.
You aim for the splintered glass. Through the crack, you see Mr. King’s face.
And as you squeeze, a zombie seizes you from behind. The monster sinks its teeth into your shoulder. You howl, staggering forward, your hand contracting and the Smith & Wesson firing into the ground.
And then the Lincoln is upon you.
The three-ton vehicle hits you in the gut at 55 miles per hour, shattering your lower body, smashing both your legs, and yanking you underneath. The left tire rolls over your right arm, crushing it while the undercarriage catches your nose and tears it, ripping off your face.
Zombies shuffle toward you, smelling their next meal.
Your head rolls to the side. Through the trail of broken grapevines, you see Mr. King step out of the Lincoln. You expect him to come kill you. Instead, he disappears into the towering rows.
Zombies surround you. Hungry mouths descend upon your body. Flesh is sucked off the bone.
You feel your body turning. Your blood feels hot. What little skin that hasn’t been torn off is burning up.
You maintain consciousness just long enough to see Mr. King stomping back through the orchard. You swallow. Blood in your throat.
Mr. King is dragging Iris’s body.
You see him pull a machete from the Lincoln, stand over Iris, and begin hacking her to pieces, officially ending any hope of completing your mission. And then you don’t see anything at all, because your eyeballs are ripped from your skull . . .
AN END
REVERSING COURSE
Leave the El Camino?
You had to make your peace with abandoning the mission. With letting Iris go. But the El Camino? The thought of leaving it suddenly sparks something in you, a need to push forward and finish what you began.
“Can’t leave the car,” you say to the guard. “She’s my best friend.”
You walk back to the El Camino. Sliding inside, you say, “We’re not giving up yet, Iris. Not yet.”
Zoning out along Interstate 10, you slam into an undead body. It’s a big boy and the thresher doesn’t devour it completely. The wheels roll over it, shaking the car. Rattling your brain.
And suddenly, the pain is back. The poison has returned.
The Native American healer, whatever he did—his bargain with God-knows-what—it’s over and done with. You’re no longer free of Eigle’s death tonic. Once again, your life depends on getting to San Francisco.
“Hang on, Iris,” you say, stamping the accelerator. “We’ll be there soon enough.”
Click here.
SHE’S ALL YOURS
“Take the girl,” you say.
Ring’s lower lip juts out in surprise. “Well, all right, then. Guess chivalry really is dead, huh,” he says, laughing loudly.
“You mother—” Iris starts, leaping up, charging across the room, swinging at you.
“Sorry, hon, but I’m not dying for you.”
“You’re gonna die anyway!” she says.
You shrug. “I’ll figure something out.”
Iris cocks back her fist, but Ring bear-hugs her, pinning her arms to her sides. Iris barks at you—all the fun words you never hear at church. Finally, Ring shoves her across the room, toward one of his men.
“Take her to the train,” Ring says. “My car.”
Iris gives you one last look as she’s led from the room—one of not anger but fear. You don’t say it—you can’t—but you’ll get her back. Shortly, with any luck.
Ring turns to his remaining henchman. This man has a rectangular face and oily, slicked-back hair. He wears a shiny suit, but it’s covered in stains. Dry cleaner must be closed. You spot your gun, tucked into his waist. “Lead Mr. El Camino to his car, please,” Ring says.
Greasy gives you a shove, pushing you into the hall.
“Be seeing you,” you say to Ring.
“I doubt that,” Ring calls after you as you’re led down the steps and out into the street.
Greasy will make his move any moment now. You know that. There’s no way they’ll let you leave alive.
So you make your move first.
As he pushes you toward the El Camino, you spin, grabbing his wrist, wrenching it. You twist his wrist harder, dropping him to his knees, then go behind his back and pluck your sawed-off. “This is mine,” you say, “and you shouldn’t have taken it.”
Greasy opens his mouth to scream, but you throw a vicious cross, knocking out two teeth.
“I’ll show you what happens to people who take things that don’t belong to them.”
You pull a hacksaw from the workbench, then yank Greasy to his feet. You swipe the hacksaw low, across the back of his ankle, slashing open his Achilles tendon. His eyes go wide and tears rush out.
“You’ll never walk right again,” you say. “But you can still live, if you do like I say. Got it?”
He nods twice. Fast, almost spastic.
“Good.”
You let go of him, and he tumbles forward, throwing himself over the hood of the car, just above the thresher. He’s unable to hold his own weight.
From the wall, you grab bungee cords and duct tape. You wrap the duct tape around his mouth, then begin attaching Greasy to the car. Using the bungee cords, you get him draped over it, facing out—his wrists and ankles pulled taut, so he’s strapped to the front of the car like a big X. The thresher blades cut into him, drawing blood.
Inside the car, you flick the kill switch, shutting off the thresher so it won’t grind him up as you drive.
You drive slowly toward the town gate.
People gawk and stare. Some gasp. Someone shouts for Ring. But most just get out of the way and watch.
You go over a bump, and Greasy’s body jostles. His head thrashes in pain.
“Hold it!” the armed guard at the gate shouts.
“Open it,” you shout, “or the man dies.”
The guard is unsure.
You shift into neutral and rev the engine. Greasy jerks, terrified, and his head raises. He nods at the guard, fast and hard. He’s trying to shout through the duct tape.
The gate is opened.
You light a cigarette and drive out into the zombie wasteland—now minus one girl, but with one hell of a hood ornament.
Click here.
HOOFING IT
You raise the sawed-off and fire, blowing back a horde of the monsters, then you’re kicking open the door, darting out. You run back, past the El Camino, grabbing the ax from the truck bed and swinging, cutting a swath, giving yourself some room.
You can free the El Camino later. Need to survive this first.
“He’s running!” a voice hollers. The men standing by the howitzer cannons, in front of the gift shop, watch you.
You duck behind the base of a towering statue of a man on a horse. Peeking around, you see your predicament. If you run right at the men, they’ll blow you to hell.
They fire again, and a dozen undead soldiers explode in a fiery blast—a mess of bloody limbs and splattered insides.
You need to flank the men. Come around the side of the gift shop, kill them, and then retrieve Iris.
Not far from your current spot is a small hill. Little Round Top, if you know your Civil War history. You can lose the men there, in the trees, then loop down behind them.
You holster the sawed-off, grip the ax, and move from headstone to headstone, ducked down, avoiding the gaze of the Confederate soldiers, one hundred yards away.
Twenty minutes later, you’re scrambling into the trees at the bottom of Little Round Top. You start up the hill—after that, you only need to come down the other side—then you’ll be on top of your enemy.
Creeping past a tall oak tree, an undead soldier lunges out. It had a beard, but its face is now rotted away and the flesh is singed and hair is gone. You decapitate it.
Five more stagger through the trees. You could pull the sawed-off, but the noise would alert the men working the howitzers.
So you swing the ax like fucking Conan the Barbarian.
Into the face of one rebel, splitting it open, then turning, bringing the hilt of the ax up into the next, driving its nose bone into its skull, stepping out of the turn, spinning the ax, slamming it down onto the third rebel’s head. You kick the next one square in the chest, your boot caving in its chest cavity and sending it tumbling, end over end, down Little Round Top. The final one swipes at you, and you meet it with the ax, taking the top of its head off with one red swipe, just above the nose. You move swiftly to the base of the hill, burying the ax in the one with the caved-in chest cavity before it can rise.
You’re close to the rear line now. You can see the four men working the two howitzers. You move forward, eager to make them bleed.
Click here.
IRIS AT THE WHEEL
You toss her the keys and bark, “Just get us out of here!”
You climb into the bed of the El Camino, reaching through the opening, grabbing both the sawed-off and the ax.
Iris floors it, too much gas, sliding over the dense field like the ground is made of ice. Wild blades of grass whip your arms as you hold the shotgun out the rear of the El Camino, firing to keep the monsters away.
Four zombies stumble in front of the car. Iris cuts the wheel and the car spins out, dirt kicking, rotating 180 degrees, now opposite the Lincoln.
You throw yourself to the floor of the truck bed as the Lincoln unloads with the machine gun. A long-haired zombie alongside the car is hit in the head, its face exploding, splattering you with skin and brain.
“Drive!” you shout, pounding the glass. The engine roars. You’re knocked back onto your ass as the El Camino charges forward, toward the Lincoln, and then screams past it toward the still-crumbling stables.
Splicer’s demented monstrosities are on the loose now—driven to the point of ferocious, flesh-hungry insanity. A zombified cow with a poorly stitched-on horse head lumbers in front of the car, jaw snapping. You square the sawed-off and fire, exploding its moaning, neighing head.
A lumbering zombie man with the head of a mountain lion dives up over the thresher. The monster rolls over the top of the El Camino, landing in the truck bed, hands instantly reaching, pawing, grabbing, then pinning you. The mountain lion’s blood-matted mane shimmers in the moonlight. It opens its mouth, about to sink its long teeth into you. You squeeze the trigger, blasting the monster in its human gut and blowing it back—hurt but not defeated.
It claws forward, blindly searching the truck bed for you.
You grab the ax and as the car turns, you swing—turning your wrist and feeling the almost limitless power in the ax’s wooden handle and seeing the flash of sharp steel—and then the mountain lion man’s head is split in half and gore hangs in the air.
The El Camino rips around the barn, Mr. King still trailing, guns blazing. A bullet snaps past your ear, cracking like a whip. If you don’t make a move, quickly, now, you’re a corpse.
Coming toward the house, you spot a large propane tank, red and rusted. “Iris, the house!”
Bullets fly. Flat on your back, you drop two more shells into the sawed-off while the El Camino’s reinforced tailgate absorbs the Lincoln’s slugs.
The car shakes as Iris mows through creatures. Chunks of strange flesh—pig parts combined with human, a small child covered in horsehair—whoosh past as the thresher grinds them to bits.
Iris wrenches the wheel, slicing around the house, putting you next to the large propane tank, and then you’re charging past it. You wait until Mr. King’s Lincoln is directly alongside the tank, and then you spring up, triggering both barrels, and—
KRAKA—BLAM!
A sonic boom. The propane tank explodes with deafening force, rolling the Lincoln. It flips twice, then stops, upside down, wheels still spinning.
Mr. King is out of commission, for now.
You catch your breath. Lean through the window, give Iris a squeeze on the shoulder. Nice driving.
“Look,” she says, pointing.
Dr. Splicer is in the middle of the street, being chased by one of his creatures: a goat with the head of a man. Splicer limps around, trying to avoid the thing, grasping his lacerated abdomen.
“Stop the car.”
Tires screech, and you’re thrown into the partition.
“Hand me my flask.”
Iris does. And together, you sit and watch. You watch the goat man chase down Dr. Splicer. You watch this strange, ungodly, nonanimal thing tear Dr. Splicer apart. Rip flesh from his face. Pull his ears off. Devour his bleeding stomach and leave his entrails strewn across the road. You listen to Splicer scream and cry and moan like a woman in labor. An appropriate sound, maybe, since he gave birth to this beast.
Once Dr. Splicer is good and dead, you climb out of the truck bed, Iris slides over, you get behind the wheel, and you drive as fast as the dark, narrow roads will allow.
Click here.
ANYONE HOME?
You call out, “Dewey! Anyone in there?”
You hold the sawed-off down by your side—not hiding it, but not showing it off, either.
A speakeasy grille on the front door swings up and a rifle barrel pokes out.
“State your business,” a voice calls out.
“You Dewey?”
“I said state your business.”
“Need help.”
“None here,” the voice says.
“I need a taxidermist who can freeze-dry and preserve a body.”
“Whatcha goin’ need is a doctor if you don’t remove yourself from my property. Three seconds ’fore I shoot. I don’t wanna—it’ll draw those stumblers in—but I will. I will protect my land.”
You scan the front porch: three stuffed and posed zombies—all of them bearded men—a tin coffee mug, two ashtrays. Stacks and stacks of skin magazines. Guess when there’s nearly no one left on Earth, you can just jerk off on your front porch. Silver linings.