Surviving the Undead

The year is 2025 and the world is in chaos. Last year, what was thought to be a highly effective, low cost cure to cancer without side effects was released. After the first week the drug had cured 100 million people, but on the eighth day the unthinkable happened. A major side effect was discovered. We learned that what was thought to be a miracle drug was turning people into zombies, and worse yet, the zombies were contagious. If you got a zombie’s bodily fluid in your mouth or if he bit or scratched you anywhere and broke the skin, then the person bitten or scratched would become a zombie. After one month it became clear that there was no cure to the zombie epidemic, so a giant spacecraft was built to leave Earth and start a new world on Mars. There were 25,000 seats on the spacecraft, so only the rich and world leaders could afford to go. Less than two months into the apocalypse, with six billion dead, mankind had already given up hope of survival.

My family armed themselves for survival and prepared for war. My mom, dad, brother, and I were able to fortify our house and we stayed inside for eleven months picking off any zombie stupid enough to get within range. Sadly, one day thousands of them converged on our house and were able to make it in. My mom and dad told my brother and me that they loved us and that they would hold them off while we escaped. That was the last time I saw my parents. My brother Ben and I decided we needed a place to live, but it had to be mobile, so we decided to live in a car. We found a BMW M4 a mile from our house and stole it.

For the past year, my brother and I have been fortifying, upgrading, and sleeping in the car. The back seats have been removed for easy access to the trunk where we keep our weapons and, as an added bonus, it gives us more room for sleeping. The front seats can fold back to the reclining position in less than a second so that we can shoot at the zombies through the slits we made above the floor in the car. The body of the car, windshield, windows, sunroof, tires, wheels, and back window are all bulletproof. There are a total of five guns on the car. One in the middle of both the front bumper and back bumper and one on each side of the car beneath the door. The fifth is mounted on top of the car and I can shoot it from the back seat while my brother is driving. Unlike the other four machine guns that will shoot from side-to-side and can be turned on and off through the on board computer, the machine gun on top will turn 360 degrees and angle up and down. The reason that I can shoot this gun from inside the car is because Ben and I borrowed and innovation from submarines and I am able to aim the gun with a periscope! In the trunk, we have a collection of weapons including a rocket launcher, submachine guns, sniper rifles, grenades, pistols, a flamethrower, crossbows with explosive tipped arrows, slingshots for rocks, or better yet, a grenade, throwing knives, and swords.

Each day Ben and I spent an hour practicing with two different weapons and an extra thirty minutes improving our hand-to-hand combat. With the car fully upgraded and our bodies finely tuned killing machines, my brother and I decided that it was time to make a difference.
Before the apocalypse, we had both been competitive soccer players. However, we had a sibling rivalry. My favorite team was Barcelona and Ben’s favorite team was Real Madrid, the two of which are rivals, so needless to say we were constantly bickering. The only soccer related issue we had ever agreed on was that defense is boring. I brought this up one day and we had a long discussion after which we decided that our feelings on defense translated to the war on zombies. We decided that it was about time we took the offensive.

We made a route from the map on the on-board computer and went town-to-town slaying zombies. Killing five or ten zombies was easy. The challenge is when there are one hundred or even five hundred zombies. When they are alone or in small packs they a sort of groggy and slow. In fact, they walk a lot like zombies walked in movies. However, when they are in big packs they are no longer slow-moving creatures. In large packs they rial each other up and when they chase us the run about ten miles per hour. This is made worse because they never tire. When in small packs they cannot get through a chain-linked fence because they are not smart enough to climb it or find a door if there is one. It’s actually pretty funny to watch the struggle with a simple fence. However when they are in large packs, it is no laughing matter because they can just sprint at the fence and their momentum breaks it.

In the fifth town we went to, to eliminate zombies, we encountered a pack of two hundred zombies. This was the first pack we had faced since our parents’ deaths. We knew we could not take them all on at once so while we were scoping them out by the car trying to devise a plan, one saw us and screamed. It was not a normal scream. It sounded like a deranged monkey trying to inform us that it would tackle us and eat us alive. Unfortunately, the cry also alerted his two hundred zombie friends of our presence. I stood frozen for a second until I realized my brother was incessantly pulling on my arm and screaming, “Car! Now! Get in!” This took me out of my trance. My brother got in the driver’s seat and I threw myself into the back and got the machine gun ready. My brother put the car in gear and we were off.

We knew that if they caught us they could throw the car on its side, break through the bulletproof glass, and eat us for lunch. They were spread out and the road was rough so I was only able to kill thirty in the ten seconds we had been driving. We could have escaped easily, but we were on a mission to rid the world of zombies. I was wasting too much ammo by shooting at them on a poorly paved road. When I mentioned this to Ben he responded, “We are in no danger, so stop shooting and conserve the ammo, but we have to figure out a more efficient way to kill them.” Then, like a bullet, it hit me. There was a long alley, barely wider than our car, to the left. I yelled in my excitement, “Drive through the alley on our left. Stop at the end of the alley. Their group is so big and the alley so narrow that they will slow down and we can pick them off liked sitting ducks.” To sum it all up I explained, “We are essentially herding them like cattle.”


While complying with my instructions, my brother replied with a crafty smile, “I like that. From here on out large packs of zombies shall be known as herds.” When we reached the end of the alley, I handed my brother five grenades while keeping the other forty-five close at hand; then I aimed the machine gun at the far end of the alley, prepared to strike down the first zombie unlucky enough to turn the corner. First one, then two, then three, then ten had turned the corner and been shot down immediately. The noise from the gun had riled them up and they came storming around the corner like an angry mob. There were too many of them for me to handle alone so I kept shooting at the nearest zombies while my brother threw a grenade towards the back of the alley where the volume of zombies was the greatest. But that wasn’t enough. They had made it halfway through the alley so my brother activated the gun below the rear bumper. We finished off this group before they made it half way down the alley. My brother threw one last grenade at the final wave of zombies and switched off the rear bumper gun, while I picked off the remaining twenty zombies. The battle had lasted just under a minute. Ben put the car back in gear and we were on our way.

On our way out of the town we were discussing a cure or, at the very least, a more efficient method of extermination. When I brought up going to a research center or hospital and finding a cure, Ben explained, “It’s too risky. If we go to a hospital we could get trapped by zombies in the halls.” I replied, “Okay, so it’s back to extermination. If we are going to continue hunting zombies, why go town to town, when we could bring them to us? Let’s choose a place where we have a tactical advantage and where we know the area so we can calculate where they will come from and if worst comes to worst, how to escape.”

We decided to go back to our old town. After a long discussion we decided that the best place for the “extermination” was at Los Gatos High, our old high school. We stole a wireless stereo with a remote, hundreds of gallons of gasoline, grease, and hundreds of feet of rope. We found an abandoned eighteen wheeler truck in the middle of the rode with the keys still in the ignition so we took it. I drove behind Ben in the Beamer until we reached a forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We spent the rest of the day filling the truck with logs. We got up while it was still dark the next morning and drove the last thirty miles to the high school. When we got there I put the grease in my pocket while Ben tied five feet of the rope to the stereo. He handed me the rope connected to the stereo, and I put it on like a satchel, walked the fifty meters across the dead grass to the flag pole and started climbing. I reached the top easily. Then while holding on to the pole with my legs, I tied the rope to the top of the flag pole. Halfway down I started greasing the pole to prevent the zombies from climbing up. I reached the bottom and walked around the pole to make sure it had been well greased. I had done an exceptional job and the bottom half of the pole was shiny with the reflection of the sun.

We spent the next couple of hours unloading the dead wood and spreading it around the front of the school, but put and extra big pile around the flagpole. Then we soaked the lawn and logs in gasoline. After that, we made a thin line of the gas from the lawn to the base of a nearby building, the three story math and language wing. The gas line would be our fuse. We climbed up the building using a storm drain while carrying the 200 feet of rope. Ben dripped the gas down the front of the building to connect with the rest of the line below and then he got our weapons while I tied thirty feet of rope to six different spots on the roof and left it coiled on the roof. If we needed to escape, we could throw the rope to the ground and climb down the side of the building like a descending mountain climber. We met at the fuse on top of the building at four o’clock in the afternoon. Ben took the remote out of his pocket and started the music. We had put an AC/DC CD in the stereo when we took it from the store. “Back In Black” began playing and Ben turned the volume all the way up. I could barely hear myself think and was sure I was going to have permanent ear damage, it was so loud.

There were one hundred angry zombies clawing at the flagpole within ten minutes, so we waited another two hours, and by then, there must have been well over five thousand zombies climbing over each other trying to reach the stereo to no avail. Finally, Ben nodded and I got to do the honors. I lit a match, touched it to the fuse of gas, and it shot off sizzling towards the ground. Within one minute, over one thousand zombies had been turned to ashes.

Then, DISASTER! One of the burning zombies saw us! It stared at us and did the deranged monkey scream. It was so loud that it pierced our eardrums even over the blasting music. Apparently, some of his companions noticed so they started staring and screaming while walking towards us, but they were slowly picking up speed. Before long, half of the remaining, burning, zombies were making a beeline for us and the other half were still jumping at the stereo.
I panicked. I picked up the nearest machine gun and began shooting at them wildly. I managed to kill one hundred, but I had made them angry, and worse yet, another five hundred slowly burning zombies were alerted of our presence by the sound of the gun. I threw down the gun, grabbed the rocket launcher, loaded it, and fired. That time I was able to strike down three hundred burning zombies.

As I was reaching for another rocket, Ben grabbed my arm. I looked him in the eyes and, while I knew that my eyes were wide with terror, his were calm and calculating. I dropped the rocked, took a deep breath, and turned my attention back to him, wondering what his plan was. He took out the thirty grenades we had brought with us and handed two to me before grabbing two for himself. He pulled the pin and immediately threw one into the middle of the pack. I did the same. They hit the ground and three seconds later they exploded, taking out one hundred zombies each, but more importantly, turning their attention to the explosion rather than to us. We kept throwing the grenades further and further back towards the flagpole and away from us. We were not trying to kill them. Instead, we led them back into the bulk of the flames. We let the fire burn for another ten minutes, then Ben stopped the music and I could only hear my ears ringing, but I knew what to do. I picked up the same machine gun I had used minutes before and shot three three-round bursts spaced about five seconds apart to see if any zombies were left.

There was one.

He began running towards the sound of the shots. I put my eye up to the scope and’ “Bang!” I watched as his feet buckled under him and he fell to the ground with a light thud. It was over! At long last, we had won.

I turned to Ben smiling and saw him smiling back. Exhausted, we sat there silently, enjoying the moment. Then Ben started packing up the guns and I stood up and collected the rope. I was glad that it was not used. We took the same storm drain down and returned to the car. The grass area was surround by cement, so we just left the fire burning, figuring that it would not spread. We got in the car, loaded it up, and drove back to the high school. Ben stopped the car for half a second and pressed play on the remote. The music resumed and we drove off. We were hoping that more zombies would choose to join the others and cremate themselves. “What now?” Ben asked. I replied’ “Now, we drive east, stop every hundred or so miles and do this again. Try to find people or a community if we are lucky and spread the word. We have won one battle. We need allies if we are going to win the war!” “Then, let’s get started!” Ben growled as he revved the engine and we shot off toward our destiny.