The Zombie Chasers Read online

  “You are,” Zack said, sliding open the little window between Madison and Rice.

  “You’re Greg…” Greg said.

  “Uhhh, guys? Greg’s, like, human again, but I don’t think he knows who he is. Can we stop, please?”

  “What do you mean Greg’s human again?” Rice asked, peering into the back of the pickup.

  “Stop calling me Greg!” Greg insisted.

  “Okay, then what do you want to be called?”

  “Not Greg,” Greg replied.

  “Fine,” Rice said.

  “NotGreg it is.”

  “Are you going to untie me?” NotGreg asked.

  “Not a chance,” Zack said.

  They were driving straight into a zombie free-for-all. The undead poured out of the forest on both sides of the track. They stumbled toward the truck, tripping forward on twisted ankles. Madison accelerated, but the zombies were close enough to grab the sides of the car. Zack stood up, armed with the baseball bat.

  “Don’t let them on, buddy!” Rice shouted through the sliding window.

  A pair of bloated, doughy zombie paws grappled at the passing vehicle. NotGreg was crying hysterically. The zombie latched onto the truck and pulled itself up, roaring psychotically and dripping pus all over NotGreg’s face. Zack swung hard and felt a clunk as the bat caved in the zombie’s skull like a rotten cantaloupe.

  “Speed up!” Zack could see the radar towers just past the rocky foothills, where the pine forest ended but the dirt road continued. “We’re almost there!”

  The road tapered, narrowing at a downward slant, and they seemed to be descending underground. The truck drove under a steel entryway and rumbled into the access tunnel. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered and buzzed. All of a sudden, Madison slammed on the brakes, and the truck screeched to a halt. The headlights beamed on a tangled knot of zombies ahead of them, blocking their path.

  Madison and Rice froze with unexpected dread. Twinkles wriggled around in Madison’s handbag. Zack tried to remain calm. “Madison,” he said, “honk the horn.” She honked twice. The zombies staggered toward them. “Now, turn on the flashers and put this bad boy in reverse.”

  Madison hit the switch and backed up slowly. The passageway flared and dimmed. The hideous horde of diseased fiends followed the pickup in the blinking light.

  “Madison,” Zack continued to direct, “keep it slow and steady. We have to lure them outside. Rice, man, you keep a head count and make sure we get all of them. Set the alarm on your phone for one minute from right now, too,” Zack ordered.

  “Okay…” Rice agreed hesitantly, and pulled out his phone.

  “Set it as loud as it’ll go,” Zack instructed, then reached for the phone.

  “Zack, what should I do?” Madison shrieked. “We’re almost out of the tunnel.”

  “Okay, Madison, this is important,” Zack said. “You need to speed up and park out of sight. Then turn off the lights and the engine.”

  Madison sped up the incline in reverse and cornered around the entrance of the tunnel. The phone alarm blared in Zack’s hand, and he threw it as far away from the tunnel as he could. It landed in a puff of dirt, beeping at full volume.

  “Dude!” Rice whispered angrily. “That’s the worst plan of all time!”

  “Sshhhhhhh…” Zack pressed his finger to his lips.

  The zombies staggered out of the tunnel, past the truck, and followed the beeping alarm in the middle of the road. As the zombies gathered around the cell phone, Madison’s purse stopped growling and began to whimper instead. Rice carefully unzipped the bag, and a very confused looking, but also very puppy-looking puppy poked out his head.

  “Um, guys?” Rice’s eyes darted from Zack to Madison to Twinkles to NotGreg. “If this mutt’s okay…and Bansal-Jones is okay…and they both bit Madison, that can only mean one thing.”

  “That I’m extremely lucky?” Madison asked, scooping up Twinkles.

  “That you’re the zombie antidote!” Rice exclaimed, a look of wonder on his face.

  “Awesome! Wait. What does that mean exactly?” she asked, her brow furrowing.

  “It means that if we feed you to enough zombies—”

  “Not a chance, nerdbrain!” Madison sneered. “Get your own antidote.”

  “Okay then we’ll have to clone you and let the zombies eat your clones.”

  Twinkles barked happily. “See, even Twinkles thinks it’s a good plan.”

  Ruff! Ruff!

  The zombies whipped their heads back around toward the truck.

  “We’ll figure out what that means later, but right now we gotta move!” Zack said, pointing to the zombies.

  Madison flicked the headlights and started the truck. The engine sputtered and coughed. “It’s not going!” Madison cried, twisting the key in the ignition over and over.

  The ragged mob of zombies lumbered back toward the truck.

  “Mommy, no!” NotGreg whined, and curled into a ball, clutching his knees into his chest.

  “C’mon, Madison!” Zack and Rice shouted.

  “Don’t die on us now!” Madison pleaded, turning the key again.

  At the head of the undead pack, the zombie nearest the pickup stumbled and lunged, latching onto the tailgate. The truck grumbled to life. The engine purred, and Madison yelped excitedly, shifting into gear. “Go!” Zack shouted. “Hurry!”

  Madison hit the accelerator, and the zombie flew off the back of the pickup as they swerved into the tunnel.

  “That was a close one, huh?” Zack said to no one in particular.

  “I just want my mom….” NotGreg sobbed.

  “Hate to break it to you, N.G.” Rice yelled from up front. “But your mommy’s a zombie.” Greg frowned and burst into tears. “Hey, that rhymes.”

  “Shut up, Rice.” Zack wobbled, balancing himself on the cargo bed with the truck’s rough bounce.

  The zombie moan disappeared as they reached a silver metal gate, which looked like the door of a spaceship.

  “Great,” Madison said. “All that for a dead end.”

  But she was wrong.

  Behind the rearview mirror, a light ticked green. The tunnel vibrated and hummed. The metal gate lifted.

  “E-Z Pass,” Rice said. “Sweet.”

  Madison guided the pickup into the subterranean bunker as the gate lowered slowly behind them. Zack crouched down for balance and peered through the back window of the cabin. Inside the darkening tunnel, rapid spurts of gunfire crackled through the bunkered ceiling, like distant fireworks.

  Just then, Twinkles licked Zack’s face. “Thank you for saving me, Zachary!” Rice was doing the Twinkles voice again. “You’re my all-time hero.”

  “Quit playing around, Rice,” Zack said. “Do you hear those gunshots? It doesn’t sound like they’re messing around up there.” Twinkles wriggled out of Rice’s hands.

  “Relax, dude. We made it. We got our secret formula. It’s all good.”

  Zack glanced at Madison’s leg. A splotch of red had soaked through the bandage. The antidote, Zack thought, Madison’s the medicine.

  The tires slowly rumbled on the grooved pavement, pushing the headlights’ bright beam forward into the blackness.

  Zack watched Madison as she primped herself in the rearview. She caught him staring in the mirror and stuck out her tongue, then twisted her face into a goofy sneer. She smiled.

  Zack chuckled to himself and smiled back. But despite their discovery, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was not the end.

  What brain-munching fiends will

  the Zombie Chasers meet next?

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at

  the next ZOMBIE CHASERS novel, UNDEAD AHEAD

  CHAPTER 1

  Zack Clarke stood up in the back of the pickup truck, his pulse still beating fast from the getaway. The halogen lights buzzed overhead as the truck drove into the flickering blackness of the subterranean bunker.

  The zombie outbreak had erupted yes
terday around suppertime, sweeping across the country in a matter of hours.

  Now, cruising beneath the Tucson Air Force Base, Zack’s sister, Zoe, was a zombie; his best friend and self-proclaimed zombie expert, Johnston Rice, had figured out the zombie antidote; Madison Miller, the most popular girl at Romero Middle School, was their only hope for survival; and Greg Bansal-Jones, their school’s most feared bully, had turned into a whiny sissy after his own brief zombification, now insisting that he was not Greg.

  NotGreg squirmed away from zombie Zoe, conked out in the cargo bed from the ginkgo biloba tranquilizer Rice had fed her a little less than an hour ago.

  “Hey, man,” NotGreg whimpered. “Will you untape me now?”

  “Only if you keep quiet.” Zack extracted the Swiss Army knife from his back pocket and clipped the duct tape from NotGreg’s wrists. The un-bully closed an imaginary zipper over his mouth, then threw away a make-believe key.

  I can’t believe I used to be scared of this dude, Zack thought, and peered inside the truck’s cabin. Fresh blood soaked through the gauze stretched around the bite-wound on Madison’s leg, a present from zombie Greg. Rice was riding shotgun with Madison’s Boggle puppy on his lap. Twinkles balanced his front paws on the dashboard, seeming happy to be alive again after a stint as a zombie mutt.

  “How’s the leg?” Zack asked Madison.

  “Okay, I guess,” she said. “I’m gonna kill Greg, though.”

  “You mean NotGreg.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Ah,” said Rice. “To Greg or not to Greg? That is the question.”

  “Shut up, nerd burger,” Madison said wearily. “Nobody’s talking to you.”

  Just then, Twinkles nudged Rice’s backpack with his snout, sniffing at the rank specimen within the bag. Zack’s stomach churned as he thought of the virus-carrying BurgerDog meat patty pulsating inside.

  “Bow-wow,” the puppy howled hungrily.

  “Hey, slow down, Madison,” Zack said through the slider window, and the truck rolled to a stop.

  On their right, the tunnel opened up into a large room, split into two levels by a loading dock. Yellow biohazard barrels lined the base of the high cement walls. A thick red splotch of zombie muck stained the square metal drain-grate in the center of the floor. The gory blotch extended into a curved smear that resembled a lowercase j. Uneven footprints were tracked around the ruddy trail of slime, as if the zombies had risen from a crawl.

  The whole place reeked with the thick musk of disease, and Zack plugged his nose. Something was definitely rotten in Tucson.

  “Eeeeee!” All of a sudden NotGreg let out a high-pitched squeal, grasping Zack’s lower calf.

  Zack whipped his head around.

  A zombified soldier hung off the back of the truck, climbing up the tailgate. The undead commando stretched its zombie yap, cobwebbed with spittle, wide open. It growled and gargled, wriggling its rabid tongue.

  “Step on it, Madison!” Zack ordered.

  Just then, two more zombie soldiers scaled the sides of the truck, tumbling into the cargo bed with Zack and NotGreg. Their crooked limbs were set at impossible angles, as if they were half-squashed daddy longlegs.

  The pickup shot forward, full-throttle.

  “Zack!” Rice called from inside the cab, and handed off a metal crowbar. “Use this!”

  Zack flung the piece of iron at the zombie soldier, striking him between the empty sockets of his eyes. The tailgate fell open, and the eyeball-less madman dropped with a splat into the receding tunnel.

  “Blaahrrgh!” the other two zombies bellowed.

  Zack felt around frantically on the rumbling cargo bed for another weapon and found the wooden base of his Louisville Slugger.

  Across the flatbed, one of the zombies crawled on dislocated kneecaps toward NotGreg. The terrified un-bully cowered in the corner by the open tailgate, his arms curled up like a Tyrannosaurus rex’s.

  But Zack had his own problems.

  The other zombie wheezed and tripped forward, falling full-force on top of him. In a flash, Zack flipped the bat horizontal, his ears pulsing hotly, as he strained to bench-press the zombie upward. Bulbous viral clusters curdled and bulged off the chin of the diseased sicko, and tusks of yellow-green phlegm hung from the corners of its raw swollen lips. The undead maniac grunted, and Zack felt his shoulder about to give. A ruptured infection dribbled off the zombie’s cheek and onto the corner of Zack’s mouth.

  Puhtooey!

  Zack heaved with every ounce of strength he had, and the slobbering beast was flung back, staggering to regain its balance. Zack stood, holding the Slugger tight, ready to strike.

  Suddenly, Madison shrieked at the top of her lungs, and the pickup lurched to a vicious halt.

  Zack flew backward and bashed his head on the truck bed with a hard thunk.

  “Dang, Madison!” Rice said inside the cab. “What’d you stop for?”

  “Didn’t you see?” she asked. “That person just jumped right out in front of us!”

  “Zombies aren’t people, Madison.”

  “It wasn’t a zombie, dork brain…it was some little soldier-dude!”

  Zack slumped down to a seated position, his ears ringing from the impact. His vision blurred and his head flopped sideways. He was looking directly at his zombified sister, Zoe. Her rolled-back, pupil-less eyes stared at him from behind the black metal cage of her face mask.

  And just like that, as if fingers had snapped, Zack’s mind went blank.

  Want to read the rest of

  UNDEAD AHEAD?

  Find out more at thezombiechasers.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people: Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, Katie Schwartz, and the creative and editorial staff of Alloy Entertainment and Elise Howard and Rachel Abrams of HarperCollins Publishers.

  I would also like to thank my mother and father as well as the rest of my family and friends, in particular the Hahn family for their love and support throughout this project.

  —J. K.

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  JOHN KLOEPFER began his writing career at five years old with a one-sentence short story: “And then one day the monsters came.” THE ZOMBIE CHASERS is his first novel. He lives in New York City, where he is hard at work on the next adventure of Zack, Rice, and Madison.

  STEVE WOLFHARD was born in Ontario, Canada, and has been drawing comics since he graduated from animation college. Steve has a fat barn cat named Haircut, whom he loves but does not like. The first zombie movie Steve ever saw was Return of the Living Dead, and it still scares the crud out of him.

  Visit John and Steve online at www.thezombiechasers.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Jacket art © 2010 by Steve Wolfhard

  Jacket design by Andrea C. Uva

  Copyright

  THE ZOMBIE CHASERS. Copyright © 2010 by Alloy Entertainment. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kloepfer, John.

  The zombie chasers/John Kloepfer; illustrations by Steve Wolfhard.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When zombies take over Phoenix, Arizona, Zack Clarke, his best friend, Rice, and his older sister’s mean friend Madison Miller team up to try to defeat the undead, or at least survive one another.

  ISBN 978-
0-06-185304-3

  [1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Phoenix (Ariz.)—Fiction. 4. Horror stories.] I. Wolfhard, Steve, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.K8646Zom 2010 2010004602

  [Fic]—dc22 CIP

  AC

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201113-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

  Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com