INFECTED (Click Your Poison) Read online

  INFECTED

  A Click Your Poison book

  by

  James Schannep

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  Copyright © 2012 by James Schannep

  All rights reserved.

  Second Kindle Edition

  www.jamesschannep.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schannep, James, 1984—

  INFECTED: a Click Your Poison book / James Schannep

  COVER ART BY NIKKI JANSEN

  For Michaela, who makes the Zombie Apocalypse worth surviving.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  How It Works

  Start

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to my crack team of zombie survivalists: Chris Boyes, Damon Bosetti, Mike Beeson, Kelli Mears, Jon & Tara Black, Kevin Hullihan, Brian Yoakam, Justin Jones, Lanette Hastings, Nathan St. Pierre, Colin Merrin, Ross Wichard, Richard Young, and Matt Sarda—thank you for your notes, expertise, encouragement, friendship, and ability to endure my inability to talk about anything other than this book.

  To my copyeditor: Linda Jay Geldens, cover artist: Nikki Jansen, and to Paul Salvette and the team at BB eBooks. Thank you all for your generosity and professionalism.

  And to my family, for your unyielding enthusiasm and support.

  Here’s how it works: You, Dear Reader, are the main character of this story. Live, die, and rise again—based solely on the merit of your own choices. The rules are a little different than the print gamebooks of the 1980s and 1990s; as an ebook, you simply click the links to progress through the story. Each link represents a choice, and there’s no going back, so choose wisely. Will YOU survive the zombie apocalypse?

  CLICK HERE to begin. Good luck.

  You’re not very good with directions, are you? You’re not supposed to go through the pages in this book. Stop when you see the links and click your choice. So, go back and begin the proper way. Don’t ruin it by progressing page-by-page; you’ll just turn something potentially fun into something certainly stupid.

  Congratulations on finding this book’s only Easter egg. Go ahead onto www.jamesschannep.com to brag about how outside-the-box you think. Seriously though, there’s nothing else in here, so don’t bother looking for it. Scout’s honor.

  INFECTED

  Immortality can be yours.

  That’s right. After successful testing on lab rats, Gilgazyme ® is now ready for public consumption. It’s a revolutionary new gene therapy, invented by Dr. Richard Phoenix and Dr. Lewis Deleon, which promises to end aging after only one dose. Simply use the patented inhaler, and let science take care of the rest. Your flawed genetic code will be removed, and replaced by a new and improved stream in which you’ll never age another day (this statement has not been evaluated by the FDA).

  Stay young and beautiful forever with Gilgazyme ®.

  • “Stay this age forever? I’ll sell my house, my kids, whatever—Sign me up!”

  • “Does anyone else think this is a bad idea? No freaking way I’m going anywhere near that poison.”

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Airing the Dirty Pawndry

  Death hangs in the air like a bad pun. Despite the clumsiness of the individual zombie, the swarm has proven to be adroit murderers. The proof is in the pudding-like substance that coats the walls and streets.

  You immediately notice a flaw in your plan: several undead wander the street around the pawnshop. None has seen you yet, but with this many out in the open, it wouldn’t take much to call in the horde. Then you’d become fresh pudding.

  Guns are priority one, and you’re sticking to that plan. You hide behind a nearby bus stop. It doesn’t provide much protection, but it’s better than standing in the middle of the street. You remove your binoculars, and reconnoiter the storefront.

  A sign, prominently placed, reads, “CHEAP GUNS—NO BACKGROUND CHECK!!!!!!!” Beyond this is the brick-and-mortar building. Odds are the door is locked, but as Jack Nicholson proved in The Shining, it only takes one maniac with an axe to make short work of a locked door.

  Behind you, a husky voice mutters something akin to, “Hey.” You turn around to see some punk skater kid, with dried blood on his broken teeth and your mortality locked in his eyes. He masticates, his jaw chomping his own tongue, like some kind of craven cow chewing its cud, then lets out a moan.Oh goddammit. The other undead snap their heads over to you like feral hounds that’ve just caught the scent of mutton. From as far as three blocks away they are coming for you, each adding its own moan to expand the radius of the call exponentially.

  Time to run.

  • Screw it, go back to that corner market. It should be far enough in the other direction.

  • Time to go underground. Literally. Into the sewers and out of the open!

  • Right to the pawn shop! You’ve got a good head start—my kingdom for a firearm!

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Alarming

  “Fine,” you say, hands raised in the air. You jog toward the back of the warehouse, the twenty or so hungry ghouls watching your movement like cats seeing a mouse come out of its hole. They moan in chorus and come toward you with outstretched arms.

  You pull the alarm on the far wall, which was intended to be used in case of an industrial accident. The machinery shuts down and in its place, a flashing light and wailing alarm shine and sound above you. The commotion brings other zombies out of the woodwork, as well as those who were congregating by the entrance.

  The cop hides near the hall that you walked through to come in, waiting as the undead march in a steady stream toward you. You’ve got no way out; you’re trapped. What did you think would happen?

  His plan works perfectly, and you see him slip out of the warehouse, just before the crowd tears you limb from limb.

  THE END

  Another Way

  As you run around the side of the building, you find yourself facing an HVAC system—the building’s air conditioning unit. On the other side of this wall, guns wait like ripe crops ready to be harvested. Fortunately for you, this pawnshop’s owner was too cheap to install professional central air and instead purchased a shoddy knockoff. You slap your axe against the unit only once before the plastic cover breaks free.

  The blade waiting within is a different story. The large metal fan swings quickly in a deadly arc. The undead amble toward you. This may be your best shot, so you shove your axe into the air duct like a knight spearing a dragon—the fan roars appropriately for the metaphor—metal screeching painfully upon metal. Your axe is destroyed, but so is the fan.

  Just as the punk zombie arrives, you’re ready to enter the vent. In a near-comedic twist of luck, the zombie’s baggy pants slide to his ankles and trip him. This gives you just enough time to pull yourself into the vent before he arrives. But you must move quickly, for the whole neighborhood will surely follow your trail.

  You tumble into the pawn shop, clattering into heirloom jewelry and ornamental faux samurai swords alike. There’s just so much junk in here. But there are also guns. The sound of a shotgun pumping, the shell sliding into the breach, greets you.

  You stand up with hands raised and see the greaseball proprietor pointing the business end of a weapon at your face. His hair is slicked back, face pockmarked and angry, and he wears enough gold rings to look like brass knuckles.
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br />   Then the first zombie falls out of the air duct behind you. You move away, and the shop owner turns away from you to blast the zombie. “Goddammit!” he says. “Go grab a gun and make yourself useful, fucktard.”

  He tosses his head back toward the counter, where several firearms are locked and loaded. Grabbing an AK-47, you turn back to kick some ass. The air vent grumbles and rattles with the oncoming flesheaters. Their moans echo throughout the aluminum system, giving the impression that the building itself is calling for your blood and brains.

  The cheap, particle-foam ceiling tiles lurch and give way. A dozen undead fall into the pawnshop at once, and for the moment that they’re lying prone on the floor, it’s literally like shooting fish in a barrel. The deafening roar of the shotgun erupts once more.

  You crack off shots from the AK, surprised at how little recoil there is, and blast chunks off zombie faces. It’s harder than the movies would have you believe to get a direct headshot, but the holes you leave show you how to adjust so that your next round scores a cranial explosion.

  In a moment of stillness, the pawnshop owner reloads his shotgun and you take the cue to inspect your rifle. But more zombies drop in—a lot more. You pop off round after round, and your killing rate goes from one in five shots to one in four, after only a few minutes’ experience.

  The flow of undead is unending, but your ammo supply is not. The AK clicks empty and you rush back to the counter for more. There’s a few more banana clips at the ready, but the influx of hellspawn is such that you’re better off just grabbing another firearm. The wall where the vent was collapses under the weight of twenty-five zombies. How the hell did that many fit in at once?

  The closest weapon is an old WWII surplus Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle. That’ll do. You crack off a shot at the nearest zombie’s head; the caliber is such that a headshot allows you to see clean through the ghoul. With a satisfactory slide of the bolt, you chamber another round.

  The pawnshop owner tosses down his shotgun and removes dual nickel-plated pistols from the case. Desert Eagles. What. An. Asshole. He lets loose his hand cannons and tears apart everything except brains. One shot hits the ceiling and the next the floor. Looks like the onus is on you to defend this pawnshop.

  You’re able to kill a zombie about every three or four seconds. That’s pretty good, and you’re getting better. They say bad news comes in threes, and this situation is no different: 1) the pawnshop owner isn’t doing shit; 2) the zombies are arriving at an average rate of one per second; and 3) available ammo is finite.

  It’s time to grab the next weapon. Black and deadly, a Vietnam era M-16. Your first shot pumps out three rounds in short succession. That more than takes care of the fiend in front of you, but you’ve got the wherewithal to switch the firing mode from “burst” to “semi” and make each round really count.

  Unfortunately, the rifle clicks with a jam on your next shot. You toss it and grab a hunting rifle. The pawnshop owner runs behind the counter and removes an UZI 9mm. Letting out an impressive spray, he downs half a dozen zombies in three seconds. Then his ammo is gone.

  The supply of firearms is starting to run out! The situation is desperate. There are now fifty healthy zombies coming at you. Your lever-action cowboy rifle cannot possibly take out that many. The pawnshop owner knows it too. He comes around from behind the counter and hands you something small and round: a grenade. In his other hand; one of his own.

  “Thanks for letting them in, asshole,” he says as he pulls the pin of his grenade.

  It was a valiant effort. The pair of you, after the resultant explosion, will have taken out in excess of 200 zombies. The world needs more people like you if humanity is to have a fighting chance to survive. You pull your own grenade pin and in a few seconds, you’re blown to smithereens in stereo.

  THE END

  “Anybody at Home?”

  The doors on this house aren’t just wide open; they’ve been ripped off their hinges. Still, it couldn’t be less inviting. You don’t need to be a Sioux tracker to piece together what happened here: the zombie horde was intent on making it inside, excited more than usual(probably by the hysterical screaming coming from within), and they converged en masse.

  Just as a school of fish is more than the sum of its parts, so is a throng of undead humanity. 10,000 pounds of motivated flesh, unrestrained by the pain of organic tensile limitations, can accomplish a lot. The evidence is all over the foyer of the home. Smeared blood and gore coat the entryway, caught on the splintered doorframe.

  Inside, it’s not much better. Violence and viscera, that’s the new fall fashion in the undead apocalypse. There are the remains of furniture, probably an antique sofa table, now ground into dust underfoot from the multitudinous undead.

  Finger-grooves are almost worn into that fireman’s axe, so often do you strangle its handle. As you move into the house, you get the feeling you’re entering some sort of cavern. All the accoutrements have been pushed to one side and are coated with a fine patina of innards. Well, odds are the zombies skipped the cupboard, so that’s good news for you.

  Heading toward the kitchen, you hear a faint rummaging. Do you go in?

  • Nope! Curiosity ate the survivor.

  • Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What could a peek hurt?

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Area One

  The hallway lights buzz and flicker like a fluorescent nightmare. Evidently, Sims’ power re-route was only partially successful. The entry is completely dark; there’re no lights whatsoever around the barricade. Tyberius shines his flashlight over the rubble pile; no sign of tampering or entry by the undead.

  “Area One, clear,” Tyberius reports in.

  “Copy that, come on back. Hefty, are you in position?”

  “Area Two, clear,” Hefty calls.

  “All right, Hefty. Bring it home.”

  “Sims, what’ve you got?”

  “Area Three, clear.”

  “Copy area three clear, hurry back.”

  • Head to the cafeteria.

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Area Two

  The hallway lights buzz and flicker like a fluorescent nightmare. Evidently, Sims’ power re-route was only partially successful. The entry is completely dark; there’re no lights whatsoever around the barricade. Hefty shines his flashlight over the rubble pile; no sign of tampering or entry by the undead. “Area One, clear,” Tyberius reports in over the radio.

  “Copy that, come on back,” Deleon’s voice chirps in. “Hefty, are you in position?”

  “Area Two, clear.”

  “All right, Hefty. Bring it home.”

  “Sims, what’ve you got?”

  “Area Three, clear.”

  “Copy area three clear, hurry back.”

  • Head to the cafeteria.

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Area Three

  The hallway lights buzz and flicker like a fluorescent nightmare. Evidently, Sims’ power re-route was only partially successful. The entry is completely dark; there’re no lights whatsoever around the barricade. You shine the flashlight over the rubble pile; no sign of tampering or entry by the undead.

  “Area Three, clear,” you report over the radio. As you turn to leave, the crunch of broken glass underfoot gives you pause.

  You turn the flashlight to the floor. Where did that broken glass come from? Something moves quickly in the shadows. You react by turning your flashlight at it, but it’s on top of you before you can do anything else.

  You press the large flashlight up against the fiend’s neck, keeping him just far enough away to evade his bite. “Copy Area Three clear, hurry back,” Deleon says over the radio. A second zombie—a crawler—paws and bites at the radio.

  Mustering all your strength, in one burst you roll the ghoul away and sprint off. After a few steps you turn back, your hatchet-axe raised. The flashlight beam is perpendicular to the school entrance and a pair of legs walks through. Then another, and another. They�
��ve broken through, and they’re filing in at regular intervals.

  • Run back to the cafeteria.

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Armed and Dangerous

  Before leaving, you stop by the armory. Though there’s an actual armory within the prison, this secure room has been gutted and transformed for a different use. Instead, the armory of Salvation is an Army trailer that may not be much to look at, but is filled to the brim with firepower.

  There’s a US Army soldier ready to greet you; he’s slim, his hair is short-cropped in the Army’s high-and-tight fashion, and he has a thick, ruddy handlebar mustache. “Well, looky here,” he says. “The Three Musketeers, ready for their first mission. Well… you came to the right place to get outfitted. I see you got the sword already, how ‘bout the muskets?”

  Rosie holds up her rifle. “I’m sticking with this. But if you have any .22 long rifle, I could use a refill.”

  “Coming right up, ma’am. Would you like fries with that?”

  “I must respectfully decline your wares, sir,” Lucas says. “I know my blade, and that makes it more valuable than any other weapon.”

  “You might be right, sensei. But take a couple of these just in case.” The soldier tosses him a grenade belt. Lucas Tesshu nods and accepts with a smile.

  “Umm… can I have some of those?” you ask.

  He tsks his tongue several times with a shake of his head. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Then he steps back into the shade of the trailer. A moment later, he reappears with a combat shotgun and an ammo bandolier. “You’ve got your marksman and your grenadier, and you oughta complement them well with this.” After passing the weapon off to you, he adds with a wink, “Besides, you look like you’d be handy with one of those.”