WHAM! BOOM! Furious blow after furious blow from the Floridian zombies shook the fire escape door on the factory floor. The door flung open and Olivia’s super zombie brother burst inside. Cousin Ben scampered nimbly down the wrought iron ladder and hopped onto the eyeball-gumball-covered production floor with a grunt.

Then the main door leading to the factory thumped and pounded with the force of a thousand undead fists. POW! The hallway door blasted open and super zombie Aunt Ginny plowed inside, too.

BANG! CRACK!

One of the twin arched windows shattered and a shower of glass shards crashed to the floor. Zack swiveled his head to the noise as super zombie Uncle Conrad appeared in the window frame. At the base of the window, Zack could see a roiling mass of zombified arms, legs, and heads writhing beneath the super zombie’s feet. Outside the factory, the Fun World zombies had been piled on top of one another until they’d formed a humongous staircase of the rotting undead. Standing atop his massive heap of rezombified minions, Uncle Conrad glared down into the gumball factory.

Uncle Conrad stepped off his undead escalator and jumped down onto the catwalk below the window, then bounded into the pit of gumballs to join his wife and son.

“They look pretty hungry,” Rice said.

Zack carried over a bucket of the antidote gumballs while Rice produced two Fun World slingshots from his backpack. “Brain-flavored, antidote-infused gumballs with a slight popcorn glaze.”

Madison and Twinkles stood guard in front of Olivia while Ozzie and Zoe each clutched an antidote gumball in one hand and moved forward to try to get within range of the super zombies.

Zack and Rice started firing off rounds of the antidote gumballs with their Fun World slingshots, just missing the super zombies’ mouths and smacking them in their heads.

Aunt Ginny power walked through the floor of eyeball gumballs, gurgling black bile in the back of her throat with her mouth wide open.

The brain-flavored popcorn antidote gumballs whizzed by her head as Zack and Rice fired away until one of the gumballs made a direct hit and nailed the little ding-dong thing at the back of the super zombie’s throat.

“Yes!” Rice pumped his fist. “One to nothing!”

“No way,” Zack protested. “I totally shot that gumball!”

“In your dreams,” said Rice. “One zip.”

“Glugh-glugh-glargh!” Super zombie Aunt Ginny whirled around, squawking and choking before falling face-first into the pit of eyeball gumballs.

Zack and Rice lowered their slingshots and prepared to reload.

“Take a break, fellas,” Ozzie said. “I think this sucker’s going to need to get force-fed.”

Ozzie approached super zombie Uncle Conrad, and the two of them squared off like boxers at the starting bell. Uncle Conrad’s clammy, white, pupil-less eyeballs bulged out of his sunken yellow cheeks.

Ozzie made the first move and bum-rushed Uncle Conrad, trying to slam the gumball into the super zombie’s mouth. The ghoul gagged and spat it out, then slammed Ozzie to the ground and roared, fangs of spittle hanging from his toothy maw.

Zack pulled back the slingshot and lined it up to Olivia’s pop’s wide-open gullet. He plucked his fingers like an archer launching an arrow from his bow and let the gumball fly. The brain-flavored antidote gumball sailed through the air and right into the zombie’s mouth.

“All tied up,” Zack said to Rice, who then gave him a respectful fist bump.

Uncle Conrad glugged down the gumball antidote with a confused look on his super zombie face. Ozzie hopped up off the ground and clocked the super ghoul in the noggin. Uncle Conrad crumpled in the waist-high pit of eyeball gumballs.

Over the cranking of the factory’s machinery they could still hear the never-ending zombie onslaught coursing through the hallways of the factory like an infection through the bloodstream.

“You guys, we got Aunt Ginny and Uncle Conrad,” Zack said. “Where’s Ben?”

“Blargh!”

Olivia’s super zombie brother rose out of the gumball pit directly behind Zack.

Zack spun a hundred and eighty degrees and faced off one-on-one with Cousin Ben. “Easy, tiger.”

Olivia’s super zombie brother chuckled to himself with animal glee and faked a lunge at his prey. Zack flinched and stumbled backward as the maniacal super-freak cackled once again and then pounced in a flash.

Zack dropped his shoulder at the oncoming hellion, bracing for the hit. Cousin Ben raised his pale white forearms popping with purple veins high in the air and wrapped Zack up in a super zombie bear hug. They both went toppling sidelong into the waist-level gumball quicksand.

Zack squiggled free from the super zombie’s tight arm-flexing grip around his waist and kicked back behind himself like a perturbed donkey. He kicked a second time, and the sole of his sneaker made a direct hit on super zombie Ben’s undead forehead, imprinting a waffle-iron pattern into his pale, wrinkly flesh. Zack scrabbled to his feet as Olivia’s super zombie brother grumbled and slunk into the pool of eyeball gumballs.

They all breathed a sigh of relief until Aunt Ginny suddenly rose back up and started groaning and lurching like a zombie, even though she had swallowed the antidote.

“Mom?” Olivia asked.

Then Uncle Conrad, who had just swallowed the antidote, rose up again, too. “Dad?” Olivia turned to her super zombie father.

Conrad breathed heavily, his eyes seething with furious delirium. He opened his gangrenous mouth and let forth a cantankerous roar.

“What the heck?” Rice said, his eyes wide with fear.

“The antidote isn’t working on them,” Zack said.

“What do you mean the antidote isn’t working?” Zoe quickly scrambled up from the eyeball-gumball-covered floor. “It worked on Ozzie, so it should be working on these guys.”

“Okay, so maybe it only works on regular zombies?” Madison guessed.

Immune to the effects of the antidote, Aunt Ginny and Uncle Conrad marched through the gumball pit toward Ozzie, who stood in his kung fu stance between them and his friends.

“I’ll handle the super zombies,” said Ozzie. “You guys start using the antidote on the regular zombies. Let’s try to save some lives, people.”

As Olivia’s undead parents approached, Ozzie dove down and disappeared beneath the sea of gumballs. Before the super zombies could make sense of it, Ozzie emerged behind them then grabbed both of their heads at the same time and clunked them together as hard as he could. Uncle Conrad and Aunt Ginny slumped into the gumball heap and sank below the surface once again.

“You guys,” said Zoe, pointing toward the factory door where a densely packed herd of zombies were pouring in. “We’ve got bigger problems than a couple of super zombies not un-super-zombifying.”