Zack woke up sitting in a wheelchair. He was rolling fast down a long corridor. The White House was raging out of control, teeming with undead fiends. He blinked his eyes a few times to rule out the chance that he was dreaming.
“Code blue, code blue,” a walkie-talkie crackled. “All White House personnel are instructed to evacuate immediately! The enemy has invaded. Repeat: The enemy has invaded!”
Zack felt a fat, swollen lump on his cheekbone, and the skin on his hand had a pale green tint. Crazed zombies staggered out of doorways, pouring around every corner.
Five yards directly in front of him, Ozzie hopped along on a pair of crutches, rocking a big cast on his right leg. Zack turned around in the rollicking seat. Rice was pushing the wheelchair through the gurgling zombie chaos.
“Yo, Zack…you’re back!” Rice shouted happily.
“What’s going on?” Zack asked, shouting over the noise.
“Watch out!” Rice swerved the wheelchair, dodging a flailing zombie construction worker in a yellow hard hat.
Ozzie whacked the zombie down with the rubber butt of his crutch. He spun, one-footed, and unleashed a staggering roundhouse kick with the cast on his leg, bashing another undead ghoul in the dome.
Zack looked to his right. Madison was drifting in and out of consciousness as Dr. Scott pushed her in a wheelchair. Zoe ran next to them carting the IV stand.
“Did it work?” Zack asked his buddy.
“Yeah, it worked.” Rice chuckled.
Dr. Scott reached into the breast pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a test tube of red serum corked with a pink rubber plug.
Ozzie bashed through a couple more zombies as they reached the elevator, the only exit. Zack leaned over in his wheelchair and pushed the UP button three times, fast. They waited, huffing and puffing, for the elevator to arrive.
Bing! The doors opened, and they piled into the elevator car. Just then, Dr. Scott let out a terrifying screech. A zombie secretary had latched on to her back and was gnawing at her neck cords.
“Oww!” Dr. Scott spun around in a circle, trying to shuck the crazed mutant off her back.
The zombie flew off Dr. Scott’s shoulder and smashed into the wall. The doctor jerked back, reeling in pain, which sent the vial of antidote springing out of her pocket.
“Nooooooo!” everyone shouted, eyes wide, mouths frozen in ovals of disbelief.
Time slowed as the precious serum floated up, hung for a moment, and then fell back down.
Rice dove in slow motion out of the elevator car, his hands outstretched as if he were a wide receiver diving for an overthrown football. The antidote dropped out of reach, just past his fingertips, and went crashing to the floor.
Zack grabbed his forehead involuntarily.
But the test tube didn’t smash. It wasn’t made of glass.
Rice wiped his brow and crawled on hands and knees toward the plastic serum vial, but not fast enough. A zombie foot kicked the antidote down the hall, sending it into the shuffling riff-raff.
Zack leaped out of the wheelchair and ran past Rice, jumping up to kick the zombie’s noggin like a soccer ball. The beast collapsed in a pile of slimy, decomposing mush.
Zack darted forward into the zigzagging zombie madness and snagged the vial as the zombie horde bulldozed up the hallway. He raced away from the undead swarm and pulled his buddy to his feet.
Zack and Rice sprinted back toward the elevator, which Ozzie held open with his crutch. Dr. Scott leaned down on one knee, clutching her collarbone. A deep red bloodstain was spreading over the shoulder of her white lab coat.
“Come on!” Zack slung her in the empty seat of the wheelchair and hit the CLOSE DOOR button. The zombies were only three feet away, jolting and sputtering flecks of infectious goop. A fat zombie man fell forward, stretching its arm out of its socket to reach them. Its liver-spotted wrist dropped into the gap between the closing doors.
The doors reopened.
Zack kicked the rotting zombie hand back into the hallway and hit the button once again. The ghoul rose to its feet slowly. Behind it, a sickening duo—two zombie women with tattoos and shredded black leather jackets—growled and lunged for the packed elevator. The biker chicks collided with the pot-bellied brute and tumbled in a gruesome heap of puckered flesh.
The doors finally closed, and the elevator rose.
Sitting in the wheelchair, Dr. Scott pressed the wet, bloody wound on her shoulder.
“Here.” Zack handed her the vial. “Just take a tiny sip.”
“Save the others first,” she whispered sternly. The veins on her face bulged and pulsed. Her skin was pale and ashen. “It’s up to you kids.”
“What are we gonna do with her?” Rice asked as Dr. Scott’s eyes rolled back in her head and her skin began to bubble with boils.
“Bring her,” Zack said. “We’ll save her as soon as we can.”
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out onto the roof of the White House. The sky was black and spangled with twinkling stars. The storm had cleared, but the zombies raged on, pouring out of a stairwell door on the other side of the roof.
“Now what?” asked Zoe.
“There!” Ozzie pointed to a chopper.
The helicopter that had brought Madison to the White House was halfway across the deck.
“Can you fly that thing, too?” Zack asked.
Ozzie furrowed his brow. “Please….” He scoffed then smiled.
The zombies on the roof grabbed greedily at the air, making nom-nom noises, and Zack noticed General Munschauer and Agent Gustafson thrashing in the zombified bunch.
“Come on!” Rice shouted. “Quick!”
Rice and Zoe raced across the roof deck and loaded Madison, Twinkles, and the zombifying doctor into the executive helicopter, and climbed in after them. Ozzie hopped behind the navigation controls. Zack sat in the copilot seat.
Ozzie pressed a few buttons and hit a few switches. “Helicopters are a piece of cake,” he said.
Cake? Zack thought about the pulsing BurgerDog sandwich, and for the first time all day, he wasn’t the least bit hungry.
The propeller rotated slowly, and the rotors started to chop, churning the air into a wild wind that flattened the treetops.
The helicopter leaped off the rooftop in one smooth whoosh and they rose at an angled tilt over the rain-drenched streets of Washington, D.C. The zombie footsloggers raged furiously through the monuments, memorials, and museums below.
Zack pulled the vial of serum out of his pocket and stared at it. He turned around, looking in the back of the chopper. Madison rubbed noses with Twinkles. Zoe had tied up Dr. Scott and put a gas mask over her face. Rice looked excitedly at Zack.
“Dude.” He smirked. “You were a freakin’ zombie!”
“Nom nom nom,” Zoe gurgled, making zombie noises. “Braaaaains!” She laughed.
“What can I say, Zo?” Zack shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to be just like you.”
“Who doesn’t?” The unzombified siblings smiled at each other.
And the chopper shot low through the East Coast night, chasing the westward sunset on its way back to Phoenix.
