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You've performed your first zombie virus vaccination. Time will tell if it worked. Stay alert as you try to wrangle some provisions and keep ahead of the fast-spreading plague.

Date: October 27, 2004
Place: Austin, Texas

Your friend Greg, the recently vaccinated bite victim, is in a bad way. He's red with fever, his shoulder wound is causing agonizing pain and he's severely dehydrated. Unfortunately, you have no water and your pickup truck is almost out of gas. In other words, it's time to hit the convenience store.

Just up the road a bit, you spot an Allsup's: gas, food, beverages, and you're guessing it's not too crowded right now.

You park out front, leave Greg in the truck and this time you and Travis take your rifles with you. You cover each other as you wheel into the store, just like you've seen the cops do in countless movies. The place is eerily quiet: only the spasmodic buzzing of the slushie machine breaks the silence. Travis starts loading up on food and drink while you go behind the cash register and try and figure out how to get gas flowing at your pump. You're poking around when you spot the attendant, or what's left of her. Something cracked clean through her skull. Her eyes are gone too, and the flies are already on her. Yeegads: you're immobilized with shock. The only other time you saw a dead person was at your Grandma Ethel's open casket wake when you were 12.

Just then, you hear a horn beeping and you look outside. Good Christ! Zombies! A dozen of them, clumsily pawing at the doors to your pickup truck, desperate to get inside. There are kids, old people. Where the hell did they come from? And poor Greg, trapped in the cab, pressing the horn like his life depended on it. Which it does.

Travis is already out the door, his rifle raised. The zombies immediately start moving toward him, leering at the prospect of their next meal. Travis raises the rifle and fires and hits the first one, a tall yuppie in a suit, right in the forehead. The guy jerks, falls and then wobbles back to his feet like a drunk waking up from a bender. You fall in behind Travis and take aim at a Latino kid with a shaved head. Splat! Right in the chest. But this doesn't even knock him over. He simply staggers back a little, regains his footing and resumes the ol' forward shuffle.

You look at Travis, shrug and then unload on them. It's a veritable fusillade, a video game come to life. Chunks of zombified flesh and bone are flying everywhere. Reload, shoot, Reload, shoot. And you don't miss. There's a guy missing his lower jaw; a teenage girl with the top of her skull flipped off like a Tupperware lid. Yet still they come. If you weren't so damn scared you might pause to admire their pluck and determination.

Between all the gunfire and the groaning, you don't even hear the truck starting up. In fact, you don't even notice it until it's pulling out of the parking lot and onto the street. And there, in the front seat, you see your friend Greg, the man you risked life and limb to save, cast one last rueful look back before accelerating away. "Son of a bitch!" shouts Travis as you think to yourself: "thanks, friend. So glad I hitched my star to your wagon."

Quickly, the sound of the engine recedes, and now all you hear is the shuffle of rotting feet. And the breathing. Imagine the world's worst case of sleep apnea, and you'll begin to get an idea of what a zombie sounds like when it breathes.

There are a dozen of them moving toward you, and now they're fanning out! Holy shite! The bastards are using strategy!

Barricade yourself inside the convenience store. It's full of food and drink and has a rest room. You can last forever in there. Or at least until help arrives.

Split up, take out the closest zombies, run toward the street and keep running until the zombies are safely behind you.

Kill them all. Waste every last one of them. And then have a slushie and a corn dog as you consider your next move.