You follow the woman with the gun outside. If the dead are rising from their graves, you think, it might be wise to hang around those with access to firearms. “Hey, wait up,” you yell, trying to get her attention. “Thanks for, you know, shooting those zombies and stuff. What’s your name?”
“Mittens,” the woman says without a hint of a smile. “I’m a cop.”
Hmm. Mittens is the kind of name that’s fairly common in the stuffed animal community, but you don’t typically hear it associated with regular human beings. “Uh, do you have a first name?” you ask.
“Officer,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “Now why don’t you run along and . . . aw, crap.”
You look to see what Mittens—Mittens? Really?—is staring at and discover a whole mob of gore-covered zombies piling out of an art house movie theater down the street. Mittens looks at the undead crowd, then at her gun, and then back at the crowd. “Yeah, I might need some backup on this one,” she says finally. “Run, genius.”
She takes off down the street, and since you don’t have any other ideas, you follow. You round the corner just behind her and see her flagging down a pair of mounted patrolmen. It always seemed weird to you that cops sometimes ride horses right down the middle of the road, since the internal combustion engine was invented over a hundred years ago, but in this situation you’re not complaining. “Hey!” Mittens yells at them. “Uh, hello? Zombie invasion? Turn around, you morons!”
The officers seem completely uninterested, but the horses start to slowly, awkwardly turn on their own. One of them is a big, Clydesdale-looking thing, and the other is smaller, not much larger than a pony. It turns out that the smaller horse is in better shape, though—it only has a few patches of gouged flesh and one popped-out eye socket, whereas the big horse has whole chunks of head, neck, and torso missing. The officers are in even worse condition, but still moaning and somehow managing to stay mounted.
Mittens cusses up a storm and fires a whole clip full of ammunition at the larger horse, and although its rider slips off the saddle and hits the ground with a splat, the horse doesn’t even flinch. For some reason the fallen zombie officer starts trying to climb back up on his mount. “I’ve got bigger guns in my car!” Mittens says, bolting back the way you came.
Your first instinct is to follow as quickly as you can. You’re not at all sure you can outrun a zombie horse, though—that little one in particular still looks pretty fast. And if you’re going to be eaten anyway, perhaps this a good time for some ridiculous heroics?
If you try to create a distraction that allows Mittens to reach her car before the zombie equestrians run her down, turn to page 194.
Screw that! If you’re not quite ready to die and run as fast as you can, hoping Mittens will save you, turn to page 5.