Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier Read Free Book Online Page B

this shit.”
    â€œWhat shit?”
    â€œYou didn’t see the news?”
    â€œNews? Nah bro. I’ve been sitting here for the past”—he glances over at a cheap Mets alarm clock—“shit like nine hours just getting ripped and playing
Call of Duty
.”
    â€œYou didn’t hear the gunshots?”
    â€œWhat gunshots?”
    â€œAll the gunshots and shooting and screaming and all that shit.”
    â€œNah. I got a four-hundred-and-ninety-dollar pair of Sennheiser headphones. You play video games? You play videogames, you’d love it. It’s like you’re in the middle of friggin’ Afghanistan, no joke. I spent like three grand on this
sick
surround sound system—then the old lady upstairs bitches every time I crank it.”
    â€œOh yeah—that’s the old lady next to me.” The
dead old lady
, you think.
    â€œYeah, total bitch, right? So anyway I shut down the surround sound and went with the headphones.”
    You nod slowly, then “OK, so, uh, dude—fucking zombies are all over the place!”
    He looks at you like you’ve lost your mind. Hell, maybe you have. “Bro, what the
fuck
are you talking about? You eat some bad acid or something? Mushrooms—is it mushrooms? You wanna come in, lay down, take a few pills? Chill you out?”
    You shrug, nod, and walk inside. Holy shit. …
    His apartment is out of this world. Fifty-inch flat screen mounted on the wall. Blu-ray rack with at least a hundred titles. PS3. 360. Wii. Old-school Nintendo. Old-school Super Nintendo. 64. Sega.
Sega CD!
Everything. Two bedrooms. Full kitchen.
    â€œHow do you afford this?”
    â€œYou a cop?”
    â€œWhat? No.”
    â€œYou sure? ’Cause if I ask if you’re a cop and you say no I’m not a cop then you can’t arrest me for anything I do after that.”
    â€œI’m not sure that’s true, but no, I’m not a cop.”
    â€œThen follow me,” he says, grinning.
    As you enter one of the bedrooms you see how he makes his money. Rows and rows of marijuana plants everywhere. Bright white grow lamps.
    â€œHoly shit—this has been going on in my building this whole time?”
    â€œYeah, son. You blaze?”
    â€œWell shit… now I do.”
    â€œSo what were you saying about zombies? Wait—yo, is that blood on your shirt? And your hands?”
    â€œYeah, I just killed a Nazi.”
    â€œYou what—”
    â€œDude, this apartment is amazing! How do you turn on the TV?”
    He picks up a beautiful Logitech universal remote and switches to cable. Horror in hi-def. He watches, stunned.
    He shuts the TV off. Slowly, not speaking, he sits down and stuffs a good twenty dollars’ worth of pot into a massive glass bong. He lights it and draws deep—exhales thick, almost green, smoke. Then, still silent, he hands it to you.
    You take it. Three-piece design, all glass on glass. No rubber to muck anything up. In green letters running down the side is the word RooR—as nice a piece you’ve ever seen. Nearly three feet tall, probably seven pounds in your hands. Made in Germany—you remember that piece of trivia from your college days. Thick glass, ash catcher, diffused downstem to cool the smoke.
    You rip the bong—feel the smoke fill your lungs—then explode in a coughing fit. You hand it back.
    His name’s Matty, he says, but call him the Ardle, everyone calls him the Ardle. The Ardle runs his finger over his enormous Blu-ray collection and pulls
Starship Troopers
. He pops it on. The bass rumbles.
    Minutes into the movie, you’re so stoned, so lost in the action, you momentarily forget about the chaos outside. “Man,” you say, “this movie’s not just so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s amazing.”
    The Ardle turns his head. Through a cloud of smoke: “What, no way man—it’s legitimately