Zack and Harrison Get Lost In Los Francisco

Zack Zuremberg and Harrison LeBleu-Connor-Arling-Johannson are two rich boys whose parents spend their nights at exclusive lounges and bars. They go to expensive prep schools and goof off in class. They tease girls, love their pet spaniels, and could drive a Ferrari by age nine. However, for some strange reason (maybe it has something to do with Zack getting caught hacking the school computer server), tonight their parents have forbidden them from going anywhere, including clubs, nightclubs and all the places teenage boys go on Friday nights. So, of course, Zack and Harrison decided to sneak out.
Their plan was to “sleep over” at Harrison’s house, whose parents had left for the weekend earlier that day, steal his parents’ Ferrari, and jet across town to The Moon, the popular nightclub where their girlfriends would be waiting for them.
And so it begins…1

5:49 PM, in the ostentatious Bel Water district, Los Francisco, California, 20092

“Crap!” Harrison’s shout split the peaceful Bel Water night like a hot knife through butter. “Zack, what did I tell you about the garage doors?!”
The bottom part of Harrison’s garage door had just buckled inward and collapsed because of the pressure applied by Harrison’s custom-built go-kart, which Zack had somewhat foolishly tried to drive into the garage door.
Zack hung his head sheepishly and shuffled his feet. “I––I was just trying to open them! The keypad wouldn’t open…”
“Zack, I told you, it works just as frickin’ well to hack the keypad!” Harrison sighed exas-peratedly. Zack was a great guy, he thought, but sometimes he just doesn’t get stuff. He continued, “I mean, we don’t want to activate the burglar alarm!”
Suddenly, a blaring klaxon alarm went off! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Zack knelt to the ground and clapped his hands over his ears. Harrison looked around him, like searching for an answer from God, and finally raced inside. He tore through the house until he found the fuse box in the base-ment, where all the electric connections were kept. He panically rifled through the switches until he found one marked with a G. Aha! He flicked it to the “off” side and waited for the raucous echoes of the alarm, blaring at the him through two floors of concrete, to subside. They didn’t. Crap! What the hell?, he silently cursed himself. Then, he looked at the fuse box again. A small, glowing screen, revealed behind the switch, had appeared. It blipped and chirped impatiently; as sarcastic as a password screen could get. Harrison exhaled, by now at his wit’s end, and frantically typed in “Harrison” on the small screen. Amazingly, it worked!
The alarm shut off and the luxurious estate was quiet. The screen beeped appreciatively and withdrew behind the switch. Harrison quickly ran outside again, to find Zack snoozing against the wheel of the Ferrari.
“Zack, wake up!”
Zack awoke with a yelp of confusion. “What? What happened? Where am I?”, he cried, wildly looking around him with frightened eyes.
“For God’s sake, Zack, look around!”3

By the time Harrison finally managed to disentangle Zack from the steering wheel, start up the Ferrari, and back out of the driveway, it was already six o’clock. The opulent Bel Water night practically was dripping with richness: Jaguars and Lamborghinis lounged in their five-car garages; colored fountains reared into the clear night air. Even though Zack and Harrison had seen it all a hundred times, Bel Water never failed to impress.
As the Ferrari hummed down the mountain, Harrison glanced into the glowing GPS display. “Right turn,” a mechanized female voice purred, “at Twelfth Street.”
Harrison turned off the mountain and into normal, evening traffic, praying that no one would notice a fifteen-year-old driving.
Suddenly, a Volvo SDX4 blasting techno hurtled around the corner! Zack and Harrison had only a few nanoseconds to register the car existing before––
––the two cars collided with a sickening crunch, and small pieces of metal flew everywhere.
Zack screamed like a 5-year-old girl, Harrison wrenched the wheel to the left in a vain attempt to save them, and the cars all around them screeched and swerved to avoid the unexpected accident. The driver of the Volvo laughed maniacally.
Harrison took a second look at their partner-in-crash. The Volvo was pale, sickly blue, super-shiny, and had no hubcaps. The cracked windows bled out a combination of cannabis fumes and residual chlorine gas. Now Harrison knew: it was a stoner car. Before he could warn Zack away––
“Cool, dude!”, a shaggy-haired, bike-glasses wearing twentysomething guy bellowed out the window of the Volvo, “That was freakin’ awwwesome!!”. His smoke-beshrouded companions cackled appreciatively and rolled down their windows to grin hungrily at Zack and Harrison.
Harrison rolled his eyes and turned back to the Ferrari to try to back it up. The poor car revved, de-revved, and finally settled on a kind of guttural clacking.
“Dude…it’s totally totaled.” The derisive snicker came from Zack, who, unbeknownst to Harrison, had climbed through an open window in the Volvo and was now waving around glowsticks and drinking Mountain Dew with the best of them.
“Zack!” Harrison yelled, “What the hell are you doing in there! They probably put ecstasy in your Mountain Dew!”
“Dude…that’s all good with me.” Zack murmured sadly, sounding properly like a born-again stoner.
Harrison pretty much gave up at that point, and decided to just go along with whatever happened.
“Huhhhhh…” Harrison let out a resigned sigh, thinking about how he would possibly explain this to their parents…4

-Two hours later-5

Getting lost in Los Francisco is easier that one might suspect, as evidenced by the fact that after only a couple hours in the smoke-filled back seat of the Volvo, our friendly little gang of stoners was lost hopelessly in the dark forests of Silver Gate Park.
Harrison’s shaggy brown hair was being finger-combed by a Colombian 18-year-old named Sharina as he sighed and smiled lazily, already imagining summers on the beach in Colombia, and Zack was muttering “Mountain Dew…but what about Grassland Dew??” He leaned toward the driver and said plaintively: “Whatever happened, Shaggy Chan?”––Zack’s ecstasy-induced nickname for the driver, who turned his head around and raised an eyebrow––“How did we get so lost...? In the reaalllms of possibility?”
Shaggy mumbled sheepishly, “Well, dude, um, like, I…I don’t know, dude.” He lughed ruefully, “It’s just, like, I––”
“AHAHAHA!”, Zack shrieked, causing the people in the car to jump about ten feet in the air and the right front window to crack, “I don’t knooooowww!” He turned the last word into a wordless howl, and dissolved into laughter punctuated with snorts, giggles, and “Omigod”s.
Harrison sighed heavily and sunk deeper into the plush leather seat. “You guys…we should seriously get out of this creepy forest before anything bad happens! I mean, we’re already lost!”
The stoners in the backseat grinned lazily and snickered, and someone said quietly “Suck yoouuu.”
“Exactly!” Harrison cried. “We don’t want bears, or junkies, or, or, GIANT SPIDERS and stuff like that! We just want to get home.” At this point, Zack and Harrison had completely given up going to The Moon, and were just praying to get back to Bel Water before their parents returned.
All of a sudden, slow, heavy footfalls came echoing out of the depths of the forest. Pale arms and faces could be seen swaying through the inky blackness of the trees. A greenish miasma, smelling of dead meat and rotten swamps, wafted before them like an honor guard.
“Es la automata,” Sharina whispered, terrified, “La sómbi.” Harrison no habla Español, but he knew enough to know that “sómbi” probably meant “zombie”.  
He tried to tell himself that zombies didn’t exist, especially not in Silver Gate Park, but somehow the emaciated corpses plodding through the nearest forest convinced him otherwise.
“RUNNN!” “HELP!” “ANYONE, HELP!!!” The terrified stoners were entirely sober now, and ran for their Volvo. As they piled back into the car, the zombies shuffled forward again. Now, an eerie humming and chanting could be heard. As Shaggy started to rev the Volvo, deadly terror in his face, the undead monsters suddenly broke and ran, rushing blindly towards the car with outstretched, decaying arms and desiccant fingers. Panicked, Shaggy, through pure effort of will, got the to go Volvo from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds flat. Trees whizzed by as the Volvo smashed a path through the underbrush. The zombies were left standing (or drooping, really), dumbstruck, in the wake of the car. They stared after it for a few seconds, then resumed shambling randomly through the forest.
In the backseat, the five stoners huddled together, horrified, and tried to recover from the shock.
“Did…did we just see what I think we saw?” The timid murmur was Zack’s, finally sober at what he had just witnessed, “Did we just, like, see…zombies?!” His pupils were dilated with fear and shock, and his lower lip trembled ever-so-much.
Harrison, who was squeezed between Sharina (with her hands over her mouth and her mascara smeared) and a random stoner named Geoff (who was asleep, of all things), turned his head as much as it would go and said brokenly, “……yeah.” It was pretty much all he could say, with Geoff leaning (and drooling) on his left shoulder. He sighed again.
As the little blue Volvo sped through the forest, swerving to avoid trees and boulders, Harrison gradually began to think about where they were. I mean, even what has got to be the darkest and murkiest forest in Silver Gate Park has got to lead somewhere, he surmised, so shouldn’t we have seen a road or a different stretch of trees?
“Hey! Shaggy!”, Harrison suddenly called, “Stop, and we’ll––hey, STO––”
The Volvo screeched to a halt. Everyone inside is was jolted forward in their seats. “Dude,” Shaggy muttered, “I heard you the first time. What is it?” Harrison was wondering how laid-back he could be, what with all the zombies chasing after then, but then he realized.
“Wait…” Harrison said slowly. The others looked at him expectantly. “I’ll bet the zombies aren’t chasing us anymore! Shaggy, you can slow down!”