Mushroompalooza

114.

It was just twenty people mindless standing in the street. They wouldn't react to Gilbert or Clarissa. Flashlights, loud noises, and bad smells also had no effect. Gilbert wanted to poke one in the hand with a knife but Clarissa felt that was going too far. There didn't seem to be anything else wrong with them, they just seemed like a herd of cows mindlessly standing there.

"Is there a nearby town or something?" Gilbert didn't want to help, but knew that if he said to keep driving Clarissa would give him shit and he was just about done with all of that.

"Riversberg? I've never heard of this town, apparently they have a pizza festival going on." At least they had cell coverage for Clarissa to look up what was nearby.

"And you want us to go there to see if more people are all whatever these people are."

"Its just down the road and like over a bridge..."

"God, god damn it." Gilbert just wanted to go home, face the music with regards to running into the mountain monsters group and then take a long bath, but no he had to be out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, running into some kind of pizza zombies.

Riverberg was barely a city, it was a two lane barely maintained road with some signs announcing you were in Riverberg, and presumably one announcing you were leaving it. Total population according to the welcome sign was 78 people. Including the group that Gilbert had met on the road it seemed the rest of the town was in town standing around just as dead headed. There were signs up for the pizza festival, and some pizza still out on tables uneaten, but if Gilbert had to take a guess something was wrong with the pizza from how people were acting now.

"You think its everyone?" Clarissa's question made Gilbert roll his eyes, of course it was everyone, if it wasn't everyone someone would have called someone by now.

"Well at least I don't see any children, so that'll make this less tragic when everyone is pretty much dead."

"They aren't dead they just are like poisoned."

"Right you can come back from being completely whatever these people are."

"Gilbert!"

"I'm just being honest, seen a lot of people end up something like this, very few of them ever come back from it." Clarissa decided to ignore Gilbert and instead checked out the pizzas. They looked like all different kinds of topping aside from mushrooms, every pizza had mushrooms.

"Its the mushrooms!" They both said it at the same time.

"On the pizza's Gilbert every pizza had mushrooms!"

"There are large sentient mushrooms coming this way Clarissa I'm pretty sure they are to blame for this." Clarissa almost wanted to laugh if not for the human sized mushrooms coming their way.

"What do we do Gilbert?"

"Well obviously don't eat them, but before we make any rash decisions lets at least try and talk to them, this could all be a big misunderstanding." Clarissa didn't like trying to talk to sentient mushroom that can turn you into some kind of Zombie, but Gilbert was the expert, and so she went along with it.