Zombies and Shit

Then, once she gets back to the island, she’s going to use her new passport to visit the Platinum Quadrant. Then Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla is going to die.

Scavy runs across the street naked except for his underwear and boots—the metal of the sniper rifle cold against his bare skin—following Junko and Rainbow Cat to a place where he can get some new clothing. The camera ball they had lost in the zombie fight finds them and chases after the trio.

“What’s this place?” Scavy asks, as they enter a dark windowless building. He closes the door before the camera ball can squeeze in behind them.

Junko is too busy digging out her flashlight to respond. She flicks it on and moves deeper into the black, to get far away from the entrance.

When Scavy turns on his flashlight, the beam brightens the face of a melty white zombie only inches away from him. The zombie’s hand raised to his face. Scavy shrieks and lowers his naginata spear into its head.

The zombie doesn’t fall. It doesn’t even move, frozen in place.

Junko goes over to the punk, “Shut the hell up.”

Scavy points at the zombie to show Junko why he screamed, but then he notices that the zombie doesn’t look much like a zombie.

“It’s just wax,” Junko says, pulling the spear out of the wax head. “We’re in a wax museum.”

The wax figure had been sculpted after Adolf Hitler, but over the decades the figure had melted into an unrecognizable blob. Adolf’s arm was raised in a sieg heil, but now the fingers had melted into gnarly curls. They look around at many other melted figures surrounding them.

“What did they use wax museums for?” Scavy asks.

“They made sculptures of celebrities and famous historical figures, probably so the public could pretend to meet them in person. Those clothes are real, though. If you can get them off of the sculpture you can wear them.”

Scavy nods and points at Hitler. “Who was this guy?”

“I believe he was one of America’s greatest presidents,” Junko says. “The one who freed the slaves.”

“Cool. I’ll wear his clothes then.”

As Scavy uses the blade of his spear to cut the melted wax off of the sculpture, Junko and Rainbow Cat patrol the area.

“We should get thicker layers of clothing for ourselves as well,” Junko says. “We at least need some gloves.”

All of the melted figures standing around them makes Rainbow Cat feel as if they’re in the middle of a zombie horde. Their faces are sagging in distorted ways, mouths stretched open, eyes popping out, necks melted away completely so that chins sink into chests or heads twist into awkward angles. In ways they are even more horrifying to Rainbow than the zombies.

She looks at one of the sculptures: a pirate man whose dreadlocks have melted and curled so much over time that he looks like a medusa. The sign below the sculpture reads, “Captain Jack Sparrow.” Bites have been taken out of the back of his head, as if a zombie had at one time thought he was a real person and tried to eat his brain.

“These clothes are all waxy,” Scavy yells, as he tries on the uniform.

Junko hushes him and then whispers back, “That’s good. The more water resistant the better.”

They get gloves from other figures: a Michael Jackson sculpture, a Darth Vader sculpture, and a Mork from Ork sculpture. Junko takes the Darth Vader gloves for herself.

“The gloves will make fighting a little more difficult,” Junko says, “but being able to push zombies off of you without getting infected is more important than any weapon.”

Once every inch of their skin below the neck is covered up, they head back toward the entrance. But something of interest has captured Rainbow’s attention.

“What’s that?” she asks Junko.

It is a wax sculpture of a cyborg dog.

“Was it from a science-fiction television show?” Rainbow asks, approaching the soggy animal sculpture.

Junko looks carefully at the animal near Rainbow. It is a large black German shepherd inside of a metal exo-skeleton. Long metal talons protrude from its paws, and mounted on its back are miniature Gatling guns and rocket launchers.

When Rainbow Cat leans down to look into the dog’s eyes, she says, “It looks so fake.”

“Back away from that thing,” Junko tells her.

“Why?” Rainbow says.

She backs away once the wax sculpture begins to growl.

“It’s not fake,” Junko says.

Then the creature lunges at Rainbow.

Junko pulls out her 9mm and fires at the dog’s snarling face, bits of tooth and eye spray over its snout as it barks ferociously. It ceases its attack, giving Rainbow Cat a chance to get away.

As Rainbow gets behind Junko, the Gatling gun on the dog’s back spins at them.

“Get down!” Junko cries, and the trio drops to the floor.

The gun whirrs, but no bullets are fired.

“It doesn’t have any ammo,” Junko says, as they get back to their feet. “Get it!”

Then she charges the creature, revving her chainsaw. The creature charges at her, then jumps in the air with its blade-like talons spread, aiming for her throat.

She cuts its head off in midair. When the headless body lands, it keeps charging forward. It runs past Scavy and Rainbow Cat, piling straight into a display of the cast of M.A.S.H. and attacks the set with its blade-like claws.

As the body of the cybernetic zombie dog rips apart a wax sculpture of Alan Alda, Scavy looks down on the severed dog head. It bites rapidly at the air and licks the pavement with its black tongue. Inside of its neck, there are wires and gears moving within the oozing flesh as if they’re a natural part of the animal’s body.

“I thought you said we should always run away from the zombies,” Scavy says. “But you fought that thing head on.”

“There’s no running away from those things,” Junko says, wiping blood off her chainsaw with a Doctor Who scarf. “They’re just way too fast.”

“So we get to fight these things when we come across them?” Scavy asks, excitedly.

“Not if we can avoid it,” Junko says. “If we run into one that’s fully armed we’re all dead.”

“What are they?” asks Rainbow Cat.

“Mechjaws,” Junko says. “You’ve never heard of them?”

They stare at her blankly.

“These things are responsible for the entire zombie outbreak, fifty years ago.”

Mechjaws were built by the US military several years before the zombie outbreak. They were designed to be immortal killing machines that could replace humans on the battlefield. One mechjaw was worth a thousand soldiers. It could not be killed by bullets. It had no need for food or sleep. It could survive in any terrain. Its orders could be beamed directly into its head from satellite. They were furry machines of death.

But they didn’t realize the serum designed to keep the animals alive could be transmitted by blood. They discovered this during their first field test. The first mechjaw was sent into the middle east to take out a terrorist cell. The researchers observing the test were pleased with the speed at which the mechjaw shot down each of its targets, but were then shocked by what it did to the corpses after they were all dead. The mechjaw ate all of their brains. Not their flesh, just their brains.

Then, like a virus, the chemical serum was transmitted to the dead terrorists. It brought them back to life and they became brain-eating monsters. The zombie outbreak was contained two days later and, despite the drawback, the project was considered a success.

The US military continued making mechjaws for several months until they learned that the outbreak had not been fully contained. A zombie foot had been left behind in the desert and was eventually eaten by a stray dog, which had become infected and bit a child who had become infected and bit his parents. Within a few days, the outbreak had spread throughout the Middle East and was already hitting Africa and Europe.

When news of the outbreak hit the U.S., the mechjaw project was cancelled. They were just about to salvage the mechjaw machinery and dispose of the organic material, when a group of militant animal rights activists broke into the mechjaw facility and released the dogs. Over two hundred mechjaws were unleashed on the east coast, killing and infecting every human in their path. With no orders to follow, they just followed their instincts: eat and destroy.

Z-Day, as the survivors called it, happened forty-eight hours after the mechjaws were released. That was the day practically every city on the planet had become under siege by the living dead. Some cities had it worse than others, but every city on the mainland was fighting for survival against the hordes of brain-eating undead.

The scientists who created the mechjaws had no idea what they had done. They never knew the serum would work on humans just as well as dogs. In later days, it was discovered that many species could be infected with the virus. It’s mostly restricted to large mammals, from dogs to bears to elephants to pigs, as well as water-dwelling mammals such as whales and dolphins. Smaller mammals, such as rabbits and cats, are immune to the virus. Nobody has ever researched why the virus doesn’t infect smaller mammals. If a cat is bitten by a zombie it does not become a zombie cat, it just dies. Some predict that it has to do with brain size, but that has never been proven.

Junko keeps her eyes on the mechjaw dismembering the wax Alan Alda, as she leads her companions toward the exit.

“We’re going to be in trouble if there’s more of those things in the city,” Junko says.

“Do they usually kill a lot of the contestants in the show?” asks Rainbow.

“No,” Junko says. “They’ve never been in the show before. Wayne always hoped to have mechjaws in the show, but no contestant has ever run into one. There are only a couple hundred of them on the entire continent.”

“So you think we won’t run into any more of them?” Rainbow asks.

When they step out of the door and check to see if the coast is clear, Junko runs into the floating camera ball that zooms in on her face.

“I hope so,” Junko says, then she looks into the camera. “And it would piss the fuck out of Wayne if he knew the only mechjaw attack to ever be on Zombie Survival happened off-camera.”

As they run down the street in their new extra-padded clothing, Scavy thinks about it for a minute. He’s seen enough stray dogs in Copper to know something about their behavior.

“But don’t dogs travel in packs?” he asks.

Junko freezes when she hears his words, then she turns to her left. Staring back at her is a pack of eight mechjaws, licking their scabby lips at her from the windows of a crumbling retro arcade.

“This time we run,” Junko says.

But Scavy is the first one to take off down the street as the mechjaws’ fully-loaded Gatling guns open fire.

Gogo stands behind the doorway of a low income housing apartment building as a gang of Mexican zombies stagger by on the street outside. She holds a silenced submachine gun tight to her chest, waiting for the majority of them to pass. A camera ball floats impatiently behind her shoulder, focusing on her large breasts that barely fit into her sweaty ripped-up white shirt.

“Cerebros!” the Mexican zombies groan. “Cerreebrossss…”

She waits for the last zombie, the straggler. She hopes to shoot out its legs and pull it inside before the others notice. Because her weapon is silenced, the other zombies won’t likely hear it.

Gogo didn’t realize she had a silencer in her pack when she first left the hotel. She just ran for her life, opening fire on every zombie that got in her way. She was the first one out of the hotel and was far ahead of everyone else, but then she started to get lonely and decided to go back for her friends.

She went to a rooftop and ate some kind of fruit and protein bar. All of the rations the show gave to the contestants were in bar form. After she ate the bar, she realized she was still hungry and went for another. That’s when she found the silencer. At first she didn’t know what it was, until she realized it was a piece of her gun.

Gogo likes having the camera watch her. She holds the silencer like a dick between her breasts, rubbing it slightly up and down her sweaty cleavage. Unlike the other contestants, Gogo couldn’t think of a better way to die than as a contestant on Zombie Survival. She likes the idea of being a star. It gets her off knowing that all the upper class men on the island are drooling over her body right now.

The last Mexican zombie in the line is a young tattooed living corpse, who was possibly a gang member in his previous life. As he passes the doorway, Gogo opens her skirt and stretches her thigh out into his view. Her black-painted fingernails caress up the fishnet stockings on her legs, beckoning him to come take a bite out of her.

The zombie turns to her, only seeing one leg and one hand moving beyond the doorway.

“¿Cerebros?” says the zombie, as it enters the building.

Gogo tosses a blanket over him and then wraps him up with an extension cord, binding not only his arms to his sides but also the blanket over his face and torso. Then she closes the door and shoots out the zombie’s kneecaps with her silenced SMG. The other zombies hear their friend’s cries as he hits the ground, but they don’t come back for him.

Gogo smiles seductively at the camera. Then she leans close to the zombie’s ear and says softly through the blanket, “Hey, living dead boy, wanna go for a ride?”

The zombie growls behind the cloth.

Gogo giggles flirtatiously and looks up at the camera ball.

“I’m going to give all of you a show you’re never going to forget.”

Then she drags the body into an apartment room and closes the door.

Gogo has had a zombie fetish for as long as she can remember. Necrophilia of any kind really turns her on, because the idea of sex with the dead (or living dead) seems so sick and twisted to her. She gets off on sick and twisted.

Her boyfriends were never into sick and twisted stuff. One time she was fucking Scavy while Brick was off fucking Popcorn somewhere, riding him reverse cowgirl. As she came, she took a huge dump right on Scavy’s stomach. He saw the log ooze out of her ass onto the soft flesh below his belly button.

“What the fuck!” Scavy shouted.

Gogo laughed. “What?”

“You just shit on me and shit!”

“So?” she asked, as she pulled off of him and looked down at her log of feces.

“I was just about to come when you did that, you bitch,” he said. “Get it the fuck off me!”

Gogo put her face up to it and sniffed at it. The odor was mild, but had strange hints of marijuana and red licorice. The heat coming off of it was warm against her face.

“Don’t stare at it, get rid of it!” Scavy said.

Gogo continued smelling it and examining its textures and curves, like she had just created a work of art.

“It turns you on, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Fuck no.”

“Then why are you still hard?”

She grabbed his cock and stroked it.

“It turns me on,” she said.

“You’re a fucking freak,” Scavy said.

Then she grabbed a handful of her shit and wrapped it around his penis, masturbating him with her shit as if it were some kind of lubricant.

“Don’t rub it on me!” Scavy cried.

“Tell me to stop and I will,” she said, as she jerked him off.

Scavy couldn’t get himself to tell her to stop. She was masterful at giving hand jobs. She used to give them professionally. Unlike himself and Popcorn, Gogo did go into prostitution rather than drug-dealing when she was young. But she wasn’t just some common street whore, she was an exotic dancer who also sometimes slept with her customers for money. But she said she only did this for fun, when she was in the mood. The problem was she was always in the mood.

Just as Scavy started to get into the handjob and block out the smell of shit on his body, Gogo put his penis in her mouth.

“Oh, no…” Scavy cried, as he watched Gogo suck furiously on his shit-covered dick. “That’s just nasty…”

After he came, Gogo swallowed her shit with his cum, and Scavy almost puked at the sight of it. He jumped out of bed and walked out of her apartment buck naked. He went a block down to the ocean and jumped in, trying to wash away her shit as well as the memory. He promised himself that he would never have sex with Gogo again.

Everyone in Scavy’s crew had sex with Gogo several time and every single one of them had their own crazy story of some sick stunt she pulled on them:

Scavy had the shit story.

Popcorn had a story about Gogo wanting to be fucked by a gun that had been converted into a strap-on. It wasn’t until after they both came that Popcorn learned that the gun strapped to her crotch had been loaded the whole time, with the safety off. If Popcorn had orgasmed just a little harder she would have put a bullet through Gogo’s back.

Brick had a story about how Gogo once pretended she was a zombie while they were having sex. As she fucked him, Gogo scratched and bit him, trying to get to his brain. Brick almost thought she really was a zombie, because she used all of her strength when she scratched and bit him. She drew blood in several places. She put teeth marks on his skull. He had to hold her down to continue having sex with her, but she wouldn’t stop trying to eat him alive while they screwed.

When she was done with her roleplaying, Brick asked, “Why’d you act like a zombie and scratch me up like that?”

Gogo lit a cigarette and shrugged. “I thought you’d like it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to have sex with a zombie.”

“Why?”

“Because of the danger,” Gogo said. “I bet having sex with something that’s trying to kill you would be pretty intense.”

As soon as Gogo learned that she was in the middle of the Red Zone, she knew she would have to test her fantasy to see if having sex with a zombie really was as intense as she imagined. And the fact that she had an audience only made it more appealing to her.

With the zombie strapped naked to an ancient bed and the camera ball hovering over the scene, Gogo removes her clothing slowly as if she’s dancing for a group of horny old men at her strip club.

As she removes her shirt, she rubs her breasts and points them at the camera. She licks her nipples and sucks on her fingers, then touches the moisture between her legs. The camera zooms in at her elongated clit as it becomes erect. She hopes the size of her clitoris disturbs some of the viewers watching her. It always turns her on when guys become uncomfortable or intimidated by her clit size. It’s not nearly as large as the smallest penis, but they can’t help but see it as one. This awkwardness drives her wild. It almost always makes her want to force the guy into giving her oral sex.

When his friends were about to have sex with Gogo, he’d always tell them, “Don’t show any fear. If she can tell you’re nervous around it, she will make you give it oral sex.”

Gogo strokes her monster clit for the camera, then turns to her undead lover. Her green hair brushes against the corpse’s writhing soggy body—collecting patches of brown sludge—as she climbs on top of it. The smell of rancid chicken hits her nostrils and she inhales deeply.

“You’re a dirty boy,” Gogo says. “I like dirty boys.”

“Cerebros!” cries the zombie.

She presses her tongue against a leathery mud-caked patch of flesh and slides it up to his torso. Weeds grow out of his lungs like chest hairs, tickling her lips as she kisses his nipple. A section of his skin is missing from his chest below the nipple, exposing the ribcage. She curls her tongue around a rib and then bites down on it.

The zombie growls. She can feel his growl vibrate through her upper jaw. She growls back and then tears the rib bone out of his chest. Then spits it onto his neck.

As she lies her weight on top of him, her breasts squishing into its oozing flesh, she brings her face closer to his. The zombie bites at her, snapping its jaws at the air between them.

“Cerebros! Cerebros! Cerebros!”

She bites the air back at him, flirtatiously. Then grabs him by the throat. She chokes the zombie so hard that no sound comes out of his mouth when he says cerebros. He thrashes to get out of her grip so that he can bite her hand, but once she uses both hands he’s no longer able to resist. She turns his face to the side, leans in, and bites into his brain. The skull is so brittle that it’s like she’s biting into a soft-shelled crab.

Pulling out a long strip of brain, she lets go of his neck and has him watch. Black fluids dribble down her chin as she chews on his brain. She looks over at the camera seductively and swallows. Then licks her black lips.

“Cerebros!” cries the zombie.

“Brains!” cries Gogo.

She sits back and shoves her hand into his torso, pulls out some intestines, and rubs them on her breasts. The intestines are filled with decayed fifty-year-old brains and congealed blood. Dark reddish-brown in color, they smear like inky oatmeal against her skin.

“I want you,” she tells the zombie. “I want to fuck you, my living dead boy.”

She puts on a show for the camera, laying it on nice and thick to both arouse and disturb the people back home. She hopes they don’t edit a single second out of her performance. She wants people to be watching this scene and talking about this scene for years after her death. She wants the producers of the show to know that they sent the right girl into the zombie wasteland. They chose the right girl to become a star.

As Gogo handles the zombie’s cracked penis, she realizes it’s not becoming hard. Even her masterful hands are not enough to arouse the living corpse.

“What the fuck?” she asks the zombie. Then she punches it in the chest. A cloud of dust rises into the air.

She examines his deformed penis. It is wrinkled and scaly. Brown fluids leak from a crack in its side. There are two large bulges in it, as if his rotten testicles had dropped out of his scrotum into his urethra and slid down the shaft halfway.

“We’re going to have to make this hard somehow,” she says.

Her eyes scan the room for something long and hard to prop it up with. She finds a long splinter of wood beneath an ancient dresser and brings it back to him. Holding it up to the camera and up to her lover, she gives them a good look at it. Thin and pointed at one end, but it gets thicker and flat toward the other end.

“This will probably do just fine,” she says.

She lifts his shriveled piece of flesh and brings the sliver of wood to it, pressing its sharp point lightly against the head. Like a long fingernail, she caresses the zombie’s penis with the splinter, scratching the side of the shaft. The splinter catches on a large blister and it pops, white fluid dribbles down its shaft like pre-cum.

The penis hole looks as if it had been sealed up a long time ago, so she has to reopen it by force. She points the tip of the splinter at the eye of the penis and then pokes it slowly inside. There is resistance, so she pushes harder. She grips his penis tightly with her other hand and then with all of her strength she stabs the long wooden spike through, creating a new hole.

The sound of tearing flesh as she jams the splinter deep into the zombie’s dick. A geyser of yellow pus shoots out the top and brown mucus oozes over her fingers from the hole in the side.

“Yeah…” Gogo says, as the wood goes all the way in.

She feels his dick again.

“Now it’s hard enough to fuck,” she says to the camera.

She climbs on top of his body and stares the zombie in the eyes.

“Ready?” she asks it.

She looks down at her crotch as it lowers toward his erection. Her eyes widen as she watches the gnarled blistered member disappear inside of her pussy.

“Oh yeah,” she tells the zombie, in her very phony stripper voice.

She can feel the knots in his penis as she fucks it. She moans out loud, not caring if any other zombies hear. To be torn apart and eaten alive while fucking a zombie in front of a television audience is exactly how she wants to die.

“Brains!” she yells, fucking the zombie faster.

The zombie doesn’t yell back, as if confused and frightened of Gogo.

“Brains!” she yells.

She grabs the zombie by the throat and twists his head into her face.

“Brains!” she yells again, then bites into the zombie’s brains.

She eats the creature’s gray matter as she fucks it, thrashing against him on the bed as if she’s a zombie herself.

“Brains!”

Then the ancient bed collapses and she hears a tear. A look of concern crosses her face as she gulps down the chunk of brain in her mouth. She looks at the straps that are binding the corpse, hoping the tearing noise wasn’t one of the knots breaking. But when she looks down, she notices the noise had come from the zombie’s dick. It has been ripped off.

When Gogo stands up, the camera zooms in on the severed penis between her legs. She pulls out the ragged scabby piece of meat and holds it up, frowning at it.

“You wimpy little bitch!” she yells at the zombie, then tosses the dick in his face. “You ruined it!”

The zombie’s tongue reaches out for the penis by his face. Gogo knows he’s probably trying to eat it, just in case it happens to be a piece of brain, but she imagines the corpse just wants to lick her vaginal fluids off of his dick. She always liked guys who would lick her juices off of their fingers or her dildo, but it turned her on even more to think of a guy licking her vaginal fluids off of his own severed dick.

Gogo realizes that she’s still turned on and needs to still get off somehow. If she can’t fuck him now that his penis is missing and can’t receive oral sex from him without her labia being bitten off, she decides she’ll let him finger her into orgasm. Of course, since his body parts don’t need to be attached to his body in order to function, she decides to cut off his arm.

The door bursts open as Gogo is fingering herself with the zombie’s severed hand. She shrieks, then grabs the submachine gun next to her and points it at the intruder.

“Don’t shoot,” Popcorn says, standing in the doorway with her arms raised.

“Popcorn?” Gogo asks, staring at her pale-faced friend with the bullet hole in her forehead.

“Gogo?” Popcorn says, staring at her naked friend with a writhing zombie hand in her crotch.

Gogo puts her clothes back on and shamelessly explains in great detail what she was doing with the zombie tied to the bed. Then Popcorn tells her about what happened to her, and how she is now officially a zombie even though she doesn’t feel all that different so far.

“That’s kind of awesome,” Gogo tells her. “I wish the same thing would happen to me.”

“Well, after having sex with this corpse you’re surely infected,” Popcorn says. “We’ll have to see what happens to you once you turn. You might be like me or you might become a ravenous mindless brain-eater.”

“Either way,” Gogo says, “I’m out of the contest. I guess it’s just you and me in the zombie wasteland from here on out.”

“Yep, just the two of us,” Popcorn says. “The queens of the dead.”

“It’s going to be awesome!” Gogo says.

“Yeah…”

Gogo stares hungrily at Popcorn’s head. At first, Popcorn thinks she’s imagining what it would be like to eat her brain. But as Gogo licks her lips, Popcorn realizes that she’s thinking of something sexual. She is imagining what it would be like to fuck the bullet hole in Popcorn’s head with her elongated clit.

Popcorn realizes that she’s not looking forward to spending the rest of her undead life all alone in the zombie wasteland with Gogo.

Bosco watches from the window of an office building as the zombie war dogs chase after Junko, Scavy, and Rainbow Cat. The dogs’ Gatling guns roar at them, showering the streets with bullets. The noise of gunfire catches the attention of the living dead and the street becomes full of them. The trio finds themselves stuck between the pack of fully-armed mechjaws and a wall of the living dead.

Junko takes her crew straight into the mob, weaving through the soggy corpses. The zombies reach out for them, clawing at the air only inches away from them. If just one of them grabs Junko, that would be the end of it. There wouldn’t be enough time to cut its limbs off before the mechjaws catch up. Luckily, most of the zombies’ attentions are focused on the sounds of the Gatling guns and haven’t noticed the three humans ducking through their crowd.

The mechjaws’ bullets cut through the zombie horde, but the dead do not fall. This creates the perfect human shield between Junko’s crew and the bullets. But the dogs are still closing in on them. They easily run through the mob of undead, knocking them down like dominos, shredding their corpses with their talon blades.

Bosco watches patiently to see which of the three will get killed first. Rainbow Cat is falling behind the other two. She chose a much denser path through the mob of corpses. He wonders if she will be the first to die. He really hopes not. He hopes Scavy is the first to die, because that asshole punk wouldn’t let him join his crew. Though Junko also wouldn’t let him join her crew. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with him when he talked to her, pretended that he wasn’t even there. He hopes that stuck up bitch gets what she deserves and dies painfully.

Back at the hotel, nobody wanted to join up with him, not even the other loners. Because he had to go on his own, he was nearly killed several times an hour. He was grabbed trying to climb a wall, he was cornered by a group of zombies, he was tripped by a legless zombie while trying to run away from a horde. If he had a friend with him none of these things would have been a problem. His friend could have easily helped him get over the wall or helped him fight their way out of a swarm. If only he had a friend.

Bosco has always been unlucky when it came to making friends. People just don’t ever seem to like him. He somehow rubs them the wrong way. He’s not sure why. He likes people. He likes to be around people. He’s not shy. He’s not an asshole. People just don’t like him.

In the Copper Quadrant, Bosco worked in a sweat shop making dresses for women in the Silver and Gold Quadrants. His mother had taught him to sew growing up. A skill he thought he could use, but he never thought would become his trade.

He was the only male who worked on his floor. The other workers surrounding him were older women, the youngest of them was ten years older than him. Most of them were single mothers. None of them wanted anything to do with him. He thought they would be desperate enough to be interested in him, but they all turned him down when he asked them out on dates. He’s not the most attractive man in the world, but he’s not the ugliest either. He’s in good shape and still has most of his teeth. But women just weren’t interested in him. Outside of prostitutes, he had only slept with one woman in his life.

If he couldn’t be with a woman he at least wanted to have friends, but even friends were impossible for him. Every day after work he would go to the local bar and try to make friends with the other regulars. Some of them thought he was gay and just coming on to them, because his approach to starting a conversation was too aggressive. Others thought he was boring and annoying. Others just wanted to be left alone. But, still, every day he went back to the bar trying to make a friend. At least just a drinking friend. But nobody, not even the bartender, wanted to have anything to do with him.

He doesn’t care much that he was put on Zombie Survival. His life has always been shit. He wasn’t expecting his life to get any better. Death has always appealed to him. All he wants is to not have to die alone. If only somebody would have let him join their group he would have gladly sacrificed himself for them.

His goal isn’t to get to the helicopter and survive. His goal is just to find somebody/anybody to be with him when he dies.

As Junko and Scavy get further ahead of Rainbow Cat, one of the mechjaws launches a rocket. The explosion hits between Rainbow Cat and the others, blowing everyone off of their feet. The zombies absorb most of the blast, their body parts flying through the air, black sludge splashing across the pavement. Like a landslide, the front of a building crumbles into the horde. Rainbow Cat runs into a nearby department store to avoid the avalanche. It takes down two of the mechjaws and most of the crowd of zombies.

As Junko helps Scavy to his feet, the mechjaws climb up the rubble after them. They look back for Rainbow Cat, but she’s nowhere to be seen, perhaps even buried under the wreckage. Before the mechjaws have a chance to open fire, they take off running.

Bosco sees Rainbow Cat hiding in the department store, looking out the window at her companions as they leave her behind. The zombies and mechjaws follow after.

A smile creeps up on Bosco’s face, happy that Rainbow was left all alone. If he can get to her in time she’ll have no choice but to let him join her.

“Now you will be mine,” Bosco says to the hippy girl in the doorway of the department store, “my beautiful Rainbow.”

Then he licks his finger and draws a heart in the window glass around Rainbow, as she cowers in the distance, lost, alone, and afraid.

Alone with only a dagger, Rainbow Cat realizes she needs to find a better weapon. Even though Junko had told her being able to run fast is more important than a weapon, Rainbow would feel a lot safer if she had a sword or a large club. She at least needs to find a better knife. The one she has seems better for stabbing than cutting, and she needs a weapon that will cut through limbs.

Rainbow explores the store. She doesn’t require her flashlight because stripes of sunlight brighten the room. It is a five story building but so many floors and ceilings have collapsed, cracked apart, and fallen away, that sunlight reaches all the way down from the roof to the ground floor.

Mostly everything in here is useless from exposure to the elements. The clothing falls apart between her fingers. The wooden bars used as coat racks break in half when she pulls them off the wall. Even the metal parts from the display shelves are rusted and brittle. The building feels as if it could collapse at any moment, so she decides not to search upstairs. She’ll have to go somewhere else. Hopefully she’ll be able to catch up to Junko and Scavy later.

On her way out of the department store, she runs into a figure standing in the doorway, blocking her path.

As she raises her dagger, the figure’s arms raise up.

“I’m not infected,” says the figure.

Rainbow Cat steps forward to see Bosco. A bent smile creeps onto his face, an expression that is like he’s both frowning and smiling at the same time. Rainbow steps back a little.

“I see you’re all alone,” Bosco tells her. “I’m all alone, too.”

Bosco’s tone of voice is one of sleaziness, even though he thinks he’s speaking in a friendly unthreatening tone.

“Get out of my way,” Rainbow says.

“I just want to help you,” he says. “I just want us to team up. I can watch your back, you can watch mine.”

“I already have a team.”

“You don’t need them anymore. I’ll protect you from now on.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Bosco raises his weapon, a machete.

“How can you say that?” Bosco asks her. “After all we’ve been through?”

Rainbow Cat is confused. “What do you mean? Do I know you?”

“How could you have forgotten me?” Bosco asks. “You have to remember me. You just have to.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

A tear falls down Bosco’s cheek as he says, “We used to be lovers.”

Although Rainbow Cat didn’t recognize him until now, Bosco was one of the guys she had slept with in Copper to get back at her husband for skipping a day of writing. Charlie had spent the entire day in bed, feeling sorry for himself. He had not written a single word in a day. It didn’t matter that his typewriter was out of ink and that he had food poisoning from the dumpster chicken she brought home the night before. He didn’t meet his quota and she was going to make good on her promise.

She chose Bosco because he was the most pathetic-looking guy in the bar. Sleeping with strange men was not something she enjoyed. She only did it to piss off her husband, so she picked the most worthless pieces of scum to fuck. And because he had not written a single word, she had planned to spend the night with this total loser.

Bosco had never been able to pick up a girl at a bar, let alone get picked up himself. It was like a dream come true for him. There was finally someone who wanted him, who could maybe even love him. And she was far more beautiful than any woman he had seen before. Her tiny pink smile, her lioness hair, her thin muscled arms; she was absolute perfection to him. He fell in love with her immediately. Not just because she was young and attractive, but because she chose to spend time with him of all people.

The prostitutes he used to pay to sleep with him had two rules: no kissing on the mouth and no cuddling. No matter how much he offered to pay they refused to do those things with him. This was heartbreaking to Bosco, because those are the two things he cared about most. Sex wasn’t that big of a deal to him. He wasn’t very good at it due to problems with impotency and premature ejaculation. All he wanted was to be kissed by a woman, to hold one in his arms.

Rainbow Cat was the first woman he ever kissed. The first woman who slept in his arms. When she kissed him, she did it passionately, as if he was her whole world in that moment. They didn’t just have sex, they made love. They drenched his bed with their passion. And after he came inside of her, she hugged her naked body to him. He wrapped himself around her and she slept in his arms the entire night. For that one night, she belonged to him. But the next morning she was gone.

He looked for her everywhere after that day, imagining all sorts of excuses for why she had not stayed. He thought she obviously had feelings for him, that she loved him. A week later he learned she worked on one of the farms. But after following her home from work, he discovered that she was married to another man. A horrible man who could not possibly love her as much as he did.

The next time he met her alone in the bar, she didn’t make eye contact with him. She left with somebody else that night. It was a large tattooed man with a blond beard. Dan was his name, a regular at the bar and a real shit head. Bosco tried to be friends with Dan once. He bought the guy a beer and Dan still refused to hang out with him. He thought Bosco was gay.

Rainbow didn’t spend the night with Dan that night. She just let him fuck her against a dumpster in an alley a few blocks down. The way the large muscular man rammed himself into her body was disturbing to Bosco. Dan shoved her head in the trash and repeated said how do you like that, bitch? as he fucked her. After he came, Dan smacked her bare ass and left her sitting there naked and sore. She just wiped the slime out of her crotch, gathered her clothing, and went home as if nothing had happened.

On the way back to the bar, Bosco confronted Dan.

“What the fuck were you doing with my girl back there?” Bosco asked him.

Dan looked back with a confused face.

“You?” Dan asked, recognizing him. “Did you follow us you fucking pervert?”

“Yeah, and I saw what you did. Rainbow is my girl. I love her more than anyone ever could.”

“You’re her husband?”

“No, I’m her lover. I love her far more than her husband does.”

“You’re a fucking freak, dude. Get the fuck out of here.”

Bosco got into his face.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “She belongs to me.”

Dan looked down at the scrawny man. “Look, weirdo. You’re starting to piss me off. If you don’t—”

Before Dan could finish, Bosco stabbed him in the face with a broken beer bottle. Dan screamed and fell to the ground, a shard of glass stuck through his eyelid and buried deep into his eye socket. Then Bosco stabbed the bottle repeatedly in his face and chest, until Dan was no longer moving and the bottle had shattered in his hand.

“She’s my beautiful Rainbow,” he said to the corpse, wiping the tears from his eyes.

After that day, Bosco stalked Rainbow. He followed her home from work and watched her sleeping with her husband through their apartment window at night. It wasn’t often that she had sex with other men, but when she did Bosco didn’t let them get away with it. He made sure they shared the same fate as that asshole Dan.

At night, Bosco fantasized about her body sleeping next to his. He wrapped himself around the pillow her head had slept on that night, and imagined it was her body against him. In his dreams, he would kiss her on the mouth and bury his nose deep in her blonde dreadlocked hair. They would make love and live inside of his bed like a tomb for all eternity.

Yesterday night, he had followed Rainbow and Charlie to the restaurant. He assumed Charlie was abusive to her, a horrible human being she wanted to have nothing to do with. That’s why she cheated on him so much. Bosco wanted to help her escape her living hell of a relationship. He planned to kill her husband the next morning, while she was at work. He didn’t want her to go through the anguish of seeing her husband’s murdered body, so he planned to make it appear as if Charlie left her for another woman. Just imagining how happy she would be to get rid of him for good brought a smile to his lips.

But he never got the chance to kill him. At the restaurant, Bosco watched as Rainbow Cat and Charlie collapsed into their plates of food. Their wine had been drugged. Then a man with a white goatee stepped out of the kitchen and went to the couple. Other men in white masks came in from the street, picked up their bodies and brought them into the back. The restaurant was empty save for the manager who appeared to be friends or business partners of the man with the white goatee.

Bosco didn’t know what was going on, but he knew his beautiful Rainbow was in trouble. He pulled a machete out from under his coat, the same weapon he had planned to kill Charlie with, and charged the man with the white goatee.

The men in white masks turned to Bosco as he ran screaming at them. They held out there hands to grab him, but he went in swinging. His machete cut one of their hands in half, split down the middle, spraying blood on the white suit. He chopped another one through the neck, nearly cutting his head off. Before he could get to the man with the white goatee, enough of them had grabbed him to pin him to the ground.

“Wayne,” said one of the white-masked men, “who is this guy?”

“I have no idea,” Wayne said, wiping his hands. “But I like him. Let’s put him on the show.”

They chloroformed Bosco, brought his body in the back, and dropped him on top of Charlie and Rainbow. He didn’t know it through the drugs, but he had snuggled Rainbow Cat again that night, in the back of the helicopter, all the way to the Red Zone.

The producers decided to let him use his own machete in the game. It was the first time anybody had ever been allowed to use their own weapon in the show. When he woke up, Bosco was happy to see that Rainbow was with him. But he was not happy that she was with Charlie. He decided to bide his time, wait for the two of them to separate, wait for Charlie to be killed by the undead, wait to get Rainbow alone, then save her, then they could die together.

Everything had worked out perfectly for him… until he learned that Rainbow Cat had no idea who he was.

“That was a long time ago,” Rainbow told him. “I normally don’t think much about guys after I sleep with them.”

“I’ve never stopped thinking about you.”

Rainbow backs away. “That’s a little strange…”

Bosco steps closer, with his machete reflecting beams of sunlight coming through the ceiling.

“I want you to win this, Rainbow,” he said. “I want to do everything in my power to protect you and keep you safe. All I ask for in return is that you let me die in your arms.”

As he opens his arms, as if to embrace her, Rainbow panics and runs away.

“Stop!” Bosco says.

He chases after her. “Get back here!”

She runs for an exit in the back of the department store. Angry at her for running away, he swings his machete in the air at her back to take out his frustration. He would never hurt her, but right now she’s pissing him off. The sound of the machete swiping at the air behind her makes Rainbow Cat scream.

She trips over some rubble and falls face-first into the cement. Her eyes spin in a daze as she tries to get to her feet.

Bosco drops on top of her and wraps himself around her body. She goes for her dagger, but he pries it from her fingers and tosses it across the room. She kicks at him and screams, but her head is still spinning from the fall.

He snuggles her forcefully, hushing her.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispers into her ear. “I just want to cuddle with you. That’s all I want before I die.”

As her senses return, Rainbow realizes that this freak is snuggle-raping her. He spoons her in the pile of rubble, one arm pressed between her breasts, one leg lying over her legs. She pulls her hand out from under his snuggling arm, then elbows him in the face, breaking his nose

“Get off of me!” she says, wriggling out of his grip.

When she gets to her feet, she faces him.

“You’re so disgusting!” she says.

Bosco stands up, holding his bloody nose.

“You don’t mean that,” he says. “I love you more than anything in the world.”

She says, “I only fucked your ugly pathetic ass to get back at my husband. I figured it would piss him off if I fucked the biggest loser in the bar.”

Bosco points the machete at her. “You don’t mean that.”

She spits at him. “Why the hell would I ever want to be with a loser like you?”

Bosco glares at her.

“You fucking bitch…” he says, angry tears ripping down his face. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

Rainbow bends her knees, getting ready to run away.

“Oh yeah?” Rainbow says. “Go ahead and try it.”

Bosco raises the machete and charges her. She turns to run away, but after ten feet she leaps into the air, spins around like a butterfly, and kicks him in the face. His lower jaw dislocates and he falls to the ground. Rainbow gets into a fighting stance above him, ready to defend herself.

Bosco never knew, nor did her husband, nor did anyone in the Copper Quadrant, but Rainbow was an expert martial artist. Before she was with Charlie, she was in an abusive relationship. She had a boyfriend who used to beat her. A popular soccer player named Teddy who took a liking to her. This was before she had the dreadlocks, before she read Charles Hudson novels.

She liked him at first, because he was so adored by all the other girls. Then she discovered he was a total asshole. He was a bully and flirted with women behind her back. The first time he hit her was the day she tried to break up with him. He made her change her mind, physically. Then he started beating her all the time. He hit her whenever she raised her voice to him. He would throw her to the ground and kick her in the stomach if he found out she talked to another guy. If she refused to give him sex when he wanted it she would go home with blood stains on her clothing. She was too afraid to leave him, too afraid to tell anyone about what he was doing to her.

Then she started taking lessons in self-defense. She studied several books and practiced every moment she wasn’t around him. The next time she told him she was dumping him, he wasn’t able to lay a finger on her. He threw one punch and she broke his arm.

After that, she studied the martial arts for fun. It helped her build confidence and self-esteem, which is what she needed most after the weak cowering creature that Teddy had turned her into. But after she met Charlie, she quit all of her hobbies. She wanted to devote herself completely to his writing. The reason she decided not to tell her husband about her fighting skills was because she didn’t want it to effect their relationship. She knew it might threaten his macho ego to know that his wife could kick his ass in under a minute. Plus, if Charlie ever did become abusive toward her, she wanted her ass-kicking skills to come as a surprise to him.

“I’ll cut your fucking face off,” Bosco says to Rainbow Cat, but she can hardly understand him with his dislocated jaw.

He swings his machete at her, aiming for her hips, but Rainbow catches him by the wrist and bends back his arm. He drops the machete. She punches him twice in the diaphragm, knees him in the stomach, and flips him over her shoulder into the dirt.

“Don’t get up,” she says to him with her foot in his back.

He doesn’t get up.

As she walks away, she feels as though her skills have become pretty rusty, but they’re still there. She’s going to need them if she’s going to be the one to win this competition.

Bosco retrieves his machete and charges her back, aiming to plant the blade directly in the center of her skull. When she turns around, the machete hits her in the throat. Bosco’s eyes widen with regret when he sees the look of shock and sadness on her face.

He pulls out the machete and blood dribbles out of the wound. Rainbow grabs her neck wound, holding in the blood. Then she looks up at Bosco.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

The blade didn’t hit her jugular, so the wound isn’t fatal. But the idea that he came only a centimeter away from ending her life fills Rainbow with rage.

She charges him.

Bosco holds out his machete to defend himself, but it takes Rainbow less than a second to grab his machete arm and break it at the elbow. A sliver of bone tears through the skin of his upper arm and he cries so loud that it attracts zombies in from the street. She stomps on his knee, dislocating it, and he falls to the ground in front of her.

She wraps herself around his back, snuggle-raping him in the same way he had done to her, and puts him in a tight headlock.

“Wait…” Bosco cries.

She flexes her muscled arms around his head, and slowly breaks his neck against her body.

“Don’t…” Bosco says, just before the loud cracking sound.

His body goes limp in her arms.

She tears a piece of fabric from his clothing and wraps it around her throat to stop the bleeding.

“Braiiins,” says a skeleton as it staggers toward her. Four more zombies follow close behind.

She picks up the machete and wipes her blood off of the blade, ready to hack these living corpses into pieces. Before she charges into battle, she looks back at Bosco’s corpse. He looks even twice as pathetic now that he’s dead. She has no pity for losers like him. They are a waste. She could never respect a man who loved her more than anything in the world. The kind of man she loved was one who put his ambitions above all relationships, like Charles Hudson did with his writing.

Rainbow realizes that she did end up giving Bosco what he wanted after all. When she broke his neck, he died in her arms. As she chops the head off the first zombie that comes toward her, she kicks herself for letting the pathetic asshole get his way. She wishes she would have just used the machete to slice open a major artery, and then left him there to bleed to death all alone.

After they find all of the components necessary to build the weapon laid out in the blueprints, Laurence and Haroon look for a safe place to put them all together. They cross a street to a gas station and climb a ladder to get to the rooftop. Junko had told them that zombies were horrible climbers, so Haroon figures that’s the safest place for them at the moment.

On the mold-coated roof, Haroon empties the pack. He spreads out all of the items in the black slime. Then unfolds the blueprints to figure out how to construct the thing.

Haroon knows his way around building weapons, so this isn’t much of a challenge for him. He can tell it is some kind of gun. He puts together the barrel first, then the trigger and the power supply. In less than half an hour, the weapon is constructed: a mess of wires and cables formed into the shape of a rifle.

“What is it?” Laurence asks.

“It can’t be…” Haroon says.

“What?”

Haroon examines closely.

“It’s a completely different model than mine,” Haroon says. “But they perfected it.”

“Perfected what? Spit it out.”

“My solar-powered shotgun,” Haroon says. “This is it. The weapon I had been working on for years… But this thing looks like it could actually work.”

“Let me see,” Laurence says.

He picks up the weapon and aims it at a zombie in the distance. When he pulls the trigger, nothing happens.

“Brains!” the zombie yells at him from the distance.

“It doesn’t work,” Laurence says.

“No, it wouldn’t. Not yet. The power supply needs to be charged up, in the sunlight.”

“How long is it going to take? We don’t have much sun left.”

“I have no idea. We should wait at least an hour.”

“Fine with me,” Laurence says, reclining into a moldy puddle on the roof. “I could use a rest anyway.”

Haroon places the rifle onto a ledge in the direct sunlight.

“You looked like MacGyver putting that thing together,” Laurence says.

“MacGyver? You said that name earlier. Who the heck is MacGyver?”

“Oh, he’s an old television character who used to build laser cannons out of bubble gum and paperclips.”

“You have a television? In Copper?”

“No, this was a long time ago. Back in the 1980’s. I used to be on a show back then, too.”

“The 1980’s? You’re not old enough to have been alive in the 1980’s.”

“I was.”

“That’s impossible.”

Laurence grunts at the sky and says, “Nothing’s impossible.”

Then he tells Haroon his story.

Laurence’s full name is Laurence Tureaud, but he was widely known by the name Mr. T.

Back in the 1980’s, Mr. T was a television star and a cultural icon. Everybody loved him. He was the most badass motherfucker on television, the epitome of cool. But then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He spent several years coming to terms with his disease, fighting the cancer every step of they way so that he could spend as many years with his family as possible. But eventually, the disease got to the point where the doctors just couldn’t do anything for him anymore.

The thought of losing Mr. T was just too much for America. A fundraiser was started to help keep the national hero alive. Although no money in the world could cure his cancer, enough money was raised to have him cryogenically frozen. So for sixty-three years, Mr. T has been suspended in time. He missed Z-Day and the apocalypse, he missed the 50 years of struggle the world had endured since then.

A couple of years ago, a scientist named Jacob Wyslen brought Mr. T back to life. He was a researcher who had a lab on a small island off the east coast. After Z-Day hit, several research stations were put together around the country, all of them with a mission to put an end to the zombie problem. After thirty years, Wyslen’s was the only one that remained. He started with a staff of twenty scientists and soldiers, but these people didn’t last very long. He sent them on dangerous missions into the Red Zone and very few of them came back alive. One day, he realized he was all alone.

Because he couldn’t do his work all by himself, Wyslen decided to resurrect the people who were frozen in the storage. He went from chamber to chamber, trying to bring the bodies back to life. On all occasions, he failed… apart from one. He was able to resurrect Mr. T.

“This isn’t the world Mr. T was expecting to come back to, Doc,” he told Dr. Wyslen, as the doctor examined his motor functions.

“I can put you back if you want?” the old man said.

“No thanks,” said Mr. T. “I would rather help you take down those dead things than live like a dead thing.”

For months, Mr. T assisted the doctor with his research. He proved to be much more useful than the doctor had expected. Not only was he able to go on missions in the Red Zone and come back alive, he also proved intelligent enough to brainstorm theories with him.

“You see, Doc,” Mr. T told him in the large empty cafeteria, “you’re goin’ about this all wrong. You can’t just freeze the undead suckas. They crave brains, and the electrochemical impulses it sends out through the body. That means they must survive on these impulses. I say you work on a nerve gas that’ll take out their whole nervous system. Do that and it’s goodbye zombies.”

“But nerve gas would also kill the surviving humans in the area,” said Wyslen.

“There ain’t nobody left alive out there. It’s just zombies. Mr. T says gas the whole place and be done with them.”

“But nerve gas is pretty useless out in the open. It would just dissipate in the atmosphere.”

“How about putting a fumigation tent over the whole country? Then gas ‘em.”

The doctor laughed. “It would probably be easier to just drop some bombs.”

Mr. T laughed with him. He said, “Now you’re talking,” and slapped the doctor on the back so hard he almost fell out of his chair.

The doctor didn’t work on a nerve gas, but he did invent a sonic device that worked as a repellant for the undead. It was kind of a high-pitched vibration that drove zombies crazy, like a dog whistle.

Wyslen died before his work was completed. Before his death, he asked Mr. T to take his research and bring it to the island of Neo New York. He wanted Mr. T to assist the scientists there with completing his work. With some time and the right resources, his device could become the breakthrough invention that would finally solve the zombie problem for good.

“I’ll make sure they finish your work,” Mr. T told the doctor on his death bed. “Otherwise, they’ll have to answer to Brick and Mortar.”

“Brick and Mortar?” the doctor asked.

“Those are the new names for Mr. T’s fists.”

Doctor Wyslen laughed himself to sleep. He never woke up after that.

After an hour, Haroon’s ready to test the weapon.

“Hopefully there’s some zombies nearby so we can test it from safety,” Haroon says.

When they go to the edge, they see a large horde surrounding the gas station.

“Braaiins!” the zombies yell when they see their heads popping up from the roof.

“You sure we’re safe up here?” asks Mr. T.

“Junko said those things can’t climb, so I figured this would be the safest place.”

“Just because they can’t climb doesn’t mean they can’t mob,” Mr. T says. “If that shotgun thingy of yours don’t work we might be trapped up here for good.”

“Well, let’s try it out,” Haroon says. “Hopefully it works better than the one I created.”

Haroon aims the weapon at the crowd of zombies below. When he pulls the trigger, a beam of energy shoots out of the barrel and shreds four of the walking corpses below.

Mr. T smiles. “It don’t shoot like no shotgun, but it sure hits like one.”

Haroon pumps the shotgun and fires again, blowing zombie limbs and body parts into the air. He shoots again. Then again. After thirty shots, the zombies are still coming at him, but he’s not running out of bullets. Just as he always planned the solar-powered shotgun would work.

“You’re pretty good with that thing,” says Mr. T. “Even though it’s technically supposed to be my weapon, I’ll trade you for the club.”

“You’d rather have the club?”

“That gun sure does the job well, but I’d rather have a weapon I can trust. The club will do just fine.”

“Sure,” Haroon says, then blasts the legs out from under another zombie.

When Mr. T arrived at the island of Neo New York, he was greeted only with hostility. The small sailboat he had taken from Dr. Wyslen’s island was stopped a mile off shore by the NNY Coast Guard. Two ships pulled up alongside his boat and he was forced to allow them to board.

Six men with automatic rifles came aboard, all of the weapons pointed at his face. Mr. T raised his hands.

“Are you armed?” asked the Lieutenant.

“Mr. T don’t need weapons to protect himself,” said Mr. T.

“Are you alone?” the young officer asked Mr. T.

“Yeah.”

After they searched his ship, the Lieutenant asked some more questions.

“Do you have business on the island or are you just looking for safe harbor?”

Mr. T responded, “I was sent by Dr. Jacob Wyslen of the Z-19 Project.”

“Never heard of him.”

“That’s not my problem,” Mr. T said. “He told me to give his research to the zombie research division on this island.”

“Zombie research division?” The Lieutenant laughed. “We don’t have a zombie research division.”

“Then who’s working on solving the living dead problem on the mainland?”

The soldiers look at each other with large smiles, then look back at Mr. T.

“They gave up on that decades ago,” said the Lieutenant. “The zombie problem hasn’t been a problem of ours for a very long time.”

“Then you shouldn’t have given up so easily,” Mr. T said. “My friend Dr. Wyslen continued his research over the past fifty years until the day he died. He finally came up with something that just might be a solution to make the mainland safe again.”

“And what solution might that be?”

“It’s a kind of zombie repellent device. If I can get the right minds looking at this research, I believe this device can be constructed.”

“It sounds like a load of bull,” said the Lieutenant.

“You don’t have to believe me. You just have to let me through. Leave the believing up to the scientists who might actually understand this jibber jabber.”

“Fine,” said the Lieutenant. “But your boat will be impounded. You’ll have to ride with us.”

“Whatever you say,” said Mr. T. “Just as long as I get this research into the right hands.”

When all of the zombies are writhing on the ground, Haroon and Mr. T climb down the ladder and continue on their way. In the distance, in every direction they look, there are hundreds of zombies staggering through the streets.

“More and more of those things are coming out,” says Mr. T. “And it’s going to be dark soon. We better find some shelter for the night if we ever want to see tomorrow.”

Haroon contemplates the zombie numbers up ahead. Then he says, “We shouldn’t find cover yet, not until it’s dark. We have to make as much progress as possible if we’re ever going to catch up to the others.”

“I don’t like it,” says Mr. T, “but whatever you say.”

“We shouldn’t have too much of a problem now that we have this weapon on our side.”

“I already told you, I don’t trust that gun. It’s a great invention, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not something Mr. T would rely on.”

“It’ll work just fine,” Haroon says. “Trust me.”

Mr. T nods. Then they move on, deeper into the city, deeper into the ocean of the living dead.

They didn’t allow Mr. T to enter Platinum to meet with the top researchers who lived there. One of the scientists came out to meet him in Copper, and by the looks of it they sent the lowest ranking member of the staff.

The doctor asked to see Wyslen’s documents and Mr. T handed them over.

After scanning through the pages for a few minutes, the young man said, “I’ll have to show these to the higher ups to see what they think. Are you staying here?”

“Yeah,” Mr. T said.

“Great. I’ll keep in touch.”

As the man walked back to the gates with Wyslen’s research in his hands, Mr. T yelled out, “Tell them I’ve got a lot of ideas on how to get it operational. I worked closely with Dr. Wyslen for quite some time.”

Then the gate closed behind the young scientist, then Mr. T went up to the gate and put his hands on the bars.

“And tell them if they don’t make this happen they will have to answer to Brick and Mortar.”

The man waved back at Mr. T without turning around.

He never heard from the scientist ever again and the Coast Guard never returned his boat, so he was left stranded in Copper with no home, no job, and nothing left to do. So he moved into an abandoned shack on the beach. It wasn’t much but it was shelter. He started crabbing for food and would sometimes sell crabs at the market. People in Copper didn’t have much money, so he didn’t sell them for very much. Later, he taught the other beggars in his shantytown how to fish and crab, but after a while so many of them started doing it that there weren’t enough crabs left to go around. Still, he was happy his vagrant friends were able to eat a little better.

One day, Mr. T saw a group of kids doing Waste under the peer. When he saw what they were doing, he charged right up to them and took the drugs out of their hands.

“What do you kids think you’re doing?” asked Mr. T. “Do you know how bad drugs are for you? You should be thinking about your futures, not wasting it on this trash.”

“Give it back, asshole!” said a ten year old street punk.

“You mouth off to me again and I’m gonna smack that mouth off your face,” said Mr. T, pointing his finger at the punk. “Now, you kids can do anything with your lives. You don’t need this to have fun.” He holds the drugs up to them. “You should have fun by playing basketball or practicing guitar.”

“Give it back, scumbag!” yelled a little 9-year-old girl with a shaved head.

“You’re not getting it back,” said Mr. T, raising his voice. “I’m trying to tell you how this stuff will get in the way of your dreams.”

Then the little girl put out her cigarette on his forehead. Mr. T screamed and the kids grabbed their Waste out of his hands and took off running across the beach. Mr. T ran after them for ten yards before giving up. He kicked a pile of seaweed into the ocean.

“And what were you going to do if you caught up to them?” Lee asked Mr. T, sitting on the beach in front of him, drinking a cup of the snake piss the Copper Quadrant calls whiskey.

“I was going to teach them a lesson about drugs,” said Mr. T.

“What for?” Lee said. “Those kids are prostitutes, thieves, and dealers. All they’ve got is drugs.”

“If they got off of drugs who knows what they could do with their lives,” Mr. T said.

“There’s nothing they can do, Laurence. This is Copper. Once you’re in Copper there’s no moving up in the world. If you’re born in the shit you die in the shit.”

“I don’t like you’re attitude, Lee,” said Mr. T. “There’s always a hope for a better life. If the people in Copper just came together we could clean up this place. We could turn it into a clean, safe place for children to grow up in.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

“Well, first of all, we get rid of the drug problem.”

“What?” Lee laughed at him. “It can’t be done.”

“Don’t you think there’s a problem with drugs here?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Well, if there’s a problem then there’s got to be a solution.” Mr. T

punched his fists together, then said, “And that solution’s name is Mr. T.”

Haroon and Mr. T go a mile deep into the zombie-packed streets of downtown, blasting their way through the horde. The first zombie that comes up from behind, Mr. T attacks with his spiked club. The bat goes through the zombie’s face and gets stuck in its mouth. The zombie bites down and thrashes it out of T’s hand, then blindly runs in the opposite direction.

Weaponless, Mr. T looks down at his hands.

“And you said you could trust that weapon better than this?” Haroon asks, holding up his solar-powered shotgun.

Mr. T smiles.

“Just because I don’t have a weapon,” he says, “doesn’t mean I’m not armed.” Then he punches a zombie’s head off of its shoulders.

The duo go a half mile farther down the street until there are so many zombies they come to a standstill. Haroon can only shoot them down quick enough to hold them back, not quick enough to enable them to move forward. The zombies come at them from all sides.

“They’re coming in from behind,” Haroon says. “Fall back, to the east.”

“We got this!” Mr. T yells, throwing punches at the living dead coming at them.

“Fall back!”

“We got this!”

Haroon breaks away from Mr. T and runs down a side street to get away from the main horde. Mr. T doesn’t follow. zombies fill the space between them.

“Come on,” Haroon says, trying to shoot a path for his large friend.

But Mr. T keeps on fighting, no matter how bleak the situation looks.

Mr. T learned that the head of the drug trade was Tim Lion. He was the inventor of Waste, and he pretty much owned Copper. The moment he discovered that Tim Lion owned a club in the downtown area of the quadrant, Mr. T decided he was going to give the chump a visit.

He stormed into the club in his red jumpsuit, pushing strippers out of his way and knocking over platters of Waste that were carried by waitresses from table to table. He went straight for the big man in the back, the one in the green top hat.

Tim Lion was surrounded by armed men and naked women. He was drinking a cosmo and eating buttered lobster over pasta.

“Are you Tim Lion?” he asked the man. “Mr. T wants a word with him.”

“Who the fuck is Mr. T?” Lion asked.

“You’re looking at him, fool!”

The gangster was almost amused by Mr. T’s forwardness. He decided to hear him out before he had his men kill him.

“Mr. T don’t like the way you’re selling drugs to kids,” said Mr. T, leaning in as close as possible. “Scum like you give the good folks of Copper a bad name.”

“Is this guy for real?” Lion asked.

“I’m going to clean up this town,” said Mr. T. “Starting with you.”

Tim Lion looked at his men and said, “Get rid of this idiot.”

Mr. T clothes-lined one of his men over the back of his chair, and kicked over the table, spilling Lion’s food and drink into his lap. The entire bar looked over at them.

“Kill this asshole!” Lion yelled.

Mr. T grabbed a man’s wrist before he could draw his gun, then headbutted him, knocking him to the floor. As he raised his fist in Lion’s direction, three gunshots rang out across the table. The bullets hit Mr. T square in the chest.

Mr. T continues punching zombies as they come at him, knocking them to the street.

Haroon fires at the zombies furiously. “I can’t hold them off much longer.”

“Just get out of here,” Mr. T yells, tossing a zombie over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Haroon says.

“I’ll be fine,” Mr. T says, raising his fist to punch out another zombie.

Before he could throw his punch, a zombie grabs Mr. T’s fist and bites down on his arm.

“T!” Haroon yells, as the zombie’s teeth break through the fabric of Mr. T’s clothing.

Haroon turns and moves on. He knows his friend has to be infected now. There’s no hope for him. Haroon has to go on by himself.

As Haroon disappears down the street, Mr. T gives the zombie on his arm a growling face. The zombie growls back, with his arm in its mouth.

“How come this guy isn’t dead?” Tim Lion asked his men, as Mr. T still stood there in front of them with three bullets placed directly in his chest.

“He didn’t even fall down,” one of his men said. “That should have killed him.”

Mr. T just glanced down at the holes in his red jumpsuit, then looked up at Tim Lion with a snarl on his face.

“I’m not just Mr. T, fool!” he said, ripping open his clothes to reveal a robot body made of gold-plated stainless steel. “I’m the motherfucking T-2000!”

The zombie’s eyes roll with confusion as all of its teeth crumble out of its head. Mr. T throws the corpse to the ground and pulls off his hooded sweatshirt. His golden metal body glimmers in the twilit sky.

Then he swings his fist of steel through three zombies at once, their heads exploding into a splash of red soup.

When Mr. T was cryogenically frozen, they did not preserve his entire body. They only preserved his head. So before Doctor Jacob Wyslen resurrected him, he had built Mr. T a robot body. One that was powerful enough to go on missions into the Red Zone and still come back in one piece. He still had artificial organs and still had to eat, sleep, and breathe like a normal human, but Mr. T’s new body was not made of flesh. It was made of steel.

When Wyslen showed Mr. T his new body in a mirror for the first time, Mr. T nodded in approval. Then he pointed at the numbers on the chest.

“T-2000?” Mr. T asked.

“That’s the model number,” Wyslen said. “The previous one I built was the S-1000. This is the first one that actually kept its host alive. There are several earlier models, but this is the best of them.”

“Why did you build these things?”

“I used to think that the best way to survive in a world of the living dead was for mankind to exchange their flesh for machinery.”

“That sounds almost as bad as becoming one of those dead things,” said Mr. T.

“You’re not happy with it?”

“I didn’t say that, Doc. Living in a metal body is better than being dead with no body.”

“Good.”

Mr. T checked his metal musculature out in the mirror, noticing that his muscle size was even larger than his previous life.

“T-2000,” Mr. T said to himself. “I like the ring to that.” Then he looked more carefully at his hands. “But this drab metal color has got to go…”

“Oh?” asked the doctor. “We can paint it if you want.”

“Not paint,” said Mr. T, then he pointed at a mountain of gold jewelry in a crate near his cryogenic chamber. “Melt all that down. Mr. T’s metal body needs some gold-plating.”

Then he gave the doctor a big twinkling smile.

The T-2000 stood in front of Tim Lion in his men. Their mouths dropped open at the sight of him.

“Now do you want to promise to quit selling drugs, or is Mr. T gonna have to pound some sense into the lot of you?”

Machine guns opened fire on him as a response. The bullets ricocheted off of his body, sending sparks into the air. The T-2000 just swatted them away like mosquitoes.

Mr. T punched his fist through a gangster’s chest, ripping his heart out through the backside. As the heart stopped beating in his golden hand, Mr. T said, “If you had a real heart you’d stop selling drugs to kids.”

Then he used the gangster’s corpse like a battering ram and drove its head through a bald man’s stomach. The bald man puked up his guts as he died.

“All of these scumbags make me want to puke, too,” Mr. T said to the dead gangster.

After the T-2000 dismembered and decapitated every last gangster in the club, filling the room with blood and gore, he went for the big man, Tim Lion, who was cowering on the floor in the corner, hiding under his green top hat.

“You better listen to the T-2000,” he told the cowering drug lord. “Crime doesn’t pay. And even if it does pay, there’s taxes on that pay. And the T-2000 is the tax man, come to collect. And he makes sure you pay your taxes in full, on time. And you can’t write off nothing, not even a company car.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Tim Lion asked.

Mr. T thought about it and realized his metaphor had gotten a little too convoluted.

“Forget it,” Mr. T said.

Then he ripped the man’s brain out through the top of his top hat.

On the way back to his shack on the beach, Mr. T came across the group of kids who had been doing drugs under the peer.

The kids began to shrink and tremble as they saw his blood-coated gold metal body towering over them.

“Don’t worry, kids,” he said. “I took care of that drug pusher for you. Now you don’t have to do drugs anymore. You’re going to have a bright future.”

Then he gave the kids a bright smile and a thumbs up.

The kids ran away.

As he continued down the street, whistling, a man with a white goatee stepped out of the shadows behind a strip club.

“I want him,” the man said to his associates in white masks.

“Now?”

He shook his head. “Wait until he’s at home, asleep. I wouldn’t want to get any more of you killed after that last guy went psycho on us.”

The men in white masks agreed, staring at the large metal man as he strutted happily down the street, envisioning a brighter tomorrow.

Heinz walks casually over charred corpses, heading toward the sound of two fellow contestants. It is the punk kid and that Japanese ex-host of the show. Their shoes are caked in thick meat mud as they trample over piles of mannequin limbs and cat skeletons, fleeing down the alleyway. Heinz hides behind a wall of charred yellow bricks, peeking out at them, ready to unleash a cloud of flames as they pass. But then he notices they are being chased by a pack of weaponized cyborg zombie dogs, snarling and thrashing and firing machinegun ammo. He decides it might be best to keep out of this fight.

Scavy and Junko collapse in a pile of blue flowers growing from black mulch behind a dumpster, catching their breaths.

“Did we lose them?” Junko asks.

Scavy looks back.

“They are chasing one of the floating cameras,” he says, watching the mechjaws jumping up and snapping at a floating camera ball. The camera shoots lasers at their feet, trying to scare them away.

Junko laughs. She bets it really pisses off Wayne that his own cameras accidentally distracted the mechjaws long enough for her to escape.

“You think the hippy made it?” Scavy asks, stomping a blue flower into the concrete.

“Probably not,” Junko says. “Even if she got away from the dogs and the collapsing building, there’s no way a weak little rich girl like her could make it alone out there with only a dagger.”

“So what do we do now?”

“It’s almost dark,” Junko says. “We should find shelter. Very few contestants who try to travel at night survive long.”

“Where?” Scavy asks.

Junko points at a tall white castle-shaped building a few blocks down.

“There,” she says. “The castle building. It should be safe there until dawn.”

They get up and head for the white building, passing Heinz pressed up against a wall with his flamethrower pointed at the ground.

Heinz steps into the street.

“So you’re going there, are you?” he says to their backs as they run into the distance. “I’ll be sure to kill you there later, you Japanese trash.”

Heinz hates the Japanese. He hates all races apart from the superior Aryan race, but the Japanese he hates most of all. That’s why Junko is at the top of his hit list.

White people are a minority in Neo New York. The dominant race is Asian, mostly Japanese. After Z-Day, Japan was one of the last countries to be hit with the zombie outbreak and one of the first to learn about it. They had plenty of time to prepare themselves. They fortified their cities, they evacuated VIPs to secure islands in the Pacific, they loaded people onto ships and spread them out into the sea. Of course, none of their efforts worked out according to plan. Letting one infected person into a fortified city would wipe out most of the population within a couple of days. Loading up boats full of people and sending them out to sea keeps them from getting infected, but they’re going to run out of food and supplies eventually. Though most of their population was wiped out, Japan still faired better than most countries.

It was the Japanese survivors that helped the American survivors build Neo New York. They had more resources and were better organized. When the class system was established for the construction of Neo New York, the Gold and Platinum Quadrants were populated with mostly Japanese survivors, whereas the Silver and Copper Quadrants were mostly American.

Heinz was born in Silver, in a German-American neighborhood. But as a teenager he was moved to Platinum when his father got a position at the new university that had opened up. It was very rare for entire families to be moved from Silver to Platinum, but they made some exceptions for university faculty. The high school Heinz attended was predominantly Japanese, with some Indian and Chinese students. The few students who were considered white were Jewish or half-Japanese. Heinz was the only blue-eyed blond kid in the school.

The other kids didn’t like him. Not only because his eyes, skin, and hair were different, but because he was low class. He had come from Silver. He didn’t belong. Because of his white skin, the kids called him Cum Face.

“How’s it taste, Cum Face?” a Japanese kid told him as he shoved his face into a mound of dog shit. “Does it taste like home? Did you used to have to eat dog shit for lunch in Silver because your family was so poor?”

Heinz wanted to fight back, but that would only make it worse.

“Maybe we should put shit in your eyes, too, so they won’t be blue anymore.”

They rubbed shit in his hair, on his skin. Then the group of five Japanese boys kicked him repeatedly. When they were done, they laughed.

“It’s a good look for you,” one kid said. “You’re not quite as ugly with shit all over you.”

“From now on,” said another, “you have to wear shit all the time. We’re sick of looking at your ugly cum skin and snot-colored hair.”

Another said, “If we see you and you’re not wearing shit on your skin we’ll kick your ass.”

When Heinz arrived at home covered in shit, his father was displeased with him.

“You let those inferior slanty-eyed rodents do this to you?” his father yelled. “You are Aryan, the descendent of Germans. Have you no pride?”

“But there were five of them,” Heinz said.

His father slapped him. “One Aryan is worth a hundred of them. A million. You are racially superior to them.”

His father lifted his shirt to reveal a large black swastika tattooed over his heart.

“Do you see this?” his father said, pointing at his tattoo. “This is a symbol of pride. One day you too will wear this symbol, if you prove worthy of it. You must never cower before such vermin. It is better to die than to shame your race in such a manner.”

“I’m the only Aryan in the school,” he said.

“One day that will change,” his father said. “Until that day you must endure. You must show these scum what a true Aryan is made of. You will not show any weakness. You will prove the quality of your genes. You will show them your race is the master race. Is this clear?”

Heinz nodded and then his father helped him clean the shit off of his face.

Heinz freezes when he hears the sound of growling coming from behind him. He turns around slowly. A large mechjaw is facing him, pointing its Gatling gun at his chest.

“Nice doggy,” Heinz says with a smile. The dog growls at him.

Heinz reaches into Adriana’s pack and pulls out her weapon: a blowgun. Slowly, without making any sudden moves, he brings the blowgun close to his lips.

“It’s okay.” His voice calm and soothing. “No need to shoot.”

Just as the Gatling gun is about to fire, whirring into motion, Heinz blows a dart into the dog’s neck. The gun shuts off before any bullets come out. The dog’s body twitches and then falls to the street, paralyzed.

“That’s a good dog,” Heinz says, placing the blowgun back into the bag.

The nerve toxin in the darts might not do any damage to the undead, but it numbs their muscles and nervous system for a short amount of time, immobilizing them. At first he thought the blowgun would be a useless weapon out here, but now that he’s run into a mechjaw he sees how useful it can be.

Heinz kneels down to the undead dog. With his gloved hand, he pets the hair on its slimy head, staring into its black hungry eyes.

“Why aren’t you covered in shit?” a Japanese bully asked Heinz the next time they saw him.

There were seven of them this time.

“We told you to wear shit from now on,” said another. “Otherwise we’d kick your ass.”

“I considered it,” Heinz said. “But I decided not to.”

Heinz changed directions to take a shortcut behind a shopping center. The bullies followed.

“Why not, Cum Face?”

“Because I didn’t want to look like the lot of you,” Heinz said.

Two of the bullies got in front of him so that he couldn’t move forward anymore.

“What did you say, Cum Face? You saying our skin looks like shit?”

Heinz got in the kid’s face. “You heard me, insect. Now get out of my way. I’m sick of looking at your filthy skin.”

The kid punched Heinz in the eye. He was wearing an iron skull-shaped ring that cut open the puffy flesh around the Aryan’s eyebrow. Heinz looked back at him, a thin trickle of blood on his cheek.

“Don’t you dare ever touch me again with those disgusting hands,” Heinz said.

The kid punched him again, causing more blood to erupt from his forehead.

“This is your last warning,” Heinz said. “Do not touch me again.”

The kid raised his arm to throw a third punch. Then Heinz stabbed him in the head with a crab fork. The boy screamed as blood squirted out of the hole on his forehead. Two boys tried to grab the Aryan, but he turned on them before they could pin him down.

Heinz stabbed the thin two-pronged fork into one of their eyes, scooping out the eyeball like a scallop from its shell. The kid dropped to the ground, shrieking. Then Heinz stabbed the other in the neck. This bully did not cry out. He stepped back, holding his neck. A look of horror crossed his face as blood geysered from his jugular over his fingers, showering the pavement and the other bullies.

When they saw this, all of the kids ran away, except for two: the leader with the hole in his forehead and the kid with the neck wound, bleeding to death by Heinz’s feet.

“One day all of you cockroaches will fall to the master race,” Heinz told the lead bully, flicking the eyeball off the crab fork.

The bully cried at Heinz, begging for mercy. The blood from his stab wound ran down his nose and mixed with his tears.

“I’m sorry,” said the bully. “I’m so sorry.”

As the bully’s friend lay motionless in a puddle of blood, a horrible stench of feces filled the air. The kid had shit his pants after he died.

Heinz looked at the dead kid’s ass.

“I want you to smear his shit all over your face and hair,” Heinz said, impersonating the Japanese kid’s voice. “If you don’t I’ll kick your ass.”

The bully cried as he pulled handfuls of shit out his dead friend’s pants and rubbed it on his skin and hair. The shit collected in the hole on his head, mixing with the blood and crumbs of skull.

“That is why your race is pitiful,” Heinz said, bringing the crab fork to the kid’s throat. “An Aryan would never disgrace himself like that, no matter what the cost.”

Night falls and the streets fill with the living dead. A cloud covering blocks out all light from the moon and stars, drowning the city in black. The only thing that lights Heinz’ way is the fire from his flamethrower and the burning corpses as they hit the ground.

The zombie mob stretches as far as he can see in all directions, a great sea of writhing molten flesh. The fifteen foot circle around Heinz is the only empty space that he can see for blocks.

In this close of a fight, Heinz discovers a major problem with using a flamethrower as his weapon: flaming zombies. After he burns them, they do not immediately fall to the ground. They continue shambling toward him with their flesh on fire, trying to wrap themselves around him. If the zombies get too close to the gas canisters on his back it is likely to cause an explosion.

Heinz has to switch between the flamethrower and Brick’s double-fisted sledgehammer. Once he ignites the zombies and the flaming corpses come after him, he swings the sledge at their midsections and sends them hurling back into the crowd.

Up ahead, Heinz notices two small lights in the sky. When he focuses his vision, he can tell they are flashlights shining from the window of an office building a few blocks down. Somebody is camping out there for the night.

Heinz knows his fuel tank won’t last for much longer if he continues using it at this rate. He’ll have to move indoors as soon as possible. Perhaps whoever is camping up there in that building has a secure enough setup to last through the night. He decides to make that his destination. Whoever is up there, they will have to share their shelter with him if they want to live.

When Heinz returned home to his father covered in blood, his father was furious. Heinz proudly told him the story of how he stood up to those Japanese insects.

“You idiot,” his father yelled. “You’ve ruined everything!”

Heinz didn’t understand.

“I’ve spent twenty years trying to get to the position I am at now. There are only three other members of the Brotherhood who have infiltrated the Platinum Quadrant.”

“The Brotherhood?”

“The Brotherhood of the Fifth Reich. Our mission is to take this island from those slanty-eyed rodents and convert this nation into a proud Aryan state, under Nazi control. We have people in key positions all over the island. When you were old enough, you too were supposed to play a crucial role in the uprising. Then you went and murdered the sons of important government officials.”

“It was self-defense,” Heinz said.

“It doesn’t matter,” his father said. “You don’t have a future anymore. You can’t stay here.”

“Where will I go?”

“Pack your things,” his father said. “I’m going to send you off of the island, to join the others.”

“What others?”

“The rest of our forces,” said his father. “The Fists of the Fifth Reich.”

Heinz fights his way into the lobby of the building, the zombie mass flooding in behind him. The door to the stairwell is electronically locked. With his back against the wall, he has no other choice but to get through this way. He uses the sledgehammer on the window, which is just a thin strip of plexi-glass down the upper left side of the door. The first blow does nothing. The second swing creates a popping noise. Heinz turns around and blows fire at the mob as it closes in. With the third swing, he uses all of his strength. He won’t have time for a fourth.

“Brains!” cries the mob of molten flesh reaching for him.

The glass breaks open. Heinz sticks his hand through the hole and opens the door from the inside. He enters and shuts the door behind him. The undead reach their arm through the slot, but likely aren’t intelligent enough to get the door open.

Heinz climbs the stairs, using the tiny flame of his weapon to lead him through the dark. As he takes the first flight, he hears the sounds of the undead in the stairwell a few floors down. They are coming up from the underground parking levels, attracted to the echoes of his human footsteps.

The nazis claim there were five notable reichs in history. The Holy Roman Empire was the First Reich. The Great German Empire of 1871-1918 was the Second Reich. When Adolf Hitler was in power, he created the Third Reich which was the birth of Nazism. The Fourth Reich, formed by postwar neo-nazis, was an underground movement that attempted to bring nazi values back to the Aryan people. Now there is the Fifth Reich, which formed soon after Z-Day, after the fall of civilization.

It started with a group of neo-nazi skinheads who had survived in a bunker in Tennessee. They welcomed all survivors into their facility, but only Aryans who supported their ideals were allowed to join them. All others were fed to the undead for their amusement. They grew in numbers until they were able to embark on an exodus toward the coast, where they found their new home for the next forty years: a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. And, like most nuclear-powered vessels of the time, it had enough uranium fuel in its reactors to last them for several decades.

After they cleared the ship of naval zombies and claimed it for their own, they named it the Fifth Reich.

Their mission was to redesign the new world in the way God had intended: a world dominated by the one true master race. They created a breeding program. Aryan women became breeding slaves whose only purpose was to bear their young. Only the purest, strongest, and most intelligent Aryans were allowed to breed with them. Heinz’s father was born through this breeding program. He was bred to be a leader, a man who would one day bring their ideals to the people of Neo New York.

Heinz was delivered to the aircraft carrier by a small fishing boat, owned by brothers of the Fifth Reich living in Copper. On the boat ride over, Heinz imagined how majestic this colony of Aryans must be. A nation of proud, mighty white men. But when he arrived, it was not at all as he expected it to be. Things had changed greatly since the day his father had left the Brotherhood to infiltrate the island of Neo New York.

The people on the ship were starving and weak. They had long lost hope of ever taking the island. And worst of all, they were no longer proud of their race. Since the majority of them had never even met a member of another race, they didn’t understand what was so special about their own. They didn’t understand their own magnificence.

“What is wrong with these people?” Heinz asked the Captain of the ship. “They are weak and have no spirit in them. Do you call this an army?”

The Captain leaned back in his chair and put his shredded boots onto his desk.

“It hasn’t been an army for a long time,” said the Captain. “Not since I’ve been in charge of this ship. My predecessor was your grandfather, a stubborn idealistic fool who was so determined to build a grand army that he didn’t realize that we didn’t have the food and resources to support so many men. He overpopulated the ship. The men were starving, but your grandfather didn’t care. All he cared about was preparing for a war that was never going to happen.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was killed by his own men. After he cut their rations down to a fifth, his men couldn’t take it anymore. They shot him dead one night while he was sleeping. As his second in command, I took over the ship. I promised these people we would focus entirely on our own survival and forget about the war. You might think those men out there are starving and weak, but they are much better off than they were five years ago.”

Heinz slammed his fist on the table.

“Better off?” Heinz yelled. “They would be better off dead than the pathetic wretches they have become. Your men are the Fists of the Fifth Reich. They should have the intelligence to thrive even in the harshest of circumstances. If you were a proper leader you would not have let this become of your men.”

“What the fuck do you know, kid?” the Captain said. “Since birth you’ve lived in the luxury of the Platinum District. What do you know of hardship and survival? You’ve had everything you could possibly want.”

“I have not lived long in Platinum. I was born in the slums of the Silver District.”

The Captain laughed. “The slums of Silver? Any one of these men would kill the both of us just to live one year in Silver. Even the people in Copper have better lives than most of the men on this ship.”

“It doesn’t matter where I’m from,” Heinz said. “I am Aryan and I will not allow my people to live like scum.”

“Get out of my office,” the Captain said. “I’m through talking to you. You’ll learn soon enough.”

“And you’ll learn just what a true Aryan can do,” Heinz said on the way out the door. “The Fists of the Fifth Reich will be strong once again. Stronger than ever before. I will make certain of that.”

“Sure, kid. Just get the fuck out of here.”

By the end of his first day on the ship, Heinz decided he would make it his mission to bring pride back to these fallen people. He would bring them out of the muck and restore them to the great people they were destined to be.

When Heinz arrives at the lighted floor of the office building, the door to the stairwell is wide open. He looks up ahead to see the lights coming from an office a few doors down. He shuts the door behind him, and creeps toward the sound of voices.

“You’re making me sick,” says a female voice.

Another female voice giggles and moans.

“It’s so fucking hot,” says the other voice.

“It’s disgusting.”

When Heinz peeks around the corner into the room, he finds two women in punk clothing. The one with the green hair is facing the other, completely naked with her hands in her crotch, her back arched. Upon closer inspection, Heinz realizes that the green-haired punk has a severed zombie head in her lap. All of its teeth have been removed so that it doesn’t bite into her. She writhes and moans as the zombie licks and gums her clit and labia, trying to eat her flesh. Black slime leaks from the corpse’s cheeks down the girl’s inner thighs.

“Make me cum,” Gogo tells the zombie head, then she licks her lips at the camera ball floating above them.

Popcorn is sitting on the floor, cringing at her friend’s unsettling display. She watches as Gogo whimpers and sweats with ecstasy.

“Oh fuck,” Gogo cries. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

As she comes closer to orgasm, Gogo shoves the head so hard into her crotch that the zombie’s lower jaw breaks in half. She pulls the head beneath her body and presses all of her weight against it, crying out as she cums. The skull cracks open like an egg and her ass crushes it flat against the seat of the chair.

When Gogo stands up, stretching and rubbing the zombie goo covering her buttocks, she looks down at the remains of the zombie head. It is now just a puddle of bone and slimy meat on the chair. One of its eyeballs rolls to the side of the mush to stare at Gogo as she rubs its liquid flesh up her crotch to her breasts.

“That was amazing,” she tells the remains of her undead lover.

Popcorn drops her face into her hand and groans. It was bad enough her friend had sex with that corpse, but rubbing its rancid jellied flesh on her body goes too far. That smell is going to linger. Popcorn doesn’t know if she’s going to be able to handle being around Gogo for very long. When Popcorn takes her hand away from her eyes, she sees a man standing in the doorway over Gogo’s shoulder.

Heinz steps into the office with a look of disgust and rage on his face. When Gogo turns around to him, she goes for her submachine gun on the desk. Heinz kicks her in the chest and she falls back. He casually takes the machine gun from the desk and points it at them.

“You filthy whores,” Heinz says to them. “How can you degrade yourselves in this manner?”

Gogo laughs at him. Heinz steps forward and backhand slaps her so hard she falls to the ground. While the nazi isn’t looking, Popcorn flats her bangs into her face so that the guy doesn’t see the bullet hole in her head.

“My eyes tell me that you are Aryan women. Perhaps your ancestry is not Nordic or Germanic, but you look at least Celtic or Anglo-Saxon.”

The girls have no idea what he’s talking about. Those raised in Copper are usually ignorant of race and ancestry.

“You whores dishonor your race,” Heinz says. “It is bad enough that you defile your beautiful white skin with tattoos and metal jewelry, and conceal your blonde hair behind unnatural colors, but you also do this.” He points at the puddle of zombie head twitching on the chair. “You corrupt your pure flesh by this shameful disgusting act.”

Gogo snickers again, but then holds her tongue when she sees the fury in his eyes.

“You are Aryan, you should be proud of your race,” Heinz told a group of teenagers about his age. They were on the deck of the ship, drinking homemade liquor and lying around when they were supposed to be working in the greenhouses. “You look like a bunch of pathetic mongrels. Your laziness shames your race.”

“Shut the fuck up,” one of them told him.

Heinz went to the boy who spoke, took the bottle out of his hand and tossed it overboard.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

Four of the boys stood up to him.

“I’m helping you become a proper Aryan,” he told them. “Liquor makes you weak.”

One of them pushed Heinz. “I’m going to beat the fuck out of you, rich boy. You come in here and tell us how to live? You lived on the island your whole life. What do you know?”

The boys closed in on him.

“I know that you’ve let yourself become weak and lazy,” said Heinz. “I know that you won’t be able to lay a finger on me, because all of you have forgotten how to be strong.”

One of the boys came at him from behind. Heinz dodged and elbowed him in the stomach. He punched two others in the face and tossed the fourth face-first into the ground. The rest of the boys got up and came after him, but one at a time he knocked them down. When it was over, Heinz was the only one standing. The others lay on the ground, gripping their sore ribs or bloodied faces.

Heinz went to the first of them, towering over him with his blond hair blowing in the ocean wind. The kid cowered beneath him.

“Brother…” Heinz said, holding out his hand to the bloodied kid. “Don’t cower like a worm. You are Aryan.”

The boy stopped cowering and took Heinz’s hand.

As the boy got to his feet, Heinz patted him on the shoulder and said, “Come with me. I will teach you how to be strong.”

The other boys stood up and gathered around him. It was the beginning of a new army of the Fifth Reich.

Popcorn notices Heinz is carrying Brick’s sledgehammer. Her heart sinks in her chest when she realizes what must have happened to her boyfriend.

“Where did you get that?” she says, pointing at the hammer strapped to Heinz’s back.

Heinz glances over his shoulder at it. “I took it from one of those walking corpses.”

“That was Brick’s weapon!” Popcorn cries. “My boyfriend. Is he okay?”

Heinz frowns. “I’m sorry to say, but your boyfriend has joined the ranks of the living dead.”

“I know that,” she says. “But was he okay?”

Heinz is confused by the question.

“He’s at peace,” Heinz says. “I incinerated his remains earlier today.”

“You mother fucker!” Popcorn says, getting to her feet.

She holds herself back from charging the guy and ripping out his throat. The submachine gun pointed at her belly holds her at bay.

“You were planning on fucking his corpse like your whore friend, weren’t you?” Heinz asked. “It’s a good thing I saved you from such blasphemy.”

A loud crash out in the hallway causes the two girls to jump. Heinz backs up into the hall, his gun still pointed at the girls. Behind the door to the stairwell, a crowd of zombies have gathered, slamming on the door and shouting. The glass has broken out of the window and three skeletal arms reach through. When they see Heinz in the hallway, the zombies thrash wildly.

“Brains!” the zombies cry.

“Cerebros!” cries a Mexican zombie.

When Heinz recognizes the Mexican zombie, his eyebrows curl with disgust. He marches toward the door, aims the submachine gun through the window slit at the undead Mexican, and fires until the zombie’s face is shredded with holes. As he turns away, two figures race across the hall.

“Run,” Rainbow yells at Gogo, as the two girls try to escape from the crazed nazi.

Gogo lags behind her friend, trying to put on her clothes as she runs. Heinz fires the machine gun at the ceiling. Because the gun is silenced, the noise isn’t intimidating enough to get Popcorn to stop running.

“Don’t move, whore,” Heinz says.

Gogo stops in her tracks, but continues dressing herself. Heinz goes to her with the barrel of the gun pointed at her face.

“Tell your friend to come out or I’ll put a bullet in your head,” Heinz says.

Gogo opens her mouth to yell to Popcorn, but instead she pukes all over Heinz’s shoes. The puke is a rancid pile of rotten zombie intestines, brains, half-digested flesh, and the head of a zombie dick. Heinz steps back at the offensive smell.

“Call your friend,” he says, shifting his face away from the direction of the vomit.

Gogo coughs and gags as she pulls a long intestine from her throat. As it plops on the ground, she spits and wipes green acidic mucous off of her tongue with her fingers.

“Call your friend!”

Gogo looks up at him with disgust, then stands up and does as he says. Popcorn doesn’t make an appearance.

“If you don’t come out your friend is dead,” Heinz says. “I’ll give you only three seconds to come out.”

Gogo looks up at Heinz’s shiny forehead as he points his gun at her.

“One,” Heinz says.

Gogo is becoming aroused by the look of his forehead. The way it gleams in the dim lighting. The smoothness of his white Aryan skin. She wants to lick it and rub her body against it.

“Two.”

Licking her lips and inching forward, Gogo’s eyes go wild with hunger, realizing that it isn’t his forehead that’s attracting her but the brain inside of his skull. She wants to bite open his skull and pull out his brain. She wants to put it between her legs and fuck the brainstem.

“Three.”

Gogo opens her mouth and goes for Heinz, but the nazi shoves the silencer down her throat.

“Don’t!” Popcorn cries, stepping into the hallway. “Don’t shoot her.”

Gogo sucks on the silencer seductively, eying Heinz as if she wants to eat him alive.

When Heinz sees her giving the gun a blowjob, he pulls it out of her mouth and pushes her back.

“Disgusting whore,” he says. Then he turns to Popcorn. “Don’t try running away from me again. Next time I will fire without warning.”

Gogo rubs her breasts and smiles at Heinz. Everything about the nazi is beginning to turn her on. From his uniform to the way he holds his weapon to the electricity flowing through the nerves under his skin. As she rubs her breasts, she feels a stiffness in her chest. She presses her hand to her chest and listens closely, but doesn’t hear anything. She no longer has a heartbeat.

“So, we now have only minutes before those walking corpses get through that door,” Heinz says. “Help me find a way out of here and I might let you live.”

Gogo and Popcorn look at each other. When Popcorn notices Gogo’s condition, she winks. They know that Heinz can’t kill them if they are already dead.

“Now,” Heinz says. “Let’s get to work.”

Then he leads them down the hallway, away from the undead.

Over the course of a few years, Heinz collected followers among the wretched starving youths of the Fifth Reich. He inspired them to hold their heads up high, to work hard, and believe in the future of the Aryan race. Eventually, his men were practically running the ship. They were the strongest, most skilled members of the Aryan population. They were organized and little by little they improved the living conditions of their brothers.

“I’m taking over the ship,” Heinz said to the Captain of the Fifth Reich.

The Captain looked at Heinz. No longer was Heinz a teenaged kid, he was now a fully-grown man and a leader. Behind Heinz, stood a row of his soldiers, armed with shotguns. The Captain stood up from his desk and removed his hat.

“I’m grateful to have you on board,” said the Captain. “You have helped discipline and motivate the men. I haven’t seen the ship run so smoothly in over a decade.”

“So you will relinquish your command?” Heinz asked.

“No,” said the Captain.

Heinz nodded at his lieutenant. Then all of his men pumped their shotguns and pointed them at the Captain.

“I beg of you, Heinz,” said the Captain. “Our people need food, not war. You don’t yet have the experience to run this ship. I’d like you to become my second in command. You can learn the ropes, see what it means to be the leader of this ship before you sit in the Captain’s chair. Then you will understand where I’m coming from.”

The Captain held out his hand in friendship.

“You are weak,” Heinz told the old man. “I would never serve under such a pathetic coward. It is your weakness that allowed this ship to fall into disrepair. It is because of you that your people have fallen into such a pitiable state.”

“And you think you can do better?” asked the Captain. “You think you can reshape these people into the Fists of the Fifth Reich?”

“No,” Heinz said. “That army died a long time ago. We are now the Hammers of the Fifth Reich. And within five years time, I promise the island of Neo New York will be ours.”

Then Heinz turned his back on the old man.

“Don’t listen to him,” said the Captain. “If you attack Neo New York you will fail. They have superior weapons and a larger military force. If you follow this man you will die.”

As Heinz left the room, his men closed in on the ex-Captain. After the chorus of shotgun blasts, Heinz placed the Captain’s hat on his scalp. Marching down the hallway with his head held high, whistling Wagner’s Das Rheingold—the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.

Heinz takes the girls from office to office, trying to find another way out.

Gogo twitches and holds her stomach as she walks. Popcorn wraps her arm around her shoulder, trying to hold her upright so that the nazi doesn’t realize she’s infected.

“Are you okay?” Popcorn whispers.

“Hungry,” Gogo responds, looking over her shoulder at Heinz. She widens her mouth at him, imagining what it would be like to suck on his fat moist brain.

Although Popcorn never hungers for food, Gogo couldn’t be more different. Gogo is indulgent. She is always hungry for food, drugs, and sex. The three are inseparable to her. She finds the act of eating erotic and sensual. Gogo’s voluptuous body is as close as any citizen of Copper comes to being fat. Not many people have the money to gorge themselves in the poor quadrant. But with the money she takes in as a stripper and prostitute, Gogo has enough to indulge on rich, greasy foods whenever she wants. She is always either fucking or eating or doing Waste.

Unlike Popcorn, Gogo wants to eat brains. She craves to taste a piece of Heinz’s brain. She craves to lay her body in a bed of brains. She craves to lick, suck, and fuck brains all day long.

When she rolls her tongue out of her mouth at Heinz and sucks on the tips of her fingers, Heinz believes the slut is just trying to seduce him into letting his guard down. He has no idea what depraved thoughts are going through her head at the moment. Popcorn yanks her friend forward, trying to get her eyes off of the nazi. If Heinz catches on that the two of them are undead he will surely incinerate them as he did to Brick.

After searching the entire floor, it seems as if the stairwell is the only way out. They either need to barricade the collapsing door or figure out a way to fight through the undead.

“So what are we going to do?” Popcorn asks.

“We fight our way through,” Heinz says.

Within five years, Heinz had turned the Aryans of the Fifth Reich into a lean fighting force. Overpopulation had been the problem under the previous Captains’ reigns, but Heinz solved that by starting the Population Control Program. His men exterminated all Aryans who proved too weak or too useless to join the Hammers of the Fifth Reich. They also exterminated anyone who disapproved of their methods or seemed disloyal to the commander in chief. He executed many of the breeding slaves, stating that they would have plenty of new breeding slaves after they took Neo New York. It was not the time to raise children. It was the time they answered their calling and finally took what was rightfully theirs.

When he tried to send word to his father in Platinum, Heinz learned that his father had died a few years back. Then he tried to get in contact with other operatives who had infiltrated the island, but the majority of them were no longer supportive of the Fifth Reich. They had become fat and lazy, content with the luxurious lifestyle of Neo New York. They cared more of their own happiness than that of their brothers. They had been dominated by lesser races for so long that it no longer bothered them.

This setback was not enough to dissuade Heinz from his mission. He directed the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for Neo New York and went into battle.

“Mein Fuhrer?” said a young soldier to Heinz.

Heinz stopped marching and turned to his soldier. The boy was only twelve-years-old, but he wore his uniform with pride, holding his rifle tightly to his shoulder, standing in line with troops twice his age. Under Heinz’s command, children had to pull their weight just as much as the adults. Those who could not pull their weight were put to death. He wasn’t willing to waste precious food and water on children who could not work or fight. His men could always make more children later, once they had achieved their goal.

As Heinz looked down on the child soldier, the boy smiled up at him. He was so excited to fight for their cause.

“Yes, soldier?” said Heinz, annoyed that the boy spoke without first asking permission.

“Are we really going to win?” asked the boy. “Are we actually going to live on the island and have all the food we can eat?”

Heinz placed his hand on the child’s soldier and smiled.

“Lieutenant?” Heinz asked the man standing by his side.

“Sir?” asked the Lieutenant.

“Have this soldier shot,” Heinz said, his smile turning to a frown. “I don’t need men who lack faith in our strength. A true Aryan would know that our victory is ensured.”

The boy’s face deflated beneath his leader, tears filling his eyes. The boy cried out as the Lieutenant grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the line. He cried not because his life was about to end, but because he disappointed his leader.

As the gun was fired and the body fell into the sea, Heinz marched down the line to find any other weak-willed soldiers that had to be weeded out. Such men did not deserve the honor of battle.

“We cannot possibly fail,” Heinz told himself, over and over again.

Heinz directs the two women to lead the way down the stairwell. The three of them face the door as its metal frame bends inward.

“How are we supposed to fight them with these?” Popcorn asks, holding up a chair.

Heinz wasn’t about to hand over any of his weapons to the girls, so he gave them each a chair to fight the living dead with.

“All you have to do is shove them back,” Heinz said. “If any of them get past you I will take them down.”

Gogo leans against her chair, eying the nazi’s body up and down. The hunger builds stronger in her by the second. She’s finding the man completely irresistible. Her mouth fills with drool. She’s dying to sink her teeth into his moist fleshy brain.

“You know how fucking strong those things are?” Popcorn asks. “Especially when there’s so many of them.”

“You have no choice,” Heinz says. “You do what I say or you will die.”

Popcorn groans at him and points her chair at the door.

“Fine,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”

Heinz gets behind the two girls, pointing the submachine gun at their backs.

“Open it,” he says.

Heinz had no idea the military of Neo New York was so large. The aircraft carrier was such a huge vessel that it was seen by the island’s Coast Guard from miles away. This gave the island’s military leaders plenty of time to put all naval forces into action. By the time the Fifth Reich arrived to the island, the carrier was surrounded by hundreds of ships. Heinz had a thousand men in his army, but the military of Neo New York was two hundred thousand strong. He had the largest ship, but it was not enough to put up much of a fight against his enemy.

“One Aryan is worth a thousand of them,” Heinz told his men, his voice shaking as he spoke. “They do not stand a chance against us.”

The men looked around at each other, stepping out of line, staring at the battleships approaching them. They instantly reverted back to the small weak wretches they had been before Heinz had become their leader.

“Victory will be ours!” Heinz said. “We are Aryans! We are the master race!”

His words inspired only anger in the men. They now realized that they had been led astray. They had believed in his stupid impossible dream. They had allowed him to take advantage of them. They had killed their friends, their wives, and their children for him, because he convinced them it was for the good of their people. They had believed all of his bullshit and now they were back where they had started.

The Coast Guard warships ordered the aircraft carrier to turn around or they would consider them hostile and attack. The Fifth Reich didn’t put up a fight. They turned the ship around and fled into the sea. The nazis didn’t stand a chance. Not because they were outnumbered, but because the Coast Guard knew they were coming. The government had long known about the Fists of the Fifth Reich and their plans to attack the island.

It only took a single member of the Brotherhood to ruin their secret plans. An Aryan living in Gold had fallen in love with a Japanese woman, had a family with her, and realized he no longer wanted the Fifth Reich to succeed. After killing two of his Aryan brothers in self-defense, he came forward and explained to the government everything he knew about the Fifth Reich. The government would have sent out their troops right then and there, but they decided the Fifth Reich wasn’t much of a threat to them.

After the Aryans returned to their home waters, they put Heinz and his top officers on a boat and sent them adrift with no food or water. Starved and ill, they eventually made their way back to Neo New York. The Coast Guard allowed them to live in Copper with the rest of the white trash, because they knew that these nazis would work well on the Zombie Survival show. Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla paid the Coast Guard well every time they allowed a newcomer with potential into the Copper Quadrant.

With a small band of men and a new life in Copper, Heinz was determined never to give up the fight. He was beaten, but not defeated. He vowed to build a new army of men out of the citizens in Copper. They would rise up and take the island one quadrant at a time and someday Neo New York would become a utopian Aryan nation as it always should have been.

Only one month after he arrived on the island, before gaining a single new recruit, Heinz was gassed in the bathroom of a Filipino she-male whore house. When Wayne Rizla stood over his unconscious body, he chuckled to himself, noticing the line of she-male cum dribbling from the nazi’s chin.

When Popcorn opens the door to the stairwell, the zombies spill in. But they don’t go for the two punk girls at all, they rush right past them and go directly for Heinz. Heinz wasn’t prepared for that. Frozen in shock, confused over why the zombies ignored the girls, Heinz suddenly finds himself surrounded by the living dead. He opens fire on them as they grab at his sleeves.

Popcorn drops her chair and says, “Later, asshole!”

Then she grabs Gogo and pulls her into the stairwell. Furious, Heinz fires a few rounds into the girls’ backs, but they do not fall. The bullets hardly faze them. He watches as their pink and green heads disappear into the mob of zombies.

Heinz steps backward, firing into the undead as they fill the room. When the gun runs out of bullets, he drops it on the floor.

“Brains!” the zombies cry, closing in on him.

Heinz closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, allowing the powerful orchestral music of Wagner fill his heart. He feels the blood of a strong Aryan warrior pumping through his veins. He tells himself he must survive, he must win this competition, because there is so much more work to be done.

Just before the zombies reach him, he opens his eyes. Then he digs his hand into his pack and pulls out the severed head of a mechjaw. Like a wet glove, he shoves his fist through the neck of the beast and grabs it by the brain. Then he straps the mechjaw’s Gatling gun to his arm.

After he had paralyzed the mechjaw back on the road, Heinz realized that he could use the creature as a weapon. Because it was the dog’s brain that controlled its weaponry, all Heinz needed to take was its head and the minigun.

The dog’s skinless severed head snarls in the air, as Heinz points it at the zombies.

“I have a Japanese cunt to kill,” Heinz tells the shambling corpses. “And you’re all in my way.”

Then he squeezes the dog’s brain and the mechjaw’s Gatling gun shreds the zombie crowd into thousands of tiny pieces.

Far ahead of all of the other contestants, the three merc punks traverse the wasteland. They cross a rail yard in the industrial side of the city, ducking through overturned train cars rusted into the earth. Normally merc punks would never travel through zombie territory at night, but the mercs don’t have time to stop for rest. They have to accomplish their mission and get to the helicopter before any of the other contestants.

“Which way?” Zippo asks Xiu, in Spanish.

Xiu takes her homemade metal sunglasses from her eyes and examines the map. Zippo shines his flashlight, tied to his automatic shotgun, over her shoulder so she can see.

“East by northeast for a mile,” Xiu says. “Then east. We should get there early in the day tomorrow if we keep moving. Then we should be able to make it to the helicopter before dark.”

Behind them, Vine stands on a fallen train car, keeping a look out. The area seems free of the living dead, but he knows not to let his guard down. Standing still, even in a remote area, is always more dangerous than being on the move. Those things always tend to sneak up on you out of nowhere when you least expect it.

Vine watches every structure in the vicinity carefully, especially the fallen train. It looks as if a dump truck had crashed into the train decades ago, causing a pileup. Any one of those overturned train cars could be filled with the undead. Vine eyes each one carefully, watching for movement, and watches the top of the hill on the other side of the rail yard, and watches for other zombies that might have followed them in there.

He does all of this without moving his head an inch, not making a sound. Merc punks know that zombies are attracted to movement and noise. Merc punks are trained as children how to stand perfectly still for hours on end, even in the most awkward positions. Vine’s body is contorted in unnatural ways, his limbs bent and twisted, his AK-47 crossing his chest like a crucifix. He’s so motionless that he looks more like an abstract steel sculpture than a human being. He does this to camouflage his body against the twisted rusted metal of the wrecked train surrounding him. Blending in with the surroundings is another skill merc punks are taught since childhood. It is something they all are trained to perfect.

Over the last five decades, merc punks have developed zombie survival skills that are unknown to the rest of civilization. They know to cover their eyes with sunglasses or masks, because looking into a human’s eyes is the major way zombies can tell the difference between the living and the dead. There are other ways zombies can smell them out of a crowd, but looking into a human’s eyes is a sure way to drive a zombie wild with hunger.

They also know how to fight their way through a horde using only a small amount of ammo. They know how to sleep in the same room with the undead, without ever being discovered. They know how to debilitate a zombie in less than a second, using any found object from a rock to a hubcap to a pencil. They know the types of places where zombies are most likely to hibernate. They know how zombies hunt their prey. They know how the zombies think.

Xiu puts the map away. She hydrates herself with a water bottle, just two sips, then pours some water down her face and scalp, and rubs it across her short black mohawk. Zippo sits motionless, awaiting Xiu’s command.

Merc punks always move in threes. When they work together, they are no longer three individuals. They are one being. They are one Head and two Arms. In this unit, Xiu is the Head, Vine is the Right Arm, Zippo is the Left Arm.

Xiu does all of the thinking for them. Vine is the fast, quick-striking spearhead. Zippo is the sturdy backup. Ever since they were children, this is how it has been. Once they came together, they were no longer individuals. They were one unit, with Xiu in complete command of their every action and thought. Not just in the wasteland, but every waking moment, even when they were back home, on their ship.

Xiu was not born of merc punk blood. She was adopted into the family nineteen years ago, at age seven. She doesn’t remember anything before they found her. Decades after Z-Day, they found her wandering through the wasteland in South America, unarmed, all alone, and behaving as if nothing was wrong in the world.

They didn’t call themselves merc punks. That’s the term Neo New Yorkers gave them. They call themselves The Mongols, which was the name of the biker gang that originally started their tribe over 50 years ago. The Mongols are mostly of Hispanic descent, consisting of survivors from the pacific coasts of North and South America. Although many of the original Mongols came from the American biker gang of the same name, most of its members came from gangs of urban South American street punks that were slowly accumulated over the years. These punks were wild and tough, surviving not on the road or on the seas but on their own two feet.

By the time Xiu was adopted by the Mongols, the tribe was over 500 warriors strong. They had a fleet of ships that patrolled up and down the pacific coasts of the Americas. Once a day, ships would drop off three-man units all along the coast. The units would go half a day deep into the wasteland, collect all the resources they needed, then return to the coast to be picked up by nightfall.

They found Xiu in Chile. A unit of Mongols went into La Serena, collecting food and medical supplies, when they came across her casually spray-painting graffiti on the walls as zombies roamed the streets in the area. At seven years old, she was wearing five-inch platform combat boots two sizes too large, three tattoos, a lip ring, and a black and red mohawk.

“Wh-what are you doing, little girl?” The Head of a Mongol unit asked her in Mexican Spanish.

Xiu shrugged and stepped back to examine her painting on the half-collapsed brick wall.

She responded in Chilean Spanish. “Making art.”

“Are you all alone out here?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “Yeah.”

The Head of the unit held out his hand.

“My name is Carlos. You should come with us.”

Xiu never remembers this when she’s asked about it. She doesn’t remember anything from back then. The Mongols guess that she came from a band of Chilean punks who had survived in the wasteland for several decades all on their own. They aren’t sure if she is the only survivor from that group or if she had become separated from them at some point. Either way, they decided to take her with them. Not because they pitied her, but because they were impressed by how a seven-year-old girl could survive in the wasteland all by herself for so long without difficulty. There was also a youth unit within their clan that was in need of a new Head. These Mongols knew this girl had the smarts to be a unit leader.

Vine spends so much time examining each of the train cars for hidden zombies, that he doesn’t notice the zombies crawling out of the wrecked dump truck behind Xiu and Zippo.

“Let’s go,” Xiu says, and turns to face several figures lunging out of the shadows toward her.

There are a dozen of them. All children. The zombies had been hibernating inside of the gravel-filled dump truck for so long that their flesh has become coated in a layer of gravel fused to their rotten flesh.

“Behind you,” Xiu yells at Zippo as four more come out behind him.

Xiu throws one of her hand-axes at an undead child coming at Zippo, but the blade just bounces off of its gravel skin.

“Run,” Xiu says.

They leap out from the middle of the gravel creatures, and loop around toward Vine. Zippo fires two shells into a zombie in their path, causing bits of stone to fly in the air. The zombie is pushed back, but the blast does no real damage to its body.

Vine drops to the ground and fires his AK-47 at the creatures, slowing them down a bit until his friends get behind him. Then the three continue through the rail yard.

Xiu looks back at the rocky figures lumbering across the train tracks. Stones in their mouths clack together as they try to cry out for brains. The undead children come after them, but are too weighed down by their heavy gravel skin to catch up.

“Move out,” Xiu says.

As they turn to go up the hill out of the rail yard, they see a horde of zombies assembling above them, drawn to the sound of gunfire. Before they reach the bottom of the hill, they realize that there are hundreds of them up there. The largest mob of zombies they have encountered yet.

“Is there a way around?” Zippo asks.

Xiu shakes her head. “We go through.”

Without second thought, Vine dashes forward, ready to cut them a path through the crowd.

“Conserve your ammo if possible,” Xiu says in her Chilean accent. “We still have a long way to go.”

Xiu has retained her Chilean accent for all these years, and being the dominant member of her unit her two men conformed to her way of speaking and developed the accent as well.

Mongol units are chosen at birth. They are matched up the day they are separated from their birth parents, when they are old enough to walk. These children grow up together, their lives intertwined, as inseparable as conjoined twins. When a unit is matched together, they are immediately assigned their position in the unit: Head, Right Arm, or Left Arm. Sometimes these positions are determined at random, other times they are determined based on their early behavior or the strength of their birth parents. Whoever becomes the Head is the one who decides how their unit behaves, thinks, moves, and reacts. The two Arms completely conform to their Head’s ideals, tastes, opinions, and mannerisms, mimicking their leader in every possible way.

“Although you were not born a Mongol,” Carlos said, taking young Xiu aboard his crew’s ship. “You will become the Head of a Mongol unit.”

Xiu nodded, but didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. She boarded their ship in her clunky combat boots and scale mail vest, looking around the vessel as if it was a spaceship from another world. The ship was patch-worked together with scrap metal and dozens of different types of wood salvaged from several different sources. It had been repaired and reinforced many times over the decades. The Mongols around her were all grouped into threes, some of them mopping the deck together, some drinking papaya wine together, some sharpening swords together.

Although each Mongol unit was a tight family, all of the units on a Mongol ship were an extended family. They called this extended family their crew.

“Hi!” Xiu said to a unit of older Mongols.

They ignored her, drinking wine and playing cards.

“I’m Xiu,” she said.

Carlos took her away from their table.

“They won’t recognize you while you are an individual,” Carlos said. “Individuals are ghosts to the Mongols. You must be joined with your unit before anyone will recognize you. Otherwise you will be ignored.”

“You don’t ignore me?” Xiu looked up at him and his unit, her chubby round face covered in red spray paint.

“That’s because we’re doctors,” Carlos said. “Part of our job is to heal broken units, so we are allowed to speak to ghosts.”

One of the hardest aspects of Mongol culture is when a unit loses a member. Since they act as one being, losing an Arm can be devastating. Some units never recover from that. Severed units are ghosts to the rest of their tribe until a doctor unit can put them back together again. The doctors take broken units and combine them with parts from other broken units, until they are whole again. But these new units never function quite as well as their original units. They are like Frankenstein’s monster—body parts from various dead bodies sewn together to form a new being. It sometimes works okay when it is just a Left Arm that is replaced, but a Head is a completely different story.

Zippo and Vine had lost the Head of their unit when they were six years old. The little girl had died of Malaria, leaving her two Arms lost and afraid. They spent their time sitting quietly in the dark together, not speaking or eating, completely unsure how to move or act or speak without their Head telling them what to do.

“I brought you into the tribe to be the new Head for Zippo and Vine’s unit,” Carlos told Xiu. “They need you more than anything. It is likely they will die without their Head. Without you.”

“I will save their lives just by telling them what to do?”

“Hopefully. When a new appendage is connected to a body, there is always a chance that the body will reject it. If Zippo and Vine reject you they will likely die.”

“Isn’t there anyone else who can be their Head?”

“There is one other ghost their age, but he is both a male and a Right Arm. Zippo and Vine require a female Head.”

“Can’t the Right Arm just become a Head?” Xiu asks.

“It is possible for a Right Arm to become a Left Arm, or a Head to become an Arm, but an Arm has never successfully been able to transform into a Head. Arms spend their entire lives following. They have no idea how to lead.”

Carlos’ unit brought Xiu to the sick bay, to introduce her to her new Arms. Zippo and Vine are curled together in a corner, staring up at the hospital bed next to them.

“Their Head, Rosa, died here,” Carlos said, pointing at the bed. “They haven’t moved from that spot since the day of her death.”

Xiu crouched down to take a peek at them from under the bed. She saw them cradling each other, wiping each other’s eyes even though they were too dehydrated to cry. Zippo looked at Xiu for a second, but the moment his eyes locked on Xiu’s they shot right back up to the bed.

“Zippo and Vine are younger than you, by almost two years,” Carlos said. “But I think it will be okay, especially with you becoming their Head. They are more likely to conform to an older girl than a younger one.”

Carlos took Xiu to the other side of the bed. His two Arms stayed in the back of the room. He positioned Xiu in front of the two boys, blocking their view of the bed. “This is Xiu,” Carlos told the boys. “She will be your new Head. She will replace Rosa.”

The two boys didn’t acknowledge her. They shifted their visions, trying to see around them, waiting for Rosa to come back to the bed.

“The tall skinny one with the long hair is Vine,” Carlos told Xiu. “He will be your Right Arm. The short one with curly hair is Zippo. He will be your Left.”

“Hi,” Xiu said, waving at them.

They didn’t acknowledge her.

“Try giving them some water,” Carlos said, as one of his Arms handed him a canteen.

Xiu took the canteen and held it up to the boys. “Want something to drink?”

“Don’t ask them,” Carlos said. “Tell them.”

“Drink this,” Xiu said to them. “You need water.”

“You have to be more forceful,” Carlos said. “Command them. Show them you are their boss.”

“Drink!” Xiu told Vine, shoving the canteen in his face. “I command you to do as I say!”

Vine didn’t respond. Then she tried shoving it into Zippo’s face. He too ignored her.

Frustrated, young Xiu punched Zippo in the face.

“Drink it now!” she told him.

Shocked, Zippo stared up at Xiu, blinking. She punched him again. Vine looked over at his Left Arm, wondering what was happening to him. Xiu punched Vine in the face until he stopped looking at Zippo, and started looking at her.

“I’m your new Head,” Xiu told them. “And you’re going to do as I say from now on. If you don’t drink this I’ll punch you again.”

Then she shoved the canteen in Zippo’s mouth and poured it down his throat. After a couple of gags, Zippo gave in and drank the water of his own will. When she brought the canteen to Vine, he accepted it without incident.

“That’s not the normal method of getting new Arms to listen to you,” Carlos said. “But it seems to have been effective.”

“So they’ll do everything I say from now on?” Xiu asked, almost excited by the prospect. “Like my personal slaves?”

“Not slaves, Xiu. They will become your Arms. They will become an extension of you.”

“But I’ll still own them? They’ll be mine and they’ll do everything I say?”

Carlos nodded. “The ceremony will be tonight. After the ceremonial joining, the three of you will be one unit. One body. Although your bodies will be separate, the three of you will become inseparable from that point on. Three bodies join as one to become the perfect fighting machine.”

Xiu nodded and then ordered her new Arms to stand up. They looked up at her, then at each other. Slowly, Zippo and Vine stood to face their new Head. She placed her right hand on Vine and her left hand on Zippo. Then she smiled brightly at them, red bits of spray paint in her teeth. The two boys smiled back, like mirrors.

Xiu has only one throwing axe left, but with her two Arms she doesn’t even need a weapon of her own. Zippo and Vine are her weapons. In the middle of the two of them, Xiu directs her Arms to blast out a zombie’s knee, leap over a wrecked pickup truck, and slice through a line of undead to get to the sidewalk.

Zippo and Vine are so tuned in to Xiu’s commands, that they know what she wants them to do before she even has to tell them. The Mongols call it unit telepathy, which is kind of an intuition that Arms develop from following their Head for so long. When Xiu commands them, she feels as if she has tiny invisible strings connected from her fingertips to their brains, as if Zippo and Vine are living marionettes.

Cutting their way through the industrial district, lined with crumbling factories and warehouses, the merc punks are not able to conserve much ammo. There are just too many of those things. These are the kinds of circumstances merc punks are trained to avoid, rather than fight through. And the farther they go into the industrial district, the thicker the mob becomes.

“To that airplane,” Xiu tells them.

Vine cuts them a path toward the blackened remains of a Boeing commercial airliner that had crashed into a steel mill long ago. The tail of the plane is missing, so they head for entry to the plane on that side. The rest of the plane leans up the side of the half-collapsed building, like a ramp. When they get to the tail end of the plane, Vine and Zippo hold their ground as Xiu assesses the situation.

“We need to get off of the street,” Xiu says. “We’re going to have to cross this area from above.”

Entering the back of the charred aircraft, they climb the aisle upward toward the cockpit. The mob of zombies try to follow, but as they attempt to scale the slanted passageway they only slide back down across their slimy flesh.

The fuselage rattles as they make their ascent. They balance themselves. Zippo holds Xiu from sliding back into the mob below.

“Keep going,” Xiu says, as the building that holds up the plane begins to crumble.

They continue up.

A blackened skeleton sitting in one of the airplane seats nearby turns back and eyes them with black ash-filled sockets. As Vine passes him, the corpse reaches out with burnt twig-like limbs.

“Brains,” hisses the zombie.

But the charred undead corpse can’t reach Vine. Its seatbelt buckled around its waist keeps it securely fastened to the seat.

When they get to the cockpit, Xiu kicks out the door and the unit jumps out of the plane onto the third floor of the building. Once safely out of the plane, Xiu gives her Arms a smirk. Then, in unison, the three kick the side of the fuselage with enough strength to separate it from the building. The plane rolls down into the street, crushing several zombies below.

Xiu laughs at the destruction they caused, and her men laugh with her. But then the building rumbles and chunks of debris rain down from the ceiling. Sections of the floor break open as the building begins collapsing around them.

“Get to the roof,” Xiu says, leaping from a crumbling floor to solid ground.

Zombies come out from the shadows, lumbering toward them, as they head for the nearest stairs. They blast out the zombies’ legs, guarding each other’s backs, as the structure deteriorates quickly around them.

When they were teenagers, Xiu, Zippo, and Vine were the most unruly unit in the Mongol tribe. Raised in the wasteland, Xiu didn’t grow up with the traditions of the Mongols. She was used to doing as she pleased, any way she pleased.

They were supposed to be collecting food deep in the Amazonian rainforest of southern Columbia, but back then Xiu was easily distracted from her missions. Once she noticed there were zombies wandering through the jungle nearby, she wanted to hunt them down and kill them for fun.

Because they were not to be trusted traveling on their own, Xiu’s unit had to be accompanied by a guardian unit. All units are assigned to a guardian unit the day they are formed. This guardian unit becomes like their unit’s parents. The guardian unit raises the young unit, teaches it how to fight, how to scavenge, and accompanies them on missions. A unit is usually separated from its guardians the day the Head of the unit turns thirteen. That’s when the members of the unit are considered adults. And though they continue to train with their guardians, they are considered old enough to take care of themselves.

Xiu’s guardian unit was the same unit that found her in Chile when she was seven years old, the one led by Carlos.

When Xiu was fifteen, her unit still needed to be looked after by Carlos’ unit. At that age, they were one of the weakest, sloppiest, least organized units in the tribe. Her two Arms worked just fine. They did exactly what they were told. Xiu was the problem. She was a troublemaker. She didn’t listen to the Heads of her guardian unit or the other elder units. She did whatever she wanted.

“Let’s go,” Xiu told her Arms, as they snuck through the trees away from their guardians.

Carlos’ unit wasn’t watching them. They were busy collecting bushels of wild marijuana into potato sacks. Xiu led Zippo and Vine away from their guardians, through the trees, into the jungle, to hunt down the living dead.

As a youth, Xiu was fascinated by the different kinds of zombies that were out there in the world. She wanted to encounter every kind—from white American zombies, to Mexican zombies, to morbidly obese zombies, to midget zombies. But what she always wanted to find were the zombies from the indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest.

When she saw the first of them, Xiu smiled. The zombie stumbled through the trees, covered in mulched vegetation, beetles and grub worms burrowed in and out of its flesh. On the side of its head, there is a wasp nest covering much of its face.

“I get this one,” Xiu said, aiming a rifle at the corpse’s head.

When she fired, the bullet went through a section of the wasp nest before passing into its brain. The zombie stumbled back, then turned to face Xiu’s unit, wasps buzzing angrily around its head. The zombie groaned and stepped forward.

“Now everyone,” Xiu said.

And they all shot bullets into the zombie, as it lumbered toward them.

“Xiu!” called a voice from back the way they came.

Their guardian unit had heard the gunshots. Vine and Zippo looked to her for instruction.

“Keep firing,” she said, with a mischievous smile.

The bullets didn’t take the zombie down, but the three punks weren’t interesting in stopping it. They just wanted to use it as target practice. As the zombie came closer, the wasps began to swarm.

Zippo was stung first. He flinched a bit, but kept on firing. Vine was stung by three of them. The bugs left Xiu alone, so she continued firing her rifle. The two boys whimpered as more and more wasps stung them, crawling across their face and down the collars of their shirts. Xiu didn’t order a retreat. She continued shooting, giggling at the chunks of mulched flesh exploding from the corpse’s body.

“Are we going to leave soon?” Zippo whined, cringing at the bugs crawling on his face.

“No,” Xiu said, annoyed that her Left Arm was expressing an attitude different from hers.

The first wasp stung Xiu and she slapped it dead against her wrist, then continued shooting. As the zombie reached them, Xiu had them withdraw a few yards. They walked backwards through the jungle, right into the middle of six more walking corpses that were coming at them from behind, drawn to the sound of gunfire.

Just before one of the corpses grabbed Xiu by the back of her neck, a shotgun blast separated its head from its neck. Xiu turned to see her guardian, Carlos, coming through the woods after them.

“Get down!” Carlos yelled.

Xiu did not get down, so neither did the rest of her unit. They turned and fired on the zombies.

“I said get down!” Carlos ran up to Xiu and yanked her away from the shambling corpses. Then his unit hacked at zombies with axes and machetes, cutting off limbs and heads.

Forgetting about the original zombie that was coming at them, Zippo was grabbed from behind. He thrashed around to free himself form the zombies’ grasp, causing the wasp nest to break off the corpse’s head and land on his shoulder. Behind the newly exposed flesh, Zippo saw the wasp nest was not just on the outside of the zombie, the wasps had burrowed into its hollowed-out skull and chest. Dozens of wasps flew out of the zombie’s hive-like cavities, stinging Zippo in the face and neck.

When Xiu turned around, she was horrified at what was happening to her Left Arm. Little Zippo, barely fourteen years old, was covered in angry wasps, unable to defend himself from the zombie that had a hold of him. She was in too much shock to save Zippo. She was in too much shock to command Vine to save him.

Carlos went in with a machete and chopped the zombie away from Zippo, allowing several wasps to sting him as he pulled the boy to safety. As other zombies poured into the vicinity, the six of them rushed out of the jungle. Xiu cried as Carlos carried Zippo in his arms. The boy wasn’t able to walk on his own anymore. When Zippo weakly turned his head to Xiu, he saw that she was crying. This made him cry, too.

Back on the ship, Zippo was treated in the sick bay. He was very upset—not because he was in a tremendous amount of pain, but because Xiu was in trouble.

“You almost got him killed back there,” Carlos yelled.

Xiu shrank before him.

“You are a Head,” said Carlos. “You have a responsibility to keep your Arms safe. They are not your play things to take advantage of. They depend on you to make the right decisions.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, tears flowing down her cheeks.

“I don’t want you to apologize,” Carlos said. “I want you to grow up and take your duty seriously.”

“I will.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I promise.”

From that moment on, Xiu stopped messing around. She stopped thinking only of herself and started focusing on what was best for her unit. After five years of training hard, Xiu’s unit went from being the absolute worst unit in the tribe to one of the strongest. She didn’t do it for Carlos. She didn’t do it for herself. She did it so that nothing bad would ever happen to Zippo ever again.

When they get to the roof, Xiu is surprised to see how many zombies are up there waiting for them. The building rumbles beneath their feet as they scurry across the rooftop.

“This place is collapsing,” Xiu yells. “We need to get off of here now.”

Zombies spill in from the stairwell behind them. By the time they get to the middle of the roof, they are surrounded. Zippo and Vine go back-to-back, protecting Xiu in the middle. They fire into the crowd with all they’ve got.

A zombie covered in barbed wire comes at Zippo, but as Zippo fires his shotgun it only clicks.

“It’s jammed,” Zippo yells.

Xiu throws her last axe at the zombie, cutting through its chest. But the axe gets tangled in the barbed wire, so it doesn’t return to her. When the corpse gets to Zippo, he uses the shotgun as a bat and hits the zombie so hard that the barrel of the gun bends a couple of inches, rendering it useless.

When Xiu turns to Vine for help, the roaring AK-47 clicks into silence.

“I’m out!” Vine says, tossing the gun away.

The ground beneath them splinters apart, cracking open under the weight of the mob as it closes in on them. Out of ammo and axes, they stand back-to-back, waiting for Xiu’s command. A camera ball floats above them, beeping with anticipation. Miles away, the camera operator sits on the edge of his seat, refusing to blink, determined to capture their deaths on film.

Xiu looks over at Vine.

“It’s time,” she says.

Vine nods.

Then Zippo and Xiu duck to the ground, as Vine reveals his hidden weaponry. Out of his wrists, two metal hooks appear as he clenches his fists. Then he spins in a circle and in one blink, twenty of the zombies surrounding them are cut in half at the waist. The zombies’ upper halves fall to the ground as their legs stumble forward.

Miles away, the operator of the camera ball jumps out of his seat, completely mystified by how Contestant #19 just took out so many zombies within a split second.

“What happened?” asks Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla, peeking over his shoulder.

“I have no fucking clue,” says the camera ball operator. “He just spun around and then all of a sudden the zombies were cut in half.”

“Rewind it,” Wayne says. “Play it in slow motion.”

The camera operator rewinds the video. In slow motion, they see the hooks that appeared out of Vine’s wrists. When Vine spun around in a circle, the hooks flew almost thirty feet out of his wrists. Connected to each hook is a hair-thin strand of razor-sharp steel wire. The wire cut through twenty of the zombies as Vine spun in a circle. Then, like a yoyo, the wires pulled the hooks back into the merc punk’s wrist.

“Holy fuck…” the camera operator says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Wayne smiles. “I’m glad these merc punks volunteered for the show. They have proved themselves to be most interesting contestants.”

At the age of 20, merc punks are fitted with mechanical implants. Much of the flesh on their arms are removed to install metal weaponry. These weapons become a part of their body, so that they can always defend themselves, even after they run out of bullets.

“What did you get?” Xiu asked Vine as he came out of the sick bay.

“The wires,” he said, showing her the hooks dangling from his bandaged arms. “You?”

Xiu raised her arms at Vine and two foot-long blades burst out of her fists. “Swords.” Then she padded her new metal knee-caps. “And jumpers.”

They smiled at each other, excitedly. They had been waiting for their implants for a long time. The implants are what define a merc punk. They are sacred. The type of weapon a merc punk gets is a reflection of their soul. Because these weapons are so revered and personal, they are only to be used when absolutely necessary.

Zippo stood silently behind them. When Xiu and vine looked over at him, he blushed.

“Zippo?” Xiu asked. “What about you?”

Zippo lowered his eyes. “I don’t like it.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed. Then he raised his arms, which were now mostly metal. When he clenched his fists and turned them sideways, gigantic razor-sharp sheers emerged from his arms.

“Scissors?” Xiu asked, giggling. “You got the scissors?”

Zippo nodded.

“That is the worst one you could have gotten,” she said. “Did they even give you extra leg implants, like my jumpers?”

Zippo sighed again. He raised one leg to them. Another pair of sheers emerged from his ankle.

“More scissors!” Xiu laughed.

Because Xiu thought it was funny, Vine and Zippo thought the scissors were funny, too. But deep down, Zippo felt bad. It was as if they were laughing at his soul.

“Don’t tease him,” Carlos said, as he came out of the operating room.

The trio quieted down.

Carlos put his hand on Zippo’s shoulder. “The shears are a good weapon. If you train hard, they will serve you well.”

Then a pair of shears sprang out of Carlos’ arm. He scratched his chin with it and smiled, then moved on.

After the wires are back in Vine’s wrists, Xiu and Zippo stand up. Zombies trample over the halved corpses toward them.

“Zippo,” Xiu says to her Left Arm. “Now.”

The scissors spring out of Zippo’s wrists and cut at the undead, snipping like crab claws. The razor-sharp scissor blades cut arms and sever legs. Then a pair of shears pop out of Zippo’s ankle, as he jump-kicks a zombie. The sheers cut through its neck, decapitating it.

Xiu turns to her opponents and crosses her arms. The blades spring out of her fists. With the speed of a samurai, she slashes down the zombies as they run at her.

Zippo stumbles back as the ground quakes below him.

“This place is coming down,” Xiu says. “Let’s get out of here.”

Zippo nods, and wraps his arms around Xiu’s waist. With her Left Arm on her back, Xiu bends her knees, then clicks the lever on her metal kneecaps. Her mechanical knees snap up, launching them high into the air. Like a human cricket, she leaps over the street, to the roof of the building next door. When she lands, the suspension in her kneecaps cushion the fall.

Vine’s wires slice the heads off the zombies left and right. He cuts down the last one as the floor caves in beneath his feet. He falls through the roof and looks down to see six stories of open space. A horde of zombies staring up at him from below.

Without needing to look up, Vine shoots one of his wires up over the rooftop to the building next door. The hooked end catches a ledge, and Vine reverses directions. He launches up into the air as the wire reels itself back into Vine’s wrist, pulling him with it. As he emerges from the building, the structure collapses to the street in an avalanche. When he’s completely reeled in, he drops onto the next building’s roof beside Zippo and Xiu.

Xiu stares at him.

“Ready?” she asks.

Vine nods.

“Then let’s move.”

As they turn around, the three merc punks come face-to-face with something they have never encountered before: a pack of mechjaws. There are five of them, on the rooftop, as if they were waiting for them the whole time.

When the dogs growl at them, Xiu freezes. She notices the armaments on the zombie dogs’ backs. She sees the look of hunger in their eyes, but she isn’t quite sure what to do. They weren’t trained to fight mechjaws.

Xiu decides to play it safe.

“Run,” she says.

Then she grabs Zippo and leaps into the air, over the dogs, to the roof of another warehouse. Vine shoots a wire at the same building and launches into the air behind them.

The mechjaws open fire. A storm of bullets comes at the merc punks before they make it to the next building, whizzing past Vine’s face. As he is pulled through the air, Vine uses his free hand to shoot the other wire at the undead mutts. The hook slices through their storm of bullets and catches one of the mechjaws by the throat.

The dog snarls and thrashes as the hook digs deep into its neck. Once Vine makes it to the next warehouse, the wire from his wrist reels itself in, pulling the mechjaw off of its feet. The mechjaw flies through the air toward them, as Vine’s wire reels it in like a fishing line.

Bullets erupt from the dog’s minigun as it soars, but while in midair it cannot take proper aim. When the mutt reaches them, Xiu’s sword cuts its head off. The dog’s body falls to the ground, the head rolling across the roof. Xiu’s unit watches the dog’s twitching legs, as if it’s trying to run while lying on its side.

“What is it?” Zippo asks.

“A hellhound,” Xiu says.

Her two Arms nod in agreement.

The mechjaws on the rooftop across the street stand at ledge, their rocket launchers opening up. The merc punks don’t see the rockets flying through the air toward them as they stare at twitching dog by their feet. All four rockets hit their target, and the warehouse explodes into a cloud of flames.

of all of the remaining contestants spread throughout the Red Zone.

Rainbow Cat sees the explosion from an office window, as she sharpens her new machete against the sole of her leather shoe. Ever since she killed Bosco, her face has grown colder. She is determined to win this game, no matter what she has to do. She will kill even Junko if she has to. Nothing and no one is more important to her than getting back to Neo New York so that she can get her dead husband’s masterpiece published.

Haroon looks up at the explosion from a homemade raft. He drifts down a canal, hoping that it leads to a river, hoping that his raft doesn’t fall apart along the way. He built it by tying together a collection of boards and driftwood. As he floats, he prays that he finds her. He shines his flashlight on the bank of the canal, hoping to see her standing there, waiting for him. That’s the kind of thing he would expect from her. She always knew what he was thinking, what he was planning, what he was going to do next. If he doesn’t survive this thing, he prays that he will at least get to see her face once again.

Popcorn looks up at the cloud of flames rising in the distance. She walks down the street, in the middle of a crowd of rancid shambling zombies, dragging Gogo with her. Gogo holds her stomach in agony, groaning, and puking black saliva into the street.

Gogo glares up at the explosion with wild, hungry eyes. She cries, “Brains! Get me some fucking brains!”

Wendy sees the explosion from the balcony of a luxurious downtown hotel, petting the curls in her hair. In her lap, a lawn gnome stares up at her with its red hat and smiling chubby face. She grips it tightly, as if it is the most important thing in the world to her.

Laurence sees the flames rise in the sky over the shoulder of a zombie, while punching its head off of its body. As he charges across the street to another walking corpse, he wonders if anyone got hurt in that explosion. He hopes that whoever is over there got out okay. That is, unless that person happens to be a real scumbag. Then he’s glad they got their ass blown up.

Heinz glances over at the explosion through the window of a barricaded studio apartment, then goes back to tidying his things before bed. He hums orchestral music that plays in his head, standing in his boxer shorts, his black swastika tattoo reflecting in a broken mirror. He folds his uniform into a neat stack and organizes his weapons in order of size. He pats the snarling severed heads of two mechjaws propped up on his nightstand. Then he crawls into a dust-caked bed, lying back and sighing with relief.

Nemesis pays little attention to the fire in the distance. She stands in the middle of a high school football field, naked. With her arms spread to her sides, she breathes the air in deeply, her eyes closed, letting the soft breeze press against her bare pale-as-paper skin.

Oro hears the explosion from over his shoulder, but he is too busy trying to make his shot. Within an indoor miniature golf course, he hits a golf ball with his putter. The golf ball goes across the artificial turf, up a ramp, through the windmill, down a hole, comes out the back, and then enters the mouth of a decapitated zombie head. Hole in one, Oro says to himself. He smiles on one side of his mouth, then lights up a fresh cigar.

“Shit,” Junko says as she sees the explosion in the distance.

“What?” Scavy says.

They are looking out of a window of the white-bricked castle-shaped building downtown, looking at the fire rising in the sky.

“It’s those merc punks,” Junko says. “It has to be.”

“So?”

“If they are all the way over there then that means they are ahead of us by far more than I anticipated. They’ll probably get to the evacuation zone sometime tomorrow.” She looks Scavy deep in his eyes. “That means we don’t have three days to get to the helicopter anymore. We have to get there by midday tomorrow.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“I have no idea. Moving around is going to be twice as difficult tomorrow as it was today. It’s probably impossible.”

Scavy looks down at the sniper rifle in his hands, trying to come up with a plan.

“What if they’re already dead?” Scavy asks.

Junko looks back at the flames in the distance.

Scavy says, “All three of them could have died in that explosion. We might not have to worry about them.”

Junko takes a deep breath.

“I hope so,” she says, “because I’m pretty sure the only way we’re going to win this thing is if all three of those merc punks are already dead.”

Xiu flies through the air, escaping the explosion, with Zippo gripped tightly to her back. She looks over at Vine as he glides through the air beside her, pulled by his wire. The light of the flames flicker across their sunglasses as they smile at each other in midair.

“We’ll accomplish our mission,” Xiu tells her Arms. “And there is nothing that will get in our way.”

When they get to the street, they run East, toward their goal. The zombies in the area have all been attracted to the flames, so not many of them notice the merc punks as they scurry away.

Xiu’s unit passes a parking garage as they head up a freeway onramp. Once they disappear down the freeway, an engine whirs into life from within the garage. Headlights flip on. Then a large black truck covered in dried blood pulls out of the parking garage. It slowly weaves through the debris in the road, its engine growling, as it heads up the onramp toward the freeway.

As dawn begins to crack, Haroon drifts down the canal on his splintered makeshift raft. He’s wet, itchy, coated in mud, and tired of trying to keep his balance on the half-submerged floatation device.

He’s made it quite a long distance during the course of the night. The few zombies he passed did not even try to come after him. It was so dark out that he was not visible to the living dead from the middle of the canal. But traveling alone in the dark all night has taken a toll on him. For the past six hours, he had been unsure where the canal was taking him, how safe the water was, or how long his raft was going to last.

The blue and pink sky brightening in the East is a comfort to him. Although he’s no longer hidden in the darkness of night, he’s finally able to see where he’s going. He can see the lumps in the brown water are really fallen branches rather than zombies swimming toward him. He can see where the water ends and the algae-coated asphalt wall of the canal begins.

Pulling out his map, his shivering pruned fingers rattle the paper. He’s not exactly sure where he is on the map, but he knows that if he keeps going in this direction the canal will eventually empty into a river. He has to find a boat soon. There’s no way he can make it much further without one.

As he crosses under a bridge, he sees a fat Rastafarian zombie with oil-caked dreadlocks staggering across the road above him. The zombie goes to the railing and looks down at the raft.

“Brains,” the zombie belches down on him.

Black drool sprinkles in the water as Haroon passes underneath. When Haroon comes out on the other side, he hears a splash. The large zombie hits the water, thrashes to keep afloat, and then sinks to the bottom, leaving a coat of green oil on the surface of the water.

Up ahead, a few more zombies on the road running alongside the canal see him coming their way. They shamble toward the water, groaning at him. One of them hops in and sloshes through the thick brown sewage. As Haroon passes, the zombie goes deeper into the water until he’s up to his armpits, then dives for the raft. Mere inches from Haroon’s ankle, the zombie sinks into the murk and disappears under the surface.

Haroon aims his solar-powered shotgun at the bubbling water as he goes by, just in case the corpse knows how to swim. The zombie doesn’t resurface. He goes back to his map. Examining carefully, the river the canal empties into curls north, toward the evacuation zone. If he decides to play the game and go to the helicopter he would have a pretty good chance of making it—a better chance than finding a boat and making it to the ocean. It’s not likely that any river will make it out to the ocean. Even if he knew what part of America he’s in, he knows nothing of the geography. Still, he doesn’t like the idea of playing the game. If he got to the helicopter first that would mean he’d be condemning all the other contestants to death.

But he wouldn’t be able to make it out of the Red Zone without help. And since he knows everyone is headed for the helicopter, that would be the best place to meet up with them. They could draw straws to see who gets to go and who has to stay, then together the remaining contestants can figure out how to get off of the continent alive. He would gladly stay behind, especially if she is among them. With her by his side, he knows they would be able to make it. All he needs to do is find her.

Her name is Nemy. She doesn’t actually have a name, but that’s what Haroon likes to call her. The other people in the research facility called her Nemesis, after the project she came from, or Specimen #5. The Nemesis Project was designed to genetically engineer a soldier capable of surviving in the Red Zone. Nemy is the latest model. Completely immune to the zombie virus, sweat that releases a chemical that is repulsive to the living dead, with the eyes of a hawk and the stealth of cat, she is the ultimate Red Zone survivalist. And her offense capabilities are twice that of her defense. There is no better bodyguard you could have while traveling through the wasteland.

Haroon met her when visiting his friend who had recently been transferred to the genetics division. Terry was his closest associate for several years and it just wasn’t the same working without him.

“They got you mopping the floors I see?” Haroon asked as he walked into the genetics lab one night.

Terry looked up at his old friend, then continued mopping. “Yep. They couldn’t demote me any further than this.”

“That’s what happens when you blow your boss’s finger off.”

“It was your fault. I said those shoddy modules you gave me wouldn’t work. You should be mopping these floors with me.”

“I will if you want me to.”

“Serious?”

“Sure.”

“Take a mop then,” Terry said, rolling the mop bucket over to Haroon.

Haroon went to work, mopping under the work stations across the room.

“How’s the shotgun coming?” Terry asked.

Haroon chuckled. “It shoots. Kind of.”

“Still got a long way to go, eh?”

“Give me a few years, it’ll work.”

Haroon mopped down to the hallway and noticed something moving in the corner of his eye. Stepping a bit further into the hall, he discovered a holding cell that contained a woman with long black hair. At first he thought she was a dead body. The woman looked cold and stiff, lying naked in the corner of the cell with paper-white skin and colorless eyes. Once she sat up and looked at Haroon, he jumped back.

“Who is she?”

Terry came over. “That’s number five. One of the mad Dr. Chan’s creations.”

“Is there a one through four?”

“Behind you,” Terry said, pointing to four dead specimens in glass cases behind them. Two were stillborn fetuses. One was a deformed three-year-old girl. The last was a skeleton-thin adult. All of them had reptilian features, some with snake teeth, scales, and lizard tails. “The previous versions weren’t quite as successful.”

“She’s part reptile?”

Terry nodded. “You wouldn’t think so just but looking at her, would you? Reptiles are immune to the zombie virus, so they spliced her DNA with that of a snake or Gila monster or something like that.”

Haroon watched as the woman stood and stepped toward the glass. She looked Haroon in the eyes and cocked her head.

“Put on your clothes,” Terry said to her, knocking on the glass. Then he pointed to the white jumpsuit on the bed.

“I don’t like them,” she said.

Haroon was a little surprised that she could speak. Her voice was a little alien, a slightly higher pitch than a normal female, with a whispery lisp.

“You’re going to drive my friend here mad with lust,” Terry said, then he turned to Haroon. “She’s always taking off her clothes. They say she’s built to endure in extreme temperatures, so clothes aren’t really necessary to her. Still, the mad doc is a prude and doesn’t approve of the indecency.”

As the woman walked back to her bed to clothe herself, Haroon realized he couldn’t take his eyes off of her body. She wasn’t considerably beautiful. She didn’t have any curves, her breasts were small, she was a little too thin, a little too muscular, her pale skin seemed almost rubbery, and the vertebrae of her spinal column seemed to stick out of her back so far that they looked like spikes, but there was something about the way she moved and the way her skin glistened in the fluorescent lighting that was alluring to Haroon.

“Don’t even think about it,” Terry said to him. “She might look like a human, but deep down she is a cold-blooded killer. If you even stepped foot in that cell she’d probably snap your neck in seconds. She’d pick your corpse clean to the bone by morning.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Not since she was a kid. But that was only four months ago.”

“She’s only a year old?”

“Seven months old. They grow up fast.”

“Huh.”

As Terry went back to the mop, Haroon watched her adjust her jumpsuit. The clothing seemed awkward and uncomfortable to her. She sat on the bed, readjusted the fabric, stood up, readjusted, pulled the sleeves up, put them back down, then she unzipped the jumpsuit and stepped out of it. Haroon laughed. She turned to him and glared with such intensity that he stepped away from the glass. Her inky black eyes looked like that of a snake ready to strike. She didn’t take her eyes off of him as he walked out of the hallway, past Terry, and out of the lab.

The canal empties into the river, and Haroon’s crude raft barely holds together as he hits a faster current. Haroon was expecting the river to be in a more remote side of the town, but the waterway cuts right through the city. It takes him past an amusement park, where rusty warped roller coasters dangle over the water. The river here is full of debris from the amusement park, including old bumper cars, concession stands, and horses from the merry-go-round. Haroon has to push off of the carnival wreckage to prevent his raft from ramming into anything.

On the side of the river, there is the skeletal frame of a circus tent, the last shreds of tent flapping in the breeze. Haroon sees animal cages and a warped Ferris wheel. Through the bleachers, he catches a glimpse of what he believes to be an elephant. After he floats ten feet, his view becomes blocked by a row of scorched food carts.

Three balls in the water float toward Haroon’s raft. At first, Haroon thinks they are more pieces of amusement park junk that has blown into the river, but then he notices that they’re floating upstream. When they get close enough, Haroon can tell they are zombies. They are submerged up to their noses, so all Haroon can see are the tops of white skulls and hungry bloodshot eyes. They look almost like alligators stalking their prey as they swim toward him.

Haroon pumps his shotgun and aims it at the first zombie. He was hoping not to have to fire his weapon, but he doesn’t have a choice. They are blocking his path and seem to be able to swim faster than he can float.

“Braainns,” gurgles the zombie as its head raises out of the water.

Haroon blows off the top of its skull. Its limbs thrash in the water. Haroon shoots off its arm as he passes, just in case it tries to grab for his raft. Then he fires at the other two heads bobbing in the water, blasting them back just enough for his raft to slip past them.

As he feared, the sound attracts more of the creatures. They come out from behind concession stands and the tilt-a-whirl ride. The water splashes all around him as the undead jump into the river. He ignores the ones behind him and focuses his fire on those in his path, the ones capable of reaching him before he can float by. Chunks of green meat spray through the air as Haroon pumps and fires the shotgun as fast as he can.

The ground quakes around him and a rumbling fills the air. Once Haroon hears a shrill trumpet call, he knows what’s coming. The zombie elephant crashes through a fallen roller coaster track and dives into the water, trampling human corpses into the brown murk. Its flesh is black and soggy, riddled with pus and sores. The flesh on the left side of its abdomen is missing, revealing the ribcage and rancid organs. From within the creature’s stomach, the arms of a zombie clown reach out through its rib bones. Decades ago, the elephant had swallowed a circus clown whole in order to eat its brain, and when the clown had come back to life it found itself trapped permanently within the creature’s belly.

As Haroon continues firing at the zombies in his path, he realizes that the elephant is moving too quickly for him to get away. He turns the shotgun on the monstrous animal and aims for its front left leg. He doesn’t aim for anything else, just shooting that leg in the exact same spot, hoping to slow it down. Unfortunately, he’s not a trained marksman. His shots hit the water, hit its face, and its chest. Only a few hit the leg, but none of them in the exact same spot. If his gun wasn’t solar-powered he would have been out of ammo by now. He turns and fires at zombies in front of him, then turns back to the elephant. No matter how many times he shoots it, the creature doesn’t slow down.

The zombie elephant’s trunk raises and creates a blasting trumpet noise. Green toxic vomit sprays from its trunk in a geyser across the water, barely missing Haroon’s raft. He raises his shotgun and aims for its face. Firing six consecutive shots, he blows off the creature’s trunk as well as shredding both its eyes. This slows it down, but it keeps plowing blindly forward.

Haroon turns to the zombies in the water ahead and notices a bend in the river. That’s his chance. He decapitates a few of the zombies, then paddles with his free hand to take the curve without getting stuck on the rocks along the shore. After the bend, he looks back to see the elephant trampling over the rest of the zombies straight onto dry land. It doesn’t change directions, stomping forward into the carnival parking lot at full force.

The second time Haroon saw Nemesis, she was sitting on the bed staring at him in such a way that it seemed as if she was expecting him. He had come to see Terry after the lab was shut down for the night, but Terry was gone. His mop bucket was in the middle of the floor, but he was nowhere to be seen.

But Haroon didn’t just come to see Terry. He also wanted to see the reptilian woman again. Ever since he saw her he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head. She scared and disturbed him, yet he found her strangely attractive.

He went up to the glass and just looked at her for awhile. She was cross-legged on the bed, topless, eyeing him. After a few moments, she stood up and came to the glass. She put her hand on the door.

“You can come in if you want,” she said.

Haroon was surprised to hear her say that. He didn’t know how to react.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She pointed at the door handle. Haroon walked slowly to the glass. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to do it, but he went inside with her. She lunged at him and grabbed the door before it closed.

“Don’t let it shut,” she said, as she held the door open a crack. “You’ll be locked in. If Dr. Chan found you in here with me he wouldn’t be happy.”

Haroon took off his shoe and put it in the door.

“I thought you were trying to escape,” Haroon said.

She cocked his head at him, as if she didn’t understand the word escape.

“Let’s get started,” she said.

Haroon’s questioning face turned into a face of alarm as she crawled onto the bed and pointed her ass at him, as if she wanted him to fuck her doggy style.

“What are you doing?” Haroon asked.

“Aren’t you going to have sex with me?”

“What!” Haroon yelled.

She sat upright. “Isn’t that why you came here?”

“No, I—”

“I assumed by the way you were looking at me…”

“No, I just wanted to talk. I think you’re fascinating. I wanted to learn more about you.”

“Oh,” she said, perplexed. “That’s usually not why people come here.”

“I’m sorry, I think I should go.” Haroon stepped toward the door.

“No,” she said, her hand slapping against the door to keep him from opening it.

Haroon wondered how she got off the bed and across the room so fast.

“Don’t go,” she said. “I’d love to talk. Nobody ever talks to me.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice shaking a little. “Yeah, that would be good.” He smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, but cocked her head a little.

Haroon held out his hand.

“My name is Haroon,” he said.

She didn’t take his hand.

“I don’t have a name,” she said.

“What do they call you then?”

“I’m from the Nemesis Project so sometimes they call me that.”

“I don’t want to call you Nemesis. It sounds inhuman.” He paused nervously after the word inhuman, but it didn’t seem to bother her. “What if I call you Nemy?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“I’d like that,” she said.

But her expression appeared as if she wanted to tear his throat out if he ever actually called her by that name.

Haroon comes to a shop on the edge of the river. Three giant blue letter Rs dangle from an ancient sign, above the words River Recreation Rental. On the dock, there are rows of yellow plastic kayaks. The area seems clear of the undead, so he directs his raft to the shore to take a closer look at the boats. If any of them are useable it would be much quicker, safer, and more comfortable than the tied-together driftwood he’s been riding.

Dragging his raft into the bushes along the shore, he goes to the kayaks. They look warped and brittle, not very promising. He taps one of them with the tip of the shotgun and the barrel breaks right through, more fragile than paper. Pounding on each one them with his fist, they are all useless. The sun shining on them for several decades has deteriorated the plastic practically to dust.

He looks back at the raft. He really doesn’t want to get back on that thing. This kayak rental is probably the best bet he’s ever going to get for finding something suitable for water transportation. He knows there’s got to be something useable there, somewhere.

Haroon decides his best bet would be to go inside of the shop. Nothing lasts long when its exposed to the elements like this. He walks shotgun-first toward the shop. As the door swings open, Haroon jumps at the sight of a crazed man’s face. The man’s mouth wide open and snarling. Haroon raises the shotgun, but stops himself from firing. The man isn’t a zombie. It is just a life-sized poster of an extreme sports kayaker howling at the top of his lungs as he goes down some wild rapids.

Haroon goes around the advertisement to examine the merchandise. There are some kayaks inside, but not many. Most of them were on display out by the river. He goes to them one at a time, but none of them seem very strong. Just the light from the windows was enough to wear them down. In the storage room, where no light could possibly shine, he finds one last kayak. This one is pink and made for children. He pounds his fist on it. The plastic is still sturdy and seems like it will stay together, at least for as long as he’ll need it. He decides to give it a try. Hopefully, his legs will fit inside.

As he drags the pink boat and paddles outside, he runs into three large undead truckers examining his driftwood raft outside, as if they can smell him on it. When they look back at him, Haroon feels almost embarrassed to be carrying the pink kayak. But once the zombies stagger toward him, he runs for the water and dives kayak-first into the river.

Lying across the top, balancing himself with one leg in the water, he paddles out into the middle of the river. The zombies follow him. He squeezes into the opening, but he can’t get his legs all the way in. Bending his knees and hunkering forward, he paddles the miniature kayak downstream, away from the splashing corpses of ex-truckers.

Although uncomfortable, the boat is a huge improvement over the driftwood. He can actually control his direction and move several times faster. When zombies hop into the water with him, he easily gets around them and cruises by. He doesn’t fire another round of the shotgun until he gets to the edge of the evacuation zone and goes ashore.