Zombies and Shit

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“Braaaaaaaiinss ...and shit.”

Every zombie fan has a plan for what they would do in order to survive the zombie apocalypse...you know, if it were to actually happen someday. My plan is to put my brain into a robot body. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, as long as it has tank treads for legs, laser cannons for arms, and can fly. Then I would be like a robotic superhero of the zombie apocalypse. I would carry around a battle axe and wear an american flag cape, fighting zombie hordes and rescuing survivors from malls and farm houses. It would be awesome. But I guess it would also be kind of lonely, because I’d be the only robot in the wasteland and who wants to be friends with a robot? Still, it’s kind of a cool idea...

I’ve been obsessed with zombie movies my entire life and I believe I might have one of the largest zombie movie collections in the world, it includes some movies that are so rare that the only other people who own copies of the movies are the people who made them.

My collection started back when I used to bootleg zombie movies for a living. When I was 21 and trying to make it as a writer, I was able to write full-time because I bootlegged zombie movies on the side. Then I started a company called Crappy Homemade Zombie movies, where I sold unreleased backyard zombie movies through bootleg distribution channels. It was a fun way to make a living. Most writers are happy to quit their day jobs once their writing careers take off, but once mine took off I was actually kind of sad to quit.

“Zombies and Shit” is my thank you letter to the zombie genre. If it weren’t for those zombie movies I probably wouldn’t have a writing career today. However, I have been hesitating to write a zombie book for quite a long time. So many zombie movies and zombie books come out these days that it seems unnecessary to unleash yet another zombie novel onto the reading public. But I wrote one anyway, for the fun of it.

However, I decided not to go with the Romero style of zombies. Instead, I did the Return of the Living Dead style of zombies. Nobody does the sludgy brain-eating indestructible Return of the Living Dead zombies in literature. I don’t know why. They should. Return of the Living Dead is fucking awesome. And it’s punk as hell. And it was also the first zombie movie I saw as a kid.

It is pretty obvious that this book was inspired by the Return of the Living Dead movies (well, at least 1 and 3). It was also inspired (in small ways) by zombie video games like Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead, as well as zombie books by Brian Keene. But probably the biggest influence for this book is the book/movie/manga Battle Royale. I have always loved the “elimination match” plot line. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.

“20 people go in, only one comes out...”

This book is an elimination match story set in the zombie apocalypse, which is something I’ve always wanted to read. They say you should write what you want to read, so that’s what I’ve done. It was the most fun I’ve had writing a book in a long time. I hope you enjoy it.

- Carlton Mellick III 10/10/10 4:08pm

As far as trends go, I think most of us can agree that zombies should pretty much be done. They’ve had their fifteen minutes in the pop-culture spotlight, and now the marketplace is saturated. The time has come for the dead to die off again, and come shambling back a decade from now, with new life and purpose, to eat the hell out of a new generation.

Except this isn’t happening.

And it used to be my fault.

But now the blame falls squarely on Carlton Mellick.

Let me explain. In case you’ve been living under a rock or in a coma for the last decade, most critics and media-watchers agree that the current uber-zombie craze in pop culture (books, movies, comic books, television, video games, board games, card games, role-playing games, trading cards, toys, clothing, food, tattoos, philosophy, music, college courses, etc.) is at least partially my fault.

A decade ago, the publication of my first novel, The Rising, coincided with the release of a movie called 28 Days Later. Both The Rising and 28 Days Later featured different kinds of zombies, which was okay with most people, since nobody else had done much with zombies for the decade leading up to the book and movie’s releases. Both were big hits. City of the Dead, my sequel to The Rising, followed soon after, and so did a lot of other books and movies and comics. And they haven’t gone away. Indeed, there seem to be more of them than ever. There are now publishing companies that publish nothing but zombie literature and authors who write about nothing but the living dead.

I had a chance to do the same. In truth, I could have probably made a very good living (i.e. a lot more money than what I make now) doing for zombies what Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton did for vampires, and just written zombie novels, but doing so didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to be typecast. I didn’t want to become ‘The Zombie Guy’. Occasionally, I would write about zombies. I tried my hand at the traditional “Romero-style” undead (with Dead Sea) and returned to the world of The Rising with a collection of thirty-two original short stories that all took place in that world, called The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World. After that, I decided I was really burned out on them. Upon reflection, though, I wasn’t so much burned out as I was written-out. I didn’t want to just repeat the same story over and over again (which is the risk any author or filmmaker runs when dealing with zombies—or any other genre trope). There are only so many things you can do with the dead, and I felt I’d done them all. Much of what I read and saw from my peers seemed to be treading the same old ground. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There were some good stories. Some great stories, in fact. But they weren’t anything new. We’d seen it all before.

Recently, after several years of refusing to write anything about zombies, I returned to sub-genre for three projects: a novella (The Rising: Deliverance), a novel (Entombed), and an ongoing comic book series (The Last Zombie). The only reason I agreed to do them was because I felt they were something different than what we’d all done before. The Rising: Deliverance is a prequel that focuses heavily on characters and not on zombies. In Entombed, the zombies appear only briefly (a handful of pages) before the story focuses on a group of survivors who are safe from the zombies but not each other.

And The Last Zombie takes place after the zombie apocalypse is over, and focuses on humanity’s efforts to rebuild.

Still, the majority of what is still being published is material that just re-treads and recycles the same old plotlines. And as a result, I predicted readers would soon grow bored, and then zombies would go away for a while until somebody younger and smarter came along and figured out a way to revitalize them. I figured this would take about ten years.

I was wrong.

Fucking Carlton did it in the here and now.

It would be easy to dismiss Zombies and Shit as nothing more than a fun, entertaining, literary distraction. And if you want to look at it as just that and nothing more, there’s no harm in doing so, because the book is fun and it is entertaining. Hell, it’s fucking exhilarating—a tight, breakneck narrative and lots of awesome ultra-violence and quirky, distinct characters.

But it is the setting that really sets this book apart, and thus, not only elevates it above any other zombie novel currently on the market (including my own), but also instills that new blood and new idea I was talking about before. And the bitch is, the whole thing is so deceptively simple. Carlton simply changed the location. Gone is the familiar shopping mall or island or skyscraper or any of the other genre tropes. Instead, we have a dark, dystopic, post-apocalyptic future. Think Mad Max or Battle Royale… with zombies.

How fucking genius is that?

Throw in some wild futuristic technology, a bit of Carlton’s trademark social commentary (this time focusing on our society’s reality television addiction and Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame), and a plot that literally leaves you guessing until the end, and you’ve got a hit. You’ve got a classic. You’ve got an addition to the zombie canon that, twenty years from now, will be just as influential on the next generation as Romero’s original trilogy and Skipp & Spector’s Book of the Dead anthologies were on our generation.

If you love zombies, you’ll love this book. But more importantly, if you’re sick of zombies—if you want them to go the fuck away now—then you will love this book. Why? Because it will remind you of what you loved about them in the first place, before they became overdone clichés that saturated the marketplace.

And in either case, you can blame Carlton Mellick.

Empathize

Brian Keene

Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania

June 2011

Charlie rolls over in his sleep and spoons his wife lying next to him. He burrows his face into the back of her neck and inhales the scent of cinnamon and motorcycle grease. His eyes still closed, he takes a deeper smell of her hair and recognizes the odor of cloves mixed with river clay. Her hair is soft against his nose. He wonders why she has such soft hair. Rainbow Cat, his wife, normally has very crusty dreadlocks that are itchy against his nose. With his lips pressed against her bare neck, it feels as if she doesn’t have dreadlocks at all. It feels more like she has a short pixie haircut.

As he rubs his arm against the front of her body, he wonders if this is actually his wife at all. His hand is cupped around a large plump breast, yet his wife is nearly flat-chested. Her waist and hips are soft and curvy, yet his wife’s body is knotty with muscle from working in the fields. When the woman moans, it is deep and smooth, not high and coarse. This is definitely not his wife.

Charlie opens his eyes. He feels groggy, drugged. His muscles are so relaxed that he only just realizes that he’s been fully clothed this whole time, lying on a hard concrete floor. He pushes himself up and looks at the woman next to him. She’s an Asian woman with short dyed-blonde hair, someone he’s never seen before in his life. She’s wearing jeans and a white tank top. Her mouth is open against the pavement, a puddle of drool below the corner of her lip. In her

sleep, she grabs his arm and pulls it back against her chest, hugging it like a teddy bear.

Leaning awkwardly against the sleeping woman with his arm in her grasp, he takes a look around the dimly lit room. It seems to be the lobby of an old abandoned hotel or office building. Dust-coated couches and chairs can be seen through the stripes of light coming from the boarded up windows. Debris from the partially-collapsed ceiling litters the reception area.

There are other people sleeping on the floor all around him, almost two dozen of them. Most of them look to be real scumbags: vagrants, gutter punks, junkies, whores. Charlie wonders how the hell he got there. The last thing he remembers is having drinks with his wife. It was their five year anniversary, the first day in months they were able to afford to go for a night on the town. He remembers having some drinks and then waiting to be served. He remembers the owner of the establishment giving them each a couple of free drinks.

The only thing that makes sense to him would be if he’d gotten too drunk to walk home and passed out in a nearby abandoned building. It isn’t rare for abandoned buildings to be filled with lowlifes these days. It also isn’t uncommon for him to pass out in public places after a night of heavy drinking. But what is strange is the drugged feeling in his brain, his numb mouth and tongue. If he did some kind of drug while he was drunk, Rainbow is probably pissed off at him right now. He promised her he would never do any kind of drug ever again. She might have even kicked him out of their apartment. Perhaps that’s why he’s sleeping in a place like this.

He looks down at the Asian woman snuggling his arm. She’s probably a prostitute. Charlie might have even slept with her last night for all he knows. Rainbow isn’t with him, thankfully. He hopes she arrived safely to their apartment last night and has no recollection of what happened to them the night before. Otherwise, he might have just fucked up their marriage for good.

For a hippy, Rainbow Cat is a very angry and unforgiving human being. She’s also materialistic, snobbish, and high maintenance. He told her he was done with pills and hookers. If this is what happened that would be the end of it. She wouldn’t take him back this time.

Charlie tries to slip his arm away from the sleeping woman, but she only hugs it tighter. He tries to rip it away and she digs her fingernails into his arm. When the fingernails draw blood, he cries out, waking her. Her black eyes pop open and point up at him. As he hovers a foot above her, he sees the shocked look on her face. She is just as surprised and confused to be there as he is. He can tell that she too has no idea where she is or why she is there.

Still holding his arm, she glares at Charlie. Then she grinds her teeth and digs her nails deeper into his arm, as if she thinks he is the person responsible for bringing her there.

The woman is about to go for his eyes when they hear somebody yell, “What the fuck!”

They turn their heads to see a young punk with a tall yellow mohawk standing on the other side of the room.

“Where the hell are we?” he says. “What the fuck is going on and shit?”

A punk girl, one with pink spiky hair, gasps and looks around frantically. More people begin to wake up, all of them just as surprised to be there as Charlie.

“Why am I on the floor?” cries a shivering prostitute, no older than sixteen.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” says a large black homeless man with a beard and mud-coated hoody.

Charlie looks down at the Asian woman and their eyes meet. The white tank top she’s wearing is moist with sweat. Because she’s not wearing a bra, Charlie can clearly see her dark nipples

“Get the fuck off me,” she yells, then kicks him to the floor.

When Charlie gets up, he watches the angry woman storm away from him, covering her breasts with folded arms. She pushes through the shoulder of a muscle-bound punk with a white flat top and a hot pink half-shirt.

“I’ve been drugged,” says a voluptuous punk girl with green hair. “I can taste it.”

“Yeah, me too, and shit,” says the yellow mohawk punk. “What the fuck!” He kicks a piece of rubble across the concrete floor.

Everyone in the room has now woken, pulling themselves slowly to their feet, rubbing their groggy eyes. All of them except for one: a girl in the corner. A tall, bony girl with blonde dreadlocks.

“Rainbow?” Charlie says.

He goes to her and turns her over. It is his wife. She rubs her eyes open and smiles at Charlie.

“There you are,” she says, touching her index finger sloppily to his lower lip.

The Asian woman looks over at Charlie with a sneer, feeling dirty for snuggling with a married man while his wife was in the same room, even if it was an accident. She shakes her head and stares out of a crack in the boarded up window.

When Rainbow Cat looks around and notices the unfamiliar surroundings, she leaps to her feet, and yells, “Oh god.”

The hippy girl looks around the room in a panic. When Charlie tries to hug her to him, she pushes him away.

“This has got to be some kind of mistake,” she says. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

The Asian girl looks over at Charlie and says in a calm, serious tone, “You better shut her mouth right now.”

“I can’t be here,” Rainbow cries. “I can’t be here!”

“Shut her up or I’ll snap her neck,” says the Asian woman, without raising her voice.

Charlie can tell by the look in her eyes that she’s serious, so he calms down his wife. The Asian woman’s eyes return to the window, peering at something in the distance.

“Where the fuck are we and shit?” says the yellow mohawk punk, as Charlie passes him to go to the window. The punk follows him.

Standing over the Asian woman’s shoulder, Charlie peers out of the window. Outside is a vast city of collapsing vine-ridden skyscrapers and rubble. A wasteland. The building they are in is an old hotel, with a security wall around the perimeter.

The punk’s jaw drops when he sees the city. It is one of the ancient ones, the kind of city that they have only seen in old pictures and books.

“We’re on the mainland,” says the punk, “in the middle of the damned Red Zone!”

“Impossible,” Charlie says. “How did we get all the way out here?”

The punk’s mohawk quivers. “Look around and shit! We’re not on the island anymore. It’s obviously the damned Red Zone!”

The Asian woman glares up at the punk. The look in her cold dark eyes is enough to shut him up. She peers at Charlie and puts her long black-painted fingernail to her lips, then points to a figure on the other side of the yard.

When Charlie looks, he sees a naked man staggering through the weed-coated parking lot. His skin has melted off of his body, his face nothing but a skull buried in fluffy pink meat, his intestines wrapped around his neck like a scarf. He’s a walking corpse, moaning with every step he takes.

“We are in the Red Zone, aren’t we?” Charlie asks.

The Asian woman nods. “Right in the middle.”

“How is that even possible?” Charlie asks. “That’s hundreds of miles away from the island. How could we have possibly gotten here?”

“We were put here,” she says.

“For what reason?” he asks. “To play some kind of joke on us?”

“Something like that,” she says.

When the young prostitute with the dark red hair looks out of the window and sees the zombie, she screams.

“What the fuck is that!” she cries. “What is it doing here!”

The zombie hears the prostitute and looks over at her. Sunflowers are growing out of its hollow skull like weeds. A tongue coils out of its black teeth.

“Brains…” it says, then approaches the building.

When the prostitute’s eyes meet with the zombie’s, she covers her mouth and backs away. The zombie shuffles forward like bags of garbage spilling from a dump truck.

“It’s a fucking zombie!” says the yellow mohawk punk, almost excitedly.

Everyone runs to the window to see it for themselves, but once they get a glimpse of it they all back off.

Charlie looks back at his wife, sitting on the floor, curled around

her knees, shaking her head. He goes to her. “Do you know what’s going on?” he asks.

She looks up at him with tears in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry…” she says.

He holds her close to him, her tears tickling his cheeks.

A voice comes over the intercom system. The building has long been without electricity, so Charlie is confused by how it is functional.

The voice says: “Welcome, contestants!” It’s the voice of an overly excited young woman with a Japanese accent. “I hope you slept well! I’m sure you’re all wondering what has happened to you and why you have come to be in the middle of the Red Zone. But, for you, I have super great news! All twenty of you have been randomly selected to participate in the hit television series, Zombie Survival! The Platinum Quadrant’s favorite reality game show, number one!”

“I knew it,” says the Asian woman.

The voice continues: “Most of you are probably unaware of this show, because citizens of the Copper Quadrant such as yourselves do not have the luxury of television. But it is the most electrifying entertainment on TV, guaranteed! If you do a good job and win the game, first prize will be citizenship in the Silver Quadrant, with certified passports to the Gold and Platinum Quadrants. However, there can be only one winner. Losers will be left for dead in the Red Zone.”

“This can’t be,” says an obese man of Italian descent. “I’m not a citizen of the goddamned Copper Quadrant. I’m from Silver. I was just visiting my dumbshit nephew!”

The Asian woman hushes him.

The voice continues: “If you will all make your way up to Room 222, you will find your supplies. Each of you have been left a backpack including survival gear and a unique weapon personalized to your estimated fighting capabilities! The backpacks are electronically locked and will not unlock until you have left the safety of the barricaded hotel. I recommend you go upstairs and claim your pack immediately. If you stay in the lobby for too long you are likely to gain some unwanted attention.”

The punks rush up the stairs and go for room 222. Everyone follows. Charlie is the last one upstairs, waiting for Rainbow to stop crying and get to her feet.

“Braaains!” the zombie yells through the glass.

Looking behind him on the way up the stairs, Charlie examines the zombie banging on the boarded window trying to get in. It rips at the boards with its claws, a cracking sound splits through the wood but the plank remains in its place… for now. Charlie gets a good look at the sunflowers growing out of its empty eye socket and out the top of its hollow skull. Its mulched brain must have acted like fertilizer for the flowers, its head like a pot. He wonders how the thing can think without a mind in its head.

It’s been seventeen years since Charlie has seen a zombie. Back when he was a kid, he lived in one of the many fortified cities along the coasts of the mainland. Back then, he saw zombies every day, through the barrier, in the wasteland. The dead were constantly trying to get into the city and the living were always reinforcing their perimeters to keep them out. Every capable human was responsible for guarding the perimeter. Charlie’s father was no exception.

“There are so many of them out there, like an ocean,” his father used to say when they would stare at the zombie wasteland from the top of the guard tower.

His father was fascinated with the walking dead. He thought of them as almost beautiful, like works of art.

He handed Charlie his machine gun and had him look through the scope. While zooming in, Charlie saw a black sludge-covered skeleton creeping down a street. Its eyes bulged out of the sockets, its skeletal teeth in a wide smile. Its black flesh melted from its body. The thing looked comical in its bumbling state. It made Charlie laugh.

“What is it?” his father asked.

“It’s funny,” young Charlie said. “The zombie looks funny.”

Then he looked again at its bulging googly eyes and laughed harder.

His father patted him on the back. “Yeah, perhaps they are a bit funny. From a distance.”

Eventually, civilization moved off of the mainland completely. They built protected cities on islands, on oil rigs, on aircraft carriers. Most of Charlie’s generation have it pretty good compared to those who had to survive the zombie apocalypse that began over fifty years ago. Very few people have to fight for their lives on a day to day basis anymore, especially those in the upper-class Platinum Quadrant of Neo New York.

The twenty contestants squeezed into the small hotel room on the second floor. Lying along the wall were twenty bags. They weren’t all backpacks. Some were duffel bags, some were purse-sized packs, some were large mountaineer packs. Charlie guessed the size had something to do with the weapon included within. A good weapon would be a huge advantage, but lugging around a large pack would not.

The voice came over the intercom: “Your packs will also include a map of the area with the pickup point marked by an X. You have three days to arrive at the designated pickup zone, but remember brave contestants: the remote control helicopter only has room for one passenger. If more than one person tries to board the craft, it will not take off. If all of you fail to arrive by 3pm on the third day, all of you will be left behind. If you want to win you will not only have to fight the zombies, you will also have to fight each other.”

Rainbow hugs Charlie, her dreadlocks wrapping around his body like itchy tentacles. His eyes widen at the thought of only one of them getting out of there alive.

“There is only one rule: do not break the cameras,” the voice says.

Then, outside the window, a floating spherical device about the size of a coconut rises to eyelevel. The lens on its front films the contestants, broadcasting their alarmed expressions to all the fat wealthy families watching at home in the Platinum Quadrant.

“The cameras are equipped to defend themselves against contestants as well as the walking dead. If you do happen to break one of them it will cause an explosion capable of killing all contestants within a 50 yard radius. This is the only rule we enforce. So, whatever you do, don’t mess with the cameras.”

“You mean like this?” The yellow mohawked punk kicks the glass right in front of the floating camera ball.

The device flies backward at the movement. The other punks burst into laughter. He flips off the camera and then shows it his bare ass. A couple of the other punks join in, flipping off the camera, hollering at it. A scantily dressed green-haired punk slut flashes her boobs at the camera and then spits.

The voice continues, unaware of the vulgar display happening before the camera, “So, good luck brave contestants! You can work as a team for a while if you like, or go solo right from the start. But remember, there can only be one survivor. I also recommend getting a move on as soon as you have your packs. The barricade around the hotel was only designed to last for a few hours, max.”

When the voice is finished, the obese Italian man steps forward and speaks at the camera through the window. “My name is Alonzo Fisichella. I am a citizen of the Silver Quadrant, not the Copper Quadrant. I do not belong here. I have connections to people in both the Gold and Platinum Quadrants. I am not a scumbag lowlife like the rest of these people. Just look up my credentials. I should be exempt from this. You have to come pick me up!”

The camera hovered. It did not speak back to him.

“Answer me, you bitch!” Alonzo says to the intercom system.

The Asian woman says, “It’s just an automated message. You’re not going to get a response.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Alonzo asks.

The Asian woman takes a breath. “Because I was the one who recorded it.”

All eyes lock on her.

Charlie and the other contestants listen to the Asian woman’s story. She introduces herself as Junko. It was five years ago when Junko recorded the message, back when she was a younger, more naïve girl, who was viewed as a typical empty-headed large-breasted sex object hired on to be the spokesperson for the Zombie Survival reality television series. That is, until she quit and led a protest against the show last year. After that, she had been deemed unemployable in the Platinum, Gold, and Silver Quadrants. She had to move to Copper with the hard laborers and the vagrant scum of the island. She knew it was only a matter of time before she was chosen as a contestant for the show herself.

“I know how this game works,” she says. “It’s all about sticking together and working as a team, not dividing apart. The people who go solo, no matter how tough they are, never make it to the end.”

“But there can only be one winner?” asks the muscle-bound punk guy with the flattop and pink half-shirt.

“Very few people ever actually make it as far as the helicopter,” she says. “Most games don’t have winners at all. Don’t think of this as a competition. Think of it as survival.”

“How many winners have there been?” Charlie asks.

“Out of the ten games that have been played so far?” Junko blinks. “Only two, and one of those was infected and had to be eliminated by the time she got back to the island.”

“So there’s no hope?” Rainbow Cat asks. “We’re done for?”

The large bearded vagrant steps forward and pulls the hood from his head to reveal a short black mohawk.

“There’s always hope,” he says, “if we stick together.”

Then he gives a thumbs up and smiles a big dumb smile, his bright white teeth contrasting with his unwashed skin.

Each of the bags has a name tag on it. The big black vagrant, Laurence, calls out the names written on the bag and hands it to the appropriate contestant. This is also how the contestants are introduced to each other.

There is already one team that has formed: the seven punks. They either know each other from before the contest, or already made fast friends. There’s Scavy, the punk with the yellow mohawk, Brick, the large muscular punk with a platinum blond flattop and pink half-shirt, Gogo, the busty green-haired punk slut, Popcorn, the short punk girl with the spiky pink hair, Xiu, a Chilean punk girl with a black mohawk, Zippo, a skinny punk guy with an aviator helmet and goggles, Vine, a quiet punk guy with black hair, a black surgical mask, and a black spiked-leather outfit.

Bosco, a skinny redneck with a comb-over and facial features that can only be described as goblin-like, tries to team up with the punks, but they won’t have him. They don’t trust anyone who isn’t a punk.

“This is going to kick ass and shit!” Scavy says, and his punk army raises their fists with him.

To these guys, this is nothing but a game, even if their lives are at stake.

“Shouldn’t we all stick together?” Charlie asks Junko.

Junko is busy trying to pick the lock on her duffel bag.

Charlie leans into her field of vision. “You said we needed to work as a team in order to survive.”

She turns to him, “Large teams draw too much attention. Splitting up into three or four smaller teams is preferable. I wouldn’t want any of those punks on my team, anyway. They’re unpredictable.”

“Who’s on our team then?” Charlie asks.

Junko looks at Charlie with an annoyed expression. “Who said I wanted you on my team?”

Charlie steps back. “I just thought…”

“Actually,” Junko says, “if you get rid of your bitch I’ll take you along.”

“What?” Rainbow cries.

“You’re Charles Hudson, aren’t you?” Junko asks. “The writer?”

Charlie smiles. No matter how accomplished of a writer he is, he always appreciates being recognized.

“Yeah, or at least I was,” he says. “Until the Platinum Quadrant decided fiction wasn’t worthwhile anymore. I’ve been a poor nobody in the Copper Quadrant ever since.”

“I’ve read some of your books,” she says. “You have a clever mind. I could use clever.”

“But what about my wife?” he asks, hugging Rainbow to his waist.

“For starters,” she says, “she’ll slow us down. She’s dead weight. Secondly, couples never make it very far in this game. They always get themselves killed by risking their necks to save each other. Thirdly, trust is the most important thing I need from a teammate. If I can’t trust you then I don’t want you.”

“But why can’t you trust us?” Charlie asks.

“I can probably trust you,” Junko says. “I just don’t trust her.”

Charlie looks at Rainbow with her confused puppydog face, then back at Junko. “Why don’t you trust my wife?”

Junko glares at the hippy girl. “Because she’s the reason you’ve been chosen as a contestant for this show.”

Rainbow bursts into tears when Charlie looks back at her. He doesn’t know what the Asian woman is talking about, but based on Rainbow’s reaction whatever she is saying is likely the truth.

“What do you mean?” Charlie asks.

Junko tells him about how the producers of Zombie Survival pay a reward to any citizen who recommends a good candidate for the show. She can tell that Rainbow recommended her own husband for the show, expecting to retire from the reward money. Charlie’s celebrity status would make him an interesting contestant to the people watching back home.

“But you had no idea the producers never intended to pay, did you?” Junko tells his wife. “You might have heard rumors about the show and the reward, but you didn’t know that your only payment would be to share the fate of your husband. That’s what they always do.”

Charlie notices a floating camera ball above Junko’s shoulder, filming their conversation. Rainbow looks at Charlie with red watery eyes.

“Is this true?” he asks.

Rainbow nods her head and looks away.

“You didn’t have a job and we needed the money,” she says, her back to him. “I was sick of being the one who pays for everything all the time. I was sick of taking care of you.”

“You did it just for money? On our five year anniversary?”

“You owed it to me,” she says. “I work so hard to buy your food, pay your rent, support your alcohol addiction.”

“I hardly drink anymore!”

“This was the only way I could get that money back.”

“But, it’s just money,” Charlie says. “I’ve only been unemployed for the past ten months. When I was a novelist and we lived in the Gold Quadrant, you didn’t have to work for over three years!”

“I know!” she says, her eyes no longer tearing with sadness but with anger. “That’s why you owe it to me! You took that life away from me and I want it back!”

“I loved you…” Charlie says.

Her anger subsides.

“Loved?” she says. “You don’t love me anymore?”

“What the hell do you think?” he says to her, the camera zooming in on his face. “You sentenced me to death just because you were tired of paying the bills yourself. How the hell do you expect me to feel?”

“But they sent me here, too,” she cries. “We’re in this together now.”

He shakes his head. “You’re in this alone.”

Her lips quiver and then open as if to argue back, but she can’t find the right words. She turns and runs down the hall, to another room, collapsing on a mattress that crumbles to dust beneath her.

Adriana, the young prostitute, looks out of the window at the urban wasteland below. The zombie with the sunflowers in its skull is attracting the attention of other zombies. There are three more of them now, and five more headed in the direction of the hotel from down the street. Their soggy green and black flesh drips from their limbs. Some of them have debris melded into their flesh, as if they had been lying in the rubble of the wasteland for over a decade, waiting for humans to return. Like the sunflower zombie, some of them grow weeds, moss, or vines from their rotten flesh.

“Braaaaiiins…”

The girl steps away from the window, just in case the zombies look up. She wouldn’t want to excite them too much.

“So what the fuck are we going to do?” Bosco says. “The bitch said we only have three hours max before this place becomes unsafe.”

Junko scowls at him for calling her a bitch, even if she does agree that she was a bitch in that past life.

“And the sooner we get out the better our chances,” Laurence says.

Adriana looks out of the window again and sees a dozen more zombies approaching. And beyond them, in the distance, there is at least a dozen more.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Adriana says, her voice quivering as she scrunches her puffy short skirt.

They look at her.

“You can’t just stay here,” Junko says.

Alonzo steps forward. “I’m staying, too. I wouldn’t last ten minutes out there in my condition.” He jiggles fifty pounds of belly fat to prove his point.

“I agree,” another man says from the back of the room. He steps forward, a blond man wearing a black suit and leather overcoat. Charlie and Junko hadn’t noticed him before. They only know his name from the tag on his enormous mountaineer pack that reads: Heinz.

“I think staying back might be a worthwhile strategy,” says Heinz. His voice has a snobbish upper class tone to it, as if he thinks he is speaking to a group of inferior peasants. “If we lure all of the dead in the vicinity to one place, such as this building, they would be much easier to kill.”

“Don’t you understand what it takes to kill just one of those things?” Junko says.

“Of course,” says Heinz. “It will not be too difficult of a task.”

Junko shakes her head. “You’re crazy.”

“I think he could be right,” another man says. Haroon, a young man of Indian descent, who is wearing perhaps the nicest clothing in the room.

Junko says, “You all have to know that staying here is suicide. I’ve seen it happen every time. Every season, there’s always somebody too afraid to leave the starting point. They never last long.”

“Yeah, what the hell is wrong with you pussies?” Scavy says.

“That’s not what I mean,” Haroon says. “I think we should forget about the helicopter. Only one of us can survive that way. If we work together I think we can all survive.”

“How’s that?” Bosco asks.

“I’ve been studying the map,” Haroon says. “In order to get to the helicopter, we’d have to go through the most dangerous parts of the city. But what if we were to skip the helicopter and go for a boat?”

“Is it possible?” Alonzo asks.

Haroon holds up his map and points to a blue line along the bottom. “There’s a harbor along the river here. It’s farther than the helicopter but we’d travel through less dangerous territory. If we find a boat we can sail it downstream to the ocean. Then we’d be home free.”

“That’s never going to work,” Junko says. “It seems close on the

map but it is nearly three times the distance of the helicopter. There’s no way anyone could survive out there for that long. And even if you happened to survive the trip and find a boat it would be over fifty years old. It’s not going to be sail-worthy after rotting in disrepair for so long.”

“Maybe we can find a plane at an airport to get us home?” Adriana says.

“Or find an armored vehicle that could take us out of the Red Zone,” Alonzo says.

Junko groans and shakes her head at all of them.

“We’re talking fifty years!” Junko says, knocking on her head. “Do you know what happens to machinery, boats, and buildings after fifty years?”

Nobody answers.

“They become useless,” Charlie says. “She’s right. Our only option is to go for the helicopter.”

“But then only one of us will survive,” Haroon says.

“You don’t understand,” Junko says. “We’ll be lucky if even one of us survives. Last season not a single person lasted beyond the first day.”

“Then why bother?” Adriana says. “We might as well kill ourselves now.”

Junko shrugs. She doesn’t really have a good answer for her. But Laurence steps forward and answers for her. “Because if we’re gonna die, we’re not gonna die like chumps.”

Then he punches his large fist into his palm.

The punks cheer him.

Junko goes to Charlie.

“So, are you going to join me,” she asks, “and leave the bitch behind?”

“Yeah,” he says, without making eye contact. “I’m with you.”

Junko smiles at him. “Good. Forget all about her and you might actually last awhile.”

Charlie wipes his tears away, tries to toughen up.

“So who else should we team up with?” he asks.

Junko looks around the room. She points at the black man with the mohawk and the guy he is talking to, an ex-soldier turned vagrant named Lee. “Them.”

“They can be trusted?”

She nods. “I’m a good judge of character.”

“Who else?”

“I think I can trust that Haroon guy,” Junko says. “But he’s an idiot if he thinks he can actually get out of the wasteland by anything other than helicopter.”

“He seems okay. That all?”

Junko looks around the room, then nods.

“Yeah, the rest are either worthless or scumbags or both.”

Charlie says, “Then let’s talk to the three that are worthwhile.”

As Junko introduces herself to Laurence and Lee, Charlie grinds his fist at the thought of Rainbow betraying him like that. He knew she was on the selfish side, he knew she hated the idea of living in the Copper Quadrant, and he knew money was important to her. But what he didn’t know was how little of importance he was to her.

Rainbow was a hippy from the Gold Quadrant. She lived in relative luxury since as long as she could remember. As a rich spoiled girl whose parents paid for everything, she was able to spend her time reading, smoking pot, protesting, painting, promoting peace and happiness, smoking pot, dancing, sun-bathing, and smoking pot. There were a lot of hippies in the Gold Quadrant. There were very few in the Silver and Copper Quadrants, because people were too busy working their asses off for just the bare essentials of survival.

When Charlie and Rainbow first met, it was at the university.

“What are you reading?” Charlie asked her.

Rainbow looked up from her picnic blanket to see the strange man staring down on her, blocking the sunlight.

“Charles Hudson,” she said, folding her legs, her wet grassy toes resting on top of a cucumber sandwich.

“What are you reading that crap for?” he said. “There were much better books written before Z-Day.”

“But I like his books,” she said. “I relate to them. He’s the only good writer since the apocalypse.”

Charlie smiled and stretched his back at her. “I don’t know, I think he’s kind of a douchebag. Just look at his author photo. Total douche.”

Then he walked away.

“Asshole,” Rainbow said.

She hated when people said crap about her favorite author. Just because he was a popular contemporary writer, that didn’t make him terrible. Most of the classics were originally bestsellers, written by the popular contemporary writers of their time. Just because Charles Hudson wasn’t dead yet and had yet to withstand the test of time, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.

She muttered to herself, “You look more like a douchebag than Charles Hudson.”

Then she turned to the bio page and looked at his author photo. Then she looked back at Charlie, who was walking casually through the park with his hands in his pockets. Charlie was wearing the same green antique army coat as the author in the photo.

She chased Charlie down and walked beside him, looking at his face and holding his book up as reference. Although he was younger in the photo, had less meat on his bones, and was clean shaven, she could see they were the same person.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she asked. “Charles Hudson.”

Charlie smiled. “I was wondering if you’d notice.”

“Why didn’t you tell me!” she said. “You’re my favorite author!”

“If I’m your favorite author,” he said, “you’re not reading the right books.”

“I’ve read a lot,” Rainbow said, then licked her upper lip. “You’re the only author that really speaks to me.”

“But there’s a whole library full of books by masters of the craft,” he said, pointing at the university library on the other side of the park. “Those are the all-time greatest works of literature, written by geniuses. I’m no a master. I’m no genius. I’m not even smart, really. I’ve just been writing stories my whole life, since I was a kid, as a way to escape our shitty reality.”

“But I can relate to that,” she said, swinging her dreads over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t blocking her cleavage. “I can’t relate to some masterful genius from a completely different era telling stories about a world I never knew. You write about our lives now, in Neo New York.”

“But those other books are brilliant works of art.”

“I don’t care if they are brilliant. I care about emotion. You make me smile, laugh, cry, fear, fall in love. That’s what is important.”

Charlie smiled at her. She smiled at him. He noticed she was sucking in her stomach, arching her back, pushing out her breasts so that they wouldn’t look so small.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Cathy,” she said. Then she leaned in, pressed her cheek against

his, and said in a gentle voice, “But you can call me Rainbow Cat.” Her lips so close they tickled his earlobe when she spoke.

He was used to the flirtatious advances of his female readers. His past six girlfriends were all young pretty fans. They were the only girls he was interested in, because even though he liked to make light of his writing talents all he really wanted was to have his ego stroked as much as possible. Compliments meant so much more when they were coming out of the lips of a beautiful woman.

By the next morning, they had already had sex three times. Rainbow was aggressive with her sexuality, gluttonous with it. She knew what she wanted, and she wanted it all right then and there. Charlie liked that about her. The more she wanted him, the better he felt about himself as a writer. She didn’t know him, personally. She only knew his work. So for him to see her crave him sexually so bad meant that it was his art that she wanted to fuck. She wanted to lick his art, press her body against his art, feel his art inside of her. As an artist, it was like an ego blowjob, and he loved every second of it.

But she didn’t just want to make love to him, she wanted to possess him. It wasn’t long before she dropped out of college and moved in with him. It wasn’t long before she convinced him to marry her.

They were happy together. Rainbow was happy that her favorite author now belonged to her, both physically and mentally, and he was happy to be with this pretty young girl who loved his work so much that she was willing to dedicate her life to him because of it. For each of them, it was a perfect arrangement. But it didn’t last.

When the last fiction publishing company in Neo New York went out of business, Charlie was no longer an author. With no college education, neither Charlie nor Rainbow could get jobs in the Gold Quadrant. They were downgraded to the Silver Quadrant and eventually ended up in the ghetto of Copper.

Rainbow still believed in her husband. At least she did when they first moved into the Copper Quadrant. She told him that she would take care of them from then on. All he had to worry about was his writing.

“Your work is what is important,” she said. “Someday a new publishing company will go into business. When that happens, you’ll have several manuscripts ready to go. Then we’ll be rich again.”

Charlie agreed, but he wasn’t as optimistic as she was. It was difficult for him to get back into writing. He became more interested in drinking, sulking around the house. He started taking pills, getting high on Waste, and sleeping around with prostitutes. But Rainbow helped him out of his despair. She told him that she would leave him if he didn’t quit taking drugs or ease up on the drinking.

To get back at him for sleeping with prostitutes, she told him he had to write ten pages a day, every single day. If he was short a single page, a single paragraph, she would go out and fuck a random guy that night. Sometimes he met his goal, sometimes he didn’t. She always made good on her promise, even if she wasn’t in the mood that night. If he didn’t write a single sentence, even if he happened to be sick, she wouldn’t even come home that night. She would let some strange guy pick her up, then sleep in his bed with him, snuggle him, kiss the back of his neck as he slept, until it was time for her to go to work the next day.

Even though he wasn’t making any money, Rainbow Cat made him a better, more responsible writer for doing this to him. He thought she was a total bitch for it, but because she was a bitch she had helped him through a hard time. He believed she was a bitch to him because she loved him.

He still can’t believe she would sell him out to this television show, just for the sake of money. And on their anniversary, of all days, which wasn’t just to celebrate five years of marriage but also to celebrate the completion of his newest novel. It wasn’t only his newest, but also the greatest book he had ever written. His masterpiece. The book that he would be remembered for more than anything else he’s ever written.

The last thing he remembers from their anniversary dinner, before the drugs in their drinks took effect, was telling her who the book was dedicated to.

The inscription on the manuscript page read:

To my Rainbow Cat, for always believing in me.

The number of zombies outside of the hotel is rising. The undead are breaking the wooden barrier into splinters. Some are puking green radioactive vomit across the walls, others are dripping black oily fluids on the sun-burnt pavement.

“We need to get going pretty soon,” Junko says to Charlie.

They have separated from the others and are now in a private hotel room, trying to plan their escape. Haroon and Lee are in the room, leaning against a dresser. Laurence is also there, pointing at the path.

“I say we head straight through there,” Laurence says, while pointing at the widest street in sight. “It might be the most wide-open but it has the least amount of obstacles. We’ll be able to run faster.”

“No,” Junko says. “You want to put obstacles between you and them. They can run pretty fast, but they are terrible climbers. We should go over the wall. They won’t be able to follow us over and it’ll take them a good hour to figure out how to get around. I’ve seen it before.”

“How far away do we have to get before our packs open?” Lee asks through his scruffy gray beard. By his tipsy posture, Charlie assumes that the old man is drunk even though he couldn’t possibly have any alcohol on him.

“Don’t bother with them until we get over the wall and find safety,” Junko says. “Focus on running. Trying to fight them will only slow us down.”

“When should we leave?” Charlie asks.

“Right now,” Junko says.

Once the five of them arrive in the lobby, they notice that the seven punks have the same idea. The punks are ready to go, their eyes lit with excitement. The other people in the room don’t seem to be as organized. Charlie can’t tell if they are all one group, several small groups, or if they all plan to go solo. Rainbow is the only person who isn’t in the lobby. She must still be hiding up in a room somewhere.

The zombies are ripping boards from the windows and scratching against the glass. One of them is missing flesh from the tips of its fingers, causing a screeching noise as its finger bones scrape across the glass.

Scavy looks closely at one of the zombies. It is a female corpse who looks like she had been an exotic dancer in her past life, wearing fishnet stockings and a withered black corset. Her breasts are hanging out of her ripped open shirt. Scavy can see the saline implants through holes in her breast meat, where chunks of flesh had been bitten away.

The female zombie locks eyes with Scavy and says, “Braains!”

Then she thrashes harder against the boards. It’s as if looking him in the eyes made her more hungry, as if she could see his brains through his pupils.

“Hey, this one’s kind of hot!” Scavy says to his friends, pointing at the ex-stripper zombie.

His friend, Brick, laughs and wiggles his tongue at her through the glass.

“Braains,” she says, staring Scavy in the eyes. “Let me eat your brains!”

Charlie notices that she is salivating.

“Brains!” she cries.

Brick and Scavy pretend to squeeze her breasts through the glass. This only works up the zombie even more.

“Need!” she cries. “Need your brains! Now!”

Junko pushes the punks away from the window. “Don’t tease them. You’ll only make them hungrier.”

The punks don’t seem to care.

“Are they intelligent?” Charlie asks Junko. “I’ve never heard them say anything but brains before… even when I was a kid and saw them all the time.”

“It depends on how much of their minds are still intact,” Junko says. “Most of their minds have been destroyed. Some of them, especially the freshly turned ones, can have entire conversations with you.”

“So you can reason with them? Convince them to let us go? They must understand what it’s like to be human.”

Junko laughs and shakes her head. “Even the most intelligent zombies are like junkies going through a massive withdrawal. All they need to get their fix is to feed on the electrical impulses in your nervous system. If you want to convince junkies not to shoot up anymore, it’s not going to happen while you’re waving a bunch of free Waste in front of their faces.”

“But what if you tried to reason with them from a distance, over an intercom?” Charlie asks. “Maybe if you take the Waste out of their faces it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Clever,” Junko says. “But a useless idea.”

“I wonder if the more intelligent ones have conversations with each other,” Charlie says, “when humans aren’t around to drive them brain-crazy.”

“Brain-crazy?” Junko asks.

“It’s a term I use in my novels to explain zombie behavior around living beings.”

“Hmmm…” She scrunches her eyes at him. “No wonder why people don’t take your books seriously.”

He shrugs. “I was never trying to be taken seriously.”

“Are you ready to do this?” Junko asks.

Charlie looks behind him to check with Lee, Haroon, and Laurence. They nod their heads. Laurence smiles and gives him a thumbs up through his black leather glove.

“Let’s do it,” Charlie says.

The punks crowd the front entrance, wanting to be the first ones out. As they pry the boards from the front door, all of the zombies in the yard become attracted to the sound and gather on the other side.

“How are we gonna get through them?” Bosco says.

“We should leave through another entrance,” Haroon says, inching away.

Before the punks get the boards down, the door splinters apart and a hole opens up on the top half.

“Braains!” a zombie’s face says through the hole.

All the punks back away except for Brick and the pink-haired girl, Popcorn. They try to hold the door in place as it is ripped apart.

“Help us!” Popcorn yells.

The group scatters. Some of them run to the east side of the building, some run to the west. All of the punks leave their two friends, except for Scavy.

“Leave it,” Scavy yells at them. “Come on!”

Brick and Popcorn won’t let go of the door.

“You go first,” Brick tells the girl, flexing his enormous weightlifter muscles. “I’ve got this.”

Popcorn says, “You sure?”

“Yeah!” he says.

Popcorn bites her lip and eases away from the door. But just before she can get back far enough, a skeletal hand reaches through the hole and grabs her by the arm.

“It’s got me!” she cries.

Scavy grabs her by the other hand and tries to pull her away, but its grip is too strong.

“Brains!” the zombie says, black sludge pouring out from between its teeth.

Then radioactive vomit sprays out of its mouth and covers Brick and Popcorn.

“Get back,” Junko says to Charlie and her crew.

Charlie and the others back away from the vomit puddle on the floor as it bubbles and steams. Brick cries out as it burns his flesh like acid. Steam rises from the green slime on the right side of his face. As it drips into his eyes, it bleaches the color out of his right eyeball.

“If you get that shit on your skin you’ll be infected,” Junko says. “Let’s get out of here. These guys are done for.”

Junko takes off to the west side of the building, Charlie and the others follow after.

Rainbow Cat misses Charlie by three seconds as she comes downstairs with her bag over her shoulder, still wiping tears from her eyes. She sees that everybody has already gone except for the three punks in the entryway.

Popcorn screams as the zombie’s bony claws dig into her skin. Scavy yanks on her arm with all of his strength and the zombie’s claws are ripped out of her flesh. When he feels the release, he thinks she is free. But then there is another tug and Popcorn is pulled closer to the door.

When Rainbow approaches them, she sees that the zombie no longer has a grip on her arm. Instead, there is a thin red rope attached to her wrist that the zombie is holding on to. When she gets a closer look, Rainbow realizes that it isn’t a rope. It is the girl’s tendon.

Popcorn’s cries hit a high pitch as the zombie reels the girl in closer to the hole in the door, using her tendon like a fishing line.

“Braains!”

Brick lets go of the door with one hand and grabs hold of her tendon, holding it from being pulled further through the hole. But without using his full strength to hold the barrier, the door crumbles open. The zombies pour inside.

When Junko and Charlie get to the side entrance, the door is already wide open.

“Let’s do this,” Laurence says behind them.

Junko looks back to make sure they are all with her.

“Where’s Haroon?” she asks.

They look back.

“He was behind Lee,” Charlie says.

Lee, in the back, just shrugs at them.

“We’ll have to go on without him,” she says.

When they exit the building, they run under a camera ball hovering overhead, ready to follow them through the wasteland. Up ahead, they see the tail-ends of other contestants running across the yard, dodging the zombie horde. Three of the punks who had ditched their friends are in the lead. Led by the Chilean female punk, Xiu, they weave quickly through the horde like cocaine-driven football players.

Bosco, the bony redneck, is in the back, not having as much luck. He gets cornered by five of them.

“Help me, goddamnit!” Bosco yells, as Junko and her crew run past him.

Charlie considers throwing some rocks or debris at the zombies to knock them away from the redneck, but Junko knows what he’s thinking and snaps him out of it.

“Leave him,” she says.

Charlie takes his eyes off of Bosco and focuses on his own survival. They run past two zombies with outstretched arms. One soggy corpse hisses at them, bubbles gurgling out of its throat as if it had been soaking at the bottom of a pool for the past decade.

There are only about a dozen on this side of the building, but they move pretty fast. Charlie and Junko run through six of them just before they squeeze together, blocking the path between them and their teammates.

Junko keeps moving, but Charlie looks back. Four of the zombies grab Laurence and pull him to the ground. Behind him, Lee turns around and runs in the opposite direction, heading for a collapsed section of the wall by the south side of the building.

“Keep going,” Laurence says to Charlie. “I got this.”

Charlie turns and continues after Junko.

They get around to the front of the building and arrive at the wall they had originally planned to go over. Charlie acts as a ladder to get Junko up the wall, then she lowers her arms to pull him up. Charlie notices that despite Junko’s 4’11 height and soft flesh that doesn’t appear to have an ounce of muscle, the Asian girl is surprisingly strong. She pulls him up with little effort.

At the top of the wall, the two of them look back at Laurence. Zombies are piling on top of him.

“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Junko says. “Come on.”

She turns to drop down on the other side, but Charlie stops her.

“Wait.”

They look at the pile of zombies and see movement coming from beneath. Then the entire pile lifts from the ground as Laurence stands. The man is massive, Charlie knows, but with those baggy clothes covering up every inch of his skin he wasn’t sure how much of him was fat and how much was muscle. As the corpses are thrown across the yard, Charlie imagines he is all muscle under those rags. He must be two or three times the size of Brick, and Brick looks like one of the old time professional wrestlers.

Laurence punches one of them in the stomach so hard that his fist bursts through its rotten soggy organs. But that doesn’t stop the creature. With his fist stuck inside of it, the thing goes for Laurence’s skull with its claws. It shrieks in his face and widens its fingers. But before it reaches him, Laurence stomps down on the creature’s knee, breaking its leg. The zombie crumples to the ground.

As the zombies return to their feet, Laurence punches them with his leather-gloved fists, knocking them back down. Then he pauses and turns to Charlie and Junko. He gives them a thumbs up and a big smile.

“Not a problem,” he says. “Give me a minute to take care of these suckas.”

Charlie looks back at Junko. She examines the vagrant carefully. The zombies have yet to lay a scratch on him. His clothes are covered in their rancid goo, but none of it has gotten on his skin. He’s not infected. Junko agrees that they should wait for him.

Beyond Laurence, Charlie sees Lee escaping through the south wall. Bosco does not appear to be dead, but he’s no longer in the place they had last seen him. He must have made it out of there somehow. On the other side of the wall, deeper into the city, the three punks are running down the street, dodging corpses and jumping rubble. Even though they are punks, they move like trained soldiers, their minds focused.

Beyond them, in the distance, there is machine gun fire. Charlie isn’t sure where it is coming from, but somewhere out there contestants are already fighting their way toward the helicopter.

Brick runs from the hotel entrance toward the perimeter, leaving his friends inside to fend for themselves against the zombies. Then Scavy runs out of the hotel, carrying Popcorn at his side, her blood leaking out of her arm and from a fresh bite-wound on the back of her neck, just below the skull. Zombies exit the hotel, chasing after them.

And in the back of the crowd is Rainbow Cat. From the wall, Charlie can see his wife running for her life. He wonders how he’ll feel if the zombies kill her right in front of him. He wonders if he’ll feel sorry for her or feel satisfaction that she got what she deserved. He wonders if he’ll feel anything at all.

“They’re doomed,” Junko says. “If that punk kid ditches his girlfriend he might stand a chance, but the other two are already infected.”

Charlie can see how the vomit on Brick’s face and Popcorn’s chest has eaten away at their flesh like acid. Brick’s cheek is dripping from his face like a long bloodhound jowl. His right eyeball is pure white and poking slightly out of the socket.

Far ahead of the others, Brick runs until he makes it through the perimeter into the city street. Once he gets there, his long duffel bag makes a beeping noise as it unlocks. He doesn’t continue running from there. He drops the bag and opens it up, digging for his weapon.

Charlie watches as Brick pulls out a large two-handed sledgehammer. He leaves his bag on the ground and runs back to his friends to help them out, raising the enormous hammer over his head like he’s ready to chop wood with an axe.

Brick and Scavy had been friends for several years, ever since Brick had become a punk. Not many sub-cultures from the old world had survived, but the punk culture was stronger than ever. It had nothing to do with music anymore. It was all about attitude and style. Punks embraced the post-apocalyptic lifestyle. They raged against the authority of Neo New York. They despised the greedy scum living in the Platinum Quadrant.

Brick was born one of the rich kids in Platinum, but the Platinum Quadrant had strict rules for their youth. Three strikes and you’re kicked out. Brick was a troubled kid. He enjoyed breaking into other people’s apartments and stealing their stuff, just for fun. He enjoyed ditching class and getting drunk in his room while his parents were off shopping for new golfing outfits.

Eventually, he was caught shoplifting one of the brand new televisions that had finally come back into production for the first time since the collapse of the old world. It was the third strike, and he was out. His parents disowned him. A rich kid thrown into the Copper Quadrant was like throwing a sheep to the wolves.

Brick was beaten every day. Any money that he made from working on the docks was stolen by one of the many punk gangs that prowled Copper. In order to defend himself, Brick worked out everyday. He had to toughen himself up. By working on the docks, he was able to steal fish that put plenty of protein in his diet. By the time he was seventeen, he was one of the most muscular men in the Quadrant.

He became friends with Scavy the day Scavy and his crew tried to mug him. They asked for his money, but Brick told him no. When they got violent, Brick didn’t back down. He beat one of the punks unconscious with his bare fists. He dislocated one of their shoulders. He sent another running off into the alleyway. No matter how many came at him, he wouldn’t give in.

Eventually, they hit him in the back of the head with a two-by-four, then took his money and left him face down in the mud. But Scavy was impressed. Not just because the guy stood up to his entire gang, but because he did it to hold onto a lousy ten dollar bill.

The next day Scavy asked him to join his gang. All by himself, he approached him while he was at his job, loading boxes on the dock in his gray uniform covered in fish guts.

“Why do you bother working this shit job for shit pay?” Scavy asked.

“It’s all I’ve got,” Brick replied.

“Do you know each fish here sells for $10 each in the Platinum Quadrant?” Scavy said. “That’s as much as you make in a day.”

Brick knew how much things cost in Platinum. He didn’t need some punk reminding him.

“Get lost,” Brick said.

“You know how much I make in a day?” Scavy said.

Brick continued loading boxes onto a cart.

“$500 a day, minimum,” Scavy said.

“Bullshit,” Brick said.

“Okay, not me personally. That’s how much my crew makes. We split it up evenly and shit.”

“What is it that you do to make that much money?”

“We take it,” Scavy said with a smile. “From the stupid.”

“You took money from me,” Brick said. “Are you calling me stupid?”

Scavy laughed.

“In this world, it is survival of the fittest,” Scavy said. “The strong prey on the weak. The weak are left to suffer.”

“So?”

“Do you want to be on the bottom of the food chain?” Scavy said. “Or do you want to fight your way to the top and shit?”

Brick dropped a box and it smashed on the ground, dozens of dead fish oozing out in the mud by his feet. He decided to leave the fish where they lay.

“Honestly, I’d rather fight my way to the top,” Brick said. “. . . and shit.”

As Brick runs through the yard with his sledgehammer in hand, he thinks back on how much better his life had become once he joined up with Scavy. No more working his ass off for shit pay. No more getting beat down by every punk who confronted him on the street. Scavy gave him a new family and a new life. And even if it wasn’t as luxurious of a lifestyle as he had when he was a kid, it was still a hell of a lot more fun.

Brick smiles as he swings his sledgehammer at the first zombie to get in his path. His eyes light up with glee as its skull explodes on impact.

Charlie notices that there is something unusual about Brick’s weapon. It’s not shaped like a usual sledgehammer. Instead of a rectangular shape, the head of the sledgehammer is shaped like two fists, one on each side. When Brick slams the hammer into the next zombie’s face, it is as if he is crushing open its jaw with knuckles made of high carbon steel.

As Scavy and Popcorn pass him, Brick gets in the path between the zombies and his friends. He raises his double-fisted sledgehammer over his head and charges straight into the horde.

Although he thinks of him as a brother, Brick isn’t fighting for the sake of Scavy. He’s fighting for the sake of Scavy’s girlfriend, Popcorn. Even though the gang believes his girlfriend is that slut Gogo, Brick has been in love with Popcorn since the day they first met.

“This is Brick,” Scavy said to Popcorn as they entered her apartment. “He’s my new muscle and shit.”

As they approached her, Brick checked out the thin little punk girl as she painted her toenails pink. She had pink spiky hair, pink tattoos, and she was draped across the couch wearing nothing but pink panties.

When she noticed he was checking her out, she said, “Hey, think fast.”

Then she threw a baseball at him. He didn’t lift his hands in time to catch it and the thing hit him right in the diaphragm at full speed. With the wind knocked out of him, Brick leaned over and gasped, trying to catch his breath. It hurt more than the two-by-four that had hit him in the back of the head a couple days prior.

When he looked up at her, Popcorn was laughing, her pointy breasts shaking at him like children pointing their fingers.

“He’s slow,” she said. “Sure you want another dumbass in the gang?”

When Brick looked up at her, their eyes met. She smiled at him with her bright pink lips. It was love at first sight.

For the next year, Brick and Popcorn were fucking behind Scavy’s back. She said that she loved him, but he wasn’t so sure. She said she wasn’t a one man girl, that she could love both of them at the same time. Even though he didn’t like it, Popcorn convinced him that it was for the best.

“If I was with just you I would get bored too easily,” she told Brick. “This way our relationship will last much longer.”

Plus, she thought it was fun sneaking around behind Scavy’s back. Brick didn’t know it at the time, but she was also sneaking behind his back and sleeping with a couple of other guys in the gang. She also slept with Brick’s faux-girlfriend Gogo from time to time, but Brick already knew about that. Everyone in the gang slept with Gogo.

The night before they were abducted, Popcorn was going to tell him that she and Scavy were breaking up. She was bored with Scavy who had also lost interest in her. She decided that she was willing to give Brick a try for a while, as her number one.

But she never got the chance to tell Brick about it. Scavy’s apartment was gassed while they were drinking beers and playing cards. The producers of Zombie Survival got the lot of them. The last thing Brick remembers was his face hitting the floor next to Popcorn’s pink combat boots, as men in gasmasks flooded the room.

Popcorn looked back at Brick as he caved in a zombie’s ribcage with his double-fisted sledgehammer. She could tell he was doing it for her, even though she never got a chance to tell him he’s now her main boyfriend.

She pulls away from Scavy and yells back at him, “I love you, Brick!”

Brick turns around. His pink half-shirt covered in zombie goo.

“You’re my number one!” she says.

Brick smiles wide at her, as the right side of his face slips off of his head to reveal the white of his skull. His right eye drops out of its socket and lands next to his pink combat boot.

Popcorn didn’t realize he was wearing the combat boots she had stolen for him until just now. When she first got them for him, he said he didn’t want to wear them because he would get shit from the other guys. They already gave him shit for wearing pink shirts from time to time. He didn’t want to make it any worse.

Popcorn covers her mouth when she sees the boots. They looked withered and old, as if he’s been wearing them all the time, when nobody else was looking.

Brick turns back to the zombie horde and uses the last of his strength to fight them off, breaking their faces open with his steel fists.

Charlie helps Scavy climb up the wall, and then Scavy lifts up Popcorn.

“We can take the guy,” Junko says. “But the girl is infected. Get rid of her.”

“She’s fine,” Scavy says, crouching on the wall like a cat. “Don’t worry about it.”

Junko is about to push the both of them off of the wall, when a scream echoes through the yard. They look over to see Rainbow Cat has been tackled by the zombie with the sunflowers growing out of its head. It crawls slowly over her, toward her brain.

“Bitch will get what she deserves,” Junko says to Charlie.

But when she looks over at the writer, she doesn’t see a look of satisfaction across his face. She sees a look of horror.

“I’m going after her,” Charlie says.

He leaves his bag and stands up, balancing himself on the top of the wall.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Junko says. “After what she did to you?”

“I know she deserves it,” Charlie says. “But I can’t just let her die.”

Then he walks carefully along the top of the wall to get closer to his wife. A few zombies on the ground follow him below, trying to jump up to reach his feet like snapping turtles.

“Fuck,” Junko says.

Charlie leaps off of the wall, over the heads of the zombies, and lands on his hands and feet. He gets up and runs before the zombies even turn around.

Rainbow screams as the zombie bites down onto her skull, to get at her brain. Its jaw closes down on her head, but misses her flesh. It can’t get through her dreadlocks. When it tries to eat her brain again, all it gets is a mouthful of hair-tentacles.

Charlie kicks the zombie in the face, sunflower petals exploding into the air. He pulls Rainbow to her feet and leads her back to Junko and the others, several zombies following close behind.

Before Junko can help the hippy bitch up the wall, a loud bang vibrates the bricks beneath her feet. She looks over at Laurence. Somehow, the wall next to him has collapsed and a dozen more zombies are pouring into the yard with them. They get between Laurence and the others. He has to fall back, in the wrong direction.

“Laurence,” Junko yells.

“Forget about me,” Laurence says. “I’ll catch up with you all later!”

Then he heads to the south, running over the zombie he had earlier crippled, like a tank.

The zombies close in around Charlie as he pushes Rainbow up the wall. When she’s at the top, Junko lowers her arm for Charlie to grab.

“Braains!” Charlie hears all around him as he takes Junko’s hand.

Before he makes it up, the zombies grab him by his lower section. They pull him back. Rainbow grabs Charlie’s other hand and tugs on him.

“Charlie!” Rainbow cries.

They pull him out of the zombies’ grasp and get him to the top of the wall. He stands up and looks down. The zombie horde fills the area below them, leaving not an inch of ground.

“Fuck,” Charlie says. “That was close.”

He looks over at Rainbow Cat.

“You came back for me,” she says, tears in her eyes. “Even after what I did to you.”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t let you die. I still love you, no matter what you did.”

“Brains!” the zombies yell from below.

“I’m so sorry,” Rainbow says, burying her eyes in his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

“Forget about it,” Charlie says. “If we’re going to die we’ll die together.”

Rainbow nods her head. “Okay. As long as we’re together.”

As she leans in to kiss her husband, his legs break out from under him. Her lips hit nothing but air. Charlie falls from the wall, into the crowd of zombies below.

“No!” Junko yells, trying to catch him. She reaches out just a second too late.

Charlie screams as they bite into his skull and limbs, trying to get to the neural tissue. From inside of the horde below, Brick licks the blood off of his double-fisted sledgehammer. His eyes lock with Popcorn’s.

“Brains,” he says to her.

Popcorn shakes her head at the sight of her zombiefied boyfriend and jumps down to the other side of the wall.

As they chew through Charlie’s flesh, Rainbow reaches down to him. When he sees her through his twitching eyes, Charlie reaches out for her.

“I love you,” Rainbow cries, his fingers too far out of reach to meet hers.

“I love you, too,” Charlie says with a bloody smile. “…you bitch.”

The tips of their fingers touch for a brief moment, just barely. Then his body is ripped into eight different pieces.

“No…” Rainbow says, still reaching out for his hand as his arm is taken away from his body.

Junko pulls her back, but Rainbow won’t budge. She won’t take her eyes off of her husband’s severed head as it is pulled through the crowd.

“Let’s go!” Junko yells.

Rainbow finally turns away when a zombie cracks open Charlie’s skull like an egg, to get at the runny brains within.

They jump down on the other side of the wall, and run down the street to get as far away from the horde as they possibly can. Junko shakes her head at herself as she runs, realizing that none of the people she is with now are people she would have chosen to team up with. She’s stuck with a useless bitch who backstabbed her own husband and two punks, one who’s infected and one who’s a complete idiot. Still, she knows it’s better than going on alone. Those who go solo from the start never make it very far.

The last thing Rainbow Cat wanted was for her husband to die so soon in the game. If she wasn’t there she knows he would have lasted much longer, perhaps even made it all the way to the end. He had ingenuity, charisma, strategy. He would have been a perfect hero for the show, the one everyone rooted for back home in Platinum. But then he had to go and get himself killed rescuing her.

“That idiot,” she says, as they run into an alley to get off the main drag.

Rainbow lied about her reason for getting Charlie on the Zombie Survival reality game show. She didn’t do it for the money. She did it because she wanted people to read Charlie’s new book. Even though he was her favorite writer, she felt his books had gotten worse and worse ever since his first major success. The four books he published while they were living together in the Gold Quadrant were borderline crap. They didn’t have that raw emotion as his early books did. It didn’t seem like he was even trying anymore. For all she knows, his publishing company might have gone out of business just because people were no longer interested in their bestselling author.

But things changed after he was sent to the Copper Quadrant. He stopped writing for the money and started writing for the art. That is when he had created the greatest book Rainbow had ever read. A book about a couple struggling to make ends meet in the ghetto of Copper. It was a story about love and despair, isolation and hope. It was a story that everyone in Neo New York had to read. The kind of book that would change the way people think about how they live their lives.

She tried to figure out ways to get people interested in Charles Hudson again. She had sent letters to his old publisher, sent a duplicate of his manuscript that she typed up herself during breaks at work, but she never received a response. His manuscript was returned unopened.

That’s when she came up with the idea of getting him on Zombie Survival. She had heard the rumors of this popular television show. The people in the upper quadrants were obsessed with it and idolized the contestants more than any other celebrities. She knew if Charlie was on Zombie Survival he would capture the attention of the public again. He would become a bigger celebrity than he had ever been before. And she knew the public would demand his books come back into print. Then his final masterpiece would be published and it would solidify him as a great voice in the history of literature.

She believes it would have all worked out perfectly, but her plan backfired. When she was also brought onto Zombie Survival as a contestant, everything got fucked. She was the one who was supposed to negotiate the publication of his last book after he had been killed. She was supposed to dedicate the rest of her life making sure that Charles Hudson was remembered. But without her, it is likely that nobody is going to know that his last manuscript ever existed. Not only that, but because of her Charlie was one of the first contestants eliminated. She doubts any of the viewers will care about him now that he’s gotten killed off so quickly.

She wishes she would have been the one to get killed off instead of Charlie. Once she realized she had been brought onto the show, she came up with a backup plan. She was going to let the audience perceive her as the bad guy, Charlie’s horrible wife. They would have felt sorry for him and empathized with him as a victimized hero-type. Then the audience would have relished in Rainbow’s death, she would play the role of the bitch who got what she deserved. As long as Charlie was cheered on by the audience, there would be a renewed interest in his work. Perhaps they would even find his final masterpiece at some point, locked away in their apartment.

But now Charlie is dead and she has to come up with a new plan. As Rainbow runs down the alley, leaping over ancient garbage cans and cat skeletons, she decides that her new plan is to be the winner of the Zombie Survival reality game show. With that kind of celebrity status, she will be able to direct the attention of the masses on her husband’s work. She can explain why she betrayed him. She can explain how her husband’s book is so good that it was worth sending him to his death just so that it could be read by the world. Then his masterpiece will be published. Then he will be remembered as the greatest writer of their generation.

But first, she has to win the game. If she can win then it will all work out fine. The only thing she will regret is that Charlie died thinking she sent him to his death for the sake of money, when in reality she sent him to his death because she loved him so much.

If Charlie were still alive and found out the reason behind Rainbow’s betrayal, he would have said, “You didn’t send me to my death because you loved me, you sent me to my death because you loved my books.”

Then, after a long pause, Rainbow would have said, “I don’t understand the difference.”

Junko leads them to an isolated area in the parking garage of an old grocery store. They duck behind a wall of scrap metal, which looks to have once been several wrecked vehicles that have rusted together into one giant slab the size of a garbage truck. There is a ten foot buffer between Popcorn and the others. Nobody wants to get near her.

“Let’s see what we got,” Junko says, kneeling down to unlock her duffel bag.

The others sit down and place their bags into their laps, as they catch their breaths. A camera ball floats over their heads, panning across their powwow. Revealing each of the contestants’ weapons is one of the viewers’ favorite moments of the show.

Scavy unzips his bag first and pulls out two rods, one with a long jagged blade attached to it. He holds them up to the camera, as if giving his audience what they want to see.

“What the hell are these?” Scavy says. “I wanted a fucking machine gun and shit.”

Junko looks over at his weapon.

“You screw them together,” she says. “It’s an ancient Japanese naginata spear.”

“A spear?” Scavy says. “They said the weapons would be personalized to our fighting capabilities. Why would I get a spear?”

Junko shrugs. “Because the blade matches your mohawk?”

“I’m totally a machine gun kind of guy,” Scavy says.

Junko’s eyes light up when she spots the weapon in her bag.

“Well, they got mine right,” Junko says, pulling a chainsaw out of her bag. “I’m totally a chainsaw kind of girl.”

It is a custom-designed chainsaw built specifically for the game. It is long, thin, and lightweight, created to strap onto her right arm.

“Chainsaw arm!” Scavy says. “You lucky bitch!”

Rainbow Cat is the most disappointed in her weapon. With her thumb and index finger she lifts it out of her purse-sized bag by the handle, holding it like a dead rat by its tail.

“A dagger?” she whines.

They look at her.

“That’s it?” Scavy says. “Just a knife?”

Junko chuckles. “They did that on purpose.”

“Why?”

“You got a dagger because you stabbed your husband in the back,” Junko says. “The people back home are probably laughing their asses off right now.”

“That’s bullshit,” Rainbow says. “How am I going to get anywhere with this?”

“All you really need is something to cut them off when they grab you,” Junko says. “A lightweight weapon has its advantage. You’ll be able to run faster and it won’t give you a false sense of security.”

Rainbow pulls up her skirt and straps the dagger around her thigh.

Junko continues, “Too many people get killed off early on in the game by thinking their weapon is powerful enough to take on a whole horde head-on. The people who get the furthest are those who don’t stay and fight, but run away. Avoiding confrontations is best way to survive.”

When Popcorn pulls a 9mm handgun out of her bag, Junko snags it away from her.

“Hey!” Popcorn cries, reaching out to take back her gun.

Junko dodges her hand and digs ammo clips out of her bag, then places them into her own. “You don’t get a weapon. You’re infected.”

“I’m fine!” Popcorn says.

Then her tendon slides out of her wrist and lands in her lap.

Junko snorts and spits. “I doubt it.” Then she points at Popcorn’s shirt.

The zombie puke had burnt through her clothing and eaten away a few layers of her skin above her cleavage. Popcorn pouts as she looks down at her chest. To her, it just looks like a really bad sunburn.

“Who gets the extra bag?” Scavy says, looking down at Charlie’s duffel bag next to Junko.

“Take it,” Junko says.

Rainbow jumps in. “Hey, he was my husband! I should be the one to take it.”

Scavy unzips the long duffel bag and pulls out a black rectangular case. When he opens it, he finds an M24 sniper rifle.

“Fuck yeah!” Scavy says.

Junko shakes her head. “That’ll be useless.”

“No, it won’t,” Scavy says. “It kicks ass and shit.”

“It’ll only slow you down. The only use you’d have for it is shooting zombies from a distance, but if you see zombies in the distance you’re better off sneaking around them.”

“If it’s useless, then why’d they give it to Charlie?”

“Because the producers saw him as a strategist,” Junko says. “Somebody who would fight from a distance, from an advantage point.”

“I’m a good strategist,” Scavy says.

Junko laughs and tries to take the rifle away from him. Scavy pushes her back.

“No, I’m taking it! I don’t care what you say.”

“Fine, but you’ll regret it,” Junko says.

“No, I won’t,” Scavy says. “Besides…” He holds it up to his shoulder and peers through the scope. “How else are we going to take out the competition?”

“We need to move on,” Junko says. “This is the most crucial part of the game. We need to cover as much ground as possible.”

“What’s with this pussy crap?” Scavy is holding up his middle finger to her while he speaks. “I don’t want to just run away. I want to kill some fucking zombies and shit.”

“Then you will die,” she says.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Scavy says. “As long as I have fun with it. Besides, they’re not even that tough.”

“Not tough?”

“Back at the hotel, almost everyone got out alive and they weren’t even armed yet. Once Brick got his hammer he was able to take out eight of those things like they were nothing.”

Junko points her chainsaw at his face.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “The zombies in this area haven’t been in hunting mode for decades. They’ve been in hibernation and are just now waking up. Over four million infected people lived in the area we have to cover, and by the end of today they will all have woken up. They’ll know we’re here and every single one of them will be coming for us.”

“Four million?” Scavy says, his rifle shrinking toward the ground.

Junko nods. “And they’re all waking up as we sit here wasting time.”

After Junko says that, there is a bang in the wall of meshed vehicles behind Popcorn. They turn around. Another bang.

“Let’s go,” Junko says, pulling her bag over her shoulder.

The others go to investigate the noise.

“Forget it,” she says. “Let’s go!”

A zombie bursts out of the mound of rusted metal and charges for Scavy. Most of it is black and charred. Car parts have been fused with its flesh: a steering wheel is jutting out of its shoulder, a muffler is melded into its left leg, rusted engine parts run down its abdomen. Junko guesses that the creature had been hibernating in there for a long time, before the vehicles had decomposed together into one lump.

“Braains…” it says in a deep, barely-audible growl.

The girls get away from it, but Scavy doesn’t back down. He swings the rifle over his shoulder and points his spear at it. The thing stumbles awkwardly forward, tripping on its muffler-fused leg.

When Scavy swings his naginata spear, his gun strap falls off of his shoulder and lands on his wrist, weighing down his arm too much for an effective attack. The blade misses the zombie’s chest by a foot. The creature raises its arms as it comes closer.

“Forget it, come on!” Junko yells.

“Braains.”

Scavy drops the rifle and swings the spear at its neck to cut off its head, but the blade bounces off of the steering wheel. The zombie grabs the shaft of the spear before Scavy can make another attack. The punk kid pulls back, but the skeletal fingers have too strong of a grip. He can’t pull it free.

Junko shakes her head and sighs. Then she turns on her chainsaw arm, revs it up.

“From now on, you listen to me,” Junko says as she cuts the arms off of the zombie.

Scavy pulls back. The zombie’s arms are still attached to the shaft of the spear.

“Now come on,” Junko says, and turns to run.

Scavy picks up his rifle. Then he looks up at the skeleton hands attached to his spear, wondering how the hell he should take them off.

“Braains,” the zombie says.

Scavy shrugs and continues on, leaving the arms still attached to the weapon.

Alonzo finishes boarding up the stairwell to the second floor of the hotel. He decided not to leave with the others. He stayed back, where it was safe. After he saw the writer, Charles Hudson, ripped into pieces from the second floor window, he knew he couldn’t go out there. He just couldn’t.

“Will that hold?” Adriana says.

He looks over at her, the hammer shaking in his hands. “It better.”

They had found extra wood, hammers, and plenty of nails in Housekeeping. The Zombie Survival work crew, who had dropped them off and boarded up the building for them, must have ditched their leftover barricade supplies in there. Alonzo made good use of them.

“There’s only two stairwells we have to worry about,” Alonzo says, then collapses against a wall to catch his breath. “Plus, I don’t think they realize we’re still up here. They went after everyone else.”

“What about Heinz?”

“He’s on the roof,” Alonzo says, breathing so hard he can hardly speak. He pulls off his coat to reveal massive sweat stains under his armpits. Adriana cringes when she sees them. She’s not used to being around fat people.

“Should we go up there with him?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “In a minute. I need a break.” Then he holds his chest to make sure he’s not going to have a heart attack.

There aren’t really any fat people in the Copper Quadrant. There isn’t enough food or money to fatten anyone up. The Silver Quadrant, where Alonzo is from, is full of fat lazy people. The Gold and Platinum Quadrants also have some fat people, but most of them are wealthy enough to hire personal trainers or get their excess weight removed surgically.

Alonzo had been fat since he was a kid. Unlike most people who grew up post Z-Day, he never had to struggle for survival. He had it easy. His father was the foreman of an oil rig when Z-Day hit the mainland. While the majority of the population was being transformed into brain-eating undead mutants, his father was safe at sea. It was hard to get by at first, but nothing compared to the turmoil taking place everywhere else in the world.

Eventually, when society began to rebuild itself, his father was in an excellent position for trade. He traded oil for food and supplies to the walled cities on the mainland that were still around during that time, and eventually to the people in Neo New York as it was being constructed and populated. He took charge of other oil rigs in the region and built an empire. He married and had children. When his parents passed away, Alonzo and his brother inherited the family business. They didn’t have to want for anything for most of their lives.

Eight years ago, the government of Neo New York bought him out of the business and so they decided to retire on the island. He started out in the Gold Quadrant, but ended up in Silver as he realized he was blowing through his money fast. His brother, who had a wife and kids, went through his cut of the money faster and ended up in the Copper Quadrant in just a couple of years. Because they were newcomers to the island, they couldn’t get jobs. Neo New York was overpopulated as it was, so one way to discourage immigration was to encourage companies to hire employees based on residency. Once Alonzo’s money ran out, he wouldn’t be able to earn any more legally. That’s why Alonzo decided to start earning money by illegal means.

“I want you to come work for me,” Alonzo asked his nephew, the night before he was abducted. “I’ve got a little business going in Silver and could use your help.”

Tony, his nephew, was nineteen. A scrawny little good for nothing punk who made next to nothing as a tattooist.

“What kind of business?” Tony asked, mopping blood off the floor of his shop from when two of his punk customers got into a knife fight earlier in the day.

Alonzo sat down on a homemade stool barely strong enough to hold his fat ass off the ground. “Waste.”

“You want me to sell drugs?” Tony asked.

Alonzo laughed. “No, I’d sell it in Silver. There ain’t no fucking money in Copper. I want you to make it.”

“I don’t do illegal shit,” Tony said.

“Nothing’s illegal in Copper,” Alonzo said.

Tony took off his sweat-stained shirt, revealing a collage of black sunflower tattoos. “Even if I agreed, how the hell would I get the stuff from Copper to Silver? They’d never let me through the barrier without a pass and they don’t issue passes to anybody. I don’t even know how you managed to get one.”

“I’ve got my connections,” Alonzo said. “I’ve already arranged to have it smuggled through the produce shipments.”

Tony put his mop in a doorless closet. “I don’t know, Uncle Alonzo. My shop’s doing fine. I’m the top tattoo artist in Copper. Most of my clients are assholes, but they respect me.”

“But you make shit,” Alonzo said. “You knocked up that whore girlfriend of yours. You need to make some real money if you’re going to raise a kid.”

“I’ll do it my way,” Tony said. “If I’m going to be a dad, I need to do honest work.”

“Honest work?” Alonzo said. “You sound like your idiot father.”

Tony glared at him when he said that. It was too soon to say shit about his father. “Find somebody else.”

“But you’re family,” Alonzo said. “Believe it or not, I care about what happens to you. You’ve been the closest thing I’ve had to a son. I want to see you living better. If business goes well I might even be able to get you citizenship in Silver.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” he replied.

Alonzo stood up. “You’re starting to piss me off, kid.”

“What do you want me to say? I don’t want to work with you. The answer is no.”

“Do you want to raise your kid in this dump?” Alonzo said, getting in his nephew’s face. “Do you want to end up like your dumbfuck father? Knifed in an alley by some punk over pocket change?”

“Don’t you fucking talk about him like that, Uncle Alonzo.” Tony’s eyes were burning red.

“I’m just trying to look out for you, ya moron,” Alonzo yelled. “If you want to end up like my idiot brother then go right ahead. Have a kid with some bitch when you got no money. See what happens once the slut gets sick of you and takes off, leaving you to raise the brat on your own. You’ll slave away for the rest of your life keeping your kid fed, then one day you’ll find a knife in your guts. Because, like your father, you were too much of a dumbfuck to make the right decisions.”

Then Tony punched Alonzo in the stomach with all of his strength. Alonzo slumped over and gasped, nearly puking out his breakfast of smoked halibut and poached eggs. Tony didn’t say anything. He stepped away from his uncle and started putting away his inks.

“Fine, if that’s how you want it…” Alonzo held his stomach and caught his breath. Then he unfolded a jackknife and cut his nephew’s throat while his back was turned. “I don’t need a worthless fuck like you anyway.”

Tony’s eyes widened as his blood gushed down his black sunflower tattoos. His body landed on the floor, in the spot he had just mopped.

“Stupid little shit,” Alonzo said, folding up the knife.

He didn’t even bat an eye as he passed his nephew’s pregnant girlfriend on the street outside of the tattoo shop. He just spit on the ground by her feet and walked on.

When they get to the roof of the hotel, Adriana and Alonzo see Heinz peering over the edge, tying shreds of ancient bedsheets into a rope. Heinz’s suit and coat are perfectly clean, despite being a resident of the Copper District. His trench coat flutters in the cool breeze as he stares up at the violent clouds that smother the sky around them. The sound of moaning zombies echoes through the yard. A camera ball hovers by his head.

“What are you doing?” Alonzo asks.

Heinz finishes his sheet-rope and looks over at the obese man.

“Give me your bag,” Heinz says.

Heinz lifts up his backpack. “Why?”

“It’s the smallest.” Heinz snatches it out of his hand and ties the end of the rope to the straps. “Get back.”

After the fat man and the teen prostitute back away, Heinz runs like a pole-vaulter and tosses the backpack over the edge of the roof. It goes over the zombies, past the yard, and lands outside of the perimeter. The electronic lock beeps off.

Then Heinz reels the backpack in with the rope, pulling it up to them. He hands it back to Alonzo. When Alonzo opens it, he pulls out his weapon: a .45 caliber revolver.

Alonzo smiles. He likes the way it feels in his hand. Then he looks down at Heinz’s enormous mountaineering pack.

“How are you going to toss that big thing all the way over there?”

“I won’t.” Heinz pulls his blond bangs out of his eye. “I’ll have to find another way.” He holds out his hand to Adriana’s pack. “Now you.”

When the second bag is thrown, it doesn’t make it quite as far. As Heinz reels it back up, the movement catches the attention of a zombie and it lunges on top of the pack. Heinz tugs and the bag yanks free of the zombie’s grasp, but now it is covered in purple slime-meat.

Five more zombies go for the bag, they grab at it, fight over it. The rope goes loose as a knot in the rope comes undone. The bag is lost.

Before the trio back away from the edge of the roof, the zombies look up to see where the sheet-rope is falling from. When they see the three contestants, their mouths begin to salivate a green fluid.

“Fresh brains!”

The zombies rush toward the building, a dozen more of them follow suit. In the distance, zombies recently woken from hibernation are heading their way.

Heinz turns to Alonzo. “Go downstairs and hold them off.” Then to Adriana. “Reinforce those doors. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Who the fuck says you can boss me around, pal?” Alonzo says.

“You’re the only one with a gun,” Heinz says. “Use it if you want to live.”

Alonzo looks over at the door leading downstairs. His gun is shaking in his hands. He doesn’t want to go down there.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Heinz says, raising his tone to him, his shiny pronounced forehead reflecting the fat man’s scared bulgy face back at him.

Growing up on an oil rig, Alonzo hadn’t seen many zombies in his life. The only time he had ever seen one was when he was a kid, the one that killed his little sister.

They thought they were safe. They had hundreds of miles of ocean between them and any landmass inhabited by the living dead. But one of them still got to them. Nobody is sure how it happened. The crew of the rig assumed it had been caught up in a riptide and was pulled out to sea or came up from the bottom of the ocean, from some kind of sunken ship.

Little Alonzo had heard stories about the walking dead, but he didn’t know what to expect. He had seen dead bodies before, but never anything like the creature that crawled on board that night.

He awoke to his sister’s screams across the hall. He was used to her nightmares. She would wake up screaming regularly, after having dreams about their house sinking into the sea, or about Father’s ship getting sunk by an infected whale while he was off on business. Alonzo always went to her room to comfort her. If he didn’t she would keep the whole ship awake all night.

When he left his room, he noticed the trail of black slime in the corridor leading into his sister’s cabin. The zombie had skipped his brother’s room and all of the other rooms along the way. It had chosen the one cabin that had left its door open. Alonzo’s little sister was too scared to sleep with her door shut.

The zombie was eating his sister’s brains out of her skull as young Alonzo entered her cabin. The thing was like a skeleton with gray patches of flesh dangling from the bones. Its chest was covered in barnacles and seaweed. Tiny fish were flapping around in its hollow chest, half-filled with water. A crab crawled across its shoulder and disappeared into its neck. Its eyeballs were like that of a sea slugs’.

His sister was no longer moving. The zombie flopped her corpse around like a doll as it ferociously tore the meat out of her split-open head. It gurgled and hissed as it consumed her. The image drilled a hole into young Alonzo’s mind. An image that he was never able to get rid of. After the adults came running to his screams, and pulverized the zombie’s bones under the bottoms of fire extinguishers, Alonzo understood the horror that his parents had been trying to keep from him. He prayed he would never have to face a creature like that ever again.

When Alonzo gets downstairs, the zombies are already banging on one of the boarded doors.

“Get some more wood on there,” he tells Adriana.

The teenager looks at him with a terrified face.

“Don’t think about it, just do it,” he says. “I’ll cover you.”

She runs to the wood. Her hands shaking hard as the door rumbles next to her. When she pounds a nail with the hammer, her strikes are timid and sloppy, causing the nail to drop from her fingers.

Alonzo looks to his right, through a hotel room window. He sees a swarm of zombies running through the street toward the building. Three times as many as had earlier attacked. Beyond them, in the distance, he sees explosions erupting from street corners, as if some contestant out there is trying to fight off the zombie horde with a grenade launcher.

When he sees the chaos outside of the window, his gun hand begins to quiver. He imagines the zombie he saw that night inside of his sister’s bedroom. Now he imagines a hundred of them, all outside, all of them coming to get him. Ever since that day as a kid, he has been having nightmares that zombies are coming to get him. Now he is living that nightmare. Looking down at the gun in his hand, he contemplates pointing it at himself in order to wake up.

Heinz finishes knotting a second sheet-rope. He breaks a power line with a piece of brick and attaches it to a satellite dish on a higher section of the roof. Then he ties the sheet-rope to a strap on his giant mountaineer pack and snaps the other strap around the power line. He lets the pack go.

The zombies swarm the yard below as the pack slides down the power line. When it hits the edge of the rooftop of the next building, the locking mechanism beeps off. Then Heinz pulls the pack back up the power line with the sheet-rope.

He can hear a commotion of smashing and banging noises in the hotel rooms below as the zombies fill the building. He doesn’t have much faith in the defense capabilities of a fat slob and a childish whore, but he hopes they can hold back the creatures long enough for him to put his plan into action.

Alonzo stands behind Adriana and points his gun at the door, his pockets filled with extra ammunition. He can see the young girl’s ass cleavage hanging out of her tight vinyl shorts. Her shiny mounds point up at him like she’s begging him to take her from behind as she hammers boards on top of the other boards. He licks his lips with his cracked dry tongue.

Adriana didn’t know it, but Alonzo was there last night when she was selected as a contestant for Zombie Survival. After he had murdered his nephew, Alonzo was in a rotten mood and needed some cheering up. He had to find a new business partner and had no idea where to look. The next morning, he planned to figure that out. But that night, he was going to release some stress.

The prostitutes in Copper were numerous. They were cheap as hell and wouldn’t object to anything the client wanted them to do. What Alonzo was most interested in was the underage prostitutes. In Copper, the prostitutes came in any age you wanted. Girls in their prime, girls on the mature side, girls in their teens, and girls who haven’t even gone through puberty yet. The only age group that wasn’t available were elderly women, just because the people in Copper didn’t live long enough to make it into their golden years.

A lot of girls end up in prostitution when they’re kids because their parents decide they can’t afford to raise them anymore and toss them out into the streets. Prostitution is the only job a kid can get in Copper, so that’s where the majority of them end up.

Adriana is a typical case. She lost her mother when she was nine and went right into whoring herself on the streets. By ten she was addicted to Waste. By eleven she had lost all sense of self worth. By thirteen she had her first abortion. By fifteen she was chosen to be a contestant on the Zombie Survival reality game show.

The producers of the show bring at least a few prostitutes into every season. They add an element of sex appeal that viewers at home can’t get enough of. Viewers love to see prostitutes trading sex for protection. They love to see their slutty little bodies torn apart by the undead. There’s no shortage of whores in the Copper Quadrant, so they never fail to make it onto the show. They have even thought about maybe doing an all-hooker season of Zombie Survival at some point in the future.

Alonzo saw Adriana in an alley as he prowled the redlight district. She was giving some guy a blowjob behind a ten-foot pile of refuse. He knew he should have minded his own business, but Alonzo decided he would check it out. He could tell the girl was young. He thought she might have even been thirteen, which was the age he was looking for. He was hoping she would be willing to give him a blowjob after she was through with the other guy.

Standing with a smug smile on his face, Alonzo watched as the man came inside of her baby-soft lips. The man moaned slightly through his white goatee.

“There you go, my darling,” said the man, his penis still dangling in front of her face. “How does it taste?”

Adriana stared up at the man with her cheeks full of his gunk.

“Swirl it around on your tongue,” said the man, petting her dark red hair behind her ears, as if she were a kitty, or perhaps his daughter.

She did as he asked.

“That tastes good, doesn’t it?” he said. Then he used his hand to nod her head for him, as she continued swirling his cum around in her mouth.

Alonzo noticed that the man with the white goatee looked too clean to be from Copper. His clothes were too nice. His hair was too neat. He looked more like somebody from the Gold or Platinum Quadrant.

“Now swallow it,” he said. “Swallow it for me.”

She gulped it down dramatically for him, lifting her throat closer to his face so that he could hear it go down. She liked to please clients like this man. The only clients she respected were the ones who treated her like she was a worthless piece of shit.

“Good girl,” he said to her, stroking her hair. “That’s my good little girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”

Alonzo was getting a little too creeped out while watching this. He was pretty sure this was all just an act to get the man off, but Alonzo couldn’t stop imagining that he really was her father.

Before he turned around, men in white masks came out from the other side of the alley and grabbed Adriana from behind. She tried to scream, but they put a rag of chloroform over her mouth. Her muffled cries didn’t last long before she was out.

As Alonzo backed away, he kicked a whiskey bottle with the heel of his shoe, sending it clanging against the asphalt.

The man with the white goatee looked up at Alonzo.

“Take him, too,” he said, as he zipped up his fly.

The men in white chased after Alonzo. He ran across the street toward a strip bar, but the door he chose was the back entrance. It was locked from the other side. The men in white tackled him against the door and put the chloroform over his mouth. He slammed his fists against the door, but the music inside was too loud, the men inside were too focused on bouncing naked breasts.

Alonzo is so focused on Adriana’s tight little ass that he doesn’t notice the wood of the door cracking apart. Before Adriana can hammer in the last nail, a hand bursts through the door and grabs her by the hair. She screams.

“Braains!” says the zombie as it pushes its head through the hole in the door.

Alonzo fires his .45, throwing his arm back with the recoil, but blowing the right half of the zombie’s face clean off. This doesn’t faze the zombie, though. It continues to pull Adriana up by the hair. Alonzo grips the pistol tighter this time and fires again, just before the creature bites into the girl’s skull. The bullet shatters its lower jaw into dusty fragments. The zombie’s eyes roll around with confusion as the teeth of its upper jaw taps against her forehead, not sure why its not able to bite into her.

Adriana hammers at the zombie’s hand, thrashing to get the thing to let go. She smashes melted flesh off its arm, but the bony fingers have a tight grip.

Heinz opens his mountaineering pack and pulls out his large, heavy weapon. He takes out the map, flashlight, and a canteen of water, and tosses the rest of the contents over the side.

He straightens his blond hair and looks down at the massive horde of zombies gathered below. Their eyes stare in his direction, like an audience gathering to hear him speak.

The camera ball pans around him as he juts his chin into the air.

“Help me!” Adriana cries.

Alonzo fires the .45 again, but misses the zombie. Instead, the bullet goes through a board, exploding a new hole in the door. The hole splinters apart and another zombie’s hand reaches through it, grabbing her by the arm that holds the hammer.

“You idiot!” she screams. “Get them off of me you fucker!”

Alonzo comes in closer to get a better shot. He raises the gun up to the zombie’s head and fires.

Heinz removes his trench coat and tosses it over the side. Then he straps fuel canisters to his back, nuzzles a hose around his hip to the handle of the flamethrower’s igniter. And flicks the igniter switch, sparking the flame to life at the tip of the nozzle.

The camera ball circles around to his side and pauses on the swastika armband strapped around the upper sleeve of his black suit.

He raises out his left hand and sieg heil’s the cloudy heavens above him. Electricity sparks through the clouds. Then he squeezes the trigger on the flamethrower and bathes the zombie horde in a rain of fire.

Alonzo’s bullet shatters the zombie’s arm at the shoulder, freeing Adriana’s hair. She pulls herself back, but the other zombie has her by the wrist. It twists her arm sideways, digging its claws into her. She cries out and drops the hammer.

Another zombie gets its arms through at the bottom of the door and grabs her by the ankle. Alonzo shoots and blows apart a zombie’s neck, knocking its head off its spine. The skull dangles by a rope of meat, still snapping its jaws in Adriana’s direction.

As Alonzo reloads his revolver, slamming noises rattle the door to the other stairwell.

“Shit.” Alonzo snaps the revolver’s cylinder back into place. “They’re coming in from over there, too.”

Heinz showers the zombie crowd with flames. Shrieking balls of fire run in circles below him. Their dried up flesh burns quickly, reducing them to quivering smoldering blobs in the dirt.

He can hear the screams of Adriana and Alonzo beneath him, as he inhales the scent of his burning enemies. Flakes of ash sail through the breeze like a ballet of black butterflies.

His lips curl into a smile as the ash twirls around him and the flames dance from his fingertips.

A zombie pulls Adriana’s head up to the hole in the door and bites the back of her neck. She shrieks at Alonzo, but the sight of the zombie biting into her freezes up the fat man. His gun begins to shake and he can’t get himself to pull the trigger.

The zombie pulls back, ripping flesh from her neck. A large red centipede coils out of the wound. It takes Alonzo a moment to realize that the thing squirming inside of the zombie’s mouth isn’t a centipede, but the girl’s spinal column. Her lower body goes limp, but by the look in her face Alonzo can tell that she’s still alive. Her eyes wide and mouth dropped open in shock as the zombie tugs on her spinal cord with its teeth like a dog playing a game of tug-of-war.

When the back of Adriana’s skull tears open, Alonzo screams. It isn’t the prostitute that he sees anymore. It is his little sister, being eaten before him once again. The girl’s brain is yanked out of the back of her skull, and dangles from the end of the spinal cord in the zombie’s foaming jaws.

Alonzo turns and runs toward the stairwell to the roof, but before he gets there the barricaded door on the other side of the hall breaks open. The hallway fills with the undead, blocking his path. He turns around and the door by Adriana’s corpse splinters open, the dead piling through over her body.

Dodging into the closest hotel room, he locks the door behind him, then pushes a crumbling dresser in front of it.

When the zombies burst through the stairwell onto the roof, Heinz whips around and covers them in flames. Smoke fills the rooftop as the hotel catches fire. A camera ball films the first floor of the hotel, as flaming zombies run through the lobby, catching the building on fire.

Alonzo looks out the window and sees the smoke pouring up from the ground. He considers jumping down from the second floor, but the mass of burning bodies in the yard below look like Hell on Earth to him.

He points the gun at the door as it breaks open. Smoke and zombies shuffle over the dresser, two of them on fire. He shoots them in their chests and heads, but they keep coming toward him. A bullet blows a zombie’s hand off of its wrist as it reaches out for him.

“Braains!” the zombies groan, as they close in on him.

With the hotel up in flames, Heinz’s job is done. He had attracted all the zombies in the vicinity to him, got them to enter the hotel, then burned it down. Fire is the most effective weapon against the undead. It is the only thing that can ultimately destroy them. He is pleased with the weapon that the producers of Zombie Survival had chosen for him. It will help ensure a victory for the leader of the Fifth Reich.

He walks through the smoldering corpses that crawl across the roof on their bellies.

One of them reaches out for him and whimpers, “Braaains!”

He steps on its head with his leather boot, crushing its skull into a pile of charcoal, as he walks to the power line he had used for his backpack. Wrapping his arm around the cord and gripping his other wrist, he slides down the wire and drops down next to Adriana’s pack. He scoops it over his shoulder, then walks casually out of the yard down the rubble-filled streets.

When he looks back, he sees the hotel being swallowed by the flames. He doesn’t know if Alonzo and Adriana are still alive in there, nor does he care. They served their purpose and are of no further use to him. They just saved him the trouble of having to kill them later.

As Alonzo’s revolver clicks empty, the zombies grab him and tear into his flesh. They suck the nerves out of his skin like angel hair spaghetti, the sensation of their chewing sends jolts of electrical pain through his body.

The zombie with the sunflowers growing out of its skull grabs Alonzo by the throat. Its flesh is now burned and blackened, the flowers charred to a crisp. When Alonzo sees the burnt sunflowers, he zones out. He doesn’t see it as a zombie anymore. Through the smoke, he sees the creature as his nephew, Tony. Fresh blood runs down Tony’s chest, over his black sunflower tattoos.

“You said I was like a son to you,” Tony says to him.

Alonzo shakes his head. “You got what you deserved, punk!”

“All I wanted was to raise my kid honestly, like my father raised me.”

“Your father was a damned idiot!”

Tony’s mouth stretches open so wide that his lower jaw touches his chest. Then he bites his uncle’s skull open.

“And I’m also a damned idiot for thinking you could have been any different!” Alonzo says, as Tony chews on a meaty strip of his brain.

Junko, Scavy, Popcorn, and Rainbow Cat are on top of a high-rise downtown, scanning the area. They needed the high vantage point to see which path would be safest through the city. But all the streets look the same. All are packed with the living dead. They use the sniper scope to look farther into the distance, but there are zombies everywhere.

“They’re waking up way too soon,” Junko says. “We should have been mostly clear for at least until the late afternoon.”

“So what do we do?” Rainbow asks.

“We need to keep moving,” Junko says. “It’s bad now but it is only going to get worse. Much worse.”

A few blocks away, explosions erupt along the street, blowing up sections of the zombie horde.

“That’s what is doing it,” Junko says, pointing at the explosions. “That asshole’s being too loud. He’s waking them up.”

Then they see the man who is causing the explosions. The old ex-military vagrant staggers down the street, tossing grenades at the zombies around him.

“That guy is punk as fuck!” Scavy says.

The old man heads toward the door of a building across the street from him. He tosses a grenade and it blows some of them apart, but then the rest of the undead close in on him, grab him by the arms. He pulls them with him, trying desperately to get through the door of the building, but they won’t let go, biting into his arms and shoulder.

He tries throwing another grenade but it lands only a few feet away. Lee’s grenade blows the zombies into pieces across the asphalt, but takes him out with them. His body flies though the glass door of an ancient city tavern.

“Well, that’s the end of that guy,” Scavy says, chuckling.

Junko frowns. “At least he won’t wake any more of the dead.”

Rainbow Cat looks down at the street immediately below them, and sees three of the other punks—Xiu, Zippo, and Vine—running through the zombie crowd. Vine leads the way, shooting out their knee caps with an AK-47 as they run. They don’t even bother going for the head. They just want to cripple them enough so that they can run past.

“Your friends look like they’re doing alright,” Rainbow says to Scavy.

Scavy looks down at the other punks. “Oh yeah, those guys.”

“They’re good,” Junko says. “How long have you known them?”

Scavy shrugs. “I don’t know. I just met those guys.”

“You mean they’re not part of your gang?” Junko asks.

“No,” Scavy says. “I just thought they looked cool so I let them join my crew. Never seen them before today. I don’t think they even speak English.”

Junko looks down at the trio of punks and examines them carefully. They move in formation, like trained soldiers. Xiu, their leader, tosses a throwing axe at one of them and dismembers both of its arms before it can latch onto Zippo’s back.

“Those aren’t ordinary street punks,” Junko says, as the axe boomerangs back to Xiu’s hand. “They’re merc punks.”

Junko knew the ratings for Zombie Survival had been going down. The past couple of seasons were very disappointing for fans and many of them were so outraged that they almost got the producer of the show, Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla, fired by the network. The show was becoming repetitive and boring. Last season, all the contestants died on the first day. Most of them were killed before even getting out of the safe house. Wayne was choosing too many weak, boring contestants. Just the same old vagrants, hookers, and street punks. The network said he had to do better than that. He had to get some contestants who would actually last long enough to make it to the helicopter.

Junko knew Wayne had chosen her for the show to help with ratings. He knew audiences would love to see the old host of Zombie Survival on the show herself. But she knew throwing on celebrities like Charlie and herself would not be enough to save his job. He had to get some badass zombie killers. There’s no better zombie killer than a merc punk.

While most of the human population stays as far away from the mainland as they can get, there are small bands of scavengers who live in ships along the coast of the mainland like pirates. When Z-day struck, many people survived not by fortifying themselves in bunkers or walled communities, but by constantly moving. They were post-apocalyptic biker gangs who kept on the road, stopping only to fill up on gas and supplies. They never stayed in one place long enough for the zombies to gather in a number they couldn’t handle.

Eventually, gas had become an issue. It was a limited resource that spoiled quickly. They knew it wouldn’t last them forever. So they went out to sea, living on sailboats instead of armored vehicles. They sail up and down the coasts of the Americas, stopping on the mainland to kill zombies and scavenge for food. For several generations, these punk pirates of the apocalypse have been surviving out there on the outskirts of the Red Zone. They even have their own culture they have developed over the years.

Over the past decade, the government of Neo New York had been hiring them as mercenaries to recover technology and important artifacts from the mainland. That’s why they’re called merc punks. Although they look and dress very similar to that of common street punks like Scavy and Popcorn, merc punks are a hell of a lot more dangerous.

“This is going to be even harder than I thought it would,” Junko tells them. “Our competitors have been doing this kind of thing since the day they learned how to walk.”

Scavy looks back at Popcorn. She is sitting against a wall on the other side of the roof, quivering. Her skin is white. She doesn’t look good at all. At first, he thinks she could just be going through Waste withdrawal. But he can tell that’s not it. Junko was right, Popcorn is infected.

Scavy had known Popcorn since they were kids. Both of them were living on the streets, abandoned by their parents, running with the same gang. If you’re abandoned by your parents in the Copper Quadrant you have two options: whore yourself or sell Waste. They chose the latter.

Popcorn was the weirdest chick Scavy knew. She was unpredictable, destructive, and always on high energy. They were never really romantically involved at first, even though they did hook up from time to time. She dated a lot of his friends but he wasn’t really interested in her in that way. He thought the pink mohawk she had back then was pretty cute, but he mostly just thought she was cool to hang out with.

He clearly remembers the first day they met. He was walking along the beach in his bare feet, squishing the sand between his toes, watching the waves hitting the shore. The one thing he liked about Copper was that he had the beach. The people in the upper quadrants couldn’t walk in the sand if they wanted to. They were walled up in the center of the island. A lot of those people haven’t even seen the ocean through their tall barriers.

Sure the beach was littered with broken glass, medical waste, and all the other trash the rich people dumped into the ocean, but he still felt privileged to visit the beach whenever he wanted.

As he walked past the vagrant shacks that lined the beach, he saw a teenaged pink-mohawked girl about his age. She was trying to break down the door of one of the shacks, kicking it in with her pink combat boot.

“What are you doing?” Scavy asked.

She didn’t stop kicking the door.

“Robbing the shack?” Scavy said. “You know they don’t have shit in there, right?”

She shrugged at him and then kicked the door open. But once the door was open, she didn’t enter. She just went to the next shack and started kicking that door in.

“Why are you kicking in doors?” Scavy asked her.

She shrugged. “Just for fun.”

Scavy liked that answer.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

They went from shack to shack, kicking doors down. A couple of hobos stumbled out of their shacks and slurred drunken obscenities at them. The punks just laughed and continued kicking.

One door Popcorn kicked splintered on impact and Popcorn’s boot went through the middle. She burst into laughter when some hobo on the other side grabbed her leg.

“Damn punks!” cried the hobo on the other side of the door. “I’ll fuck you, fucking punks!”

Then the homeless guy twisted Popcorn’s leg, as if he was trying to twist it off. Popcorn just giggled at him and grabbed Scavy by the shoulder.

“Help!” she cried, then laughed.

Scavy grabbed her under the arms and pulled, then pushed off against the door with his foot. The door opened and hit the hobo and the face, causing him to let go. They both ran off, laughing, then hid under the dock and did some lines of Waste.

Once they were high, Scavy asked, “What’s your name?”

“Poppy,” she said. “But some people call me Popcorn.”

They became good friends after that. They used to go out and wreak havoc on the neighborhoods. Scavy would steal a crate of fish from the docks and then they would throw them at strippers in the redlight district. Poppy would sleep with the local tattooist to get them both free tattoos. Then they would shit in crates of produce that was to get shipped to the upper quadrants. She was Scavy’s kind of person.

One of Popcorn’s favorite things to do was spray paint pictures on the wall separating Copper and Silver, usually of muscular women with pink mohawks sneering and flipping the middle finger. They would have dialog bubbles that were supposed to be insulting, but never quite hit their mark. Stuff like: “Silver Sucks!” or “Fuck off, filthy scum!” or “think fast, fuckers!” which is one that really made no sense to anyone else except for Scavy and Poppy.

Popcorn was a huge fan of the “think fast” game. Whenever Scavy wasn’t looking, she would say “think fast!” and then throw an apple or a rock at him. Sometimes he would catch the object, sometimes he wouldn’t. Scavy knew that when Poppy said “think fast” trouble was coming.

One day, while they were doing lines of Waste, Poppy said, “Think fast!” and then stabbed a knife through Scavy’s hand, nailing it to the table.

Scavy just looked at the knife in his hand and back up at Popcorn who had a goofy “I totally got you” look on her face.

“What the fuck!” Scavy yelled, his blood mixing with the lines of Waste on the table.

“You’re too slow,” she said, then snorted one of the lines with his blood in it.

Scavy tried to pull the knife out of his hand, but it was jammed into the table pretty good. He just sighed and shook his head at Poppy, his blood on her nostril. When you’re friends with a crazy unpredictable bitch, you’ve got to take the good with the bad.

They started dating, for a while, but both of them knew that wasn’t going to stick. Popcorn wasn’t the type to get serious with anyone for very long. She just gets bored too easily. But Scavy relates to that. He’s the exact same way.

A couple of days ago, Scavy told her, “So I think we should break up and shit.”

And all she did was shrug, and said, “Yeah, sure. You wanna do a line?”

“Yeah.”

And that was it

As Scavy watches Popcorn shiver and spit, he taps the bottom of his spear against the concrete roof. Junko notices that he’s finally come to terms with his friend’s condition. She goes to him.

“We have to take care of her,” Junko says, holding up the 9mm. “Before she changes.”

Scavy nods a few too many times. “Yeah, okay.”

“I’ll do it if you want,” Junko says.

“No, I’ll do it,” Scavy says, reaching for the gun.

“Make sure she doesn’t see it coming,” Junko says, blocking the sight of the handoff from his girlfriend. “It’ll be easier for her that way.”

“Yeah. Easier.”

“Shoot her before she even knows what’s going on.”

“Yeah, I can do that.”

“Okay,” Junko says, and pats him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry…”

Then he turns to Popcorn. He takes a deep breath and points the gun at her. A smile appears on his face as he gets a funny idea for how to handle this.

“Hey, Poppy,” he says.

She looks up at him.

“Think fast.”

Then he shoots her in the face.

“What the fuck, Scavy?” Popcorn says to him, as blood drips from the bullet hole in her forehead.

The other three just stare at her.

“Umm…” Scavy leans over to Junko. “She didn’t die.”

Popcorn wipes her forehead and then looks at the blood on her fingers. “You think that’s funny, asshole?”

“She’s already turned,” Junko says, taking the handgun from the punk and pointing it at the punk chick.

Poppy looks behind her at the blood on the wall, then she stands up and goes to them. “You’re such a dick.”

“Stay back!” Junko says.

Popcorn stops. Junko isn’t sure if she even knows what is going on.

“Why isn’t she trying to eat our brains?” Rainbow asks.

Junko shakes her head. “I have no idea.”

Scavy knows why she isn’t hungry for brains. It’s because Popcorn doesn’t get hungry for anything. Ever since he knew her she has been that way. She had done so much Waste growing up that it had destroyed the nervous tissue in her stomach and through much of her body. She could eat all she wanted and never feel the sensation of being full or she could starve herself for weeks and never get hungry.

That was why she was so skinny. She didn’t ever get hungry for food. She never even had cravings for food. The act of eating to her was just chewing a flavorless substance and then depositing it inside of her body. If she didn’t get weak and tired from lack of food she would have just stopped eating altogether. Now that she’s a zombie, it’s not any different.

“So what do we do?” Rainbow asks.

“We can’t take her with us,” Junko says.

“But I’m fine,” Popcorn says.

“We don’t know if you’re going to stay fine,” Junko says. “And, besides, you’re still infectious.”

Popcorn sticks her pinky finger in her bullet hole and then pulls it out again, then smiles as if the act is amusing.

“But it would be cruel to just leave her here…” Scavy says.

Junko says, “You put a bullet in her head like it was a joke, but you think leaving her is cruel?”

“I don’t want her coming with us,” Rainbow says.

“Well, I think she should,” Scavy says.

“Two to one,” Junko says. “She stays. Trust me, it’s for the best.”

They look at her smelling the brain blood on her finger. She tastes it. The taste of brain makes her cringe.

“Besides,” Junko says. “She’s a zombie now. All the other zombies will treat her like one of them and leave her alone. She’ll most likely survive longer than any of us.”

“Hey, yeah,” Scavy says. “That’s kind of fucking badass. She’ll be like the queen of the zombies.”

“But I don’t want to be the queen of the zombies,” Popcorn says. “I want to kill zombies, with you.”

Scavy shakes his head. “We’ve got to go on without you.”

“This is bullshit,” she says.

“Come on.” Scavy puts his arm around her shoulder. “It’s going to be awesome. You’ll have the entire wasteland to yourself. You can wreck shit up all you want.”

“What if I start to rot like the others?” she says. “I don’t want to be just bones and slime.”

“Fuck it,” he says. “Just have fun with it.”

“But I don’t want to be alone.”

Scavy looks back at the others who are waiting for him to leave. Junko looks so impatient that she might punch the camera ball floating next to her.

“What about Brick?” Scavy says. “He’s a zombie too, now. Maybe the two of you can hook up again and rule the wasteland together. That is, unless you have a problem with his looks being uglier than usual.”

Poppy laughs. “Well, half his face is gone, but he did look pretty hot in those pink combat boots.”

“That’s the spirit,” Scavy says.

“Let’s go,” Junko yells. “Now.”

“I got to go,” Scavy says.

He hugs her and steps back.

“I should eat your ass for leaving me like this,” she says.

“Say hi to Brick for me.”

Popcorn waves to him as he goes, her bloody tendon dangling from her wrist, swaying back and forth. Then she looks out across the wasteland, imagining it as her new kingdom.

Before Scavy enters the building, he calls out to her. “Hey, Poppy.”

She looks back.

“You look pretty hot with that bullet hole in your head.”

She flips him off.

He smiles, then follows after the others.

Lee pushes a squirming zombie torso off of him. Its sludgy head and limbs had been blown away by the grenade, coating the barroom floor in ground meat. The living corpse absorbed most of the blast, but Lee didn’t get away unscathed. The blast took off flesh from the right side of his head, including his right ear. Both of his legs are mangled. He can’t feel anything in his left arm. There are also large shards of glass buried in his back.

The corpses outside of the dilapidated tavern are in much worse shape than he is. The grenades he had tossed blew many of them into pieces. All of them are still alive, worming across the ground, pulling themselves by finger bones. The only one still standing wanders the street with nothing but a mass of pulpy soup for a head.

Pulling himself up by his one good arm, Lee goes behind the bar of the old tavern. Most of the shelves have rotted away, breaking bottles on the floor below. But the bottom shelf is still standing and holds a single bottle of 55 year old sour mash Kentucky bourbon.

Lee’s eyes light up.

“Hello, beautiful,” he says to the bottle, before breaking it open and taking a swig.

He plops himself down on a wrought iron barstool and exhales the smooth whiskey fumes.

“Braains,” belches a severed zombie head on the bar next to him.

“Cheers to that,” Lee says, and taps the zombie’s forehead with the bottle, like a toast. Then he takes another swig.

When Lee separated from Junko and the others, he had only one goal in mind: he wanted to get drunk. He knew there was no way he was going to win the contest. He didn’t even want to win. Lee was fucking old and ready to die. Life is shit when you’re a 65-year-old homeless war veteran abandoned by your society. There’s nothing he wanted more than to just throw in the towel and die already. If he had the guts he would have hung himself years ago.

Bosco was the only other contestant he had run into after leaving the yard of the hotel. The young redneck was hanging from a fire escape with zombies grabbing at his ankles. He called out to Lee for help but the old man wasn’t stopping for anything. He waved goodbye to the screaming man and just took off down an alley.

When he opened his pack, he groaned at the sight of grenades. There were almost twenty of them, but they were heavy and not the type of weapon that he could use at close range. With all of those years of zombie-fighting experience, he knew that close-range defense is what matters most.

He crossed a park, waking three of the undead sleeping there. They were half-submerged in the dirt, covered in grass and weeds. One of them couldn’t get up due to the roots of trees that had grown through its abdomen. He lost the other two that chased him by ducking into a liquor store. As the corpses passed, Lee watched them through a broken window: two dirt-coated skeletons whose flesh looked to be made of chewed-up clay. Their mouths and throats were so filled with mud and weeds that their voices came out of holes in their necks when they tried to say brains.

When Lee turned around, what he saw was pure heaven. Lined up before him were shelves upon shelves of spiced rum, potato vodka, pear brandy, orange cognac, single malt scotch, and every other liquor he could possibly dream of. And it was old world liquor, not the cheap shit that people pass off as liquor these days in Neo New York. It was made back when people cared about the quality of their wines, their foods, their cigars. People lived well and died old. Their lives didn’t revolve around fighting every single day just to stay alive.

Lee had grown up in this era, before the zombie apocalypse. He lived in the suburbs with his upper middleclass family. This period of his life he remembers well. He remembers playing basketball with his best friends, picking flowers for his first girlfriend, watching television with his parents. But he doesn’t remember much of Z-Day. It was like a distant dream, a time when everyone was in a constant state of shock as the chaos swept in around them. One day he was scribbling notes to his girlfriend during math class, and the next everyone he knew was dead and he was being evacuated by fire truck to the only safe zone in Kansas.

Then he went from safe zone to safe zone. Each one either fell to the zombies or ran out of supplies and had to be evacuated. After surviving for eight months with random strangers whose faces changed on a weekly basis, he eventually ended up in a fortified city along the Gulf of Mexico that would become his home for the next twenty years.

Like most male refugees with no family to take care of him, Lee was immediately drafted into the local army. Despite the fact that he was still a teenager, he was expected to defend their city from the hordes of undead surrounding their settlement. At first, Lee was proud of his job. The city’s population was over 2,000. He wanted to do his part to keep all of those people alive. But so many of his fellow soldiers died. Even the trained soldiers were little match for the indestructible undead. Lee realized that it was unlikely that he would live long enough to see adulthood.

In the first year after Z-Day, there were over 150 fortified cities like this one in America. By the next year, there were only 57. The year after that, there were only 22. By the time the island of Neo new York was constructed and the entire continent was undergoing evacuation, only 6 cities were still standing and most of those had populations that had dwindled into the low hundreds.

The worst part was when Lee realized that the people he was giving his life to protect were a bunch of selfish assholes who didn’t give a shit about him. They lived in comfort and safety, while he risked his life to hold back all the undead who tried to break through the barricade. The citizens despised the soldiers so much that they separated them from their society. The soldiers became third class citizens. They weren’t allowed in most parts of town and spent most of their time in the barracks, in the guard towers, or patrolling the city walls. Lee saw this as a form of slavery. His superior officers, who did have full rights as citizens, saw this as just following orders.

He knew that the only way he could be integrated into society was if he became an officer. He did his best to rise through the ranks, but could never get past the rank of sergeant. This rank meant that he was more commonly put into dangerous situations and had far more responsibilities than lower ranked soldiers, but without the benefits of being an officer.

The only time Lee was truly happy was when he led scavenging missions. Once a month he would take a team of six soldiers in an armored vehicle into the Red Zone for several days, picking up canned food, tools, machine parts, and everything else that could be useful. They had to fight their way through zombie hordes to get from store to store. Part of the reason Lee liked these missions was the absolute freedom he had. He wasn’t a slave to his superior officers, he was a ruler of the wasteland. But the main reason he loved going on these missions was that he was able to drink. In old convenience stores or bars, Lee and his men took the liquor for themselves. They barricaded themselves in old garages and drank themselves stupid. It was the only time the soldiers were ever able to enjoy their lives.

In the old liquor store Lee went for two bottles of single malt scotch. When he was a soldier on missions, good single malt scotch was in high demand among the fat upper class citizens of their city. But when he was in charge of the missions, the best bottles of scotch would never make it back to home base. He would drink them with his men.

Lee opened a bottle and took a swig. Then smiled. He had not tasted something so wonderful in a very long time. When he looked down at the label, he recognized the brand. It was a bottle of Talisker 1994 Manager’s Choice, double-matured in a sherry cask.

Talisker reminded him of his old friend, Timothy. This guy was his right hand man on many a mission. Not because he was a great shot or a good soldier, but because he knew how to track down the best liquor. Lee wasn’t sure if it was because he had good logic when it came to guessing locations of taverns on city maps or if he was just a lucky bastard, but that guy was always able to track down a cache of liquor bottles no matter how well-scavenged of a region they were in.

“You’re supposed to drink the worm,” Timothy said to Lee as he held up the bottle of mescal.

“What kind of worm is it?” Lee put his eye close to the bottle.

“It’s a butterfly larvae, actually,” Timothy said. “It’s supposed to make the tequila taste better.”

“Are you sure they weren’t just put in there by Mexicans to see if they could get gringos to eat worms?”

“Of course they were, but that’s not the point,” Timothy said. “The point is you’re a pussy if you don’t drink the worm.”

“Oh…”

Lee took a drink from the bottle. His face cringed as the harsh liquor burned his throat.

“The worm isn’t working,” he said, holding back a cough. “This stuff tastes like shit.”

“Of course it does, there’s a fucking worm in there.” Then Timothy laughed and took a swig of Talisker.

Lee stared at the worm in the bottle. He could swear the thing had a little human face that was staring back at him. He knew that it was impossible for insects to become infected with the zombie virus, but he could swear the worm in there was alive and watching him. He decided to put the cap back on and save the rest for the upper class.

Then Timothy poured him four fingers of Talisker.

Lee drank half the bottle in less than five minutes. He didn’t know how long he was going to last in the game and he wanted to make sure he was good and drunk as soon as possible.

A camera ball followed him as he walked down the street, chugging the bottle of scotch. He flipped off the camera and then stuck his finger up his nose. Lee hated the upper class. He always did. When he was relocated to Neo New York, it was no different. They put him with the rest of the trash in the Copper Quadrant, outside of the city gates, separated from the rest of society. He had given thirty years of his life protecting the assholes and once they moved to Neo New York they didn’t need him anymore and tossed him aside.

Copper was filled with old soldiers with similar stories. Living in homemade shacks down by the beach, living off of crabs and seagulls, shitting in holes in the sand. They drank the worst swill on the island that was made in orange rusted garbage cans. It tasted like urine-flavored rubbing alcohol and quickly turned their livers into blackened husks.

Lee decided that he would not put on a show for the fat cats. His final act would be to get drunk and die a very boring death. No going out in a blaze of glory for Lee. He was going to just let those zombie bastards take him without a fight.

So he walked casually down the street, drinking from his bottle. When the two clay-fleshed zombies came after him, Lee just tossed a grenade over his shoulder and blew them into pieces.

Staggering down the road, Lee tossed more grenades at the zombies as they approached him. The explosions completely disabled the corpses. The grenades might not have killed many of the undead, but they did blow all of their legs out from under them. The zombies weren’t able to catch up to him even if he was walking so slowly.

“Fuck you, bastards,” Lee said to the camera. “I gave all you rich sons of bitches the best years of my life. You know what you gave me? Nothing.”

He paused to take another swig and throw another grenade.

“You know why all of you assholes are still alive? It’s because of me. I kept all of you safe and sound while you sat on your fat asses eating all the food I risked my neck scavenging for you. And how the fuck do you thank me? You put me on this fucking show. You feed me to the zombies I protected you from since I was fourteen years old.”

The sound of the grenades was waking the dead in the surrounding buildings. The number of zombies that were coming after him was increasing dramatically.

“But you know what I have that you don’t?” Lee raised his bottle to the camera. “I’ve got a sixty year old bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. Not a single one of you will ever have a liquor of this quality, not ever in your lives. No matter how rich you are. No matter how many mercs you send into the Red Zone. You’re never going to find a bottle quite as nice as this.”

Then Lee finished off the bottle right there in front of the camera.

“I’m living the high life,” he said, pulling out the second bottle of scotch.

But before Lee could break it open, a thin red laser beam shot out of the camera ball and shattered the bottle, splashing the liquor all over him.

The camera eyed the whiskey-drenched Lee as if it were laughing at him.

“Fuck you, you fat dirty pigs!” he growled at the camera. Then flipped it off.

With his liquor gone, Lee went looking for something else to drink. He went from store to store, wishing he had Timothy’s alcohol intuition. In the center of downtown, he saw a tavern at the end of an intersection.

“Bingo,” he said to the bar.

But before he could get inside the place, the group of zombies had caught up to him and he accidentally blew himself up.

Bleeding from his legs and face, Lee takes a sip of the sour mash. It’s not as flavorful as the scotch but it’s just as smooth. The camera ball floating next to him zooms in on his wound. A piece of shrapnel juts from his temple. He’s so drunk that he can hardly feel the chunk of metal pressed against his brain.

“I’ll never forgive you fuckers,” Lee says to the camera. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Timothy.”

When the fortified city on the Gulf of Mexico was evacuated, not everybody was allowed to leave. There were only so many people who were allowed to move to the island of Neo New York. Over two hundred soldiers were left behind to fend for themselves. They weren’t left with any food, supplies, or weapons to defend themselves with. They weren’t even left with the proper tools necessary to keep the barricade up. They were left to die. Timothy was one of them.

“I’m going to stay, too,” Lee told Timothy the day he was supposed to evacuate. “It will be better here than on that shitty island with all those assholes.”

“Nah,” Timothy said. “You should get out of here. You’re one of the lucky twenty percent.”

“It’s bullshit they had us draw straws. None of the citizens had to draw straws.”

“Forget about it. That’s just the way things are.”

“I’m not going to forget about it. I’m going to stay. We can scavenge the Red Zone like we used to. Only now everything we find we can keep for ourselves.”

“They didn’t leave us with any weapons or vehicles. Going into the Red Zone now would be suicide.”

“We’ll get new vehicles. We’ll get new weapons.”

Timothy just shook his head. “Lee…”

“We can live better than we ever did before.”

“Lee.” Timothy raised his voice. “We aren’t going to survive the night.”

Lee looked behind him at the men with guns aimed at the soldiers that were being left behind. He knew that the main reason they were letting twenty percent of the soldiers come with them was so that they would protect them from those who were staying behind. Besides Lee, every single one of them were ready to kill their own friends in order to keep their seat on the boat.

“Forget about us and get out of here.” Then Timothy walked away, leaving Lee standing there in front the row of armed men.

As Lee drinks from his bottle, a new horde of zombies closes in on the bar, attracted to the noise of the last explosion. He doesn’t pay them any attention as he drinks his whiskey and thinks back on the day he left Timothy.

As his ship was setting sail, he saw that the soldiers left behind didn’t bother putting up a fight for survival. They just opened the gates and let the creatures in, welcoming their demise. Lee saw nothing but a blank stare on Timothy’s face as the zombies opened up his skull and chewed out his brain.

Just as his friends did on that day, Lee welcomes zombie teeth to his flesh. He sips his whiskey as they grab him by the shoulders and bite into his neck. The camera ball zooms in to get a good look at Lee’s face as he is eaten. The old soldier tries to ignore the zooming sounds of the camera, but they are too irritating to tune out.

Lee looks into the camera with a sneer. Black slime oozes from a zombie’s face down his chest. His blood sprays out of him across the bar, into his drink. Then he pulls something out of his pocket and holds it up to the camera.

“How fast can you fly, little bird?” the old man says to the camera, as he flicks the pin of the grenade across the bar.

When the camera sees the grenade in his hand, it flies backward. Lee smirks as it flees for safety yet refuses to miss the shot of Lee’s death. Just before the camera escapes the tavern, Lee tosses the grenade and it bounces off the side of the camera’s protective casing. Then the grenade explodes and smashes the camera against the wall.

Lee smiles wide as the bomb inside of the camera goes off. The bar becomes a flash of white light. Then Lee, the zombies, and the entire city block disappear into a cloud of fire.

Haroon rushes through the streets, avoiding the undead, trying desperately to find her.

He swears that he saw her among the group of contestants back at the hotel, but he only caught a glimpse of her during the escape. She’s good at blending into crowds, so it’s very possible she was with them the whole time without him noticing. If she is a contestant he must find her. She could save him. She could save them all.

His hand grips tightly to his weapon: a spiked club. It’s not exactly a club, more like a child-sized aluminum baseball bat, embedded with several metal studs, then painted black. He uses it to club zombies out of his way. He doesn’t use it to fight the undead. All he needs it for is to bat away reaching claws and biting mouths. Because of its smallish size, it’s lightweight and swings fast.

All he needs to do is run and keep an eye out for her. Once he finds her, she’ll be all the protection he’ll need. He wonders why she didn’t come to him back in the hotel. There’s no way she wouldn’t have recognized him. Perhaps she was just overwhelmed by the situation and her new environment. In her entire life, she had not seen much of the world—only the secret underground chambers beneath the Platinum Quadrant. He wasn’t even sure if she had seen the sun before. It makes sense that she would have been so overwhelmed that she wouldn’t have been paying attention to the people surrounding her.

If he can’t find her right away it would be good for him to find other people to team up with. He got separated from Junko’s group when he thought he’d seen her. Even though he wanted the group to stick together, he had to go after the woman to verify whether or not it was really her, but she got away too quickly. She jumped out of a hotel window and raced out of there so fast it was like a blurred ghost darting through the yard and disappearing into the shadows of the wasteland beyond. When he went back to find the others, they had already gone on without him.

Right now, if he wants to survive he must seek out other people. Perhaps they will help him find the woman he’s after and together they can find a different way out of the Red Zone, rather than competing for the one seat available on the helicopter. Unfortunately, most of the people are far ahead of him.

After an hour of searching, Haroon comes across another contestant. He hears a commotion coming a few blocks east and takes an alley to investigate. Crouching down and peering around a corner, he sees a crowd of flaming zombies crumbling to the ground. Beyond them, he sees Heinz marching through the street with his flamethrower in hand, burning down every living corpse that gets in his way.

When he sees how well the tall blond man seems to be doing against the undead, Haroon decides he would be the perfect person to team up with. Haroon stands up and heads toward the man, running to catch up to him.

A black leathery hand reaches out from an open door and grabs him by the arm. It pulls him into the shadows. Haroon opens his mouth to cry out to Heinz for help, but another leathery hand covers his mouth. His scream is muffled.

“Be quiet, fool,” says the attacker.

Haroon turns around to face the man who had grabbed him. At first, he just sees a large black form. Then he realizes that the large form is Laurence.

Laurence holds up his leather gloved hands to show that he means no harm.

“What did you do that for?” Haroon says.

“I was trying to save your sorry ass,” Laurence says. “You were thinking of making friends with that scumbag out there, weren’t you?”

Haroon nods.

“Let me show you something.” Laurence has Haroon look out of the window at Heinz’s clothing. He points at the swastika armband. “You see that symbol on his arm there? That means he’s not interested in making friends with you. It means he’s a racist nazi piece of trash.” Then he pulls Haroon back inside.

“I don’t understand,” Haroon says.

“Trust me,” Laurence says. “That guy’s no good. You’re better off alone than going with him. If you want to team up with somebody you can team up with me. I won’t let you down.”

Laurence gives him a thumbs up.

Haroon decides to believe Laurence, even though he’s never heard of nazis before. After Z-Day, a lot of Earth’s history had become lost and forgotten. The horrible events of the past paled in comparison to present day life. Although the schools in the Gold and Platinum Quadrants have been getting into teaching history over the past few years, the majority of the citizens of Neo New York just don’t know much about the old world. Most kids are assigned a career and then trained specifically for that position. Construction workers are raised to learn the skills to work construction. A farmer is raised to learn how to farm. They might also learn how to read and do basic math, but that’s about it. History just isn’t taught, perhaps because most people are trying very hard to forget the past.

When the two men enter the street to head back toward the alleyway, Haroon looks back at Heinz. The tall Aryan man is burning a zombie, a look of sadist pleasure stretches across his face. The zombie shrieks as it is burned. Upon closer inspection, Haroon notices that the zombie is Brick.

Zombie Brick cries in agony until he crumbles to ash. Then Heinz grabs the punk’s double-fisted sledgehammer from the ground, drapes it over his shoulder, and continues marching down the street.

As they backtrack through the alleyway, trying to get as much distance between them and Heinz as possible, Haroon notices Laurence is unarmed. He has his backpack slung over his shoulder, but otherwise he’s empty-handed.

“What weapon did you get?” Haroon asks, holding up his spiked club.

Laurence shakes his head. “Didn’t get one.”

“What?” he asks. “Everybody gets a weapon. You had to have gotten something.”

“Nope,” Laurence says.

“Give me your bag.”

Laurence hands it over. They duck into an old coffee shop, making sure no zombies are following them. In a back room, Haroon empties the pack across a table. He spreads out the items and examines each one. Every item he has is exactly the same as the items Haroon has in his pack, minus a weapon.

“You’re right, there’s nothing,” Haroon says. “Why the hell did they screw you like this?”

“Well, I’m not exactly unarmed. My whole body is one giant weapon.” Laurence punches his fist through the plaster wall next to him to prove his point. “I think they just wanted to make it fair to the other contestants.”

Then Laurence smiles.

“Still, they should have given you something. Brass knuckles, nunchucks, something.”

Laurence shakes his head. “I don’t need any of that. I can kill zombies with my bare hands just fine.”

Then Haroon notices something unusual about one of the items on the table: the map. It doesn’t look quite right. It’s much bulkier than the map he received in his own pack. Haroon picks it up and unfolds it. Inside, there are several sheets of paper.

“What’s that?” Laurence asks.

Haroon holds them up for inspection. “Blueprints.”

Laurence leans over the Indian man’s shoulder. “What kind of blueprints?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Haroon says. “I think they are instructions on how to build a weapon.”

“Build a weapon? They expect me to build my own weapon when everyone else gets their weapons fully constructed? Who do they think I am, MacGyver?”

Haroon has no idea who MacGyver is.

“By the looks of this, I bet it’s an incredibly powerful weapon,” Haroon says. “Perhaps too powerful to give to any contestant right at the start.”

“Hmmm… Maybe you’re right. And they gave it to me because they knew I’d be the contestant most likely to survive unarmed long enough to build the thing. Only one problem…”

“What’s that?”

“Finding these parts to make it. I have no idea what most of them even are.”

Haroon scans the list.

“Then you’re lucky you ran into me,” Haroon says. “This kind of thing is my specialty.”

Haroon was a top researcher who worked on classified projects for the government of Neo New York. He was registered as a citizen of the Platinum Quadrant, but he had never once stepped foot in Platinum. He lived in an underground research facility with over fifty other scientists. Each scientist was a specialist in their field, educated from childhood to fill a unique position. Haroon was trained to become a weapons engineer.

Bullets are effective against living beings, but against the undead they are not as much so. Haroon worked on developing weapons that would be more effective against the undead. There was a division that focused on freezing weapons and another that focused on particle beam weapons, but Haroon’s division focused on self-recharging weapons. The kind that could have an unlimited power source, without the risk of running out of ammunition.

The most significant item produced by Haroon was the solar-powered shotgun. It was still years away from being perfected, but the basics were there. The big problem was that its range was only ten feet and it took an entire hour to recharge. It also didn’t do as much damage as an ordinary shotgun. One ten-foot shot per hour was not nearly as effective as a standard shotgun. But he promised his superiors that with time he could develop a weapon as powerful as a shotgun, one that would never run out of shells or need to be reloaded. All a soldier would have to do is put it in the sunlight for one hour every couple of days and the ammunition would be unlimited.

Of course, Haroon failed to deliver on his promise. Lucky for him, he could never be fired from his job for failing to deliver. The worst that could happen to him was reassignment. His best friend in his division, Terry, was responsible for blowing their boss’s right index finger off, and all he got was reassigned to the genetics division. He might have been mopping floors and washing toilets, but he still had a job. Since they put so much work into training their researchers, they don’t just get rid of them unless they absolutely have to. A person would have to commit murder or high treason in order to lose their position. But if that were to occur the person wouldn’t be fired, they would be executed, imprisoned, or worse: put on Zombie Survival.

This is how Haroon was chosen for Zombie Survival. He committed an act of high treason. He never heard of the show in the underground facility—researchers didn’t have the luxury of television—so Haroon had no idea this could have possibly been his punishment. For six months, he waited in his cell for execution, but it never came. They were holding him there until the next season of the show.

Haroon is thankful they gave him a fighting chance. As long as he’s alive, there is still hope. It is also nice to be outside in the sunlight after so many years underground. Even if he is going to die, at least he’s able to see the sun again. He did have a sunroof in his lab for testing weapons, but it was only one square foot of light which just wasn’t the same as being out in the open.

And if she is really out here with him, everything will work out perfectly.

Laurence and Haroon go from building to building, searching for the components listed in the blueprint. Some of them aren’t easy to get, but most of them are obtainable at any grocery store. If only they can find one.

“You sure we’ll be able to build that thing?” Laurence asks.

“Positive.”

They move in the direction of the helicopter marked on their maps, picking up items as they go. Because they aren’t firing guns, the zombies aren’t as attracted to them as the other contestants.

“Back at the hotel,” Laurence begins, “you said that you wanted us all to go for a boat instead of the helicopter. That way we all could make it out alive.”

“Yeah,” Haroon says. “I still believe it’s possible. The Asian girl was right, most of the boats would not be useable, but I’m sure we could find at least one boat that would work. Hell, we could probably even make our own.”

“I like the way you think,” Laurence says. “There’s always another way. That’s what I’ve always said. Just because the Man says there’s only one way to survive, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Once we get this gun together, I say we collect Junko and whoever else we can, then head for the river.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Haroon says.

“It’s a plan and a half.”

All Haroon has to do is build this weapon and find her, and he knows the plan will succeed. Then they can all get out of there without having to kill each other.

Junko, Scavy, and Rainbow Cat race down a city street, trying to cover as much ground as possible. Unfortunately, there are too many zombies awake already for them to get very far. They go down one street and their path is blocked by a crowd of undead. They go around to another road and run into another crowd of zombies. They take so many detours that they seem to be getting farther away from their goal, rather than closer.

“We have to fight our way through them,” Scavy says. “This pussy running bullshit is getting us nowhere.”

The camera ball floating behind them makes beeping noises as if it agrees with Scavy, annoyed that they aren’t giving it any interesting footage. The camera’s operator, sitting safely behind a computer hundreds of miles away, must be bored out of his mind.

“Trust me,” Junko says. “We want to avoid a fight with them at all costs. Shooting them will only attract more. Melee fighting is only useful when you’re up against one of them at a time, not a crowd. We just need to keep moving, even if it’s in the wrong direction.”

“Bullshit!” Scavy says. “Those badass merc punks fought their way through crowds no problem.”

“You’re not a merc punk.”

Scavy shuts up at that comment. He really wishes he was a merc punk. They seem tough as fuck. He wishes he would have joined up with them rather than Junko and the hippy.

Once they run into yet another zombie mob blocking their path, Scavy says, “Fuck it,” and charges forward.

“What the hell are you doing!” Junko yells.

The camera ball quickly follows Scavy, as if excited the viewers will finally get to see some action.

“I’m sick of going around them,” he says, holding up his naginata spear like a lance. “I’m going straight through.”

He lets out a battle cry and all of the zombies turn their attention to him.

“Braains…” they moan as they stagger toward him.

“Get back here, you dumbfuck!” Junko yells.

Junko stomps her foot and glares over at Rainbow Cat. The hippy girl rolls her eyes. Junko groans loudly and then races after the idiot.

“The only good part about being put on this fucking show,” Scavy says, just as he reaches the first zombie, “is being able to kill shit.”

Then he swings the blade of his spear at the attacking corpse with all of his strength, the blade cuts through the zombie’s neck and decapitates it. The head flies over his shoulder and rolls down the street toward Rainbow Cat.

But the zombie continues its attack. Green sludge spews out of the corpse’s neck hole as it wraps its claws around Scavy’s shoulders. Even though it no longer has a head, it’s stump of a neck still tries to get at Scavy’s brain, as if desperately hoping that there might be a way to slurp the brain into its neck hole.

“Don’t let that green shit touch you!” Junko yells at Scavy. “It’s infectious.”

Scavy pushes away at the headless corpse with the shaft of his spear, as the green sauce geysers in his direction. Then two other zombies grab him by the elbow and neck, going for his brain. The punk thrashes around to prevent them from getting a good bite, but the thrashing causes the green sludge to get onto his clothes.

One of the zombies that has a hold of him is incredibly sloggy and melted. It has dozens of pennies, nickels, and quarters embedded into its flesh, as if it had been hibernating in a wishing fountain for the past few decades. When it opens its mouth to groan, several coins trickle out of its mouth like a slot machine. Scavy laughs at the sight. He wonders if the zombie had swallowed all of those coins in order to eat the brains of all of those tiny metal presidents.

As the coin zombie widens its jaws around Scavy’s ear, Junko smashes its face with the base of her chainsaw arm. Coins fly into the air as it tumbles away from the punk. Then she revs her chainsaw and severs the arms off of the headless zombie and kicks him away. Scavy shoves the third zombie off of him.

Eight more zombies come at them, and Junko charges forward. In a spinning motion, she ducks under their reaching arms and slashes their Achilles tendons. They drop. Before they can grab her from the ground, she runs at the other four. She jumps at one of them and decapitates it, then leaps at another and its head goes rolling. One at a time, she cuts off their heads. Once their heads are off, she goes for their ankles.

When she has incapacitated all of the undead, she turns to the others. “What are you waiting for? Come on!”

Scavy and Rainbow Cat stare at her with wide open mouths.

“That was fucking awesome!” Scavy says, squirming zombie bodies all around him.

“Let’s go,” she says, turning off her chainsaw. “The noise is going to attract ten times as many of those things.” Then she turns and runs.

Rainbow Cat and Scavy follow after her, jumping over the zombie arms that reach blindly across the asphalt. Up ahead, they see a dozen more of the undead coming straight for them.

“Fuck,” Junko groans, as she revs her chainsaw back into life. “I was hoping to avoid this shit.”

Junko knows exactly what she’s doing out there, because she had fully prepared herself for this competition. In the history of Zombie Survival, she was the first contestant to actually know she was going to be selected for the show beforehand. The second she had become blacklisted by employers in the Platinum, Gold, and Silver districts, she knew that it was done for a single purpose: so she would be forced to move to Copper and become eligible for the Zombie Survival contestant selection. And she knew who was responsible for getting her on that blacklist: her old boss, Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla.

She had met Wayne when she was seventeen years old. He was the judge of a beauty pageant she was participating in. She remembers the way his creepy eyes wouldn’t look anywhere else but on her body. She remembers him licking his crusty too-red lips behind his too-white goatee.

Back then she had long black hair, perfect ladylike posture, and a glowing artificial smile. Her mother encouraged her to focus on being beautiful. If she was beautiful she could marry a rich man and live in the Gold or Platinum Quadrant. If she was beautiful she would be too valuable to be discarded by society into the ghettos of Copper. So her mother made sure she wore the latest fashions, took good care of her nails and hair, learned the art of makeup application, and developed an attractive personality: innocent, joyful, pure. And her mother always put her in beauty pageants. She wanted her daughter’s beauty on display for all the rich men to see.

Even though her daughter was underage, her mother encouraged her to flirt with older wealthy men. When Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla introduced himself to her after she had come in third place in the pageant (the worst she had ever placed since she was ten), she could feel her mother’s eyes telling her: “Don’t fuck this up. He’s interested in you. Smile. Flash your eyelashes. Arch your back. Stick out your cleavage.”

But Junko was more creeped out by him than any man she had ever met. She just couldn’t flirt with him.

“Hi there,” he said, rubbing his white goatee. “My name is Wayne, but people call me The Wiz.”

Junko cowered beneath him, her back slouching, her eyes glancing at the ground, her teeth chewing nervously on the inside of her cheek. She could see her mother glaring at her from across the room for not flirting properly with the older man. Junko wasn’t presenting herself at all in the way that her mother had taught her. Junko knew that she would be punished by her mother for coming in third place, but if she could attract the affection of this older man perhaps she would be forgiven. She wouldn’t have to seriously form a relationship with the man, just give the impression to her mother that he was a potential suitor.

Junko widened her eyes and opened up her body to him, flirting with her neck and smile. She asks, “Why do they call you The Wiz?”

Wayne leaned in and spoke directly into her ear with his rough deep voice, “Because I make magic happen.”

When he pulled away he laughed, as if that was supposed to be a joke. Junko laughed with him. She knows to always laugh at a man’s jokes even if she isn’t sure whether or not he told a joke.

“I’m looking for a young pretty face for a new show I’m working on,” Wayne said. “I think you’d be perfect.”

“A show?” Junko asked. “Like a play?”

“No, a television show,” Wayne said. “Do you know what a television show is?”

Junko shook her head, but kept her fake smile beamed in his direction.

“You will soon enough. Television is finally coming to the island and the show I’m working on will be the biggest hit series of all time.”

“And you want me to be a part of it?” Junko asked, her excited tone of voice was actually genuine this time.

“I want you to be the star,” he said.

Then Junko’s fake smile became a real one.

Junko leads her crew into an abandoned building to escape the zombie fight. They don’t bother barricading the door and allow the zombies to pile in after them. Instead, they zigzag through corridors until they lose them. Then they jump into the pitch-black stairwell. They seem to have also lost the camera ball that was following them.

Rainbow Cat ruffles through her pack for her flashlight, but Junko says, “Leave your lights off.”

Feeling their way up the steps, they pray they don’t run into any corpses. But Junko feels safer knowing that the zombies are even more blind in the dark than they are and have a difficulty with stairs.

They continue climbing, stepping in sticky fluids and tripping over rubble, but they don’t run into any bodies… that they know of.

A wave of relief rushes over Rainbow Cat when they leave the stairwell onto a random floor. The offices here are dimly lit, but the little amount of light they have is enough to know exactly what’s around them. They choose a well-lit office with a large window, then lock the door behind them.

“Just keep your voice down,” Junko whispers, “and they’re not going to find us.”

They drop to the ground and catch their breaths. When Junko gets a good look at the green slime on Scavy’s clothes, she says, “Did you get that shit on you?”

Scavy looks down. “Guess so.”

“Take ‘em off!” she whispers. “Now!”

She helps him carefully remove his shirt and pants, repeatedly calling him a dumb fuck for letting this happen.

“Did it get on your skin?” she asks. “If it’s soaked into your skin and into your bloodstream you’re dead.”

When he is down to his underwear, Junko examines every inch of his skin for the green substance. She pulls him up to the window to be absolutely certain.

“I don’t see anything,” Scavy says.

Junko frowns. “You look fine, but from now on you listen to me.”

“You’ve got it,” Scavy says.

The punk has a new found respect for Junko ever since he saw her take down all of those zombies. He could hardly stand up to just one, but she made short work of nearly a dozen of them.

“You kicked ass out there,” he says. “Have you fought zombies before?”

Junko shakes her head.

She says, “No, but I’ve worked for this show long enough to know which attacks are most effective.”

Then she lies back to rest for a few minutes, getting off her feet so that they won’t blister.

“I also know what mistakes not to make,” she says with her eyes closed. “Like the mistake you made back there. If you want to survive you will listen to me from now on. I won’t bail you out next time.”

After a long pause, Rainbow Cat asks, “How was it?”

“What?” Junko asks.

“Working on the show?”

It was fun at first. Junko liked being treated like a celebrity, even though she was just a host for the show. The real stars were the people who fought and died for everyone’s amusement. Junko was just the pretty face and cheerful voice that introduced each episode of the season. She liked being pretty for a living. Her mother loved it even more, because her daughter was not just a pretty face but also a major sex symbol. There was no way Junko wasn’t going to end up marrying a very wealthy man.

Then she grew up and the novelty of being a celebrity wore off. Her mother died from choking on a wine cork, and her influence died with her. The desire to marry a wealthy man faded, because she already had plenty of money. She always knew the show she worked for was brutal and cruel, but she was raised to accept these things as normal, just as all children in the upper class districts were.

But one day she was asked on a date by a handsome young man with emerald green eyes. She fell in love with him the first time she looked into those deep eyes.

“How can you do it?” he asked her, over dinner. “How can you work for that horrible show?”

Junko smiled and shrugged. “It’s my job.”

“But it’s so cruel,” he said. “Those people are being sent to their death for our amusement.”

“But people die everyday,” she said. “The world is a cruel place. That’s just the way it is.”

Then he said a single word, one that she never thought to use in her privileged life.

He said, “Why?”

Junko was taken aback.

“Why does it have to be that way?” he asked. “Why does the world have to be so cruel?”

“The living dead took over,” she said. “They turned society into a dog-eat-dog world. We have to do what we do in order to survive.”

“That’s no excuse at all,” he said. “Our government has all the resources necessary to make life better for everyone in Neo New York. Instead it chooses to make life even better for the privileged few, while making life even worse for the unfortunate lower class citizens.”

“But most of those people are criminals,” she said. “They rape and murder each other. They do drugs. They prostitute their children. Maybe the show is cruel, but if anybody deserves it it’s those people.”

“I can’t believe you said that,” he said. “Nobody deserves that kind of fate. Those people are just victims of circumstance. They would have turned out no different than you or I if our government spread out its resources to everyone evenly.”

Junko was confused by his statement.

“That’s stupid,” she said, then took a big bite of salmon.

“Compassion is stupid?” he asked.

Junko continued chewing her salmon with a full cheek. She saw anger in his beautiful green eyes. She regretted arguing with him. If only she lied he might have liked her better.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, standing up from the table. “But only on the outside.”

Then he left the restaurant.

The next season of the show, she recognized one of the contestants by his emerald green eyes. The rest of his face she didn’t recognized. He looked like he had gone through hard times in the Copper Quadrant. When she asked her boss, The Wiz, what his story was, he told her that he was an idiot. He was a wealthy fiction publisher who had decided to close down his company, move to the Copper Quadrant, and give away all of his money to the people who lived there.

“Why would he do that?” Junko asked him.

Wayne’s white goatee fluffed out as he smiled. “He did it out of protest. He said he was disgusted by our way of life in Platinum, so he refused to live here anymore. Can you believe the moron?”

The next day, when Junko saw the young man with the emerald eyes die in uptown Scottsdale, Arizona, his head torn open by crispy sun-burnt zombies, she left the television station mortified. It was the first time a contestant had been somebody she knew. She had seen violent deaths so much since she started hosting Zombie Survival that she had become desensitized to it, but it was different with him. His emerald green eyes lying on the sidewalk next to his corpse was an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She went to a bar and drank until morning.

Although she was under contract to finish the season, she wanted to quit right then and there. But she had no choice but to finish it. She did such a bland job hosting the show that Wayne was happy to get rid of her.

“You’re getting too old anyway.” Those were the last words he ever said to her.

Wayne would have just left her alone had she just left the show, but she didn’t think quitting was enough. She wanted to get the show cancelled. She led protests against the show, she spent much of her savings on a smear campaign against the television show. She also wrote a book about her experience on the show and gave tons of copies away for free. Eventually, she ran out of money and needed to find work, but she had been blacklisted. She was forced to move to Copper.

The second she stepped foot in Copper, she knew Wayne was going to put her on the next season’s show. The negative publicity was not something he was going to just ignore. He would have his revenge.

So Junko trained every day. She did the military exercises. She studied previous episodes of the show. She practiced every possible weapon, from guns to swords. If Wayne put her on the show, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of watching her die. She was going to win it.