Zombies and Shit (13 page)

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.