Zombies and Shit (14 page)

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.