Zombies and Shit (17 page)

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.