Zombies and Shit (43 page)

Oro knows that he can win this contest, as long as he can protect his glider-cycle. He knows where the intruders are hiding. He had seen a girl with blonde dreadlocks peeking her head out from the entrance to the banquet hall.

“You can’t hide from a genius,” Oro says, pointing his rocket launcher at the wall they are hiding behind.

He fires the rocket at the wall, knowing the explosion will kill everyone on the other side of it. The wall crumbles in the fiery blast. On the other side, through the window, the trio of intruders run across the street, safe from the blast. They survived, but at least he scared them away.

The explosion causes more damage than Oro had expected. After the inner wall goes down, the outer castle wall soon follows. Through a ten foot opening through the pile of debris, the walking dead enter Oro’s sanctuary.

“Get back,” Oro says to the scab-encrusted corpses.

Oro grabs his putter and stomps toward the zombies. He hits one over the head so hard it collapses to the ground.

“I don’t have time for your interruptions,” he says, slamming them left and right with his gold club. “I am a genius. I require solitude.”

“Brains!” the zombies cry.

“Exactly,” he says.

As he beats the zombies back with his club, he recognizes that the scabbed-over skin of one of the zombies looks a lot like bacon. It’s like all of its skin had been put into his future invention, the baconator. This gives him an idea for marketing it to the executives: “Even brains can be baconized!”

Oro continues to daydream as he fights the dead. He doesn’t kill any of them. Once they fall down, they just get right back up, but he keeps swinging at them one at a time without tiring. He’s got the adrenalin of his fantasies to fuel him. He’s got a bright future to think about.

“I am a genius,” he says to the undead. “You can’t possibly defeat me.”

As Oro clobbers them one at a time, another contestant passes by the castle outside. It is Heinz. He stops for a moment to look at Oro fighting back the mob of zombies. Then he moves on.

Heinz doesn’t mind the small white man when there’s a Japanese bitch that needs to be killed. He can see her just down the street, running through the wandering dead. He’s almost got her. He imagines how her flesh will smell when he burns her alive.

“We’re being followed,” Junko tells Rainbow and Scavy, as she chainsaws a zombie’s head down the middle.

Scavy looks back.

“Don’t look back!” Junko yells. “We’ve got to lose him somehow.”

“Who is it?” Rainbow asks.

A camera ball floating over her head zooms in on the conversation.

“I don’t know.” Junko leads them farther down the road. “One of the less friendly contestants, I’d say. We should move faster.”

They pick up the pace, but the zombies crawling out of the surrounding buildings make it difficult to get away. They can’t dodge them, so they have to hack their way through corpse after corpse. This slows them down. Even worse than that, because they are doing all the zombie killing, their pursuer is able to move down the street quickly without the need to fight the already-incapacitated undead.

“He’s gaining on us,” Rainbow Cat says.

They turn around to see Heinz charging toward them, burning the few zombies left standing with his flame thrower. Junko tries to avoid going face-to-face with any of the lumbering dead, but they just keep coming. A zombie with a newspaper beard grabs her by the chainsaw arm. She fires her 9mm into its head but the small bullets just barely hold it back from biting into her wrist.

Heinz reaches into his pack and pulls out the two mechjaw heads. He straps them to his arms. Then opens fire. The trio use the zombies as cover, but the corpses’ flesh is so thin and liquidy that many bullets pierce through and whiz past Junko’s shoulder.

Rainbow Cat hacks the newspaper zombie with her machete until it lets go of Junko. The three of them duck for cover inside of an old apartment complex.

Scavy knocks back a zombie with his spear as it comes in from the street, then he stares back at Heinz. The large nazi makes a pretty big target, especially with those clunky tanks of fuel strapped to his back. If only he could get a better shot at him. Bullets tear into the bricks near Scavy’s head and he falls back.

“You two keep going,” Scavy tells Junko. “I’ll deal with this guy.”

“Are you serious?” Junko asks.

Scavy holds up his sniper rifle. “I can take him. I’ll go upstairs and find a good vantage point. All you have to do is lure him down the street until he gets past me, then I’ll get him from behind.”

“It’s a bad idea splitting up,” Junko says.

“I can do this,” Scavy says.

Junko stares him in the eyes, assessing him. She doesn’t like the idea of leaving him behind, even if he does end up taking down the nazi. Even though he’s an incompetent slacker, she’s learned she could trust him. Maybe not trust him enough to competently watch her back, but trust him enough not to stab her in the back. Which is more than she can say about Rainbow.

“Okay,” Junko says. “But you catch up to us as soon as you can. Don’t get yourself killed.”

Scavy flips the safety off of his rifle. “Don’t worry about me.”

Junko and Rainbow Cat stand up and prepare themselves to run.

“I’m going to fuck his ass up and shit.”

Junko nods, then the two girls take off running. Bullets mince the asphalt by their feet, as the two girls weave past the shrieking undead.

Scavy looks back at his opponent, to evaluate how much time he has to prepare. The nazi is only twenty yards off, blasting his Gatling gun, the mechjaw head growling against his fist. Then Scavy runs for the stairwell, to find a good sniper’s nest on an upper floor.

Scavy was a worthless, low life, conniving, thieving, drug-dealing, vandalizing, good for nothing punk. But when it came to his friends, he always had their back. If anybody fucked with one of his own he didn’t let them get away with it.

Gogo was the one he regularly had to back up. She was a self-centered whore and a complete bitch, with a mouth that often got her into a lot of trouble. Whenever she didn’t like someone, she let them know. She didn’t care who they were. If a customer in her strip club pissed her off while she was dancing she had no problem spitting on them, kicking them in the head, or even farting on them when she had her dancing bare ass pointed directly in their face. This would often lead to her coming home with a black eye or a bloody nose. Scavy never let a single asshole ever get away with doing that to her, even if she sometimes deserved it. He’d find them and leave them bruised and broken in an alley somewhere.

One time Gogo fucked with the wrong guy. It was Domino, the leader of the largest street gang in Copper. They were called the Diamonds and they had twelve times the man power of any gang in the quadrant. Scavy’s gang didn’t have a name. He thought gang names were pretentious, and there was no gang name more pretentious than the Diamonds. Scavy hated the Diamonds stupid gang name, and their stupid matching leather jackets with the word
Diamonds
on the back spelled out in artificial diamond studs. Scavy already hated them just for that, but then Domino gave him a much bigger reason to piss him off.

Gogo often slept with the men she danced for, but only if they paid well and she thought they looked fuckable. Domino was a large, balding, scarred-up, punk who Gogo did not find the least bit fuckable. But Domino wanted her, and he thought he deserved to get whatever he wanted.

“Listen, bitch,” he grabbed her by the arm as she walked toward the dance floor. “I know you just fucked that scrawny kid over there. If you can fuck him then you can fuck me.”

Gogo just laughed in his face and called him a limp-dick slob. Then she started her dance. While she was on stage, Domino gave her looks of intimidation. When she leaned into him, teasing him with her breasts to show him up close what he’s never going to get, Domino whispered in her ear. “I’m going to fuck you whether you like it or not.”

Then Gogo grabbed a cigarette from his ashtray and put it out in his eye. He shrieked and jumped back. Gogo seductively bit her lip at him, as her body curved to the music on the stage. Domino clenched a fist and came at her, but the bouncers grabbed him before he could get on the stage. The punk and his crew were escorted out of the club.

But before he left, he yelled back to Gogo, “Your ass is mine, bitch.”

After the club was closed, the bouncers offered to escort Gogo home, but she said she’d be fine. She could take care of herself. That is, until Domino and four of his men jumped her on her way home. They put their hands on her mouth and pulled her into an abandoned slaughter house. There, they beat her until she was in too much pain to fight back, then they took turns raping her. With a switchblade, Domino cut a slit down the center of her lips, then kissed her. She spit blood in his face. Then he headbutted her until she was out cold.

Gogo arrived at Scavy’s place naked and crying. It was the first time he’d seen her in such a fragile, hysterical state. He cleaned her up and put her to bed. She didn’t stop crying until she was asleep.

“I’m going,” Scavy told Popcorn. “Look after her.”

“Shouldn’t you wait for Brick?” she asked, as she washed the blood from Gogo’s tattered clothing in the sink.

Scavy shook his head. “That guy is out there basking in satisfaction right now.”

Opening the drawer of his dresser, Scavy dug through his cache of weapons. There were knives, guns, and railroad spikes, but Scavy decided to go with his old standby: a crowbar. When he was really pissed off at somebody, he used a crowbar on them.

“I want to beat that satisfaction off his face while it’s still there.”