“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.
Talis
ker 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.
Zombies and Shit Page 8
