Xiu was not born of merc punk blood. She was adopted into the family nineteen years ago, at age seven. She doesn’t remember anything before they found her. Decades after Z-Day, they found her wandering through the wasteland in South America, unarmed, all alone, and behaving as if nothing was wrong in the world.
They didn’t call themselves merc punks. That’s the term Neo New Yorkers gave them. They call themselves The Mongols, which was the name of the biker gang that originally started their tribe over 50 years ago. The Mongols are mostly of Hispanic descent, consisting of survivors from the pacific coasts of North and South America. Although many of the original Mongols came from the American biker gang of the same name, most of its members came from gangs of urban South American street punks that were slowly accumulated over the years. These punks were wild and tough, surviving not on the road or on the seas but on their own two feet.
By the time Xiu was adopted by the Mongols, the tribe was over 500 warriors strong. They had a fleet of ships that patrolled up and down the pacific coasts of the Americas. Once a day, ships would drop off three-man units all along the coast. The units would go half a day deep into the wasteland, collect all the resources they needed, then return to the coast to be picked up by nightfall.
They found Xiu in Chile. A unit of Mongols went into La Serena, collecting food and medical supplies, when they came across her casually spray-painting graffiti on the walls as zombies roamed the streets in the area. At seven years old, she was wearing five-inch platform combat boots two sizes too large, three tattoos, a lip ring, and a black and red mohawk.
“Wh-what are you doing, little girl?” The Head of a Mongol unit asked her in Mexican Spanish.
Xiu shrugged and stepped back to examine her painting on the half-collapsed brick wall.
She responded in Chilean Spanish. “Making art.”
“Are you all alone out here?” he asked.
She shrugged again. “Yeah.”
The Head of the unit held out his hand.
“My name is Carlos. You should come with us.”
Xiu never remembers this when she’s asked about it. She doesn’t remember anything from back then. The Mongols guess that she came from a band of Chilean punks who had survived in the wasteland for several decades all on their own. They aren’t sure if she is the only survivor from that group or if she had become separated from them at some point. Either way, they decided to take her with them. Not because they pitied her, but because they were impressed by how a seven-year-old girl could survive in the wasteland all by herself for so long without difficulty. There was also a youth unit within their clan that was in need of a new Head. These Mongols knew this girl had the smarts to be a unit leader.
Vine spends so much time examining each of the train cars for hidden zombies, that he doesn’t notice the zombies crawling out of the wrecked dump truck behind Xiu and Zippo.
“Let’s go,” Xiu says, and turns to face several figures lunging out of the shadows toward her.
There are a dozen of them. All children. The zombies had been hibernating inside of the gravel-filled dump truck for so long that their flesh has become coated in a layer of gravel fused to their rotten flesh.
“Behind you,” Xiu yells at Zippo as four more come out behind him.
Xiu throws one of her hand-axes at an undead child coming at Zippo, but the blade just bounces off of its gravel skin.
“Run,” Xiu says.
They leap out from the middle of the gravel creatures, and loop around toward Vine. Zippo fires two shells into a zombie in their path, causing bits of stone to fly in the air. The zombie is pushed back, but the blast does no real damage to its body.
Vine drops to the ground and fires his AK-47 at the creatures, slowing them down a bit until his friends get behind him. Then the three continue through the rail yard.
Xiu looks back at the rocky figures lumbering across the train tracks. Stones in their mouths clack together as they try to cry out for brains. The undead children come after them, but are too weighed down by their heavy gravel skin to catch up.
“Move out,” Xiu says.
As they turn to go up the hill out of the rail yard, they see a horde of zombies assembling above them, drawn to the sound of gunfire. Before they reach the bottom of the hill, they realize that there are hundreds of them up there. The largest mob of zombies they have encountered yet.
“Is there a way around?” Zippo asks.
Xiu shakes her head. “We go through.”
Without second thought, Vine dashes forward, ready to cut them a path through the crowd.
“Conserve your ammo if possible,” Xiu says in her Chilean accent. “We still have a long way to go.”
Xiu has retained her Chilean accent for all these years, and being the dominant member of her unit her two men conformed to her way of speaking and developed the accent as well.
Mongol units are chosen at birth. They are matched up the day they are separated from their birth parents, when they are old enough to walk. These children grow up together, their lives intertwined, as inseparable as conjoined twins. When a unit is matched together, they are immediately assigned their position in the unit: Head, Right Arm, or Left Arm. Sometimes these positions are determined at random, other times they are determined based on their early behavior or the strength of their birth parents. Whoever becomes the Head is the one who decides how their unit behaves, thinks, moves, and reacts. The two Arms completely conform to their Head’s ideals, tastes, opinions, and mannerisms, mimicking their leader in every possible way.
“Although you were not born a Mongol,” Carlos said, taking young Xiu aboard his crew’s ship. “You will become the Head of a Mongol unit.”
Xiu nodded, but didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. She boarded their ship in her clunky combat boots and scale mail vest, looking around the vessel as if it was a spaceship from another world. The ship was patch-worked together with scrap metal and dozens of different types of wood salvaged from several different sources. It had been repaired and reinforced many times over the decades. The Mongols around her were all grouped into threes, some of them mopping the deck together, some drinking papaya wine together, some sharpening swords together.
Although each Mongol unit was a tight family, all of the units on a Mongol ship were an extended family. They called this extended family their crew.
“Hi!” Xiu said to a unit of older Mongols.
They ignored her, drinking wine and playing cards.
“I’m Xiu,” she said.
Carlos took her away from their table.
“They won’t recognize you while you are an individual,” Carlos said. “Individuals are ghosts to the Mongols. You must be joined with your unit before anyone will recognize you. Otherwise you will be ignored.”
“You don’t ignore me?” Xiu looked up at him and his unit, her chubby round face covered in red spray paint.
“That’s because we’re doctors,” Carlos said. “Part of our job is to heal broken units, so we are allowed to speak to ghosts.”
One of the hardest aspects of Mongol culture is when a unit loses a member. Since they act as one being, losing an Arm can be devastating. Some units never recover from that. Severed units are ghosts to the rest of their tribe until a doctor unit can put them back together again. The doctors take broken units and combine them with parts from other broken units, until they are whole again. But these new units never function quite as well as their original units. They are like Frankenstein’s monster—body parts from various dead bodies sewn together to form a new being. It sometimes works okay when it is just a Left Arm that is replaced, but a Head is a completely different story.
Zippo and Vine had lost the Head of their unit when they were six years old. The little girl had died of Malaria, leaving her two Arms lost and afraid. They spent their time sitting quietly in the dark together, not speaking or eating, completely unsure how to move or act or speak without their Head telling them what to do
.
“I brought you into the tribe to be the new Head for Zippo and Vine’s unit,” Carlos told Xiu. “They need you more than anything. It is likely they will die without their Head. Without you.”
“I will save their lives just by telling them what to do?”
“Hopefully. When a new appendage is connected to a body, there is always a chance that the body will reject it. If Zippo and Vine reject you they will likely die.”
“Isn’t there anyone else who can be their Head?”
“There is one other ghost their age, but he is both a male and a Right Arm. Zippo and Vine require a female Head.”
“Can’t the Right Arm just become a Head?” Xiu asks.
“It is possible for a Right Arm to become a Left Arm, or a Head to become an Arm, but an Arm has never successfully been able to transform into a Head. Arms spend their entire lives following. They have no idea how to lead.”
Carlos’ unit brought Xiu to the sick bay, to introduce her to her new Arms. Zippo and Vine are curled together in a corner, staring up at the hospital bed next to them.
“Their Head, Rosa, died here,” Carlos said, pointing at the bed. “They haven’t moved from that spot since the day of her death.”
Xiu crouched down to take a peek at them from under the bed. She saw them cradling each other, wiping each other’s eyes even though they were too dehydrated to cry. Zippo looked at Xiu for a second, but the moment his eyes locked on Xiu’s they shot right back up to the bed.
“Zippo and Vine are younger than you, by almost two years,” Carlos said. “But I think it will be okay, especially with you becoming their Head. They are more likely to conform to an older girl than a younger one.”
Carlos took Xiu to the other side of the bed. His two Arms stayed in the back of the room. He positioned Xiu in front of the two boys, blocking their view of the bed. “This is Xiu,” Carlos told the boys. “She will be your new Head. She will replace Rosa.”
The two boys didn’t acknowledge her. They shifted their visions, trying to see around them, waiting for Rosa to come back to the bed.
“The tall skinny one with the long hair is Vine,” Carlos told Xiu. “He will be your Right Arm. The short one with curly hair is Zippo. He will be your Left.”
“Hi,” Xiu said, waving at them.
They didn’t acknowledge her.
“Try giving them some water,” Carlos said, as one of his Arms handed him a canteen.
Xiu took the canteen and held it up to the boys. “Want something to drink?”
“Don’t ask them,” Carlos said. “Tell them.”
“Drink this,” Xiu said to them. “You need water.”
“You have to be more forceful,” Carlos said. “Command them. Show them you are their boss.”
“Drink!” Xiu told Vine, shoving the canteen in his face. “I command you to do as I say!”
Vine didn’t respond. Then she tried shoving it into Zippo’s face. He too ignored her.
Frustrated, young Xiu punched Zippo in the face.
“Drink it now!” she told him.
Shocked, Zippo stared up at Xiu, blinking. She punched him again. Vine looked over at his Left Arm, wondering what was happening to him. Xiu punched Vine in the face until he stopped looking at Zippo, and started looking at her.
“I’m your new Head,” Xiu told them. “And you’re going to do as I say from now on. If you don’t drink this I’ll punch you again.”
Then she shoved the canteen in Zippo’s mouth and poured it down his throat. After a couple of gags, Zippo gave in and drank the water of his own will. When she brought the canteen to Vine, he accepted it without incident.
“That’s not the normal method of getting new Arms to listen to you,” Carlos said. “But it seems to have been effective.”
“So they’ll do everything I say from now on?” Xiu asked, almost excited by the prospect. “Like my personal slaves?”
“Not slaves, Xiu. They will become your Arms. They will become an extension of you.”
“But I’ll still own them? They’ll be mine and they’ll do everything I say?”
Carlos nodded. “The ceremony will be tonight. After the ceremonial joining, the three of you will be one unit. One body. Although your bodies will be separate, the three of you will become inseparable from that point on. Three bodies join as one to become the perfect fighting machine.”
Xiu nodded and then ordered her new Arms to stand up. They looked up at her, then at each other. Slowly, Zippo and Vine stood to face their new Head. She placed her right hand on Vine and her left hand on Zippo. Then she smiled brightly at them, red bits of spray paint in her teeth. The two boys smiled back, like mirrors.
Xiu has only one throwing axe left, but with her two Arms she doesn’t even need a weapon of her own. Zippo and Vine are her weapons. In the middle of the two of them, Xiu directs her Arms to blast out a zombie’s knee, leap over a wrecked pickup truck, and slice through a line of undead to get to the sidewalk.
Zippo and Vine are so tuned in to Xiu’s commands, that they know what she wants them to do before she even has to tell them. The Mongols call it unit telepathy, which is kind of an intuition that Arms develop from following their Head for so long. When Xiu commands them, she feels as if she has tiny invisible strings connected from her fingertips to their brains, as if Zippo and Vine are living marionettes.
Cutting their way through the industrial district, lined with crumbling factories and warehouses, the merc punks are not able to conserve much ammo. There are just too many of those things. These are the kinds of circumstances merc punks are trained to avoid, rather than fight through. And the farther they go into the industrial district, the thicker the mob becomes.
“To that airplane,” Xiu tells them.
Vine cuts them a path toward the blackened remains of a Boeing commercial airliner that had crashed into a steel mill long ago. The tail of the plane is missing, so they head for entry to the plane on that side. The rest of the plane leans up the side of the half-collapsed building, like a ramp. When they get to the tail end of the plane, Vine and Zippo hold their ground as Xiu assesses the situation.
“We need to get off of the street,” Xiu says. “We’re going to have to cross this area from above.”
Entering the back of the charred aircraft, they climb the aisle upward toward the cockpit. The mob of zombies try to follow, but as they attempt to scale the slanted passageway they only slide back down across their slimy flesh.
The fuselage rattles as they make their ascent. They balance themselves. Zippo holds Xiu from sliding back into the mob below.
“Keep going,” Xiu says, as the building that holds up the plane begins to crumble.
They continue up.
A blackened skeleton sitting in one of the airplane seats nearby turns back and eyes them with black ash-filled sockets. As Vine passes him, the corpse reaches out with burnt twig-like limbs.
“Brains,” hisses the zombie.
But the charred undead corpse can’t reach Vine. Its seatbelt buckled around its waist keeps it securely fastened to the seat.
When they get to the cockpit, Xiu kicks out the door and the unit jumps out of the plane onto the third floor of the building. Once safely out of the plane, Xiu gives her Arms a smirk. Then, in unison, the three kick the side of the fuselage with enough strength to separate it from the building. The plane rolls down into the street, crushing several zombies below.
Xiu laughs at the destruction they caused, and her men laugh with her. But then the building rumbles and chunks of debris rain down from the ceiling. Sections of the floor break open as the building begins collapsing around them.
“Get to the roof,” Xiu says, leaping from a crumbling floor to solid ground.
Zombies come out from the shadows, lumbering toward them, as they head for the nearest stairs. They blast out the zombies’ legs, guarding each other’s backs, as the structure deteriorates quickly around them.
When they were teenager
s, Xiu, Zippo, and Vine were the most unruly unit in the Mongol tribe. Raised in the wasteland, Xiu didn’t grow up with the traditions of the Mongols. She was used to doing as she pleased, any way she pleased.
They were supposed to be collecting food deep in the Amazonian rainforest of southern Columbia, but back then Xiu was easily distracted from her missions. Once she noticed there were zombies wandering through the jungle nearby, she wanted to hunt them down and kill them for fun.
Because they were not to be trusted traveling on their own, Xiu’s unit had to be accompanied by a guardian unit. All units are assigned to a guardian unit the day they are formed. This guardian unit becomes like their unit’s parents. The guardian unit raises the young unit, teaches it how to fight, how to scavenge, and accompanies them on missions. A unit is usually separated from its guardians the day the Head of the unit turns thirteen. That’s when the members of the unit are considered adults. And though they continue to train with their guardians, they are considered old enough to take care of themselves.
Xiu’s guardian unit was the same unit that found her in Chile when she was seven years old, the one led by Carlos.
When Xiu was fifteen, her unit still needed to be looked after by Carlos’ unit. At that age, they were one of the weakest, sloppiest, least organized units in the tribe. Her two Arms worked just fine. They did exactly what they were told. Xiu was the problem. She was a troublemaker. She didn’t listen to the Heads of her guardian unit or the other elder units. She did whatever she wanted.
“Let’s go,” Xiu told her Arms, as they snuck through the trees away from their guardians.
Carlos’ unit wasn’t watching them. They were busy collecting bushels of wild marijuana into potato sacks. Xiu led Zippo and Vine away from their guardians, through the trees, into the jungle, to hunt down the living dead.
As a youth, Xiu was fascinated by the different kinds of zombies that were out there in the world. She wanted to encounter every kind—from white American zombies, to Mexican zombies, to morbidly obese zombies, to midget zombies. But what she always wanted to find were the zombies from the indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest.
Zombies and Shit Page 18
