As he walked through the wasteland, the zombies came to him attracted by the sound of the cart. But as soon as they approached, he dowsed their eyes with some drain cleaner. Although they were dead, he was still able to disorient them and temporarily blind them long enough to walk by. Whenever there was a horde, all he had to do was combine some bleach and ammonia to make mustard gas and toss a bucket of it in the center of the crowd. It was enough to slow them down.
He continued moving all day, picking up pieces for his machine as he went. Eventually he needed a second cart and that slowed him down even more. By the time he got to the Medieval Times indoor theme park, he found all that he needed. The well-preserved flags of the theme park were just the material he needed for the wings of the glider.
As he closed the gates of the artificial castle, he tossed the last of his mustard gas at the zombies out front. While they shrieked and twitched at the chemicals in their eyes, Oro looked at them and put his finger to his mouth.
“Shhhh,” he said. “There’s a genius at work.”
Then he got started on his flying device.
The brittle glass walls of the sky bridge shatter as the rocket flies through, past the bridge into the upper castle wall. Junko and Scavy dive for the hallway on the other side just before the bridge is engulfed in a cloud of flames.
“Bow to my genius!” they hear the tiny man yell.
Scavy and Junko take the stairwell down to the ground floor. They enter a grand banquet hall designed to look like King Arthur’s round table. There are two crippled zombies writhing on the floor. They are wearing the costumes of serving wenches and look to have been beaten with a golf club until all of their bones were broken. Junko and Scavy peek around a wall overlooking the miniature golf course. They get a better look at the flying machine. It is a bit smaller than they had realized.
“What’s going on?” Rainbow Cat says as she enters through a broken window.
“Crazy fucker with a rocket launcher,” Scavy says.
Rainbow Cat steps over a wriggling serving wench and goes toward them.
“You were awesome out there,” Scavy says. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Self defense lessons,” she says, as she wipes some green slime off of her machete on the bottom of her shoe. “A girl’s got to be able to defend herself from scumbags.”
Scavy smirked. “Where’d you get that machete?”
Instead of answering the question, she leans against the wall and looks around the corner to see their opponent. Her eyes sparkle when they see his flying machine.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” Junko says. “Some kind of aircraft.”
“Can we get it from him?” she asks.
“No,” Junko says. “We should get out of here. The explosion is going to attract more zombies.”
“But it’s worth the risk if we can fly out of here.”
“It only looks like it seats one person,” Junko says.
“So? At least one of us can use it. We can draw straws.”
“Forget it. It’s not worth fighting a guy with a rocket launcher.”
“We’ve got a sniper rifle,” Rainbow says. “Come on, we can take this guy.”
“I said forget it,” Junko says. “I wouldn’t even know how to fly that thing, would you?”
Rainbow Cat stays silent.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Junko says, going for the window Rainbow had entered through.
With a loud sigh, Rainbow follows after her.
Oro did eventually invent something worthy of getting him into the Platinum Quadrant. It wasn’t his flying machines or home recycling devices that satisfied the executive. It was a football alarm clock.
“This is it!” said the executive. “This is what every man in Platinum needs!”
It wasn’t even a real invention. It was just something Oro slapped together for fun and he hadn’t even planned to present the item to the executive. He didn’t even know what a football was for.
“Are you sure you don’t want this water filtration system? It turns salt water into fresh water.”
“No, no,” the executive shook his head. “I’d have no luck selling that. Now this,” he held up the football clock, “this I can sell.”
Oro was a bit disappointed that his winning invention took him only a few minutes to shove together, whereas his other projects took months.
“A football alarm clock…” The executive’s face brightened with excitement. “Genius. Pure genius.”
It was the only time he felt bad to be called a genius.
When he moved into Platinum, it was not at all as he hoped. The people there weren’t geniuses. Most of them seemed dumber than his low class father. They were a bunch of fat, spoiled, lazy morons. He couldn’t stand any of them. His football alarm clock sold well though, and he was able to live a comfortable life for a while. And more importantly, he was finally given the respect he rightly deserved.
He got used to the good life. He spent his time on the golf course or at the public swimming pools. He smoked cigars and drank purple martinis on rooftop bars overlooking the sea.
“Ahhh,” Oro would say. “The life of a genius…”
But the good life didn’t last. Oro couldn’t produce another invention as stupid as the football alarm clock and his funds ran out. He was quickly thrown back to Copper, back to his old way of life. The executive stopped making his annual visit to the junkyard. Oro thought he was doomed to stay there for the rest of his life.
Then Oro came up with a plan. While he lived in Platinum, he had seen the first season of Zombie Survival on television. If he could volunteer to go on the show and win then they would move him up to the Silver Quadrant. He would also have a passport to Platinum and could try to sell some new inventions there. He would then come up with the most ridiculous, superfluous inventions possible. He already had plans for creating pedicure slippers, giftwrap cutters, laser-guided golf clubs, and the baconator, which was a cooking device that could infuse any type of meat with the taste and texture of fried bacon. All he had to do was win the contest and he could live the rest of his life in luxury.
But just getting on the show wasn’t as easy as he expected. He had met with Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla at a bar in downtown Copper. He heard the rumor that if you knew an interesting contestant for the show you’d be rewarded greatly. He had the perfect contestant for him.
“So who’s this contestant you have in mind?” Wayne said.
“Me,” said Oro.
Wayne squinted at him. He rarely got volunteers. “You? Why would I choose you for the show? There’s nothing special about you.”
“I am a genius,” Oro said.
Wayne continued as if he didn’t even hear him. “Look at you. You’re a shrimp. You have no muscle, no agility. You’re ugly, so there’s no sex appeal there…”
“But I’m a genius!” Oro stood up in his chair. “I would survive longer than any contestant you could ever find. Perhaps I’m not the strongest, fastest, or most attractive contestant, but I can outwit anybody. You have never met an intellect as impressive as mine before.”
Wayne laughed. Oro slapped the smile off of his face, then found several guns pointed at his chest.
“Put me on that show and I’ll show you what kind of genius I am,” Oro said, stubbing out his cigar on the producer’s plate.
“Fine,” Wayne said. “I’ll put you on.”
Wayne waved at his men and they took Oro by the elbows. Then he said, “I could use another easy kill anyway. Not enough early bloodshed and the viewers get annoyed.”
A few weeks later they gassed him at his shack by the garbage dump. He saw them coming and greeted them at the door.
“Are you ready?” one of them asked.
“A genius is always ready,” was his response.
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 b
ack. 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.”
Even though Scavy has just met Junko, he considers her his friend, just as much a friend as Gogo or Brick. She’s earned his respect, proved herself to be one tough chick, and Scavy thinks of himself as a brother to anyone he respects. That’s why he’s willing to do this for her. Plus, he’s been wanting to use his sniper rifle on some asshole ever since he got the thing.
On the fifth floor of the apartment complex, Scavy takes his position. Heinz has gotten a bit further ahead than the punk had expected, but not nearly far enough ahead to get out of his range. A camera ball floats over Scavy’s shoulder, another is filming Heinz. Scavy swats the camera ball away like a fly as it gets too close to his face. When he looks into the scope of his sniper rifle, it’s out of focus. He adjusts the scope, but only seems to blur his vision even more.
Zombies and Shit Page 23
