He shakes his head. “No. I’m hungry, but not for brains.”
Another silence.
“She wouldn’t have made it, you know?” Popcorn says.
“Who? Junko?”
“Yeah.” Popcorn brushes her pink hair from her face. “They would have taken her out before she made it back to Platinum. I’m sure they’re pretty cautious about that kind of thing.”
Scavy nods. “I know… Still, I would have preferred not to know for sure.”
“Yeah…” Popcorn says. “I guess not.”
They stop. Scavy sits down on an iron bench and looks out at the wasteland around them.
“Ever think we’d end up dying out here?” he asks.
“Who’s dying?” she says, sitting on the street across from him. “We’re going to live forever. As zombies.”
“You ever imagine something like this would happen to us?” Scavy asks.
Popcorn smiles.
“Strangely,” she says, “this is exactly how I imagined we’d end up. Just you and me. Alone in a destroyed city. Though I always figured we would have been the ones to destroy it.”
Scavy laughs.
“It could have been worse,” he says. “We could have grown old together. Got married. Had kids. Worked on the docks for shit pay.”
“Ewww…” Popcorn says.
Then they sit in silence for a while, staring at the pink and orange light reflecting from the clouds on the horizon.
Rainbow Cat leaps to her feet and holds out her machete.
“I have to find another camera,” she says. “Where’s another camera!”
Gogo pushes her way through the zombies and lunges at Rainbow. The hippy stabs her through the chest, between her breasts. Gogo curves her body as if dancing on the stage of her old strip club, pulling the handle of the machete out of Rainbow’s hands.
As Rainbow tries to punch and kick her way through the crowd, Gogo grabs her around the throat and rips her head off. The zombies swarm her corpse as it hits the ground.
Gogo runs out of the room with Rainbow’s head, away from the other zombies. She cracks the head open like an egg, then tastes her first bite of fresh brain.
“Oh, hell yeah!” she moans, her eyes rolling in absolute bliss.
Gogo sits down, cross-legged, like a little kid eating her favorite sugary cereal. Using Rainbow’s skull as a bowl, Gogo chows down, scooping the brains out with her fingers and slurping them up with her tongue.
As Scavy and Popcorn continue down the road, they run into a pack of mechjaws. Four dogs growl at them, aiming their weapons at Scavy’s head.
“Fuck,” Scavy says. “This little gnome won’t protect me from them.”
“Hand me a gun,” Popcorn says. “Let me help.”
Scavy tosses her the sniper rifle, then lifts his shotgun.
“Let’s do this and shit!” Scavy yells, as the mechjaws open fire.
He fires his shotgun repeatedly, blowing one of them into three pieces. Bullets pierce his shoulder, but he keeps firing. He only has a few moments as a living human, so he might as well go out in a blaze of glory.
Popcorn shoots the sniper rifle, hitting the one with a rocket launcher. When it explodes, it takes out the other two with it. Their flesh flies up into the air and rains down on them.
“That was fucking awesome!” Scavy says to her, as chunks of meat splat on the ground between them.
As Popcorn smiles back at him, she sees another mechjaw coming up from behind.
“Think fast!” she cries.
She jumps into the circle, resisting the intense pain emanating from the lawn gnome, and blocks Scavy’s back.
The mechjaw fires its Gatling gun, shredding her body with bullets. Her pink clothing tears open, revealing dozens of red holes. When the dog’s gun runs out of bullets, Popcorn drops to the street. Scavy lifts his shotgun and blasts the dog until it no longer has a head or any front legs.
Scavy leans down to Popcorn. He lifts her head into his lap.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I can’t move,” she says. “I think I’m dying.”
“You can’t die,” Scavy says. “You’re a zombie and shit.”
She smiles up at him.
“I saved your life out there, big brother,” she says, raising her hand to his cheek. “Or at least what’s left of it…”
“You should have let it get me,” he says. “It might have saved me the pain of becoming a zombie.”
“No pain…” she says. “I feel no pain…”
“Are you doing alright?” he asks.
“Kiss me,” she says.
“Huh?” He becomes confused by the funny look she’s giving him.
“One last kiss…” she says, rubbing her finger down his lips. “From my ex-boyfriend.”
“Okay…” he says.
He leans in to kiss her, while pulling her up to his face by the back of her neck. As their lips touch, Popcorn’s hand drops against his lap. Her body becomes limp. He sits up.
“Popcorn?” he asks, shaking her. “What happened?”
She doesn’t move.
He shakes her again.
“Popcorn?”
Nothing.
“It can’t be…” he says.
She’s dead.
No longer undead, she’s become a normal lifeless corpse.
“What the hell just happened?” the director asks Wayne from the control room, pointing at Popcorn’s dead body on the screen.
Wayne smiles.
“The device doesn’t only act as a repellent for the undead,” he says. “It’s also a cure for the zombie virus.”
The director’s eyes widen.
“Are you serious?” asks the director. “Where did you get this thing?”
“I have my connections,” Wayne says.
“I didn’t even know such a thing existed.”
“Nobody does,” Wayne says. “It’s top secret. Nobody on the island is supposed to know about it.”
“Then how did you get it?”
“I pay my spies well.” Wayne dips a chocolate cruller into his coffee. “I had this prototype built specifically for my show. Those fat cats who run this island are probably shitting their pants now that this has been aired. By the end of the day, I bet every last person on the island, even the wretches in Copper, will know about this device.”
“But why do they keep it a secret?” asks the director. “Do you know what’s possible if we used this on a grander scale?”
Wayne wipes chocolate icing from his white goatee.
“The world would be saved,” he says. “We could move back to the mainland. Rebuild society. Everything would be as it once was.”
“Exactly!”
Wayne gives him a smirk. “But why would they want to do that? They are fat and happy where they are. With this device everyone would leave the island. They would be out of power. Without the citizens fearing the undead, and the big mighty government there to protect them, where would they be? This device is the most threatening thing to their way of life. The most threatening thing they ever could have imagined… a cure.”
“So you put it on the show so everyone would find out?” asks the director. “To save humanity? To give us all a better future?”
“Hell no!” Wayne says. “Fuck humanity! I did it because those bastards pulled my funding. The show was going to be cancelled. After all my hard work trying to prove this show was worth its budget, they decided they would cancel it no matter how well it went. And they did it the day before production!”
Wayne chugs his coffee and then tosses the cup across his desk.
“I’m no hero,” Wayne says. “I just wanted to piss those fuckers off.”
The director falls out of his seat as the door to the control room breaks open. Twenty armed men charge in, filling the room. They aim their guns at each member of the crew. Wayne slowly raises his hands for the soldiers.
“Go ahead and arrest me,” Wayne says. �
��There’s nothing you can do to stop it. The damage has already been done.”
“We’re not here to arrest you,” says one of the armed men, raising the barrel of his machine gun to Wayne’s face.
Blood splashes against the picture of Adriana on Wayne’s desk, as the armed men open fire.
Scavy figures out that the device in the lawn gnome is also a cure for the zombie virus. That is why Popcorn died on him. Once she had become human again, the bullets in her chest and brain ended her life.
Now he knows that he himself is safe from the virus. He will not join the ranks of the living dead. As long as he has the gnome, he is immune.
Sitting behind the wheels of a smart-car, one that could be operated manually, he lets out a big sigh. It’s going to be a very long journey. He wishes the brain inside of the smart-car could drive him toward the coast, but its organic material within the dashboard didn’t survive the gnome’s cure.
Mr. T opens up the passenger door and sits down next to him.
“Ready to go?” he asks.
Scavy tried to save as many contestants as he could with the gnome, but in the end he could only save Mr. T. The large cyborg was the only one in a good enough condition to survive the cure.
Mr. T looks closely at Scavy’s freshly bandaged wounds. The cyborg had removed the bullets from the punk’s gunshot wounds and stitched up the zombie bites in his legs.
“How’s the shoulder doing?” Mr. T asks. “You gonna be okay to drive?”
“Yeah,” Scavy says. “If I can stay awake and shit.”
Mr. T slaps him on the back.
“Then get a move on, fool!” he says. “We’ve got a world to rebuild!”
Scavy shifts the gear out of park and hits the gas. With a solar-powered car, a solar-powered shotgun, and the cure for the zombie virus, Scavy and Mr. T drive off, into the setting sun, toward a brighter tomorrow.
THE END
Thanks to a new miracle drug the cute little pig no longer feels a thing as she is lead to the slaughter. The only problem? Once the drug enters the food supply anyone who eats it is infected. From fast food burgers to free-range organic eggs, eating animal products turns people into shambling brain-dead zombies- not even vegetarians are safe!
Sex, Death, and Heavy Metal! The Southern Illinois Music Reeducation Center specializes in “de-metaling” – a treatment to cure teens of their metal loving, devil worshiping ways. A program that subjects its prisoners to sexual abuse, torture, and brain-washing. But tonight things get much worse. Tonight the flesh-eating zombies come . . . Rock and Roll Reform School Zombies is Bryan Smith’s tribute to “Return of the Living Dead” and “The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: the Metal Years.”
Road Warrior Werewolves versus McDonaldland Mutants... post-apocalyptic fiction has never been quite like this.
What would you do if your normal everyday world was slowly mutating into the video game world from Tron?
Zombies and Shit Page 32
