The Sunshine Dame of Doom

by Marcos Fizzotti

  With unbelievable strength, Shane pushed Susan’s body down to bring her eyes very close to Frank’s destroyed head. But Susan could not stand the horrible sight and closed her tearful eyes.

  “See what you did?” Shane spoke. “This is on you, sweetie! Your smugness killed your friend!”

  She pulled Susan up again, still holding her hair and neck.

  “Amidst all hell outside, I took you and your stupid friends in.” Shane continued, her voice slowly coming back to her usual tone. “I gave you things you couldn’t possibly imagine, not even in your wildest dreams. And that’s how you repay me?” She took a deep breath. “You’re such a hypocrite. Lecture your friends again about spitting on the plate from which you ate.”

  She forced Susan to look her in the eyes and she paralyzed. Tears were still running down her face, but Susan was too defeated and nullified to utter anything else other than weep.

  “Do you know how easily I can control your archaic weak mind, like I did to Paul, Nick and Becky?” Shane asked the rhetorical question. “I could make you bark and roll over, but I got other plans for you, a chance to redeem yourself. I’m giving you a very special mission, one I’m sure you’ll accomplish. For the moment, just sleep.”

  Susan’s eyelids fell upon her eyes like shutters hitting a window in a hurricane. And she went into deep sleep.

  She was able to wake up, but barely, still feeling drowsy. Her head was spinning. The fact it was completely dark in the place she was didn’t help her senses to regain balance. Susan was felling terribly sick. She bent her body to throw up. That was when she realized her arms and legs were tied up to the chair she was sitting on by very thick straps, strangling her wrists and ankles.

  “H-h-help…” She tried to mumble.

  Suddenly, bright lights came to life, almost blinding her eyes, which got used to darkness. While she struggled to adapt to clarity, two men entered the room with syringes.

  “Disgusting!” One of them said after seeing the pool of vomit on the floor.

  “Let’s get this over with.” The other said “Time for a refill, honey.”

  “No, no, please! Don’t do this, please!” Susan begged with the last drops of her strength, but in vain.

  They stuck needles in unhealed holes already existing on both her arms, suggesting those were not the first injections she had been given in a very short period. And the entire content of the syringes was poured right into her system.

  Susan convulsed on the chair as if having a seizure, drooling all over her shirt, while the two men simply left the room, killing the lights on the way out.

  She was barely conscious when they tossed her into a reclusion cell. Her body twitched and shook a lot.

  “So, we give her full package?” The grey-haired man wearing green apron asked Shane beside him.

  “You may go easy on the drugs, but cut solid food this time.” She answered. “Give her only water. She’s already skinny, but we can always improve her figure.”

  “Better give her some protein complements and caffeine too. We don’t want her to lose consciousness in the first three days, right?”

  “Nice thinking, doc.”

  “And how long are we keeping her that way?”

  “Till I say so.”

  And they left, closing and locking the heavy door, not that such measure was necessary. Susan tried to stand up at times, but her legs faltered and she was down on her knees again.

  She lay down on her back, sharing space with rats and some insects, while looking at the small window with bars in the ceiling.

  “Frank…!” She sometimes whispered. “It’s all my fault…”

  Every time she heard steps, she tried to scream, but nothing came out. She was very weak. Susan could only bring herself to drink the little water they gave her.

  Shane stopped by her cell every now and then to check on her general state and make sure her prisoner was only getting worse.

  After days in reclusion, taking shots twice a day and deprived of solid food, Susan was visited by Shane again, but this time she came accompanied by Sheriff McBeattie.

  Susan was nothing more than skin and bones, her state of mind an enigma. If she could talk, she would probably ask them to kill her. Susan had been reduced to a zombie, only not technically.

  “Is she ready?” McBeattie asked.

  “Pretty much, I’d say.”

  “To the hot zone with her?”

  “Yes. Take her to the latest coordinates of the truck, according to the satellite feed.”

  “You got it.”

  Susan was loaded into a van like a piece of meat. The sheriff drove the vehicle out of the walls, into the unprotected zone.

  After reaching the due satellite coordinates, McBeattie stopped the van, got out, opened the side door, lifted Susan on his shoulder and dropped her on the sandy terrain. He came back inside and honked twice to attract zombies.

  When he saw a reasonable number of them coming, he closed the door, started the engine and sped away back to the city gates.

  Dead rotting humans approached Susan almost in circles, like vultures.

  Lily turned the wheel harshly and the vehicle veered off abruptly. For a brief moment, two tires abandoned the floor.

  “Stay here.” She spoke.

  “But…”

  Lily stepped out of the car and finished the beasts. She carried the human being in deplorable state to the truck.

  “Are you sure she’s not one of them?” Clark asked. “Just take a look at her.”

  “She mumbled some words, or tried too. Besides, for some inexplicable reason, zombies don’t eat each other.

  “Can you blame them?”

  “Anyway, she’s devastated but not a corpse… yet.”

  “What the heck happened to her?”

  “This is for a doctor to say. We need to take her to a hospital.”

  “So, I guess it’s back to multiple signs walled city.”

  “We got no choice. In the meantime, we got a new mate in our bunch. Let’s try to get to know her.”

  ACT 16

  Two guards took Mate Clarkson to the shower room and threw him on the hard floor. One of them grabbed him and pushed him against a short wall between showers.

  “I bet you like this, huh fun boy?” He said leaning on Clark’s bent body from behind, his hands strongly compressing the young man’s face against cold tiles. “Are we having fun yet, party boy?”

  He then threw Clark on the floor again and kicked him right in the stomach. “What about some foreplay, what do you say?” And he kicked him once more, this time on the face. “You people make me sick!”

  “Easy there, Drake!” Another guard said with a smirk. “You don’t even know if he’s a tutti-frutti.”

  “He looks like a tutti-frutti to me! He got a knitting scissor on him. You like to knit, boy? Anyway, even if he’s not a fag, I guess mommy’s boy here needs to man up a little. And I got just the thing!”

  And Mate was hit by a powerful jet of water, after they stripped him of all his clothes.

  “Hey, he got those spots all over his body!” One guard observed.

  “Too bad they don’t come out with water!”

  “Well, we can always try!”

  And they kept on whipping Clark’s body with the jet of water. He screamed in despair. They finally closed the spigot and took him out of the shower booth. Then, they spanked him for awhile.

  “Toughening up already, huh?” Drake said.

  Even from his station, Pedro could hear the unmistakable click sound of the heavy door being unlocked from the outside. As the sector was ample and awfully silent most of the time, each and every little noise in there resounded through the walls like a thunder.

  “This is it!” Hector said to Vince.

  “Just say the word, bro.”

  “Hey, don’t do anything stupid!” Raul warned them. “It’s all our asses in a sling.”

  While the two brothers got ready to make thei
r move, Marcellus shook his head negatively on his chair.

  The door was opened, but before Hector and Vince could jump whoever was coming, they saw the punished figure of Mate Clarkson getting tossed inside. Two men with machine guns entered the room.

  “Hey, look what they did to this guy!” Vince said in horror. “This is a not a way to treat a human being!”

  “Damn right it’s not!” Hector replied grinding teeth.

  He advanced to one of the guards with furious anger. The man pointed the machine gun at his chest.

  “Don’t do it, man!” Pedro begged.

  Hector stopped but didn’t take his flaming eyes off the armed man.”

  “Back off, coon boy!” The guard said.

  “Care to call me that without the piece?” Hector defied him.

  “Easy there, monkey! Or you’ll know how a Swiss cheese feels like.”

  “What about just the two of us, man to man?”

  “Come back to the jungle where you belong.”

  He slowly walked backwards, still pointing the weapon at Hector. The other man aimed his machine gun to the general direction of everybody else in the sector. They left the room and locked the door.

  “Racist chicken!” Hector grunted.

  “This man needs help.” Vince screamed holding Clark in his arms. “They beat him up real bad.”

  “Sure.” His brother said.

  They carried the young tennis player to a chair.

  ACT 17

  “You can imagine how disappointed I was when you just turned your back on us the first time you reached our gates.” Shane said.

  “Where’s the guy who was with me?” Lily asked in a demanding tone. Her wrists and ankles were chained to the wall behind her. There was also a metal strap around her neck, bolted to the wall.

  “This is irrelevant now. But I assure you his permanence among the living also depends on how much you cooperate.”

  “If you wanted us here, why didn’t you just ask? You didn’t have to torture that poor woman!”

  “Oh, it was necessary to prove a point.”

  “Yes, that you are a big son of a bitch!”

  Shane frowned at Lily. She was surely not used to any other approach other than flatters, adulation and worshipping.

  “I should expect this kind of language from you.”

  “Now that you got me, you can undo whatever you did to that woman.” Lily said.

  “I’m afraid this is no longer possible.”

  “Who are you anyway?”

  “Shane is my name, very nice to make your acquaintance. And don’t bother telling me your name. Obviously, I already know who you are.”

  “I wouldn’t anyway. We’re not friends, stupid.”

  Shane got serious again.

  “Well, you told me at the hospital all my questions would be answered in due time.” Lily recalled. “And it seems I’m not going anywhere now.” She waved her shackles.

  “Why the hell not? I was looking forward to talking to you.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “I’m a crucial element in an extremely important project brought about by very special people, a joint venture that involves some countries concerned with the future of the planet.”

  “And I can see torturing innocents and putting people in chains are also a key element in this thing.”

  “No, those are just accessories for a greater cause.”

  “So, basically there’re a bunch of other guys pulling your strings.”

  “Au contraire, without me there is no project. I was conceived, built, modeled, perfected to lead, to dominate, to execute, ultimately to make sure everything works as flawlessly and it can possibly be.”

  “I don’t understand. You talk like you’re some kind of robot.”

  “Oh no, I’m human indeed, only improved, enhanced by the wonderful domains of science.”

  “Are you saying you’re some sort of test tube experiment from a lab or something?”

  Shane shook her head but remained firmly composed.

  “Such a shallow description for something that’s way beyond anything your small mind could possibly conceive.” The elegant woman retorted.

  “That means I’m right. You came from a test tube and a toaster probably, and now everybody has to pay for that.”

  Shane came near Lily in a threatening way. She fixed eyes on the Australian girl.

  “They selected me right from birth because I presented the highest ESP among the babies. This is extrasensory perception.”

  “I heard about it. So, they picked you because you were the most lunatic baby they got.”

  “In a way, yes. But along the years, they gave me more. My brain wound up becoming a very sophisticated broadcast system.” Shane tapped her head with a forefinger.

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “I didn’t expect you would. It suffices to say I’m able to transmit and receive radio waves together with my ESP. Thanks to this, among other amazing things I can also control regular minds as easily as you tie your shoelaces.”

  “And that’s what you’re going to do now, control my mind?”

  “Oh no, it won’t be necessary in your case, honey. I prepared something very special just for you. They filled up my brain with much more than just domination capabilities.”

  “They only forgot to add some common sense to the mix, not to mention intelligence.”

  “Joke while you can. Believe me, I do admire your spirit, but it’s worthless.”

  “What’s this project, this venture you mentioned all about?”

  “I’m very glad you asked. You see, the world was getting too crowded and Mother Nature can only take so much. Unfortunately, not so bright human samples insist on breeding like rabbits and our resources were running scarce.”

  “You got me in a loss again.” It was Lily’s turn to frown.

  “It’s a Malthusian thing. I trust that even an uneducated person like you knows what I’m referring to, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Earth’s population needed to be drastically reduced before the rabbles drank and ate everything we got. And a very exclusive group of people took matters into their hands.”

  Lily opened her eyes real wide, pondering about the implications of such words.

  “Don’t tell me you and your idiots are responsible for…”

  “Oh, the spreading of the virus created by our scientists was very successful indeed!” Shane proudly interrupted her. “The majority of population turned into flesh-eating living dead and they did some cleaning on their own, pretty ingenious huh?”

  Lily shook her head as much as she could; however, the metal strap strangled her neck.

  “Why?” The Australian woman asked. “What do you gain by destroying the world and its people? Why are you doing this?”

  “Ah, the million dollars question! The zombie plague is just the beginning. Now, it’s time to repopulate the planet, but only with those who really count. And the defective ones can work and serve us, as it should have always being, under control and in the quantities predetermined by us. Now, what do you think of the plan?”

  “I think you’re nothing more than a psycho byproduct who likes to play God!”

  “Just a matter of reference, God can be whoever people want Him to be.”

  Lily faced Shane with angry eyes.

  “And how do I fit in all this?” The Australian queried.

  “I was getting to that. Considering the current situation, people eventually have to come to us for protection. That’s when we make the due selection. Or at least that was the general idea. And we were doing rather well, but something happened, something that turned the tide a little bit.”

  “What was that?”

  “The elementary school event, the one you’re so actively participated.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Your little prowess brought new hopes to people, gave them reasons to l
ive. They started to believe life can be more than just plague and suffering. The press worked against us in that one, those fools. They would do anything for a scoop. Now, a great deal of survivors only wants to find you, copy you, be just like you, fending for themselves while helping others, instead of seeking my protection.”

  Lily’s eyes changed from angry to incredulous.

  “You didn’t know that, did you?” Shane realized. “A myth was created and this is bad for business. And now, the myth shall die.”

  Shane pulled a lever on the wall. The chains holding Lily’s wrists went up, forcing her to raise arms above her head.

  “So that’s it?” The Australian girl asked. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “That would only make a martyr out of you.”

  “Then what? You’ve already tied me up dungeon style, very unoriginal by the way. What’s next, some kind of torture, perhaps electricity through my body, a hot wire to my head, you telling me how your day was?”

  “I got a better idea.”

  Shane walked away and disappeared from view. Suddenly, a semi-putrefied, horridly deformed dead man ran straight to Lily. Instinctively, she held her body against the wall behind her, also turning her head to the left.