She gulped it down dramatically for him, lifting her throat closer to his face so that he could hear it go down. She liked to please clients like this man. The only clients she respected were the ones who treated her like she was a worthless piece of shit.
“Good girl,” he said to her, stroking her hair. “That’s my good little girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”
Alonzo was getting a little too creeped out while watching this. He was pretty sure this was all just an act to get the man off, but Alonzo couldn’t stop imagining that he really was her father.
Before he turned around, men in white masks came out from the other side of the alley and grabbed Adriana from behind. She tried to scream, but they put a rag of chloroform over her mouth. Her muffled cries didn’t last long before she was out.
As Alonzo backed away, he kicked a whiskey bottle with the heel of his shoe, sending it clanging against the asphalt.
The man with the white goatee looked up at Alonzo.
“Take him, too,” he said, as he zipped up his fly.
The men in white chased after Alonzo. He ran across the street toward a strip bar, but the door he chose was the back entrance. It was locked from the other side. The men in white tackled him against the door and put the chloroform over his mouth. He slammed his fists against the door, but the music inside was too loud, the men inside were too focused on bouncing naked breasts.
Alonzo is so focused on Adriana’s tight little ass that he doesn’t notice the wood of the door cracking apart. Before Adriana can hammer in the last nail, a hand bursts through the door and grabs her by the hair. She screams.
“Braains!” says the zombie as it pushes its head through the hole in the door.
Alonzo fires his .45, throwing his arm back with the recoil, but blowing the right half of the zombie’s face clean off. This doesn’t faze the zombie, though. It continues to pull Adriana up by the hair. Alonzo grips the pistol tighter this time and fires again, just before the creature bites into the girl’s skull. The bullet shatters its lower jaw into dusty fragments. The zombie’s eyes roll around with confusion as the teeth of its upper jaw taps against her forehead, not sure why its not able to bite into her.
Adriana hammers at the zombie’s hand, thrashing to get the thing to let go. She smashes melted flesh off its arm, but the bony fingers have a tight grip.
Heinz opens his mountaineering pack and pulls out his large, heavy weapon. He takes out the map, flashlight, and a canteen of water, and tosses the rest of the contents over the side.
He straightens his blond hair and looks down at the massive horde of zombies gathered below. Their eyes stare in his direction, like an audience gathering to hear him speak.
The camera ball pans around him as he juts his chin into the air.
“Help me!” Adriana cries.
Alonzo fires the .45 again, but misses the zombie. Instead, the bullet goes through a board, exploding a new hole in the door. The hole splinters apart and another zombie’s hand reaches through it, grabbing her by the arm that holds the hammer.
“You idiot!” she screams. “Get them off of me you fucker!”
Alonzo comes in closer to get a better shot. He raises the gun up to the zombie’s head and fires.
Heinz removes his trench coat and tosses it over the side. Then he straps fuel canisters to his back, nuzzles a hose around his hip to the handle of the flamethrower’s igniter. And flicks the igniter switch, sparking the flame to life at the tip of the nozzle.
The camera ball circles around to his side and pauses on the swastika armband strapped around the upper sleeve of his black suit.
He raises out his left hand and sieg heil’s the cloudy heavens above him. Electricity sparks through the clouds. Then he squeezes the trigger on the flamethrower and bathes the zombie horde in a rain of fire.
Alonzo’s bullet shatters the zombie’s arm at the shoulder, freeing Adriana’s hair. She pulls herself back, but the other zombie has her by the wrist. It twists her arm sideways, digging its claws into her. She cries out and drops the hammer.
Another zombie gets its arms through at the bottom of the door and grabs her by the ankle. Alonzo shoots and blows apart a zombie’s neck, knocking its head off its spine. The skull dangles by a rope of meat, still snapping its jaws in Adriana’s direction.
As Alonzo reloads his revolver, slamming noises rattle the door to the other stairwell.
“Shit.” Alonzo snaps the revolver’s cylinder back into place. “They’re coming in from over there, too.”
Heinz showers the zombie crowd with flames. Shrieking balls of fire run in circles below him. Their dried up flesh burns quickly, reducing them to quivering smoldering blobs in the dirt.
He can hear the screams of Adriana and Alonzo beneath him, as he inhales the scent of his burning enemies. Flakes of ash sail through the breeze like a ballet of black butterflies.
His lips curl into a smile as the ash twirls around him and the flames dance from his fingertips.
A zombie pulls Adriana’s head up to the hole in the door and bites the back of her neck. She shrieks at Alonzo, but the sight of the zombie biting into her freezes up the fat man. His gun begins to shake and he can’t get himself to pull the trigger.
The zombie pulls back, ripping flesh from her neck. A large red centipede coils out of the wound. It takes Alonzo a moment to realize that the thing squirming inside of the zombie’s mouth isn’t a centipede, but the girl’s spinal column. Her lower body goes limp, but by the look in her face Alonzo can tell that she’s still alive. Her eyes wide and mouth dropped open in shock as the zombie tugs on her spinal cord with its teeth like a dog playing a game of tug-of-war.
When the back of Adriana’s skull tears open, Alonzo screams. It isn’t the prostitute that he sees anymore. It is his little sister, being eaten before him once again. The girl’s brain is yanked out of the back of her skull, and dangles from the end of the spinal cord in the zombie’s foaming jaws.
Alonzo turns and runs toward the stairwell to the roof, but before he gets there the barricaded door on the other side of the hall breaks open. The hallway fills with the undead, blocking his path. He turns around and the door by Adriana’s corpse splinters open, the dead piling through over her body.
Dodging into the closest hotel room, he locks the door behind him, then pushes a crumbling dresser in front of it.
When the zombies burst through the stairwell onto the roof, Heinz whips around and covers them in flames. Smoke fills the rooftop as the hotel catches fire. A camera ball films the first floor of the hotel, as flaming zombies run through the lobby, catching the building on fire.
Alonzo looks out the window and sees the smoke pouring up from the ground. He considers jumping down from the second floor, but the mass of burning bodies in the yard below look like Hell on Earth to him.
He points the gun at the door as it breaks open. Smoke and zombies shuffle over the dresser, two of them on fire. He shoots them in their chests and heads, but they keep coming toward him. A bullet blows a zombie’s hand off of its wrist as it reaches out for him.
“Braains!” the zombies groan, as they close in on him.
With the hotel up in flames, Heinz’s job is done. He had attracted all the zombies in the vicinity to him, got them to enter the hotel, then burned it down. Fire is the most effective weapon against the undead. It is the only thing that can ultimately destroy them. He is pleased with the weapon that the producers of Zombie Survival had chosen for him. It will help ensure a victory for the leader of the Fifth Reich.
He walks through the smoldering corpses that crawl across the roof on their bellies.
One of them reaches out for him and whimpers, “Braaains!”
He steps on its head with his leather boot, crushing its skull into a pile of charcoal, as he walks to the power line he had used for his backpack. Wrapping his arm around the cord and gripping his other wrist, he slides down the wire and drops down next to Adriana’s pack. He scoops it over his shoul
der, then walks casually out of the yard down the rubble-filled streets.
When he looks back, he sees the hotel being swallowed by the flames. He doesn’t know if Alonzo and Adriana are still alive in there, nor does he care. They served their purpose and are of no further use to him. They just saved him the trouble of having to kill them later.
As Alonzo’s revolver clicks empty, the zombies grab him and tear into his flesh. They suck the nerves out of his skin like angel hair spaghetti, the sensation of their chewing sends jolts of electrical pain through his body.
The zombie with the sunflowers growing out of its skull grabs Alonzo by the throat. Its flesh is now burned and blackened, the flowers charred to a crisp. When Alonzo sees the burnt sunflowers, he zones out. He doesn’t see it as a zombie anymore. Through the smoke, he sees the creature as his nephew, Tony. Fresh blood runs down Tony’s chest, over his black sunflower tattoos.
“You said I was like a son to you,” Tony says to him.
Alonzo shakes his head. “You got what you deserved, punk!”
“All I wanted was to raise my kid honestly, like my father raised me.”
“Your father was a damned idiot!”
Tony’s mouth stretches open so wide that his lower jaw touches his chest. Then he bites his uncle’s skull open.
“And I’m also a damned idiot for thinking you could have been any different!” Alonzo says, as Tony chews on a meaty strip of his brain.
Junko, Scavy, Popcorn, and Rainbow Cat are on top of a high-rise downtown, scanning the area. They needed the high vantage point to see which path would be safest through the city. But all the streets look the same. All are packed with the living dead. They use the sniper scope to look farther into the distance, but there are zombies everywhere.
“They’re waking up way too soon,” Junko says. “We should have been mostly clear for at least until the late afternoon.”
“So what do we do?” Rainbow asks.
“We need to keep moving,” Junko says. “It’s bad now but it is only going to get worse. Much worse.”
A few blocks away, explosions erupt along the street, blowing up sections of the zombie horde.
“That’s what is doing it,” Junko says, pointing at the explosions. “That asshole’s being too loud. He’s waking them up.”
Then they see the man who is causing the explosions. The old ex-military vagrant staggers down the street, tossing grenades at the zombies around him.
“That guy is punk as fuck!” Scavy says.
The old man heads toward the door of a building across the street from him. He tosses a grenade and it blows some of them apart, but then the rest of the undead close in on him, grab him by the arms. He pulls them with him, trying desperately to get through the door of the building, but they won’t let go, biting into his arms and shoulder.
He tries throwing another grenade but it lands only a few feet away. Lee’s grenade blows the zombies into pieces across the asphalt, but takes him out with them. His body flies though the glass door of an ancient city tavern.
“Well, that’s the end of that guy,” Scavy says, chuckling.
Junko frowns. “At least he won’t wake any more of the dead.”
Rainbow Cat looks down at the street immediately below them, and sees three of the other punks—Xiu, Zippo, and Vine—running through the zombie crowd. Vine leads the way, shooting out their knee caps with an AK-47 as they run. They don’t even bother going for the head. They just want to cripple them enough so that they can run past.
“Your friends look like they’re doing alright,” Rainbow says to Scavy.
Scavy looks down at the other punks. “Oh yeah, those guys.”
“They’re good,” Junko says. “How long have you known them?”
Scavy shrugs. “I don’t know. I just met those guys.”
“You mean they’re not part of your gang?” Junko asks.
“No,” Scavy says. “I just thought they looked cool so I let them join my crew. Never seen them before today. I don’t think they even speak English.”
Junko looks down at the trio of punks and examines them carefully. They move in formation, like trained soldiers. Xiu, their leader, tosses a throwing axe at one of them and dismembers both of its arms before it can latch onto Zippo’s back.
“Those aren’t ordinary street punks,” Junko says, as the axe boomerangs back to Xiu’s hand. “They’re merc punks.”
Junko knew the ratings for Zombie Survival had been going down. The past couple of seasons were very disappointing for fans and many of them were so outraged that they almost got the producer of the show, Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla, fired by the network. The show was becoming repetitive and boring. Last season, all the contestants died on the first day. Most of them were killed before even getting out of the safe house. Wayne was choosing too many weak, boring contestants. Just the same old vagrants, hookers, and street punks. The network said he had to do better than that. He had to get some contestants who would actually last long enough to make it to the helicopter.
Junko knew Wayne had chosen her for the show to help with ratings. He knew audiences would love to see the old host of Zombie Survival on the show herself. But she knew throwing on celebrities like Charlie and herself would not be enough to save his job. He had to get some badass zombie killers. There’s no better zombie killer than a merc punk.
While most of the human population stays as far away from the mainland as they can get, there are small bands of scavengers who live in ships along the coast of the mainland like pirates. When Z-day struck, many people survived not by fortifying themselves in bunkers or walled communities, but by constantly moving. They were post-apocalyptic biker gangs who kept on the road, stopping only to fill up on gas and supplies. They never stayed in one place long enough for the zombies to gather in a number they couldn’t handle.
Eventually, gas had become an issue. It was a limited resource that spoiled quickly. They knew it wouldn’t last them forever. So they went out to sea, living on sailboats instead of armored vehicles. They sail up and down the coasts of the Americas, stopping on the mainland to kill zombies and scavenge for food. For several generations, these punk pirates of the apocalypse have been surviving out there on the outskirts of the Red Zone. They even have their own culture they have developed over the years.
Over the past decade, the government of Neo New York had been hiring them as mercenaries to recover technology and important artifacts from the mainland. That’s why they’re called merc punks. Although they look and dress very similar to that of common street punks like Scavy and Popcorn, merc punks are a hell of a lot more dangerous.
“This is going to be even harder than I thought it would,” Junko tells them. “Our competitors have been doing this kind of thing since the day they learned how to walk.”
Scavy looks back at Popcorn. She is sitting against a wall on the other side of the roof, quivering. Her skin is white. She doesn’t look good at all. At first, he thinks she could just be going through Waste withdrawal. But he can tell that’s not it. Junko was right, Popcorn is infected.
Scavy had known Popcorn since they were kids. Both of them were living on the streets, abandoned by their parents, running with the same gang. If you’re abandoned by your parents in the Copper Quadrant you have two options: whore yourself or sell Waste. They chose the latter.
Popcorn was the weirdest chick Scavy knew. She was unpredictable, destructive, and always on high energy. They were never really romantically involved at first, even though they did hook up from time to time. She dated a lot of his friends but he wasn’t really interested in her in that way. He thought the pink mohawk she had back then was pretty cute, but he mostly just thought she was cool to hang out with.
He clearly remembers the first day they met. He was walking along the beach in his bare feet, squishing the sand between his toes, watching the waves hitting the shore. The one thing he liked about Copper was that he had the beach. The people in the upper quadrants
couldn’t walk in the sand if they wanted to. They were walled up in the center of the island. A lot of those people haven’t even seen the ocean through their tall barriers.
Sure the beach was littered with broken glass, medical waste, and all the other trash the rich people dumped into the ocean, but he still felt privileged to visit the beach whenever he wanted.
As he walked past the vagrant shacks that lined the beach, he saw a teenaged pink-mohawked girl about his age. She was trying to break down the door of one of the shacks, kicking it in with her pink combat boot.
“What are you doing?” Scavy asked.
She didn’t stop kicking the door.
“Robbing the shack?” Scavy said. “You know they don’t have shit in there, right?”
She shrugged at him and then kicked the door open. But once the door was open, she didn’t enter. She just went to the next shack and started kicking that door in.
“Why are you kicking in doors?” Scavy asked her.
She shrugged. “Just for fun.”
Scavy liked that answer.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
They went from shack to shack, kicking doors down. A couple of hobos stumbled out of their shacks and slurred drunken obscenities at them. The punks just laughed and continued kicking.
One door Popcorn kicked splintered on impact and Popcorn’s boot went through the middle. She burst into laughter when some hobo on the other side grabbed her leg.
“Damn punks!” cried the hobo on the other side of the door. “I’ll fuck you, fucking punks!”
Then the homeless guy twisted Popcorn’s leg, as if he was trying to twist it off. Popcorn just giggled at him and grabbed Scavy by the shoulder.
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