A camera ball followed him as he walked down the street, chugging the bottle of scotch. He flipped off the camera and then stuck his finger up his nose. Lee hated the upper class. He always did. When he was relocated to Neo New York, it was no different. They put him with the rest of the trash in the Copper Quadrant, outside of the city gates, separated from the rest of society. He had given thirty years of his life protecting the assholes and once they moved to Neo New York they didn’t need him anymore and tossed him aside.
Copper was filled with old soldiers with similar stories. Living in homemade shacks down by the beach, living off of crabs and seagulls, shitting in holes in the sand. They drank the worst swill on the island that was made in orange rusted garbage cans. It tasted like urine-flavored rubbing alcohol and quickly turned their livers into blackened husks.
Lee decided that he would not put on a show for the fat cats. His final act would be to get drunk and die a very boring death. No going out in a blaze of glory for Lee. He was going to just let those zombie bastards take him without a fight.
So he walked casually down the street, drinking from his bottle. When the two clay-fleshed zombies came after him, Lee just tossed a grenade over his shoulder and blew them into pieces.
Staggering down the road, Lee tossed more grenades at the zombies as they approached him. The explosions completely disabled the corpses. The grenades might not have killed many of the undead, but they did blow all of their legs out from under them. The zombies weren’t able to catch up to him even if he was walking so slowly.
“Fuck you, bastards,” Lee said to the camera. “I gave all you rich sons of bitches the best years of my life. You know what you gave me? Nothing.”
He paused to take another swig and throw another grenade.
“You know why all of you assholes are still alive? It’s because of me. I kept all of you safe and sound while you sat on your fat asses eating all the food I risked my neck scavenging for you. And how the fuck do you thank me? You put me on this fucking show. You feed me to the zombies I protected you from since I was fourteen years old.”
The sound of the grenades was waking the dead in the surrounding buildings. The number of zombies that were coming after him was increasing dramatically.
“But you know what I have that you don’t?” Lee raised his bottle to the camera. “I’ve got a sixty year old bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. Not a single one of you will ever have a liquor of this quality, not ever in your lives. No matter how rich you are. No matter how many mercs you send into the Red Zone. You’re never going to find a bottle quite as nice as this.”
Then Lee finished off the bottle right there in front of the camera.
“I’m living the high life,” he said, pulling out the second bottle of scotch.
But before Lee could break it open, a thin red laser beam shot out of the camera ball and shattered the bottle, splashing the liquor all over him.
The camera eyed the whiskey-drenched Lee as if it were laughing at him.
“Fuck you, you fat dirty pigs!” he growled at the camera. Then flipped it off.
With his liquor gone, Lee went looking for something else to drink. He went from store to store, wishing he had Timothy’s alcohol intuition. In the center of downtown, he saw a tavern at the end of an intersection.
“Bingo,” he said to the bar.
But before he could get inside the place, the group of zombies had caught up to him and he accidentally blew himself up.
Bleeding from his legs and face, Lee takes a sip of the sour mash. It’s not as flavorful as the scotch but it’s just as smooth. The camera ball floating next to him zooms in on his wound. A piece of shrapnel juts from his temple. He’s so drunk that he can hardly feel the chunk of metal pressed against his brain.
“I’ll never forgive you fuckers,” Lee says to the camera. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Timothy.”
When the fortified city on the Gulf of Mexico was evacuated, not everybody was allowed to leave. There were only so many people who were allowed to move to the island of Neo New York. Over two hundred soldiers were left behind to fend for themselves. They weren’t left with any food, supplies, or weapons to defend themselves with. They weren’t even left with the proper tools necessary to keep the barricade up. They were left to die. Timothy was one of them.
“I’m going to stay, too,” Lee told Timothy the day he was supposed to evacuate. “It will be better here than on that shitty island with all those assholes.”
“Nah,” Timothy said. “You should get out of here. You’re one of the lucky twenty percent.”
“It’s bullshit they had us draw straws. None of the citizens had to draw straws.”
“Forget about it. That’s just the way things are.”
“I’m not going to forget about it. I’m going to stay. We can scavenge the Red Zone like we used to. Only now everything we find we can keep for ourselves.”
“They didn’t leave us with any weapons or vehicles. Going into the Red Zone now would be suicide.”
“We’ll get new vehicles. We’ll get new weapons.”
Timothy just shook his head. “Lee…”
“We can live better than we ever did before.”
“Lee.” Timothy raised his voice. “We aren’t going to survive the night.”
Lee looked behind him at the men with guns aimed at the soldiers that were being left behind. He knew that the main reason they were letting twenty percent of the soldiers come with them was so that they would protect them from those who were staying behind. Besides Lee, every single one of them were ready to kill their own friends in order to keep their seat on the boat.
“Forget about us and get out of here.” Then Timothy walked away, leaving Lee standing there in front the row of armed men.
As Lee drinks from his bottle, a new horde of zombies closes in on the bar, attracted to the noise of the last explosion. He doesn’t pay them any attention as he drinks his whiskey and thinks back on the day he left Timothy.
As his ship was setting sail, he saw that the soldiers left behind didn’t bother putting up a fight for survival. They just opened the gates and let the creatures in, welcoming their demise. Lee saw nothing but a blank stare on Timothy’s face as the zombies opened up his skull and chewed out his brain.
Just as his friends did on that day, Lee welcomes zombie teeth to his flesh. He sips his whiskey as they grab him by the shoulders and bite into his neck. The camera ball zooms in to get a good look at Lee’s face as he is eaten. The old soldier tries to ignore the zooming sounds of the camera, but they are too irritating to tune out.
Lee looks into the camera with a sneer. Black slime oozes from a zombie’s face down his chest. His blood sprays out of him across the bar, into his drink. Then he pulls something out of his pocket and holds it up to the camera.
“How fast can you fly, little bird?” the old man says to the camera, as he flicks the pin of the grenade across the bar.
When the camera sees the grenade in his hand, it flies backward. Lee smirks as it flees for safety yet refuses to miss the shot of Lee’s death. Just before the camera escapes the tavern, Lee tosses the grenade and it bounces off the side of the camera’s protective casing. Then the grenade explodes and smashes the camera against the wall.
Lee smiles wide as the bomb inside of the camera goes off. The bar becomes a flash of white light. Then Lee, the zombies, and the entire city block disappear into a cloud of fire.
Haroon rushes through the streets, avoiding the undead, trying desperately to find her.
He swears that he saw her among the group of contestants back at the hotel, but he only caught a glimpse of her during the escape. She’s good at blending into crowds, so it’s very possible she was with them the whole time without him noticing. If she is a contestant he must find her. She could save him. She could save them all.
His hand grips tightly to his weapon: a spiked club. It’s not exactly a club, more like a child-sized alumi
num baseball bat, embedded with several metal studs, then painted black. He uses it to club zombies out of his way. He doesn’t use it to fight the undead. All he needs it for is to bat away reaching claws and biting mouths. Because of its smallish size, it’s lightweight and swings fast.
All he needs to do is run and keep an eye out for her. Once he finds her, she’ll be all the protection he’ll need. He wonders why she didn’t come to him back in the hotel. There’s no way she wouldn’t have recognized him. Perhaps she was just overwhelmed by the situation and her new environment. In her entire life, she had not seen much of the world—only the secret underground chambers beneath the Platinum Quadrant. He wasn’t even sure if she had seen the sun before. It makes sense that she would have been so overwhelmed that she wouldn’t have been paying attention to the people surrounding her.
If he can’t find her right away it would be good for him to find other people to team up with. He got separated from Junko’s group when he thought he’d seen her. Even though he wanted the group to stick together, he had to go after the woman to verify whether or not it was really her, but she got away too quickly. She jumped out of a hotel window and raced out of there so fast it was like a blurred ghost darting through the yard and disappearing into the shadows of the wasteland beyond. When he went back to find the others, they had already gone on without him.
Right now, if he wants to survive he must seek out other people. Perhaps they will help him find the woman he’s after and together they can find a different way out of the Red Zone, rather than competing for the one seat available on the helicopter. Unfortunately, most of the people are far ahead of him.
After an hour of searching, Haroon comes across another contestant. He hears a commotion coming a few blocks east and takes an alley to investigate. Crouching down and peering around a corner, he sees a crowd of flaming zombies crumbling to the ground. Beyond them, he sees Heinz marching through the street with his flamethrower in hand, burning down every living corpse that gets in his way.
When he sees how well the tall blond man seems to be doing against the undead, Haroon decides he would be the perfect person to team up with. Haroon stands up and heads toward the man, running to catch up to him.
A black leathery hand reaches out from an open door and grabs him by the arm. It pulls him into the shadows. Haroon opens his mouth to cry out to Heinz for help, but another leathery hand covers his mouth. His scream is muffled.
“Be quiet, fool,” says the attacker.
Haroon turns around to face the man who had grabbed him. At first, he just sees a large black form. Then he realizes that the large form is Laurence.
Laurence holds up his leather gloved hands to show that he means no harm.
“What did you do that for?” Haroon says.
“I was trying to save your sorry ass,” Laurence says. “You were thinking of making friends with that scumbag out there, weren’t you?”
Haroon nods.
“Let me show you something.” Laurence has Haroon look out of the window at Heinz’s clothing. He points at the swastika armband. “You see that symbol on his arm there? That means he’s not interested in making friends with you. It means he’s a racist nazi piece of trash.” Then he pulls Haroon back inside.
“I don’t understand,” Haroon says.
“Trust me,” Laurence says. “That guy’s no good. You’re better off alone than going with him. If you want to team up with somebody you can team up with me. I won’t let you down.”
Laurence gives him a thumbs up.
Haroon decides to believe Laurence, even though he’s never heard of nazis before. After Z-Day, a lot of Earth’s history had become lost and forgotten. The horrible events of the past paled in comparison to present day life. Although the schools in the Gold and Platinum Quadrants have been getting into teaching history over the past few years, the majority of the citizens of Neo New York just don’t know much about the old world. Most kids are assigned a career and then trained specifically for that position. Construction workers are raised to learn the skills to work construction. A farmer is raised to learn how to farm. They might also learn how to read and do basic math, but that’s about it. History just isn’t taught, perhaps because most people are trying very hard to forget the past.
When the two men enter the street to head back toward the alleyway, Haroon looks back at Heinz. The tall Aryan man is burning a zombie, a look of sadist pleasure stretches across his face. The zombie shrieks as it is burned. Upon closer inspection, Haroon notices that the zombie is Brick.
Zombie Brick cries in agony until he crumbles to ash. Then Heinz grabs the punk’s double-fisted sledgehammer from the ground, drapes it over his shoulder, and continues marching down the street.
As they backtrack through the alleyway, trying to get as much distance between them and Heinz as possible, Haroon notices Laurence is unarmed. He has his backpack slung over his shoulder, but otherwise he’s empty-handed.
“What weapon did you get?” Haroon asks, holding up his spiked club.
Laurence shakes his head. “Didn’t get one.”
“What?” he asks. “Everybody gets a weapon. You had to have gotten something.”
“Nope,” Laurence says.
“Give me your bag.”
Laurence hands it over. They duck into an old coffee shop, making sure no zombies are following them. In a back room, Haroon empties the pack across a table. He spreads out the items and examines each one. Every item he has is exactly the same as the items Haroon has in his pack, minus a weapon.
“You’re right, there’s nothing,” Haroon says. “Why the hell did they screw you like this?”
“Well, I’m not exactly unarmed. My whole body is one giant weapon.” Laurence punches his fist through the plaster wall next to him to prove his point. “I think they just wanted to make it fair to the other contestants.”
Then Laurence smiles.
“Still, they should have given you something. Brass knuckles, nunchucks, something.”
Laurence shakes his head. “I don’t need any of that. I can kill zombies with my bare hands just fine.”
Then Haroon notices something unusual about one of the items on the table: the map. It doesn’t look quite right. It’s much bulkier than the map he received in his own pack. Haroon picks it up and unfolds it. Inside, there are several sheets of paper.
“What’s that?” Laurence asks.
Haroon holds them up for inspection. “Blueprints.”
Laurence leans over the Indian man’s shoulder. “What kind of blueprints?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Haroon says. “I think they are instructions on how to build a weapon.”
“Build a weapon? They expect me to build my own weapon when everyone else gets their weapons fully constructed? Who do they think I am, MacGyver?”
Haroon has no idea who MacGyver is.
“By the looks of this, I bet it’s an incredibly powerful weapon,” Haroon says. “Perhaps too powerful to give to any contestant right at the start.”
“Hmmm… Maybe you’re right. And they gave it to me because they knew I’d be the contestant most likely to survive unarmed long enough to build the thing. Only one problem…”
“What’s that?”
“Finding these parts to make it. I have no idea what most of them even are.”
Haroon scans the list.
“Then you’re lucky you ran into me,” Haroon says. “This kind of thing is my specialty.”
Haroon was a top researcher who worked on classified projects for the government of Neo New York. He was registered as a citizen of the Platinum Quadrant, but he had never once stepped foot in Platinum. He lived in an underground research facility with over fifty other scientists. Each scientist was a specialist in their field, educated from childhood to fill a unique position. Haroon was trained to become a weapons engineer.
Bullets are effective against living beings, but against the undead they are not as much so. Haroon worked
on developing weapons that would be more effective against the undead. There was a division that focused on freezing weapons and another that focused on particle beam weapons, but Haroon’s division focused on self-recharging weapons. The kind that could have an unlimited power source, without the risk of running out of ammunition.
The most significant item produced by Haroon was the solar-powered shotgun. It was still years away from being perfected, but the basics were there. The big problem was that its range was only ten feet and it took an entire hour to recharge. It also didn’t do as much damage as an ordinary shotgun. One ten-foot shot per hour was not nearly as effective as a standard shotgun. But he promised his superiors that with time he could develop a weapon as powerful as a shotgun, one that would never run out of shells or need to be reloaded. All a soldier would have to do is put it in the sunlight for one hour every couple of days and the ammunition would be unlimited.
Of course, Haroon failed to deliver on his promise. Lucky for him, he could never be fired from his job for failing to deliver. The worst that could happen to him was reassignment. His best friend in his division, Terry, was responsible for blowing their boss’s right index finger off, and all he got was reassigned to the genetics division. He might have been mopping floors and washing toilets, but he still had a job. Since they put so much work into training their researchers, they don’t just get rid of them unless they absolutely have to. A person would have to commit murder or high treason in order to lose their position. But if that were to occur the person wouldn’t be fired, they would be executed, imprisoned, or worse: put on Zombie Survival.
This is how Haroon was chosen for Zombie Survival. He committed an act of high treason. He never heard of the show in the underground facility—researchers didn’t have the luxury of television—so Haroon had no idea this could have possibly been his punishment. For six months, he waited in his cell for execution, but it never came. They were holding him there until the next season of the show.
Zombies and Shit Page 9