“Fuck!” Scavy says, trying to figure out his aim.
Meanwhile, Heinz gets further away. If Scavy doesn’t figure it out soon the nazi will be too far out of range, then Junko and the hippy will have to deal with him on their own. Scavy continues working on the scope, but just can’t get it focused right.
“Damn son of a bitch!” he says, slamming his fist down on the rifle.
A man steps out of the intersection and blocks Heinz’s way. Scavy recognizes the man. It is Laurence, the vagrant who had handed out the bags back at the hotel. Only, the guy looks a lot different now. His body is made of gold-plated steel, glimmering in the mid-morning sunlight.
Laurence stands there, in Heinz’s way, his hands on his hips.
“Shooting women in the back as they’re running away,” Laurence yells at the nazi. “The T-2000 don’t think that’s very friendly behavior.”
Heinz stops his pursuit, staring at the golden metal man with a confused expression. The dog heads on his hands snap and snarl in Mr. T’s direction.
“Mr. T’s gonna have to teach you a lesson in manners,” then he punches his metal fist into the palm of his other hand.
Heinz opens fire on Mr. T, but the bullets just ricochet off the cyborg’s chest. Mr. T roars as he rips off a chunk of the building next to him, then lifts it over his head. The piece of brick wall is the size of a dumpster.
“Here’s a gift for you,” Laurence says, tossing the enormous piece of wall at the nazi. “Courtesy of Mr. T.”
Heinz ducks out of the way and the chunk of debris explodes against the cement wall behind him. Then he continues firing. Scavy adjusts the scope, not sure whether Laurence is on his side or if he’s got to shoot down the both of them. He’s able to see Laurence through the glass, letting it out just a bit to zoom off of his chest.
Heinz’s Gatling gun runs out of ammo, so he drops the mechjaw into his pack and raises his left arm. The mechjaw on his left arm isn’t connected to a Gatling gun. It’s connected to a rocket launcher. Heinz squeeze’s the dog’s brain and the rocket shoots from his fist. It hits Mr. T square in the chest and the enormous cyborg flies back, through a wall, into an old bank building. The explosion creates an avalanche, and three stories of the building cave in on top of the T-2000.
“Fuck…” Scavy says, as he witnesses the nazi take down the cyborg. He wonders if going up against Heinz is such a good idea. If a bulletproof Mr. T with a robot body isn’t strong enough to defeat him how does Scavy have a chance?
Heinz waits for the dust to settle, to make sure the T-2000 will not be getting up again. Once he is satisfied, he turns to the direction Junko was headed for and continues on his hunt.
Scavy lifts the sniper rifle to his shoulder and peers through the scope, aiming for the gas canisters on the nazi’s back. The aim is dead center. Scavy knows that he only has one shot at this. If he misses he’s dead. He takes a deep breath.
When Scavy pulls the trigger, the kickback slams his shoulder hard, jerking back his arm. The bullet hits the street in front of Heinz, missing by over five feet.
“Damn it,” Scavy says, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
Heinz turns around, slowly, and looks up at Scavy. Then he aims his mechjaw rocket launcher at the window and fires.
When Scavy caught up to Domino and the other Diamonds who raped Gogo, they were doing Waste in the back of a broken down van. He crept up alongside the graffiti-coated vehicle, and heard Domino’s low grunting voice and laughter coming from the other four in his crew.
“Smell my finger,” he could hear Domino say. “I still got the scent of her sweet cunt on me.”
“Get that out of my face,” another said. “That shit is rank.”
The others laughed.
Their conversation only pissed Scavy off more. He gripped his crowbar tightly, fantasizing about how it will feel to bash Domino’s face in with it.
When the first of them stepped out of the van to take a leak, Scavy broke his kneecap with the crowbar. The guy fell face-first into the street.
“What the fuck?” Domino said.
Scavy jumped in the back of the van and smashed the closest asshole in the mouth. Blood and teeth splashed across the backseat. Then he lowered the crowbar into another’s forehead, knocking him out with a loud metal clunk. Scavy leapt out of the back of the van before the other two could grab him.
Domino pulled out his switchblade and came out of the van after him. As the knife darted toward his throat, Scavy swung the crowbar. It made contact with Domino’s knife-hand, breaking three of his knuckles. The switchblade flew across the street.
The other punk grabbed Scavy from behind, but quickly found a crowbar in his eye. Scavy turned around and beat him repeatedly, smashing the crowbar against his face, his chest, and his arms that waved out for mercy. When Scavy looked back, Domino was running away. His four men were either out cold or writhing in pain.
“You’re dead, asshole,” Domino yelled back at Scavy from the far end of the street. “Your whole crew is dead.”
The punk lying in the street with a dislocated kneecap went for a gun in his coat. When Scavy saw the gun pointed at him, he clicked his heels together, triggering a switchblade that emerged from the toe of his right boot. With his boot-knife, he kicked the punk in the stomach five times, stabbing him in his guts, until the bloody piece of shit dropped his gun.
Then Scavy picked up the pistol and shot the other three until they stopped moving.
Heinz’ rocket hits the wall below Scavy’s window, taking out the front of the building. The blast knocks Scavy back across the room. When he gets to his feet, Scavy can hardly balance himself. There’s a piercing ring in his ear and the taste of blood leaking from the roof of his mouth. He retrieves his rifle and staggers back to the window. He doesn’t realize his face is charred black, nor does he realize a piece of debris has impaled his side.
The flames in the burning window cover his view of Heinz, but Scavy aims the rifle through the smoke and fires again. The bullet is several feet off target.
Out of rockets, Heinz tosses the dog head and pulls out his flame thrower. He approaches the entrance to Scavy’s building. Riding the adrenalin of being blown off of his feet, Scavy keeps firing. He gets off two more rounds, but shooting vertically at a moving target isn’t a manageable task for a poor shot with a mortal wound. Heinz enters the building unscathed.
The camera ball filming Heinz floats in the doorway below Scavy, hovering in one place as it zooms in on the nazi’s back. Scavy’s bloody teeth open in a smile as he puts his eye in the scope. He aims directly at the center of the camera ball, holds his breath, then fires.
The explosion takes out the entire block, blowing out the first floor of the apartment building, as well as the first floors of every building on the block. Scavy jumps back and dives over a bed, as the flames rise into the air and engulf room. When the air is clear, Scavy lifts his head and laughs.
“Checkmate, motherfucker!” he cries.
Most people assume Scavy is as dumb as a rock, but he’s actually a lot smarter than he looks. Although uneducated, he’s got a natural intelligence. He’s quick-thinking, clever, and a born strategist. Chess was a game he loved to play, and he never lost a game in his life.
When Brick met up with Scavy and saw the four dead bodies of Domino’s men lying in the back of the van, Scavy was already working on a plan.
“Oh, shit,” Brick said, checking for a pulse on any of the fallen gang members. “Why the hell did you have to kill them?”
“I got a little carried away,” Scavy said. “They pissed me off.”
“Do you know what that means? Domino isn’t just going to let you get away with this.” Brick looked around, making sure the street was clear. “We have to go to war now. With the fucking Diamonds of all gangs!”
“They asked for it. If they would have left Gogo alone this never would have happened.”
“Gogo would have been fine,” Brick said. “She’s
a fucking whore.”
Scavy got into Brick’s face. “How can you say that? She’s your girlfriend.”
“I know it’s bullshit what happened to her,” Brick said. “But you’re going to end up getting all of us killed.”
“Not if we get them before they get us,” Scavy said.
“Are you kidding? They outnumber us twenty to one and they have more firepower. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“It doesn’t matter how big their gang is,” Scavy said. “We just have to get clever. Outsmart them.”
Brick shook his head. Scavy had never seen the big guy so worried. The reason Scavy became friends with him in the first place was because the guy never backed down even when the odds were against him.
“Trust me,” Scavy told Brick, placing a hand on his shoulder. Then Brick grunted and gave him a nod. “Help me take their jackets off. I have a plan.”
The plan was simple. Although the Diamonds were the biggest street gang in Copper, they were not the top dogs in the quadrant. The local drug lord, Tim Lion, had a much more powerful crew behind him. Domino was a mere cockroach in comparison to Tim Lion. So Scavy, Brick, and a couple of their friends decided to dress up as members of the Diamonds gang using the jackets they took off of the dead bodies of Domino’s friends. Then they robbed a drug shipment that was headed into Silver. Let everyone see the Diamonds jackets they wore. Then they dropped off the drugs on the porch of one of the Diamonds’ hangouts.
When Tim Lion got wind of what the Diamonds had done, he sent his men after Domino. With the drugs in his backyard and all of the witnesses of the robbery, Domino had little chance of proving his innocence to the drug lord. Scavy had fucked him good.
As the smoke clears in the room, Scavy stands up and feels the tightness in his hip. He looks down to see the piece of shrapnel in his side and all the blood soaking his clothing. Because he can’t feel any pain, he realizes that the wound must be even worse than it looks.
“Fuck me,” Scavy says, then wheezes out a laugh.
Something shoots him in the back. A fiery pain at the base of his spine. He rubs the wound and lifts up his fingers to reveal a layer burnt skin. He turns around to the camera ball floating in the room with him. It shoots another laser at him. He jumps over the bed, but the blast gets him in the thigh.
He knew it was against the rules to fuck with the cameras, but he thought the punishment for that was the self-destruction of the cameras. Having other camera balls attack him with lasers was not something he had anticipated.
Scavy tosses a blanket over the camera, grabs his naginata spear, and runs out of the room. The camera ball blasts blindly through the sheet as Scavy closes the door on it. Out in the hall, he sees that all the movement is causing his wound to rip open even more. He needs to pull out the metal but worries that it’s the only thing keeping the blood in his body.
As he steps carefully down the stairs of the apartment complex, Scavy comes face-to-face with Heinz. Not only did the nazi survive the blast, he had come out of it without a single scratch on him. Scavy nearly topples over in shock at the sight of the guy, standing there with his flame thrower pointed at him.
Scavy freezes. His sniper rifle is aimed at the ground. He’s not sure if he can raise it up in time to shoot the nazi before he’s eaten alive by flames. But Heinz doesn’t fire. He too is frozen in his place as he examines what Scavy has on.
“You are a member of the Fifth Reich?” Heinz asks him.
Scavy looks down at the clothes he wears. The uniform he had gotten off of the sculpture of Adolf Hitler in the wax museum is similar to that of Heinz. They have matching swastika armbands. Scavy decides his best course of action would be to play along.
“Yeah,” Scavy says.
“You must be one of the operatives positioned in Copper. I had no idea there was another Brother in this competition.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Heinz notices the look of hesitation on Scavy’s face. He can tell the punk has no idea what he is talking about.
“Why would you help that Japanese cunt you were with?” Heinz’s tone becomes more aggressive. “A true Aryan would have not allowed her to live so long.”
Scavy considers lying and telling him that he was just playing Junko the whole time, and he planned to kill her once she proved useless to him, but he respects the woman too much for that. He’d rather go sniper on flame thrower than sell her out like that.
The camera ball blasts its way out of the apartment on the floor above them. Scavy realizes he’s trapped on both sides: the camera ball hovering down the staircase and Heinz pointing his flame thrower, convinced the punk is an imposter with no right to be in that uniform.
Scavy always finds himself between a rock and a hard place. It’s almost as if such situations seek him out. When Tim Lion and his men hit Domino’s hangout, after killing a good portion of the Diamond crew, he allowed Domino to explain himself. Lion had no clue why Domino would be stupid enough to try to get away with stealing his merchandise, so he was curious.
“How could you be so stupid?” Tim Lion said, pointing his index finger at his head.
Then, somehow, Domino convinced Tim Lion that Scavy set him up and that he had nothing to do with it. Domino mentioned his four dead men with missing jackets. There were four men who hit Lion’s shipment. The packages of Waste were left on the porch unopened. Nobody in their right mind would leave all of that on a porch unless it was Scavy sneaking in at night to frame him. All the pieces fit together. Lion believed him.
So then Scavy in his crew not only had the Diamonds after them, they also had Tim Lion coming for their heads.
“This is even worse,” Popcorn yelled at Scavy. “We’re all dead for sure.”
“Not necessarily,” Scavy said. “We’ve already taken out half of Domino’s men without a single casualty. I’d say we’re doing pretty good.”
“But what about Tim Lion?”
“Lion has no idea who we are. If we can just take out Domino then Lion wouldn’t know how to find us.”
“But he’ll find out eventually. The guy practically owns this quadrant.”
“Let’s just focus on one problem at a time.”
No matter how dire the situation seemed, Scavy had optimism. He knew there was always a way around a problem. He just had to figure it out.
With his fingers tapping on the sniper rifle, Scavy decides to just go for it. He’s going to shoot the guy. Perhaps he will get burned, but it’s possible he can kill the nazi before the fire kills him. As long as he doesn’t miss, he can take the guy out.
“The Japanese girl is smart,” Scavy says. “A lot smarter than you.”
This infuriates Heinz more than Scavy was expecting.
“You went after me and let her get away,” Scavy continues. “Dumb move. I’m not letting you out of here alive.”
Heinz laughs. “Brave talk, for an insect.”
Scavy chuckles with him, exposing his charred bloody teeth. Then Scavy raises the sniper rifle and fires.
The Diamonds knew that the only way to make peace with Tim Lion was to bring him Scavy’s head on a platter, so Scavy didn’t have to hunt down Domino. He just had to wait for the prick to come to him. Domino didn’t know exactly where Scavy lived, but he knew the side of town he hung out in. Scavy, Brick, and the rest of his crew were known to hang out in the Southeastern park by the shore. It wasn’t exactly a park, it was a wide open piece of land that was once a junkyard, where citizens of Copper often dealt drugs, got drunk, got into fights, played chess, ate lunch, and just hung out. Scavy and his crew were often seen patrolling the park like bulldogs. It was the first place Domino was going to check.
“I’ll hang out here, by myself,” Scavy said to his crew. “When they see me that’ll bring them out into the open. I want the rest of you to get them from behind.”
“That’s it?” Brick asked. “That’s your plan? It sounds like suicide.”
Scavy smiled. “All my best pl
ans sound like suicide.”
Scavy gets off a round with his sniper rifle, but Heinz gets him first. The flames engulf Scavy with such force that he drops the rifle as it’s fired. The bullet misses Heinz completely. Unarmed and coated in fire, Scavy thrashes around, trying to put the flames out as he is burned alive. With each flame that Scavy puts out, Heinz covers him in several more.
Then Scavy stops thrashing around and jumps at Heinz, grabbing tightly around the waist. It catches Heinz on fire and they shriek in each others’ ears as they burn together.
“I told you I’m not letting you out alive,” Scavy yells at him.
Heinz screams, “You’re going to get us both killed!”
Then Scavy tears the hose out of a gas canister on Heinz’s back and breaks away from him. Heinz whips his arms around, trying to get the tanks off his back as the leaking gas catches fire.
Scavy dives for cover, just before the explosion. He jumps out of the stairwell into the third floor hall, then rolls on the ground until he puts the fire out on his clothes. His face is charred black, his mohawk burned off, and uniform melted to his flesh, but he’s still standing. He gets up and staggers back into the stairwell to retrieve his weapons. Grabbing his naginata spear, he sees Heinz looking up the stairs at him in anger. Although half-burnt, the nazi was able to get the tanks off before they exploded.
As Scavy grabs his spear from the steps, Heinz pulls out the double-fisted sledgehammer.
Zombies and Shit Page 24