Zombies and Shit

by Carlton Mellick III

“I’m going to squash you like the vermin that you are,” Heinz says, as he swings the hammer.

  The hammer smashes into the stairs by Scavy’s feet. The punk uses the chance to swing the blade of the spear at Heinz’s head, but Heinz catches it with his free hand.

  “Not good enough,” Heinz says.

  Scavy pulls the spear out of his grip, slicing open the palm of the nazi’s hand. Then he ducks as the floating camera ball comes in from behind, blasting its lasers at the punk. The particle beams pass over Scavy’s head and hit Heinz in the chest. Not enough to kill him, but enough to throw him back.

  Scavy takes off running—in a hopping, limping, getting-blood-all-over-the-place kind of way—down the hallway of the third floor. Heinz chases after him. Scavy dodges into an apartment, then jumps down a hole to the second floor. As Heinz enters, he doesn’t see Scavy looking up at him from the floor below. Scavy drives the spear through the hole, into Heinz’s leg. The blade cuts through the calf muscle, scraping across his fibula bone. Heinz screams at the pain, then roars at the punk. He lowers the hammer down at the spear, breaking it in half.

  Scavy laughs up at Heinz and flips him off. Then Heinz puts his blowgun to his lips and shoots a poisoned dart into Scavy’s forehead. The punk’s laughter cuts off as he sees the dart sticking out from between his eyes. He pulls it from his skin and examines it slowly, as if in a daze, then tosses it aside.

  “What the fuck was that?” Scavy’s voice is soft and shaky.

  Heinz laughs as he pulls the spear blade out of his leg.

  “Fuck,” Scavy says, then takes off down the hall, before the camera ball hovering behind Heinz’s shoulder can take a shot at him.

  Domino and his men did catch up to Scavy in the park, but he brought more men with him than Scavy had anticipated, three times as many. They also brought guns. When they surrounded Scavy, the punk just smiled at him, waiting for his men to jump him from behind. But his men didn’t come.

  Scavy’s smile faded when he realized his crew had ditched him. “Fuck.”

  “Fuck is right,” Domino said, then punched him in the face.

  The poison sets into Scavy quickly. His face is the first thing to go numb, mouth dangling wide open. Then his arms go limp, dangling by his sides as he staggers down the hall. When he trips over a piece of debris, he can’t get himself back up again. He kicks his legs around, but without the use of his arms he can’t move.

  Domino’s men took turns punching Scavy in the face and stomach, as the others held his arms behind his back. They bloodied his nose and broke his lip. He drooled blood down the front of his shirt, then looked up and scanned the edges of the park for his friends. He couldn’t see them anywhere.

  Domino grabbed Scavy by the mohawk and twisted his head up to yell in his face. “Why the fuck did you jump me and my men the other night? Do you have a death wish or something?”

  Scavy spit blood. “You started it.”

  “What?” Domino kneed him in the face.

  “You raped my friend, Gogo. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “All of this is over that worthless fucking whore? Is she your girlfriend or something?”

  “She’s a friend,” Scavy said. “You don’t do that to one of my friends and get away with it.”

  Domino laughed. “You’re going to die just because I fucked your stupid bitch whore of a friend. You’re the stupidest motherfucker I ever met.”

  Heinz laughs when he sees Scavy lying in the middle of the hall, paralyzed. He limps over to the punk and hovers over him, pointing one fist of the sledgehammer at his face.

  “You’re a white man,” Heinz says to Scavy. “Why would you sacrifice yourself to save some worthless Japanese cunt? You should be wearing that uniform with pride, as a true Aryan would.”

  “Fuck you.” The words are mumbled as they stumble out of Scavy’s dead lips.

  “Call her a whore one more time,” Scavy threatened Domino.

  Domino laughed at him.

  “What?” Domino asked. “You still trying to be a tough guy?”

  Scavy spit again. “You don’t fucking call my friend a whore.”

  Domino stared him in the eyes and annunciated every word loudly in Scavy’s face. “She is a worthless, filthy, rotten cunt whore and she deserved everything we did to her.”

  As Domino raised his fist to punch him again, Scavy clicked the heels of his shoe. Before impact, Domino’s fist went limp as Scavy kicked him in the throat. The blade of Scavy’s boot-knife pierced through the bottom of Domino’s jaw, up through the roof of his mouth, and into his brain.

  The Diamonds just stood there, staring at Scavy’s foot in their leader’s neck. Then Scavy’s men attacked. Brick drove a truck into the park, roaring across the littered beach. In the back, the rest of Scavy’s men fired bullets into the Diamonds gang, taking them down before they could get off a single shot. The Diamonds dropped Scavy and took off running. Some of them got away, others didn’t. The ones who stayed behind to fight were the first to fall.

  As Scavy pulled his boot-knife out of Domino’s head, Brick came up to him and patted him on the back.

  “You’re late,” Scavy said to him.

  “We needed to find a vehicle,” Brick said. “They aren’t easy to come by on short notice.”

  “One minute longer and I would have been dead.”

  “Yeah, but you pulled through, as always,” Brick said.

  “I just got lucky,” Scavy said.

  “Now it’s time for you to die,” Heinz tells Scavy, gripping the double-fisted sledgehammer. “If you were proud of your Aryan heritage you wouldn’t be dying for that insignificant Japanese cunt right now.”

  Scavy spit blood at him. “Call her a cunt one more time.”

  “I’ll call that cunt whatever I damn well—”

  Scavy clicked his heels together, and the switchblade emerged from his right boot as he kicked the nazi in the chest. But Heinz catches him by the ankle less than an inch away from his uniform. He bends Scavy’s foot back.

  “You’re an idiot,” Heinz says to him. “You bring shame to the master race.”

  Heinz drops the sledgehammer, puts his hand into his pack, and into a mechjaw’s neck. Although the mechjaw’s minigun is out of ammo, its teeth are still as sharp as ever.

  “I don’t think I’ll kill you,” Heinz says. “You deserve much worse.” He brings the snarling head of the mechjaw toward Scavy’s ankle, below the boot-knife. “I’m going to turn you into one of those things out there.” The dog head snaps at Scavy’s flesh. “You’ll spend all eternity as a disgusting, disgraceful living corpse.”

  Scavy kicks him in the calf, breaking his spear-wound wider. Heinz releases Scavy’s leg, and the punk kicks his boot-knife through the mechjaw’s face.

  Heinz steps back, clenching his wrist below the dog head. He slips his hand out of the mechjaw’s neck and tosses the growling head over his shoulder. Then he pulls off his glove. Examining his hand, he sees his blood mixing with the dog’s green zombie slime. The boot-knife had gone through the mechjaw’s head, through the glove, and into Heinz’s fist, infecting him with the zombie virus.

  Looking at Scavy with distress, Heinz holds his hand, shivering in fear.

  “You infected me?” Heinz says.

  Scavy sneers through his drooping lips. “Checkmate, motherfucker.”

  Anger flashes across Heinz’s face. He retrieves the double-fisted sledgehammer from the floor. The poison has now paralyzed all of Scavy’s body, so the bleeding, burnt up punk just laughs up at the nazi. He chuckles at him as loudly as he can, as Heinz lifts the sledgehammer, aiming for Scavy’s head.

  Domino was dead. The Diamonds no longer wanted to fight a war against Scavy. Then Tim Lion was found dead in his club one morning, murdered by a lone mysterious assailant.

  “Tim Lion’s dead?” Brick said to Scavy. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what they say,” Scavy said, lighting a cigarette.

  “
You’re the luckiest motherfucker on the planet. I can’t believe you got away with it.”

  “I think I’ve got a guardian angel,” Scavy said.

  Just before Heinz lowers the sledgehammer into Scavy’s skull, something hits the nazi in the back of the head. His neck breaks, his body goes limp, and then he falls to the floor. Scavy looks up to see a guardian angel standing over him. A golden, glimmering guardian angel named Mr. T.

  “You forgot this,” Mr. T says, then tosses the twisted casing of a rocket at Heinz’s chest.

  Scavy smiles in a daze as his guardian angel picks him up and carries him down the hall. A particle beam is fired at Scavy, but his guardian angel blocks it with his elbow, then swats the camera ball out of his way.

  “Hang in there,” says the guardian angel. “The T-2000 knows how to fix you up. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

  When Mr. T looks down at Scavy, he sees tears of blissful joy on the punk’s face, as if Scavy is looking at the most beautiful angel in all the heavens.

  The three merc punks arrive at their destination: the city’s art museum. A fortified white building covered in brown hop vines.

  Xiu says, “Let’s get in, get what we need, and get out.”

  Her Arms nod their heads and get to work, prying open the barricaded entrance. Zippo uses his claw-hands to cut through the boards and vegetation. Vine uses his wires to rip open the doors. Clouds of dust billow out of the shadowy interior as the merc punks enter.

  “The client wants as many as we can carry,” Xiu says. “But most importantly we need to get the masterpiece. He said we’d recognize it by the red dress.”

  Her Arms get straight to work, searching the museum for the works of art they were hired to retrieve. Many of the paintings in the museum have been destroyed by moisture and UV rays entering from the cracks in the ceiling. Some of the works of art are so faded that the images are completely unrecognizable, worthless.

  Zippo finds one that is still mostly intact. A picture of two little girls gathering acorns. He pulls it off the wall and wipes a layer of dust from the surface.

  “That’s not one of them,” Xiu tells him over his shoulder. “The ones we are looking for are different. Unique.”

  Zippo smiles and gazes at the little girls in the picture. Xiu wraps her arm around his waist and peers longingly into the image from behind Zippo’s shoulder. They put the picture back onto the wall, then press their foreheads together as they take one last look at the girls gathering acorns.

  The day Xiu, Zippo, and Vine became a unit was the day that they were married. In Mongol culture, the ceremony that brings three children together into one unit is also a bond of matrimony. Merc punk units are all threesome relationships. They share the same bed as a trio, they mate as a trio, and they raise children as a trio—until their children are old enough to join their own trio.

  When the Head of a unit reaches the age of twenty-three, they can decide whether or not to take time off to breed. They have another chance at age twenty-five, and at age twenty-seven. Xiu wanted to have a child. Even though she would not be able to raise it for long, she still wanted to produce young. Zippo and Vine also wanted to have children badly, because it was what their Head wanted. So Xiu put in a request to enter a breeding period.

  During a breeding period, merc punks don’t have to go on missions or do much work of any kind. They get to stay on their boat and spend their time trying to get pregnant. These are the happiest days in a merc punk’s life.

  The first time Xiu’s unit made love, they were all very awkward. Because a unit is trained to think and act as one being, sex is more like masturbation.

  “Ummm…” Xiu giggled as they sat naked on the bed together, in a circle. They were already completely familiar with each other’s bodies, yet intimacy on this level was new to them. It was mysterious, exciting.

  Zippo was the most awkward of the three. As an Arm, he is not supposed to have desires and feelings of his own. He is supposed to put all of his attention into mimicking his Head’s feelings and desires. Arms are trained to empty their minds of their own thoughts and fill them with the thoughts of their Head. They see their bodies as puppets for their Heads, and their consciousnesses as mere spectators that view everything from above the action.

  However, Zippo sometimes finds himself with desires of his own. He is in love with Xiu, more in love with her than any Arm is supposed to love their Head. Sometimes he wants to hold her in his arms, kiss her with all of his passion, but if Xiu doesn’t order him to do these things he’s not allowed to. He just has to wait for the moment to come, when she commands him to do so.

  Zippo was on the bed, shaking with the thought of being able to make love to Xiu for the first time. He knew that Xiu saw it only as if she was just making love to herself, but he couldn’t stop the feelings from flooding in. He waited patiently for Xiu to order him onto her body.

  Xiu smiled at her Arms and giggled. It was as if she didn’t know where to begin. They had all been waiting so long for this moment that they could hardly believe it was finally happening.

  Zippo visualized strings connected to the end of Xiu’s fingers as she reeled him toward her body. She giggled as she had him lick her left breast, suck her cocoa-colored nipple into his mouth, rub his hands down her tobacco-scented chest. She leaned back and put her hands behind her short black mohawk, as her Arms followed her telepathic commands. Vine kissed the right side of her neck and ear, as Xiu’s strings pulled Zippo’s tongue further down her body, over her belly button, to her inner thighs.

  Merc punk threesomes are not quite the same as a normal threesome relationship. When units have sex, it is always the two Arms having sex with the Head. The two arms never make love with each other. Some units are bisexual, but these are only in the cases where the Head and one of the Arms are of the same gender.

  Xiu widened her mouth as she masturbated herself with her Arms. She gave herself oral sex with her Left Arm as she rubbed her breasts with her Right Arm. Then she laid back and brought her Left Arm’s penis inside of her.

  The moment Zippo felt his Head’s warm insides, he knew that he was already going to have an orgasm. If he could only pause for a moment he wouldn’t pass the point of no return, but he couldn’t

  stop unless she commanded him to. “I’m going to come,” Zippo said.

  “Don’t,” Xiu ordered, moaning beneath him. “Keep going.”

  Zippo tried to do as he was ordered, but it was the first time he had ever had sex. He couldn’t prevent himself from ejaculating before she ordered him to do so. When she felt his penis become soft inside of her, Xiu’s face filled with shock. Her Left Arm had disobeyed orders.

  “Get off of me,” she said.

  She pulled his strings and moved him to the far side of the bed, then continued masturbating herself with only her Right Arm.

  It is common for a Head to prefer one Arm over the other during sexual intercourse. In bisexual units, the Head might prefer one gender over the other. Or a Head might just find one Arm more sexually attractive, or one Arm might perform better in bed.

  Zippo tried not to cry as he was left out of the lovemaking. He wasn’t allowed to be sad if Xiu wasn’t sad. He wasn’t allowed to be jealous of the Right Arm. He was not allowed to look away as Xiu masturbated herself without him.

  When a Head prefers one arm over the other, the unit would be considered either Right-handed or Left-handed. Zippo had always thought that Xiu’s unit was ambidextrous, until they started to make love. Then he discovered that her unit was actually Right-handed. Although he was supposed to have no feelings of his own, this hurt Zippo deeply. He loved her so much. He couldn’t bear the thought of her preferring Vine over him, even if it was just a little bit.

  They come to a chained door upstairs. After searching the entire museum, this is the last door they haven’t searched. Zippo cuts the chain with his right scissor-arm, and the chains clank against the floor.

  “Let’s go
,” Xiu says, as Vine kicks the door open.

  Inside, the room is a vast hall. It had been designed for special exhibits, and there was no exhibit more special than the works on display here.

  Xiu enters first, going toward a sculpture in the center of the room.

  “This is it,” she says.

  The sculpture raises its head and looks at her.

  “Brains…” it says.

  The piece of artwork is a zombie that had been torn apart and re-assembled into a twisted abstract sculpture, with steel bars woven through its flesh. The ribcage opened like butterfly wings, a black fist in its chest in place of a heart. A living, writhing piece of art created out zombie flesh.

  There are dozens of them, abstract sculptures made out of the flesh of the living dead. Along the walls, there are paintings, also composed of undead tissue. Each one still shifting and wheezing, permanently frozen inside of their frames.

  “Get as many as you can carry,” Xiu says. “We need to get them to the helicopter before dark.”

  Her Arms nod at her, pulling sheets and twine from their bags, to wrap up the valuable works of art.

  Their client is the grandson of a man named Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination. His grandfather was a controversial anatomist known for his Body Worlds exhibits, which blurred the line between science and art. He used the bodies of the dead, fixed with a formalin, dissected into unusual forms, dehydrated and gas-cured. This would preserve the bodies, shaping them into grotesque and fascinating works of art.

  After Z-Day, Gunther von Hagens had found himself trapped in the United States, in the very city where this season of Zombie Survival is being filmed. Fifty years ago, he barricaded himself in an art museum and slowly went mad. Whether he admitted it to the public or not, Gunther was an artist and human flesh was his medium. Having found himself trapped in the middle of the zombie wasteland surrounded by the living dead, with an infinite amount of time on his hands, he decided to continue his work, but this time he used the flesh of the living dead.