Charlie and the others back away from the vomit puddle on the floor as it bubbles and steams. Brick cries out as it burns his flesh like acid. Steam rises from the green slime on the right side of his face. As it drips into his eyes, it bleaches the color out of his right eyeball.
“If you get that shit on your skin you’ll be infected,” Junko says. “Let’s get out of here. These guys are done for.”
Junko takes off to the west side of the building, Charlie and the others follow after.
Rainbow Cat misses Charlie by three seconds as she comes downstairs with her bag over her shoulder, still wiping tears from her eyes. She sees that everybody has already gone except for the three punks in the entryway.
Popcorn screams as the zombie’s bony claws dig into her skin. Scavy yanks on her arm with all of his strength and the zombie’s claws are ripped out of her flesh. When he feels the release, he thinks she is free. But then there is another tug and Popcorn is pulled closer to the door.
When Rainbow approaches them, she sees that the zombie no longer has a grip on her arm. Instead, there is a thin red rope attached to her wrist that the zombie is holding on to. When she gets a closer look, Rainbow realizes that it isn’t a rope. It is the girl’s tendon.
Popcorn’s cries hit a high pitch as the zombie reels the girl in closer to the hole in the door, using her tendon like a fishing line.
“Braains!”
Brick lets go of the door with one hand and grabs hold of her tendon, holding it from being pulled further through the hole. But without using his full strength to hold the barrier, the door crumbles open. The zombies pour inside.
When Junko and Charlie get to the side entrance, the door is already wide open.
“Let’s do this,” Laurence says behind them.
Junko looks back to make sure they are all with her.
“Where’s Haroon?” she asks.
They look back.
“He was behind Lee,” Charlie says.
Lee, in the back, just shrugs at them.
“We’ll have to go on without him,” she says.
When they exit the building, they run under a camera ball hovering overhead, ready to follow them through the wasteland. Up ahead, they see the tail-ends of other contestants running across the yard, dodging the zombie horde. Three of the punks who had ditched their friends are in the lead. Led by the Chilean female punk, Xiu, they weave quickly through the horde like cocaine-driven football players.
Bosco, the bony redneck, is in the back, not having as much luck. He gets cornered by five of them.
“Help me, goddamnit!” Bosco yells, as Junko and her crew run past him.
Charlie considers throwing some rocks or debris at the zombies to knock them away from the redneck, but Junko knows what he’s thinking and snaps him out of it.
“Leave him,” she says.
Charlie takes his eyes off of Bosco and focuses on his own survival. They run past two zombies with outstretched arms. One soggy corpse hisses at them, bubbles gurgling out of its throat as if it had been soaking at the bottom of a pool for the past decade.
There are only about a dozen on this side of the building, but they move pretty fast. Charlie and Junko run through six of them just before they squeeze together, blocking the path between them and their teammates.
Junko keeps moving, but Charlie looks back. Four of the zombies grab Laurence and pull him to the ground. Behind him, Lee turns around and runs in the opposite direction, heading for a collapsed section of the wall by the south side of the building.
“Keep going,” Laurence says to Charlie. “I got this.”
Charlie turns and continues after Junko.
They get around to the front of the building and arrive at the wall they had originally planned to go over. Charlie acts as a ladder to get Junko up the wall, then she lowers her arms to pull him up. Charlie notices that despite Junko’s 4’11 height and soft flesh that doesn’t appear to have an ounce of muscle, the Asian girl is surprisingly strong. She pulls him up with little effort.
At the top of the wall, the two of them look back at Laurence. Zombies are piling on top of him.
“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Junko says. “Come on.”
She turns to drop down on the other side, but Charlie stops her.
“Wait.”
They look at the pile of zombies and see movement coming from beneath. Then the entire pile lifts from the ground as Laurence stands. The man is massive, Charlie knows, but with those baggy clothes covering up every inch of his skin he wasn’t sure how much of him was fat and how much was muscle. As the corpses are thrown across the yard, Charlie imagines he is all muscle under those rags. He must be two or three times the size of Brick, and Brick looks like one of the old time professional wrestlers.
Laurence punches one of them in the stomach so hard that his fist bursts through its rotten soggy organs. But that doesn’t stop the creature. With his fist stuck inside of it, the thing goes for Laurence’s skull with its claws. It shrieks in his face and widens its fingers. But before it reaches him, Laurence stomps down on the creature’s knee, breaking its leg. The zombie crumples to the ground.
As the zombies return to their feet, Laurence punches them with his leather-gloved fists, knocking them back down. Then he pauses and turns to Charlie and Junko. He gives them a thumbs up and a big smile.
“Not a problem,” he says. “Give me a minute to take care of these suckas.”
Charlie looks back at Junko. She examines the vagrant carefully. The zombies have yet to lay a scratch on him. His clothes are covered in their rancid goo, but none of it has gotten on his skin. He’s not infected. Junko agrees that they should wait for him.
Beyond Laurence, Charlie sees Lee escaping through the south wall. Bosco does not appear to be dead, but he’s no longer in the place they had last seen him. He must have made it out of there somehow. On the other side of the wall, deeper into the city, the three punks are running down the street, dodging corpses and jumping rubble. Even though they are punks, they move like trained soldiers, their minds focused.
Beyond them, in the distance, there is machine gun fire. Charlie isn’t sure where it is coming from, but somewhere out there contestants are already fighting their way toward the helicopter.
Brick runs from the hotel entrance toward the perimeter, leaving his friends inside to fend for themselves against the zombies. Then Scavy runs out of the hotel, carrying Popcorn at his side, her blood leaking out of her arm and from a fresh bite-wound on the back of her neck, just below the skull. Zombies exit the hotel, chasing after them.
And in the back of the crowd is Rainbow Cat. From the wall, Charlie can see his wife running for her life. He wonders how he’ll feel if the zombies kill her right in front of him. He wonders if he’ll feel sorry for her or feel satisfaction that she got what she deserved. He wonders if he’ll feel anything at all.
“They’re doomed,” Junko says. “If that punk kid ditches his girlfriend he might stand a chance, but the other two are already infected.”
Charlie can see how the vomit on Brick’s face and Popcorn’s chest has eaten away at their flesh like acid. Brick’s cheek is dripping from his face like a long bloodhound jowl. His right eyeball is pure white and poking slightly out of the socket.
Far ahead of the others, Brick runs until he makes it through the perimeter into the city street. Once he gets there, his long duffel bag makes a beeping noise as it unlocks. He doesn’t continue running from there. He drops the bag and opens it up, digging for his weapon.
Charlie watches as Brick pulls out a large two-handed sledgehammer. He leaves his bag on the ground and runs back to his friends to help them out, raising the enormous hammer over his head like he’s ready to chop wood with an axe.
