Zombies and Shit

Brick smiles wide at her, as the right side of his face slips off of his head to reveal the white of his skull. His right eye drops out of its socket and lands next to his pink combat boot.

Popcorn didn’t realize he was wearing the combat boots she had stolen for him until just now. When she first got them for him, he said he didn’t want to wear them because he would get shit from the other guys. They already gave him shit for wearing pink shirts from time to time. He didn’t want to make it any worse.

Popcorn covers her mouth when she sees the boots. They looked withered and old, as if he’s been wearing them all the time, when nobody else was looking.

Brick turns back to the zombie horde and uses the last of his strength to fight them off, breaking their faces open with his steel fists.

Charlie helps Scavy climb up the wall, and then Scavy lifts up Popcorn.

“We can take the guy,” Junko says. “But the girl is infected. Get rid of her.”

“She’s fine,” Scavy says, crouching on the wall like a cat. “Don’t worry about it.”

Junko is about to push the both of them off of the wall, when a scream echoes through the yard. They look over to see Rainbow Cat has been tackled by the zombie with the sunflowers growing out of its head. It crawls slowly over her, toward her brain.

“Bitch will get what she deserves,” Junko says to Charlie.

But when she looks over at the writer, she doesn’t see a look of satisfaction across his face. She sees a look of horror.

“I’m going after her,” Charlie says.

He leaves his bag and stands up, balancing himself on the top of the wall.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Junko says. “After what she did to you?”

“I know she deserves it,” Charlie says. “But I can’t just let her die.”

Then he walks carefully along the top of the wall to get closer to his wife. A few zombies on the ground follow him below, trying to jump up to reach his feet like snapping turtles.

“Fuck,” Junko says.

Charlie leaps off of the wall, over the heads of the zombies, and lands on his hands and feet. He gets up and runs before the zombies even turn around.

Rainbow screams as the zombie bites down onto her skull, to get at her brain. Its jaw closes down on her head, but misses her flesh. It can’t get through her dreadlocks. When it tries to eat her brain again, all it gets is a mouthful of hair-tentacles.

Charlie kicks the zombie in the face, sunflower petals exploding into the air. He pulls Rainbow to her feet and leads her back to Junko and the others, several zombies following close behind.

Before Junko can help the hippy bitch up the wall, a loud bang vibrates the bricks beneath her feet. She looks over at Laurence. Somehow, the wall next to him has collapsed and a dozen more zombies are pouring into the yard with them. They get between Laurence and the others. He has to fall back, in the wrong direction.

“Laurence,” Junko yells.

“Forget about me,” Laurence says. “I’ll catch up with you all later!”

Then he heads to the south, running over the zombie he had earlier crippled, like a tank.

The zombies close in around Charlie as he pushes Rainbow up the wall. When she’s at the top, Junko lowers her arm for Charlie to grab.

“Braains!” Charlie hears all around him as he takes Junko’s hand.

Before he makes it up, the zombies grab him by his lower section. They pull him back. Rainbow grabs Charlie’s other hand and tugs on him.

“Charlie!” Rainbow cries.

They pull him out of the zombies’ grasp and get him to the top of the wall. He stands up and looks down. The zombie horde fills the area below them, leaving not an inch of ground.

“Fuck,” Charlie says. “That was close.”

He looks over at Rainbow Cat.

“You came back for me,” she says, tears in her eyes. “Even after what I did to you.”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t let you die. I still love you, no matter what you did.”

“Brains!” the zombies yell from below.

“I’m so sorry,” Rainbow says, burying her eyes in his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

“Forget about it,” Charlie says. “If we’re going to die we’ll die together.”

Rainbow nods her head. “Okay. As long as we’re together.”

As she leans in to kiss her husband, his legs break out from under him. Her lips hit nothing but air. Charlie falls from the wall, into the crowd of zombies below.

“No!” Junko yells, trying to catch him. She reaches out just a second too late.

Charlie screams as they bite into his skull and limbs, trying to get to the neural tissue. From inside of the horde below, Brick licks the blood off of his double-fisted sledgehammer. His eyes lock with Popcorn’s.

“Brains,” he says to her.

Popcorn shakes her head at the sight of her zombiefied boyfriend and jumps down to the other side of the wall.

As they chew through Charlie’s flesh, Rainbow reaches down to him. When he sees her through his twitching eyes, Charlie reaches out for her.

“I love you,” Rainbow cries, his fingers too far out of reach to meet hers.

“I love you, too,” Charlie says with a bloody smile. “…you bitch.”

The tips of their fingers touch for a brief moment, just barely. Then his body is ripped into eight different pieces.

“No…” Rainbow says, still reaching out for his hand as his arm is taken away from his body.

Junko pulls her back, but Rainbow won’t budge. She won’t take her eyes off of her husband’s severed head as it is pulled through the crowd.

“Let’s go!” Junko yells.

Rainbow finally turns away when a zombie cracks open Charlie’s skull like an egg, to get at the runny brains within.

They jump down on the other side of the wall, and run down the street to get as far away from the horde as they possibly can. Junko shakes her head at herself as she runs, realizing that none of the people she is with now are people she would have chosen to team up with. She’s stuck with a useless bitch who backstabbed her own husband and two punks, one who’s infected and one who’s a complete idiot. Still, she knows it’s better than going on alone. Those who go solo from the start never make it very far.

The last thing Rainbow Cat wanted was for her husband to die so soon in the game. If she wasn’t there she knows he would have lasted much longer, perhaps even made it all the way to the end. He had ingenuity, charisma, strategy. He would have been a perfect hero for the show, the one everyone rooted for back home in Platinum. But then he had to go and get himself killed rescuing her.

“That idiot,” she says, as they run into an alley to get off the main drag.

Rainbow lied about her reason for getting Charlie on the Zombie Survival reality game show. She didn’t do it for the money. She did it because she wanted people to read Charlie’s new book. Even though he was her favorite writer, she felt his books had gotten worse and worse ever since his first major success. The four books he published while they were living together in the Gold Quadrant were borderline crap. They didn’t have that raw emotion as his early books did. It didn’t seem like he was even trying anymore. For all she knows, his publishing company might have gone out of business just because people were no longer interested in their bestselling author.

But things changed after he was sent to the Copper Quadrant. He stopped writing for the money and started writing for the art. That is when he had created the greatest book Rainbow had ever read. A book about a couple struggling to make ends meet in the ghetto of Copper. It was a story about love and despair, isolation and hope. It was a story that everyone in Neo New York had to read. The kind of book that would change the way people think about how they live their lives.