Tony took off his sweat-stained shirt, revealing a collage of black sunflower tattoos. “Even if I agreed, how the hell would I get the stuff from Copper to Silver? They’d never let me through the barrier without a pass and they don’t issue passes to anybody. I don’t even know how you managed to get one.”
“I’ve got my connections,” Alonzo said. “I’ve already arranged to have it smuggled through the produce shipments.”
Tony put his mop in a doorless closet. “I don’t know, Uncle Alonzo. My shop’s doing fine. I’m the top tattoo artist in Copper. Most of my clients are assholes, but they respect me.”
“But you make shit,” Alonzo said. “You knocked up that whore girlfriend of yours. You need to make some real money if you’re going to raise a kid.”
“I’ll do it my way,” Tony said. “If I’m going to be a dad, I need to do honest work.”
“Honest work?” Alonzo said. “You sound like your idiot father.”
Tony glared at him when he said that. It was too soon to say shit about his father. “Find somebody else.”
“But you’re family,” Alonzo said. “Believe it or not, I care about what happens to you. You’ve been the closest thing I’ve had to a son. I want to see you living better. If business goes well I might even be able to get you citizenship in Silver.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” he replied.
Alonzo stood up. “You’re starting to piss me off, kid.”
“What do you want me to say? I don’t want to work with you. The answer is no.”
“Do you want to raise your kid in this dump?” Alonzo said, getting in his nephew’s face. “Do you want to end up like your dumbfuck father? Knifed in an alley by some punk over pocket change?”
“Don’t you fucking talk about him like that, Uncle Alonzo.” Tony’s eyes were burning red.
“I’m just trying to look out for you, ya moron,” Alonzo yelled. “If you want to end up like my idiot brother then go right ahead. Have a kid with some bitch when you got no money. See what happens once the slut gets sick of you and takes off, leaving you to raise the brat on your own. You’ll slave away for the rest of your life keeping your kid fed, then one day you’ll find a knife in your guts. Because, like your father, you were too much of a dumbfuck to make the right decisions.”
Then Tony punched Alonzo in the stomach with all of his strength. Alonzo slumped over and gasped, nearly puking out his breakfast of smoked halibut and poached eggs. Tony didn’t say anything. He stepped away from his uncle and started putting away his inks.
“Fine, if that’s how you want it…” Alonzo held his stomach and caught his breath. Then he unfolded a jackknife and cut his nephew’s throat while his back was turned. “I don’t need a worthless fuck like you anyway.”
Tony’s eyes widened as his blood gushed down his black sunflower tattoos. His body landed on the floor, in the spot he had just mopped.
“Stupid little shit,” Alonzo said, folding up the knife.
He didn’t even bat an eye as he passed his nephew’s pregnant girlfriend on the street outside of the tattoo shop. He just spit on the ground by her feet and walked on.
When they get to the roof of the hotel, Adriana and Alonzo see Heinz peering over the edge, tying shreds of ancient bedsheets into a rope. Heinz’s suit and coat are perfectly clean, despite being a resident of the Copper District. His trench coat flutters in the cool breeze as he stares up at the violent clouds that smother the sky around them. The sound of moaning zombies echoes through the yard. A camera ball hovers by his head.
“What are you doing?” Alonzo asks.
Heinz finishes his sheet-rope and looks over at the obese man.
“Give me your bag,” Heinz says.
Heinz lifts up his backpack. “Why?”
“It’s the smallest.” Heinz snatches it out of his hand and ties the end of the rope to the straps. “Get back.”
After the fat man and the teen prostitute back away, Heinz runs like a pole-vaulter and tosses the backpack over the edge of the roof. It goes over the zombies, past the yard, and lands outside of the perimeter. The electronic lock beeps off.
Then Heinz reels the backpack in with the rope, pulling it up to them. He hands it back to Alonzo. When Alonzo opens it, he pulls out his weapon: a .45 caliber revolver.
Alonzo smiles. He likes the way it feels in his hand. Then he looks down at Heinz’s enormous mountaineering pack.
“How are you going to toss that big thing all the way over there?”
“I won’t.” Heinz pulls his blond bangs out of his eye. “I’ll have to find another way.” He holds out his hand to Adriana’s pack. “Now you.”
When the second bag is thrown, it doesn’t make it quite as far. As Heinz reels it back up, the movement catches the attention of a zombie and it lunges on top of the pack. Heinz tugs and the bag yanks free of the zombie’s grasp, but now it is covered in purple slime-meat.
Five more zombies go for the bag, they grab at it, fight over it. The rope goes loose as a knot in the rope comes undone. The bag is lost.
Before the trio back away from the edge of the roof, the zombies look up to see where the sheet-rope is falling from. When they see the three contestants, their mouths begin to salivate a green fluid.
“Fresh brains!”
The zombies rush toward the building, a dozen more of them follow suit. In the distance, zombies recently woken from hibernation are heading their way.
Heinz turns to Alonzo. “Go downstairs and hold them off.” Then to Adriana. “Reinforce those doors. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Who the fuck says you can boss me around, pal?” Alonzo says.
“You’re the only one with a gun,” Heinz says. “Use it if you want to live.”
Alonzo looks over at the door leading downstairs. His gun is shaking in his hands. He doesn’t want to go down there.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Heinz says, raising his tone to him, his shiny pronounced forehead reflecting the fat man’s scared bulgy face back at him.
Growing up on an oil rig, Alonzo hadn’t seen many zombies in his life. The only time he had ever seen one was when he was a kid, the one that killed his little sister.
They thought they were safe. They had hundreds of miles of ocean between them and any landmass inhabited by the living dead. But one of them still got to them. Nobody is sure how it happened. The crew of the rig assumed it had been caught up in a riptide and was pulled out to sea or came up from the bottom of the ocean, from some kind of sunken ship.
Little Alonzo had heard stories about the walking dead, but he didn’t know what to expect. He had seen dead bodies before, but never anything like the creature that crawled on board that night.
He awoke to his sister’s screams across the hall. He was used to her nightmares. She would wake up screaming regularly, after having dreams about their house sinking into the sea, or about Father’s ship getting sunk by an infected whale while he was off on business. Alonzo always went to her room to comfort her. If he didn’t she would keep the whole ship awake all night.
When he left his room, he noticed the trail of black slime in the corridor leading into his sister’s cabin. The zombie had skipped his brother’s room and all of the other rooms along the way. It had chosen the one cabin that had left its door open. Alonzo’s little sister was too scared to sleep with her door shut.
The zombie was eating his sister’s brains out of her skull as young Alonzo entered her cabin. The thing was like a skeleton with gray patches of flesh dangling from the bones. Its chest was covered in barnacles and seaweed. Tiny fish were flapping around in its hollow chest, half-filled with water. A crab crawled across its shoulder and disappeared into its neck. Its eyeballs were like that of a sea slugs’.
His sister was no longer moving. The zombie flopped her corpse around like a doll as it ferociously tore the meat out of her split-open head. It gurgled and hissed as it consumed her. The image drilled a hole into young
