Alonzo’s mind. An image that he was never able to get rid of. After the adults came running to his screams, and pulverized the zombie’s bones under the bottoms of fire extinguishers, Alonzo understood the horror that his parents had been trying to keep from him. He prayed he would never have to face a creature like that ever again.
When Alonzo gets downstairs, the zombies are already banging on one of the boarded doors.
“Get some more wood on there,” he tells Adriana.
The teenager looks at him with a terrified face.
“Don’t think about it, just do it,” he says. “I’ll cover you.”
She runs to the wood. Her hands shaking hard as the door rumbles next to her. When she pounds a nail with the hammer, her strikes are timid and sloppy, causing the nail to drop from her fingers.
Alonzo looks to his right, through a hotel room window. He sees a swarm of zombies running through the street toward the building. Three times as many as had earlier attacked. Beyond them, in the distance, he sees explosions erupting from street corners, as if some contestant out there is trying to fight off the zombie horde with a grenade launcher.
When he sees the chaos outside of the window, his gun hand begins to quiver. He imagines the zombie he saw that night inside of his sister’s bedroom. Now he imagines a hundred of them, all outside, all of them coming to get him. Ever since that day as a kid, he has been having nightmares that zombies are coming to get him. Now he is living that nightmare. Looking down at the gun in his hand, he contemplates pointing it at himself in order to wake up.
Heinz finishes knotting a second sheet-rope. He breaks a power line with a piece of brick and attaches it to a satellite dish on a higher section of the roof. Then he ties the sheet-rope to a strap on his giant mountaineer pack and snaps the other strap around the power line. He lets the pack go.
The zombies swarm the yard below as the pack slides down the power line. When it hits the edge of the rooftop of the next building, the locking mechanism beeps off. Then Heinz pulls the pack back up the power line with the sheet-rope.
He can hear a commotion of smashing and banging noises in the hotel rooms below as the zombies fill the building. He doesn’t have much faith in the defense capabilities of a fat slob and a childish whore, but he hopes they can hold back the creatures long enough for him to put his plan into action.
Alonzo stands behind Adriana and points his gun at the door, his pockets filled with extra ammunition. He can see the young girl’s ass cleavage hanging out of her tight vinyl shorts. Her shiny mounds point up at him like she’s begging him to take her from behind as she hammers boards on top of the other boards. He licks his lips with his cracked dry tongue.
Adriana didn’t know it, but Alonzo was there last night when she was selected as a contestant for
The prostitutes in Copper were numerous. They were cheap as hell and wouldn’t object to anything the client wanted them to do. What Alonzo was most interested in was the underage prostitutes. In Copper, the prostitutes came in any age you wanted. Girls in their prime, girls on the mature side, girls in their teens, and girls who haven’t even gone through puberty yet. The only age group that wasn’t available were elderly women, just because the people in Copper didn’t live long enough to make it into their golden years.
A lot of girls end up in prostitution when they’re kids because their parents decide they can’t afford to raise them anymore and toss them out into the streets. Prostitution is the only job a kid can get in Copper, so that’s where the majority of them end up.
Adriana is a typical case. She lost her mother when she was nine and went right into whoring herself on the streets. By ten she was addicted to Waste. By eleven she had lost all sense of self worth. By thirteen she had her first abortion. By fifteen she was chosen to be a contestant on the
The producers of the show bring at least a few prostitutes into every season. They add an element of sex appeal that viewers at home can’t get enough of. Viewers love to see prostitutes trading sex for protection. They love to see their slutty little bodies torn apart by the undead. There’s no shortage of whores in the Copper Quadrant, so they never fail to make it onto the show. They have even thought about maybe doing an all-hooker season of
Alonzo saw Adriana in an alley as he prowled the redlight district. She was giving some guy a blowjob behind a ten-foot pile of refuse. He knew he should have minded his own business, but Alonzo decided he would check it out. He could tell the girl was young. He thought she might have even been thirteen, which was the age he was looking for. He was hoping she would be willing to give him a blowjob after she was through with the other guy.
Standing with a smug smile on his face, Alonzo watched as the man came inside of her baby-soft lips. The man moaned slightly through his white goatee.
“There you go, my darling,” said the man, his penis still dangling in front of her face. “How does it taste?”
Adriana stared up at the man with her cheeks full of his gunk.
“Swirl it around on your tongue,” said the man, petting her dark red hair behind her ears, as if she were a kitty, or perhaps his daughter.
She did as he asked.
“That tastes good, doesn’t it?” he said. Then he used his hand to nod her head for him, as she continued swirling his cum around in her mouth.
Alonzo noticed that the man with the white goatee looked too clean to be from Copper. His clothes were too nice. His hair was too neat. He looked more like somebody from the Gold or Platinum Quadrant.
“Now swallow it,” he said. “Swallow it for me.”
She gulped it down dramatically for him, lifting her throat closer to his face so that he could hear it go down. She liked to please clients like this man. The only clients she respected were the ones who treated her like she was a worthless piece of shit.
“Good girl,” he said to her, stroking her hair. “That’s my good little girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”
Alonzo was getting a little too creeped out while watching this. He was pretty sure this was all just an act to get the man off, but Alonzo couldn’t stop imagining that he really was her father.
Before he turned around, men in white masks came out from the other side of the alley and grabbed Adriana from behind. She tried to scream, but they put a rag of chloroform over her mouth. Her muffled cries didn’t last long before she was out.
As Alonzo backed away, he kicked a whiskey bottle with the heel of his shoe, sending it clanging against the asphalt.
The man with the white goatee looked up at Alonzo.
“Take him, too,” he said, as he zipped up his fly.
The men in white chased after Alonzo. He ran across the street toward a strip bar, but the door he chose was the back entrance. It was locked from the other side. The men in white tackled him against the door and put the chloroform over his mouth. He slammed his fists against the door, but the music inside was too loud, the men inside were too focused on bouncing naked breasts.
Alonzo is so focused on Adriana’s tight little ass that he doesn’t notice the wood of the door cracking apart. Before Adriana can hammer in the last nail, a hand bursts through the door and grabs her by the hair. She screams.
“Braains!” says the zombie as it pushes its head through the hole in the door.
Alonzo fires his .45, throwing his arm back with the recoil, but blowing the right half of the zombie’s face clean off. This doesn’t faze the zombie, though. It continues to pull Adriana up by the hair. Alonzo grips the pistol tighter this time and fires again, just before the creature bites into the girl’s skull. The bullet shatters its lower jaw