Zombies and Shit

“We can live better than we ever did before.”

“Lee.” Timothy raised his voice. “We aren’t going to survive the night.”

Lee looked behind him at the men with guns aimed at the soldiers that were being left behind. He knew that the main reason they were letting twenty percent of the soldiers come with them was so that they would protect them from those who were staying behind. Besides Lee, every single one of them were ready to kill their own friends in order to keep their seat on the boat.

“Forget about us and get out of here.” Then Timothy walked away, leaving Lee standing there in front the row of armed men.

As Lee drinks from his bottle, a new horde of zombies closes in on the bar, attracted to the noise of the last explosion. He doesn’t pay them any attention as he drinks his whiskey and thinks back on the day he left Timothy.

As his ship was setting sail, he saw that the soldiers left behind didn’t bother putting up a fight for survival. They just opened the gates and let the creatures in, welcoming their demise. Lee saw nothing but a blank stare on Timothy’s face as the zombies opened up his skull and chewed out his brain.

Just as his friends did on that day, Lee welcomes zombie teeth to his flesh. He sips his whiskey as they grab him by the shoulders and bite into his neck. The camera ball zooms in to get a good look at Lee’s face as he is eaten. The old soldier tries to ignore the zooming sounds of the camera, but they are too irritating to tune out.

Lee looks into the camera with a sneer. Black slime oozes from a zombie’s face down his chest. His blood sprays out of him across the bar, into his drink. Then he pulls something out of his pocket and holds it up to the camera.

“How fast can you fly, little bird?” the old man says to the camera, as he flicks the pin of the grenade across the bar.

When the camera sees the grenade in his hand, it flies backward. Lee smirks as it flees for safety yet refuses to miss the shot of Lee’s death. Just before the camera escapes the tavern, Lee tosses the grenade and it bounces off the side of the camera’s protective casing. Then the grenade explodes and smashes the camera against the wall.

Lee smiles wide as the bomb inside of the camera goes off. The bar becomes a flash of white light. Then Lee, the zombies, and the entire city block disappear into a cloud of fire.

Haroon rushes through the streets, avoiding the undead, trying desperately to find her.

He swears that he saw her among the group of contestants back at the hotel, but he only caught a glimpse of her during the escape. She’s good at blending into crowds, so it’s very possible she was with them the whole time without him noticing. If she is a contestant he must find her. She could save him. She could save them all.

His hand grips tightly to his weapon: a spiked club. It’s not exactly a club, more like a child-sized aluminum baseball bat, embedded with several metal studs, then painted black. He uses it to club zombies out of his way. He doesn’t use it to fight the undead. All he needs it for is to bat away reaching claws and biting mouths. Because of its smallish size, it’s lightweight and swings fast.

All he needs to do is run and keep an eye out for her. Once he finds her, she’ll be all the protection he’ll need. He wonders why she didn’t come to him back in the hotel. There’s no way she wouldn’t have recognized him. Perhaps she was just overwhelmed by the situation and her new environment. In her entire life, she had not seen much of the world—only the secret underground chambers beneath the Platinum Quadrant. He wasn’t even sure if she had seen the sun before. It makes sense that she would have been so overwhelmed that she wouldn’t have been paying attention to the people surrounding her.

If he can’t find her right away it would be good for him to find other people to team up with. He got separated from Junko’s group when he thought he’d seen her. Even though he wanted the group to stick together, he had to go after the woman to verify whether or not it was really her, but she got away too quickly. She jumped out of a hotel window and raced out of there so fast it was like a blurred ghost darting through the yard and disappearing into the shadows of the wasteland beyond. When he went back to find the others, they had already gone on without him.

Right now, if he wants to survive he must seek out other people. Perhaps they will help him find the woman he’s after and together they can find a different way out of the Red Zone, rather than competing for the one seat available on the helicopter. Unfortunately, most of the people are far ahead of him.

After an hour of searching, Haroon comes across another contestant. He hears a commotion coming a few blocks east and takes an alley to investigate. Crouching down and peering around a corner, he sees a crowd of flaming zombies crumbling to the ground. Beyond them, he sees Heinz marching through the street with his flamethrower in hand, burning down every living corpse that gets in his way.

When he sees how well the tall blond man seems to be doing against the undead, Haroon decides he would be the perfect person to team up with. Haroon stands up and heads toward the man, running to catch up to him.

A black leathery hand reaches out from an open door and grabs him by the arm. It pulls him into the shadows. Haroon opens his mouth to cry out to Heinz for help, but another leathery hand covers his mouth. His scream is muffled.

“Be quiet, fool,” says the attacker.

Haroon turns around to face the man who had grabbed him. At first, he just sees a large black form. Then he realizes that the large form is Laurence.

Laurence holds up his leather gloved hands to show that he means no harm.

“What did you do that for?” Haroon says.

“I was trying to save your sorry ass,” Laurence says. “You were thinking of making friends with that scumbag out there, weren’t you?”

Haroon nods.

“Let me show you something.” Laurence has Haroon look out of the window at Heinz’s clothing. He points at the swastika armband. “You see that symbol on his arm there? That means he’s not interested in making friends with you. It means he’s a racist nazi piece of trash.” Then he pulls Haroon back inside.

“I don’t understand,” Haroon says.

“Trust me,” Laurence says. “That guy’s no good. You’re better off alone than going with him. If you want to team up with somebody you can team up with me. I won’t let you down.”

Laurence gives him a thumbs up.

Haroon decides to believe Laurence, even though he’s never heard of nazis before. After Z-Day, a lot of Earth’s history had become lost and forgotten. The horrible events of the past paled in comparison to present day life. Although the schools in the Gold and Platinum Quadrants have been getting into teaching history over the past few years, the majority of the citizens of Neo New York just don’t know much about the old world. Most kids are assigned a career and then trained specifically for that position. Construction workers are raised to learn the skills to work construction. A farmer is raised to learn how to farm. They might also learn how to read and do basic math, but that’s about it. History just isn’t taught, perhaps because most people are trying very hard to forget the past.

When the two men enter the street to head back toward the alleyway, Haroon looks back at Heinz. The tall Aryan man is burning a zombie, a look of sadist pleasure stretches across his face. The zombie shrieks as it is burned. Upon closer inspection, Haroon notices that the zombie is Brick.

Zombie Brick cries in agony until he crumbles to ash. Then Heinz grabs the punk’s double-fisted sledgehammer from the ground, drapes it over his shoulder, and continues marching down the street.

As they backtrack through the alleyway, trying to get as much distance between them and Heinz as possible, Haroon notices Laurence is unarmed. He has his backpack slung over his shoulder, but otherwise he’s empty- handed.

“What weapon did you get?” Haroon asks, holding up his spiked club.

Laurence shakes his head. “Didn’t get one.”