well-lit office with a large window, then lock the door behind them.
“Just keep your voice down,” Junko whispers, “and they’re not going to find us.”
They drop to the ground and catch their breaths. When Junko gets a good look at the green slime on Scavy’s clothes, she says, “Did you get that shit on you?”
Scavy looks down. “Guess so.”
“Take ‘em off!” she whispers. “Now!”
She helps him carefully remove his shirt and pants, repeatedly calling him a
“Did it get on your skin?” she asks. “If it’s soaked into your skin and into your bloodstream you’re dead.”
When he is down to his underwear, Junko examines every inch of his skin for the green substance. She pulls him up to the window to be absolutely certain.
“I don’t see anything,” Scavy says.
Junko frowns. “You look fine, but from now on you listen to me.”
“You’ve got it,” Scavy says.
The punk has a new found respect for Junko ever since he saw her take down all of those zombies. He could hardly stand up to just one, but she made short work of nearly a dozen of them.
“You kicked ass out there,” he says. “Have you fought zombies before?”
Junko shakes her head.
She says, “No, but I’ve worked for this show long enough to know which attacks are most effective.”
Then she lies back to rest for a few minutes, getting off her feet so that they won’t blister.
“I also know what mistakes not to make,” she says with her eyes closed. “Like the mistake you made back there. If you want to survive you will listen to me from now on. I won’t bail you out next time.”
After a long pause, Rainbow Cat asks, “How was it?”
“What?” Junko asks.
“Working on the show?”
It was fun at first. Junko liked being treated like a celebrity, even though she was just a host for the show. The real stars were the people who fought and died for everyone’s amusement. Junko was just the pretty face and cheerful voice that introduced each episode of the season. She liked being pretty for a living. Her mother loved it even more, because her daughter was not just a pretty face but also a major sex symbol. There was no way Junko wasn’t going to end up marrying a very wealthy man.
Then she grew up and the novelty of being a celebrity wore off. Her mother died from choking on a wine cork, and her influence died with her. The desire to marry a wealthy man faded, because she already had plenty of money. She always knew the show she worked for was brutal and cruel, but she was raised to accept these things as normal, just as all children in the upper class districts were.
But one day she was asked on a date by a handsome young man with emerald green eyes. She fell in love with him the first time she looked into those deep eyes.
“How can you do it?” he asked her, over dinner. “How can you work for that horrible show?”
Junko smiled and shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“But it’s so cruel,” he said. “Those people are being sent to their death for our amusement.”
“But people die everyday,” she said. “The world is a cruel place. That’s just the way it is.”
Then he said a single word, one that she never thought to use in her privileged life.
He said, “
Junko was taken aback.
“Why does it have to be that way?” he asked. “Why does the world have to be so cruel?”
“The living dead took over,” she said. “They turned society into a dog-eat-dog world. We have to do what we do in order to survive.”
“That’s no excuse at all,” he said. “Our government has all the resources necessary to make life better for everyone in Neo New York. Instead it chooses to make life even better for the privileged few, while making life even worse for the unfortunate lower class citizens.”
“But most of those people are criminals,” she said. “They rape and murder each other. They do drugs. They prostitute their children. Maybe the show is cruel, but if anybody deserves it it’s those people.”
“I can’t believe you said that,” he said. “Nobody deserves that kind of fate. Those people are just victims of circumstance. They would have turned out no different than you or I if our government spread out its resources to everyone evenly.”
Junko was confused by his statement.
“That’s stupid,” she said, then took a big bite of salmon.
“Compassion is stupid?” he asked.
Junko continued chewing her salmon with a full cheek. She saw anger in his beautiful green eyes. She regretted arguing with him. If only she lied he might have liked her better.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, standing up from the table. “But only on the outside.”
Then he left the restaurant.
The next season of the show, she recognized one of the contestants by his emerald green eyes. The rest of his face she didn’t recognized. He looked like he had gone through hard times in the Copper Quadrant. When she asked her boss, The Wiz, what his story was, he told her that he was an idiot. He was a wealthy fiction publisher who had decided to close down his company, move to the Copper Quadrant, and give away all of his money to the people who lived there.
“Why would he do that?” Junko asked him.
Wayne’s white goatee fluffed out as he smiled. “He did it out of protest. He said he was disgusted by our way of life in Platinum, so he refused to live here anymore. Can you believe the moron?”
The next day, when Junko saw the young man with the emerald eyes die in uptown Scottsdale, Arizona, his head torn open by crispy sun-burnt zombies, she left the television station mortified. It was the first time a contestant had been somebody she knew. She had seen violent deaths so much since she started hosting Zombie Survival that she had become desensitized to it, but it was different with him. His emerald green eyes lying on the sidewalk next to his corpse was an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She went to a bar and drank until morning.
Although she was under contract to finish the season, she wanted to quit right then and there. But she had no choice but to finish it. She did such a bland job hosting the show that Wayne was happy to get rid of her.
“You’re getting too old anyway.” Those were the last words he ever said to her.
Wayne would have just left her alone had she just left the show, but she didn’t think quitting was enough. She wanted to get the show cancelled. She led protests against the show, she spent much of her savings on a smear campaign against the television show. She also wrote a book about her experience on the show and gave tons of copies away for free. Eventually, she ran out of money and needed to find work, but she had been blacklisted. She was forced to move to Copper.
The second she stepped foot in Copper, she knew Wayne was going to put her on the next season’s show. The negative publicity was not something he was going to just ignore. He would have his revenge.
So Junko trained every day. She did the military exercises. She studied previous episodes of the show. She practiced every possible weapon, from guns to swords. If Wayne put her on the show, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of watching her die. She was going to win it.
Then, once she gets back to the island, she’s going to use her new passport to visit the Platinum Quadrant. Then Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla is going to die.
Scavy runs across the street naked except for his underwear and boots—the metal of the sniper rifle cold against his bare skin—following Junko and Rainbow Cat to a place where he can get some new clothing. The camera ball they had lost in the zombie fight finds them and chases after the trio.
“What’s this place?” Scavy asks, as they enter a dark windowless building. He closes the door before the camera ball can squeeze in behind them.
Junko is too busy digging out her flashlight to respond. She flicks it on and moves deeper into the black, to get far away from the entrance.
