When Scavy turns on his flashlight, the beam brightens the face of a melty white zombie only inches away from him. The zombie’s hand raised to his face. Scavy shrieks and lowers his naginata spear into its head.
The zombie doesn’t fall. It doesn’t even move, frozen in place.
Junko goes over to the punk, “Shut the hell up.”
Scavy points at the zombie to show Junko why he screamed, but then he notices that the zombie doesn’t look much like a zombie.
“It’s just wax,” Junko says, pulling the spear out of the wax head. “We’re in a wax museum.”
The wax figure had been sculpted after Adolf Hitler, but over the decades the figure had melted into an unrecognizable blob. Adolf’s arm was raised in a sieg heil, but now the fingers had melted into gnarly curls. They look around at many other melted figures surrounding them.
“What did they use wax museums for?” Scavy asks.
“They made sculptures of celebrities and famous historical figures, probably so the public could pretend to meet them in person. Those clothes are real, though. If you can get them off of the sculpture you can wear them.”
Scavy nods and points at Hitler. “Who was this guy?”
“I believe he was one of America’s greatest presidents,” Junko says. “The one who freed the slaves.”
“Cool. I’ll wear his clothes then.”
As Scavy uses the blade of his spear to cut the melted wax off of the sculpture, Junko and Rainbow Cat patrol the area.
“We should get thicker layers of clothing for ourselves as well,” Junko says. “We at least need some gloves.”
All of the melted figures standing around them makes Rainbow Cat feel as if they’re in the middle of a zombie horde. Their faces are sagging in distorted ways, mouths stretched open, eyes popping out, necks melted away completely so that chins sink into chests or heads twist into awkward angles. In ways they are even more horrifying to Rainbow than the zombies.
She looks at one of the sculptures: a pirate man whose dreadlocks have melted and curled so much over time that he looks like a medusa. The sign below the sculpture reads, “Captain Jack Sparrow.” Bites have been taken out of the back of his head, as if a zombie had at one time thought he was a real person and tried to eat his brain.
“These clothes are all waxy,” Scavy yells, as he tries on the uniform.
Junko hushes him and then whispers back, “That’s good. The more water resistant the better.”
They get gloves from other figures: a Michael Jackson sculpture, a Darth Vader sculpture, and a Mork from Ork sculpture. Junko takes the Darth Vader gloves for herself.
“The gloves will make fighting a little more difficult,” Junko says, “but being able to push zombies off of you without getting infected is more important than any weapon.”
Once every inch of their skin below the neck is covered up, they head back toward the entrance. But something of interest has captured Rainbow’s attention.
“What’s that?” she asks Junko.
It is a wax sculpture of a cyborg dog.
“Was it from a science-fiction television show?” Rainbow asks, approaching the soggy animal sculpture.
Junko looks carefully at the animal near Rainbow. It is a large black German shepherd inside of a metal exo- skeleton. Long metal talons protrude from its paws, and mounted on its back are miniature Gatling guns and rocket launchers.
When Rainbow Cat leans down to look into the dog’s eyes, she says, “It looks so fake.”
“Back away from that thing,” Junko tells her.
“Why?” Rainbow says.
She backs away once the wax sculpture begins to growl.
“It’s not fake,” Junko says.
Then the creature lunges at Rainbow.
Junko pulls out her 9mm and fires at the dog’s snarling face, bits of tooth and eye spray over its snout as it barks ferociously. It ceases its attack, giving Rainbow Cat a chance to get away.
As Rainbow gets behind Junko, the Gatling gun on the dog’s back spins at them.
“Get down!” Junko cries, and the trio drops to the floor.
The gun whirrs, but no bullets are fired.
“It doesn’t have any ammo,” Junko says, as they get back to their feet. “Get it!”
Then she charges the creature, revving her chainsaw. The creature charges at her, then jumps in the air with its blade-like talons spread, aiming for her throat.
She cuts its head off in midair. When the headless body lands, it keeps charging forward. It runs past Scavy and Rainbow Cat, piling straight into a display of the cast of M.A.S.H. and attacks the set with its blade-like claws.
As the body of the cybernetic zombie dog rips apart a wax sculpture of Alan Alda, Scavy looks down on the severed dog head. It bites rapidly at the air and licks the pavement with its black tongue. Inside of its neck, there are wires and gears moving within the oozing flesh as if they’re a natural part of the animal’s body.
“I thought you said we should always run away from the zombies,” Scavy says. “But you fought that thing head on.”
“There’s no running away from those things,” Junko says, wiping blood off her chainsaw with a Doctor Who scarf. “They’re just way too fast.”
“So we get to fight these things when we come across them?” Scavy asks, excitedly.
“Not if we can avoid it,” Junko says. “If we run into one that’s fully armed we’re all dead.”
“What are they?” asks Rainbow Cat.
“Mechjaws,” Junko says. “You’ve never heard of them?”
They stare at her blankly.
“These things are responsible for the entire zombie outbreak, fifty years ago.”
Mechjaws were built by the US military several years before the zombie outbreak. They were designed to be immortal killing machines that could replace humans on the battlefield. One mechjaw was worth a thousand soldiers. It could not be killed by bullets. It had no need for food or sleep. It could survive in any terrain. Its orders could be beamed directly into its head from satellite. They were furry machines of death.
But they didn’t realize the serum designed to keep the animals alive could be transmitted by blood. They discovered this during their first field test. The first mechjaw was sent into the middle east to take out a terrorist cell. The researchers observing the test were pleased with the speed at which the mechjaw shot down each of its targets, but were then shocked by what it did to the corpses after they were all dead. The mechjaw ate all of their brains. Not their flesh, just their brains.
Then, like a virus, the chemical serum was transmitted to the dead terrorists. It brought them back to life and they became brain-eating monsters. The zombie outbreak was contained two days later and, despite the drawback, the project was considered a success.
The US military continued making mechjaws for several months until they learned that the outbreak had not been fully contained. A zombie foot had been left behind in the desert and was eventually eaten by a stray dog, which had become infected and bit a child who had become infected and bit his parents. Within a few days, the outbreak had spread throughout the Middle East and was already hitting Africa and Europe.
When news of the outbreak hit the U.S., the mechjaw project was cancelled. They were just about to salvage the mechjaw machinery and dispose of the organic material, when a group of militant animal rights activists broke into the mechjaw facility and released the dogs. Over two hundred mechjaws were unleashed on the east coast, killing and infecting every human in their path. With no orders to follow, they just followed their instincts: eat and destroy.
Z-Day, as the survivors called it, happened forty-eight hours after the mechjaws were released. That was the day practically every city on the planet had become under siege by the living dead. Some cities had it worse than others, but every city on the mainland was fighting for survival against the hordes of brain-eating undead.
