Haroon fires at the zombies furiously. “I can’t hold them off much longer.”
“Just get out of here,” Mr. T yells, tossing a zombie over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” Haroon says.
“I’ll be fine,” Mr. T says, raising his fist to punch out another zombie.
Before he could throw his punch, a zombie grabs Mr. T’s fist and bites down on his arm.
“T!” Haroon yells, as the zombie’s teeth break through the fabric of Mr. T’s clothing.
Haroon turns and moves on. He knows his friend has to be infected now. There’s no hope for him. Haroon has to go on by himself.
As Haroon disappears down the street, Mr. T gives the zombie on his arm a growling face. The zombie growls back, with his arm in its mouth.
“How come this guy isn’t dead?” Tim Lion asked his men, as Mr. T still stood there in front of them with three bullets placed directly in his chest.
“He didn’t even fall down,” one of his men said. “That should have killed him.”
Mr. T just glanced down at the holes in his red jumpsuit, then looked up at Tim Lion with a snarl on his face.
“I’m not just Mr. T, fool!” he said, ripping open his clothes to reveal a robot body made of gold-plated stainless steel. “I’m the motherfucking T-2000!”
The zombie’s eyes roll with confusion as all of its teeth crumble out of its head. Mr. T throws the corpse to the ground and pulls off his hooded sweatshirt. His golden metal body glimmers in the twilit sky.
Then he swings his fist of steel through three zombies at once, their heads exploding into a splash of red soup.
When Mr. T was cryogenically frozen, they did not preserve his entire body. They only preserved his head. So before Doctor Jacob Wyslen resurrected him, he had built Mr. T a robot body. One that was powerful enough to go on missions into the Red Zone and still come back in one piece. He still had artificial organs and still had to eat, sleep, and breathe like a normal human, but Mr. T’s new body was not made of flesh. It was made of steel.
When Wyslen showed Mr. T his new body in a mirror for the first time, Mr. T nodded in approval. Then he pointed at the numbers on the chest.
“T-2000?” Mr. T asked.
“That’s the model number,” Wyslen said. “The previous one I built was the S-1000. This is the first one that actually kept its host alive. There are several earlier models, but this is the best of them.”
“Why did you build these things?”
“I used to think that the best way to survive in a world of the living dead was for mankind to exchange their flesh for machinery.”
“That sounds almost as bad as becoming one of those dead things,” said Mr. T.
“You’re not happy with it?”
“I didn’t say that, Doc. Living in a metal body is better than being dead with no body.”
“Good.”
Mr. T checked his metal musculature out in the mirror, noticing that his muscle size was even larger than his previous life.
“T-2000,” Mr. T said to himself. “I like the ring to that.” Then he looked more carefully at his hands. “But this drab metal color has got to go…”
“Oh?” asked the doctor. “We can paint it if you want.”
“Not paint,” said Mr. T, then he pointed at a mountain of gold jewelry in a crate near his cryogenic chamber. “Melt all that down. Mr. T’s metal body needs some gold-plating.”
Then he gave the doctor a big twinkling smile.
The T-2000 stood in front of Tim Lion in his men. Their mouths dropped open at the sight of him.
“Now do you want to promise to quit selling drugs, or is Mr. T gonna have to pound some sense into the lot of you?”
Machine guns opened fire on him as a response. The bullets ricocheted off of his body, sending sparks into the air. The T-2000 just swatted them away like mosquitoes.
Mr. T punched his fist through a gangster’s chest, ripping his heart out through the backside. As the heart stopped beating in his golden hand, Mr. T said, “If you had a
Then he used the gangster’s corpse like a battering ram and drove its head through a bald man’s stomach. The bald man puked up his guts as he died.
“All of these scumbags make me want to puke, too,” Mr. T said to the dead gangster.
After the T-2000 dismembered and decapitated every last gangster in the club, filling the room with blood and gore, he went for the big man, Tim Lion, who was cowering on the floor in the corner, hiding under his green top hat.
“You better listen to the T-2000,” he told the cowering drug lord. “Crime doesn’t pay. And even if it does pay, there’s taxes on that pay. And the T-2000 is the tax man, come to collect. And he makes sure you pay your taxes in full, on time. And you can’t write off nothing, not even a company car.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Tim Lion asked.
Mr. T thought about it and realized his metaphor had gotten a little too convoluted.
“Forget it,” Mr. T said.
Then he ripped the man’s brain out through the top of his top hat.
On the way back to his shack on the beach, Mr. T came across the group of kids who had been doing drugs under the peer.
The kids began to shrink and tremble as they saw his blood-coated gold metal body towering over them.
“Don’t worry, kids,” he said. “I took care of that drug pusher for you. Now you don’t have to do drugs anymore. You’re going to have a bright future.”
Then he gave the kids a bright smile and a thumbs up.
The kids ran away.
As he continued down the street, whistling, a man with a white goatee stepped out of the shadows behind a strip club.
“I want him,” the man said to his associates in white masks.
“Now?”
He shook his head. “Wait until he’s at home, asleep. I wouldn’t want to get any more of you killed after that last guy went psycho on us.”
The men in white masks agreed, staring at the large metal man as he strutted happily down the street, envisioning a brighter tomorrow.
Heinz walks casually over charred corpses, heading toward the sound of two fellow contestants. It is the punk kid and that Japanese ex-host of the show. Their shoes are caked in thick meat mud as they trample over piles of mannequin limbs and cat skeletons, fleeing down the alleyway. Heinz hides behind a wall of charred yellow bricks, peeking out at them, ready to unleash a cloud of flames as they pass. But then he notices they are being chased by a pack of weaponized cyborg zombie dogs, snarling and thrashing and firing machinegun ammo. He decides it might be best to keep out of this fight.
Scavy and Junko collapse in a pile of blue flowers growing from black mulch behind a dumpster, catching their breaths.
“Did we lose them?” Junko asks.
Scavy looks back.
“They are chasing one of the floating cameras,” he says, watching the mechjaws jumping up and snapping at
