Zombies and Shit

seven years old, she was wearing five-inch platform combat boots two sizes too large, three tattoos, a lip ring, and a black and red mohawk.

“Wh-what are you doing, little girl?” The Head of a Mongol unit asked her in Mexican Spanish.

Xiu shrugged and stepped back to examine her painting on the half-collapsed brick wall.

She responded in Chilean Spanish. “Making art.”

“Are you all alone out here?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “Yeah.”

The Head of the unit held out his hand.

“My name is Carlos. You should come with us.”

Xiu never remembers this when she’s asked about it. She doesn’t remember anything from back then. The Mongols guess that she came from a band of Chilean punks who had survived in the wasteland for several decades all on their own. They aren’t sure if she is the only survivor from that group or if she had become separated from them at some point. Either way, they decided to take her with them. Not because they pitied her, but because they were impressed by how a seven-year-old girl could survive in the wasteland all by herself for so long without difficulty. There was also a youth unit within their clan that was in need of a new Head. These Mongols knew this girl had the smarts to be a unit leader.

Vine spends so much time examining each of the train cars for hidden zombies, that he doesn’t notice the zombies crawling out of the wrecked dump truck behind Xiu and Zippo.

“Let’s go,” Xiu says, and turns to face several figures lunging out of the shadows toward her.

There are a dozen of them. All children. The zombies had been hibernating inside of the gravel-filled dump truck for so long that their flesh has become coated in a layer of gravel fused to their rotten flesh.

“Behind you,” Xiu yells at Zippo as four more come out behind him.

Xiu throws one of her hand-axes at an undead child coming at Zippo, but the blade just bounces off of its gravel skin.

“Run,” Xiu says.

They leap out from the middle of the gravel creatures, and loop around toward Vine. Zippo fires two shells into a zombie in their path, causing bits of stone to fly in the air. The zombie is pushed back, but the blast does no real damage to its body.

Vine drops to the ground and fires his AK-47 at the creatures, slowing them down a bit until his friends get behind him. Then the three continue through the rail yard.

Xiu looks back at the rocky figures lumbering across the train tracks. Stones in their mouths clack together as they try to cry out for brains. The undead children come after them, but are too weighed down by their heavy gravel skin to catch up.

“Move out,” Xiu says.

As they turn to go up the hill out of the rail yard, they see a horde of zombies assembling above them, drawn to the sound of gunfire. Before they reach the bottom of the hill, they realize that there are hundreds of them up there. The largest mob of zombies they have encountered yet.

“Is there a way around?” Zippo asks.

Xiu shakes her head. “We go through.”

Without second thought, Vine dashes forward, ready to cut them a path through the crowd.

“Conserve your ammo if possible,” Xiu says in her Chilean accent. “We still have a long way to go.”

Xiu has retained her Chilean accent for all these years, and being the dominant member of her unit her two men conformed to her way of speaking and developed the accent as well.

Mongol units are chosen at birth. They are matched up the day they are separated from their birth parents, when they are old enough to walk. These children grow up together, their lives intertwined, as inseparable as conjoined twins. When a unit is matched together, they are immediately assigned their position in the unit: Head, Right Arm, or Left Arm. Sometimes these positions are determined at random, other times they are determined based on their early behavior or the strength of their birth parents. Whoever becomes the Head is the one who decides how their unit behaves, thinks, moves, and reacts. The two Arms completely conform to their Head’s ideals, tastes, opinions, and mannerisms, mimicking their leader in every possible way.

“Although you were not born a Mongol,” Carlos said, taking young Xiu aboard his crew’s ship. “You will become the Head of a Mongol unit.”

Xiu nodded, but didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. She boarded their ship in her clunky combat boots and scale mail vest, looking around the vessel as if it was a spaceship from another world. The ship was patch-worked together with scrap metal and dozens of different types of wood salvaged from several different sources. It had been repaired and reinforced many times over the decades. The Mongols around her were all grouped into threes, some of them mopping the deck together, some drinking papaya wine together, some sharpening swords together.

Although each Mongol unit was a tight family, all of the units on a Mongol ship were an extended family. They called this extended family their crew.

“Hi!” Xiu said to a unit of older Mongols.

They ignored her, drinking wine and playing cards.

“I’m Xiu,” she said.

Carlos took her away from their table.

“They won’t recognize you while you are an individual,” Carlos said. “Individuals are ghosts to the Mongols. You must be joined with your unit before anyone will recognize you. Otherwise you will be ignored.”

“You don’t ignore me?” Xiu looked up at him and his unit, her chubby round face covered in red spray paint.

“That’s because we’re doctors,” Carlos said. “Part of our job is to heal broken units, so we are allowed to speak to ghosts.”

One of the hardest aspects of Mongol culture is when a unit loses a member. Since they act as one being, losing an Arm can be devastating. Some units never recover from that. Severed units are ghosts to the rest of their tribe until a doctor unit can put them back together again. The doctors take broken units and combine them with parts from other broken units, until they are whole again. But these new units never function quite as well as their original units. They are like Frankenstein’s monster—body parts from various dead bodies sewn together to form a new being. It sometimes works okay when it is just a Left Arm that is replaced, but a Head is a completely different story.

Zippo and Vine had lost the Head of their unit when they were six years old. The little girl had died of Malaria, leaving her two Arms lost and afraid. They spent their time sitting quietly in the dark together, not speaking or eating, completely unsure how to move or act or speak without their Head telling them what to do.

“I brought you into the tribe to be the new Head for Zippo and Vine’s unit,” Carlos told Xiu. “They need you more than anything. It is likely they will die without their Head. Without you.”

“I will save their lives just by telling them what to do?”

“Hopefully. When a new appendage is connected to a body, there is always a chance that the body will reject it. If Zippo and Vine reject you they will likely die.”

“Isn’t there anyone else who can be their Head?”

“There is one other ghost their age, but he is both a male and a Right Arm. Zippo and Vine require a female Head.”

“Can’t the Right Arm just become a Head?” Xiu asks.

“It is possible for a Right Arm to become a Left Arm, or a Head to become an Arm, but an Arm has never successfully been able to transform into a Head. Arms spend their entire lives following. They have no idea how to lead.”

Carlos’ unit brought Xiu to the sick bay, to introduce her to her new Arms. Zippo and Vine are curled together in a corner, staring up at the hospital bed next to them.

“Their Head, Rosa, died here,” Carlos said, pointing at the bed. “They haven’t moved from that spot since the day of her death.”

Xiu crouched down to take a peek at them from under the bed. She saw them cradling each other, wiping