they were told. Xiu was the problem. She was a troublemaker. She didn’t listen to the Heads of her guardian unit or the other elder units. She did whatever she wanted.
“Let’s go,” Xiu told her Arms, as they snuck through the trees away from their guardians.
Carlos’ unit wasn’t watching them. They were busy collecting bushels of wild marijuana into potato sacks. Xiu led Zippo and Vine away from their guardians, through the trees, into the jungle, to hunt down the living dead.
As a youth, Xiu was fascinated by the different kinds of zombies that were out there in the world. She wanted to encounter every kind—from white American zombies, to Mexican zombies, to morbidly obese zombies, to midget zombies. But what she always wanted to find were the zombies from the indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest.
When she saw the first of them, Xiu smiled. The zombie stumbled through the trees, covered in mulched vegetation, beetles and grub worms burrowed in and out of its flesh. On the side of its head, there is a wasp nest covering much of its face.
“I get this one,” Xiu said, aiming a rifle at the corpse’s head.
When she fired, the bullet went through a section of the wasp nest before passing into its brain. The zombie stumbled back, then turned to face Xiu’s unit, wasps buzzing angrily around its head. The zombie groaned and stepped forward.
“Now everyone,” Xiu said.
And they all shot bullets into the zombie, as it lumbered toward them.
“Xiu!” called a voice from back the way they came.
Their guardian unit had heard the gunshots. Vine and Zippo looked to her for instruction.
“Keep firing,” she said, with a mischievous smile.
The bullets didn’t take the zombie down, but the three punks weren’t interesting in stopping it. They just wanted to use it as target practice. As the zombie came closer, the wasps began to swarm.
Zippo was stung first. He flinched a bit, but kept on firing. Vine was stung by three of them. The bugs left Xiu alone, so she continued firing her rifle. The two boys whimpered as more and more wasps stung them, crawling across their face and down the collars of their shirts. Xiu didn’t order a retreat. She continued shooting, giggling at the chunks of mulched flesh exploding from the corpse’s body.
“Are we going to leave soon?” Zippo whined, cringing at the bugs crawling on his face.
“No,” Xiu said, annoyed that her Left Arm was expressing an attitude different from hers.
The first wasp stung Xiu and she slapped it dead against her wrist, then continued shooting. As the zombie reached them, Xiu had them withdraw a few yards. They walked backwards through the jungle, right into the middle of six more walking corpses that were coming at them from behind, drawn to the sound of gunfire.
Just before one of the corpses grabbed Xiu by the back of her neck, a shotgun blast separated its head from its neck. Xiu turned to see her guardian, Carlos, coming through the woods after them.
“Get down!” Carlos yelled.
Xiu did not get down, so neither did the rest of her unit. They turned and fired on the zombies.
“I said get down!” Carlos ran up to Xiu and yanked her away from the shambling corpses. Then his unit hacked at zombies with axes and machetes, cutting off limbs and heads.
Forgetting about the original zombie that was coming at them, Zippo was grabbed from behind. He thrashed around to free himself form the zombies’ grasp, causing the wasp nest to break off the corpse’s head and land on his shoulder. Behind the newly exposed flesh, Zippo saw the wasp nest was not just on the outside of the zombie, the wasps had burrowed into its hollowed-out skull and chest. Dozens of wasps flew out of the zombie’s hive-like cavities, stinging Zippo in the face and neck.
When Xiu turned around, she was horrified at what was happening to her Left Arm. Little Zippo, barely fourteen years old, was covered in angry wasps, unable to defend himself from the zombie that had a hold of him. She was in too much shock to save Zippo. She was in too much shock to command Vine to save him.
Carlos went in with a machete and chopped the zombie away from Zippo, allowing several wasps to sting him as he pulled the boy to safety. As other zombies poured into the vicinity, the six of them rushed out of the jungle. Xiu cried as Carlos carried Zippo in his arms. The boy wasn’t able to walk on his own anymore. When Zippo weakly turned his head to Xiu, he saw that she was crying. This made him cry, too.
Back on the ship, Zippo was treated in the sick bay. He was very upset—not because he was in a tremendous amount of pain, but because Xiu was in trouble.
“You almost got him killed back there,” Carlos yelled.
Xiu shrank before him.
“You are a Head,” said Carlos. “You have a responsibility to keep your Arms safe. They are not your play things to take advantage of. They depend on you to make the right decisions.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, tears flowing down her cheeks.
“I don’t want you to apologize,” Carlos said. “I want you to grow up and take your duty seriously.”
“I will.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I promise.”
From that moment on, Xiu stopped messing around. She stopped thinking only of herself and started focusing on what was best for her unit. After five years of training hard, Xiu’s unit went from being the absolute worst unit in the tribe to one of the strongest. She didn’t do it for Carlos. She didn’t do it for herself. She did it so that nothing bad would ever happen to Zippo ever again.
When they get to the roof, Xiu is surprised to see how many zombies are up there waiting for them. The building rumbles beneath their feet as they scurry across the rooftop.
“This place is collapsing,” Xiu yells. “We need to get off of here now.”
Zombies spill in from the stairwell behind them. By the time they get to the middle of the roof, they are surrounded. Zippo and Vine go back-to-back, protecting Xiu in the middle. They fire into the crowd with all they’ve got.
A zombie covered in barbed wire comes at Zippo, but as Zippo fires his shotgun it only clicks.
“It’s jammed,” Zippo yells.
Xiu throws her last axe at the zombie, cutting through its chest. But the axe gets tangled in the barbed wire, so it doesn’t return to her. When the corpse gets to Zippo, he uses the shotgun as a bat and hits the zombie so hard that the barrel of the gun bends a couple of inches, rendering it useless.
When Xiu turns to Vine for help, the roaring AK-47 clicks into silence.
“I’m out!” Vine says, tossing the gun away.
The ground beneath them splinters apart, cracking open under the weight of the mob as it closes in on them. Out of ammo and axes, they stand back-to-back, waiting for Xiu’s command. A camera ball floats above them, beeping with anticipation. Miles away, the camera operator sits on the edge of his seat, refusing to blink, determined to capture their deaths on film.
Xiu looks over at Vine.
“It’s time,” she says.
Vine nods.
Then Zippo and Xiu duck to the ground, as Vine reveals his hidden weaponry. Out of his wrists, two metal hooks appear as he clenches his fists. Then he spins in a circle and in one blink, twenty of the zombies surrounding them are cut in half at the waist. The zombies’ upper halves fall to the ground as their legs stumble forward.
Miles away, the operator of the camera ball jumps out of his seat, completely mystified by how Contestant #19 just took out so many zombies within a split second.
“What happened?” asks Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla, peeking over his shoulder.
“I have no fucking clue,” says the camera ball operator. “He just spun around and then all of a sudden the zombies were cut in half.”
“Rewind it,” Wayne says. “Play it in slow motion.”
The camera operator rewinds the video. In slow motion, they see the hooks that appeared out of Vine’s wrists. When Vine spun around in a circle, the hooks flew almost thirty feet out of his wrists. Connected to each hook is a hair-thin strand of razor-sharp steel wire. The wire cut through twenty of the zombies as Vine spun in a
