greatly. He had the perfect contestant for him.
“So who’s this contestant you have in mind?” Wayne said.
“Me,” said Oro.
Wayne squinted at him. He rarely got volunteers. “You? Why would I choose you for the show? There’s nothing special about you.”
“I am a genius,” Oro said.
Wayne continued as if he didn’t even hear him. “Look at you. You’re a shrimp. You have no muscle, no agility. You’re ugly, so there’s no sex appeal there…”
“But I’m a genius!” Oro stood up in his chair. “I would survive longer than any contestant you could ever find. Perhaps I’m not the strongest, fastest, or most attractive contestant, but I can outwit anybody. You have never met an intellect as impressive as mine before.”
Wayne laughed. Oro slapped the smile off of his face, then found several guns pointed at his chest.
“Put me on that show and I’ll show you what kind of genius I am,” Oro said, stubbing out his cigar on the producer’s plate.
“Fine,” Wayne said. “I’ll put you on.”
Wayne waved at his men and they took Oro by the elbows. Then he said, “I could use another easy kill anyway. Not enough early bloodshed and the viewers get annoyed.”
A few weeks later they gassed him at his shack by the garbage dump. He saw them coming and greeted them at the door.
“Are you ready?” one of them asked.
“A genius is always ready,” was his response.
Oro knows that he can win this contest, as long as he can protect his glider-cycle. He knows where the intruders are hiding. He had seen a girl with blonde dreadlocks peeking her head out from the entrance to the banquet hall.
“You can’t hide from a genius,” Oro says, pointing his rocket launcher at the wall they are hiding behind.
He fires the rocket at the wall, knowing the explosion will kill everyone on the other side of it. The wall crumbles in the fiery blast. On the other side, through the window, the trio of intruders run across the street, safe from the blast. They survived, but at least he scared them away.
The explosion causes more damage than Oro had expected. After the inner wall goes down, the outer castle wall soon follows. Through a ten foot opening through the pile of debris, the walking dead enter Oro’s sanctuary.
“Get back,” Oro says to the scab-encrusted corpses.
Oro grabs his putter and stomps toward the zombies. He hits one over the head so hard it collapses to the ground.
“I don’t have time for your interruptions,” he says, slamming them left and right with his gold club. “I am a genius. I require solitude.”
“Brains!” the zombies cry.
“Exactly,” he says.
As he beats the zombies back with his club, he recognizes that the scabbed-over skin of one of the zombies looks a lot like bacon. It’s like all of its skin had been put into his future invention, the baconator. This gives him an idea for marketing it to the executives: “Even brains can be baconized!”
Oro continues to daydream as he fights the dead. He doesn’t kill any of them. Once they fall down, they just get right back up, but he keeps swinging at them one at a time without tiring. He’s got the adrenalin of his fantasies to fuel him. He’s got a bright future to think about.
“I am a genius,” he says to the undead. “You can’t possibly defeat me.”
As Oro clobbers them one at a time, another contestant passes by the castle outside. It is Heinz. He stops for a moment to look at Oro fighting back the mob of zombies. Then he moves on.
Heinz doesn’t mind the small white man when there’s a Japanese bitch that needs to be killed. He can see her just down the street, running through the wandering dead. He’s almost got her. He imagines how her flesh will smell when he burns her alive.
“We’re being followed,” Junko tells Rainbow and Scavy, as she chainsaws a zombie’s head down the middle.
Scavy looks back.
“Don’t look back!” Junko yells. “We’ve got to lose him somehow.”
“Who is it?” Rainbow asks.
A camera ball floating over her head zooms in on the conversation.
“I don’t know.” Junko leads them farther down the road. “One of the less friendly contestants, I’d say. We should move faster.”
They pick up the pace, but the zombies crawling out of the surrounding buildings make it difficult to get away. They can’t dodge them, so they have to hack their way through corpse after corpse. This slows them down. Even worse than that, because they are doing all the zombie killing, their pursuer is able to move down the street quickly without the need to fight the already-incapacitated undead.
“He’s gaining on us,” Rainbow Cat says.
They turn around to see Heinz charging toward them, burning the few zombies left standing with his flame thrower. Junko tries to avoid going face-to-face with any of the lumbering dead, but they just keep coming. A zombie with a newspaper beard grabs her by the chainsaw arm. She fires her 9mm into its head but the small bullets just barely hold it back from biting into her wrist.
Heinz reaches into his pack and pulls out the two mechjaw heads. He straps them to his arms. Then opens fire. The trio use the zombies as cover, but the corpses’ flesh is so thin and liquidy that many bullets pierce through and whiz past Junko’s shoulder.
Rainbow Cat hacks the newspaper zombie with her machete until it lets go of Junko. The three of them duck for cover inside of an old apartment complex.
Scavy knocks back a zombie with his spear as it comes in from the street, then he stares back at Heinz. The large nazi makes a pretty big target, especially with those clunky tanks of fuel strapped to his back. If only he could get a better shot at him. Bullets tear into the bricks near Scavy’s head and he falls back.
“You two keep going,” Scavy tells Junko. “I’ll deal with this guy.”
“Are you serious?” Junko asks.
Scavy holds up his sniper rifle. “I can take him. I’ll go upstairs and find a good vantage point. All you have to do is lure him down the street until he gets past me, then I’ll get him from behind.”
“It’s a bad idea splitting up,” Junko says.
“I can do this,” Scavy says.
Junko stares him in the eyes, assessing him. She doesn’t like the idea of leaving him behind, even if he does end up taking down the nazi. Even though he’s an incompetent slacker, she’s learned she could trust him. Maybe not trust him enough to competently watch her back, but trust him enough not to stab her in the back. Which is more than she can say about Rainbow.
“Okay,” Junko says. “But you catch up to us as soon as you can. Don’t get yourself killed.”
Scavy flips the safety off of his rifle. “Don’t worry about me.”
Junko and Rainbow Cat stand up and prepare themselves to run.
“I’m going to fuck his ass up and shit.”
Junko nods, then the two girls take off running. Bullets mince the asphalt by their feet, as the two girls weave past the shrieking undead.
Scavy looks back at his opponent, to evaluate how much time he has to prepare. The nazi is only twenty yards off, blasting his Gatling gun, the mechjaw head growling against his fist. Then Scavy runs for the stairwell, to find a good sniper’s nest on an upper floor.
Scavy was a worthless, low life, conniving, thieving, drug-dealing, vandalizing, good for nothing punk. But when it came to his friends, he always had their back. If anybody fucked with one of his own he didn’t let them get
