Zombies and Shit (40 page)

After two months of visits, Nemy and Haroon had fallen in love. They didn’t talk much when he came to visit her. They spent their time in bed together, making love, caressing each other’s bodies, kissing one another with ferocious passion. Until the day it all ended.

One night, he had not propped the door open with his shoe correctly. The door had closed and he was locked in. Haroon jumped out of bed and went to the glass.

“It’s outside,” Nemy said, pointing at his shoe on the other side.

He rubbed at the tension building in his forehead.

“Come back to bed.” She pulled him to her and pressed their ears together.

Haroon shook her away.

“Do you know what this means?”

She didn’t.

“If I get caught in here I’m not going to be allowed to see you again.”

Her eyes widened.

Haroon banged on the glass, calling out for Terry. But he knew his friend wasn’t there. Terry was disgusted with hearing their lovemaking and started to clean up earlier, before Haroon got off work. Still, he kept banging on the glass until his fists were red.

“Stop,” Nemy said.

He kept banging.

“Stop.” She grabbed his fist. Her grip was so strong that resisting was like trying to bend steel. “We still have
now
. We should make the most of it.”

Then she wrapped her arm around him and kissed his neck. Tears flowed down his eyes. He wished he had the strength to pull his fist out of her fingers so he could punch the glass one more time, but she pulled his arm down around her body. He released his anger by kissing her with all the power he had in him. He grabbed her around the waist and picked her off the ground, taking her into the bed.

They made love with more passion than they ever had before, because they knew it would likely be their last chance. They tried to put a lifetime worth of lovemaking into a single night, and when all of Haroon’s energy was spent they lay together in each other’s arms. Haroon’s neck pressed against her smooth glistening cheek, Nemy’s finger tip snuggled inside of his belly button.

In the morning, Haroon awoke to a knocking on the glass door. When he looked up, there were a crowd of people gathered outside. A group of ten security guards and five doctors. The man in front was Dr. Chan, a hunched over Asian man with small eyes that sunk deep into their sockets. Haroon grabbed his clothes and put on his pants.

“I was wondering how Specimen #5 had become pregnant,” said Mr. Chan. “I was worried that she was able to reproduce asexually.”

Haroon paused when he heard that, then looked at Nemy. Her eyes narrowed at him.

“I’m sorry,” Haroon said, putting on his shirt. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to what?” Chan asked. “Fuck my specimen?”

Haroon and Nemy stepped out of the bed and went to the door.

“It wasn’t my intention to mess with your work. I just—

“Get him out of there,” Chan told the security officers. “He’s under arrest for committing an act of high treason.”

“What?” Haroon cried. “High treason?”

Five of the men came into the cell. Haroon backed away. They surrounded him. The two in front grabbed him and pulled him out of the cell.

“No,” Nemy said to Chan.

“No?” asked Dr. Chan, concerned by the disobedient tone in her voice.

“Don’t take him from me,” she said, with wide eyes. “I love him.”

The doctor was not pleased with her statement. “You what?”

“I love him!” she cried.

Haroon looked back. It was the first time she ever put emotion into her voice. A tear was coming from one eye.

Then she jumped at the door and reached her arm through the crack before it closed. She grabbed one of the guards who was trying to take away her love.

“Bring him back!” she cried, then she ripped off the guard’s arm.

As she fell back with the severed arm in her fist, the cell door slammed shut and the glass sprayed with blood. The armless guard dropped to the ground, screaming.

“You’ll never see him again,” said Dr. Chan.

As they dragged Haroon away, he looked back at her eyes wider than they’d ever been. Tears flowed down her face.

“Come back!” she yelled at Haroon. “Come back to me!”

She tossed her bed at the glass and pulled the sink out of the wall.

“We’ll see each other again some day,” Haroon told her. “I promise.”

Nemy dropped to the ground, reaching in his direction with her arms.

“We’ll be together again,” he yelled, as they took him out of the lab and dragged him down the hall.

And he was right. They are together again.

“Nemy!” he cries.

He runs to her.

He can’t stop smiling at the sight of her. They finally found each other. They finally can be together. He doesn’t think he even wants to go back to the island. He wants to find someplace else, where they can live alone together for the rest of their lives. Even if they barricade themselves in a building right here in this city, it would be like they were in her prison cell again. Together. Only he would be the one trapped in the cell and she would come and go, to get food and supplies. Then she can have her baby and they can all live together as one beautiful perfect family.

When he sees her face in the light of the low morning sun, she narrows her eyes at him. The same way she always does when she’s happy. Tears of joy flow down his eyes. He can’t wait to hold her again, make love to her again. He even can’t wait until she puts her finger in his belly button until it bleeds.

Something pushes him backward. He balances himself and looks down. A double-bladed sword is sticking through his chest. It is her sword. When he looks up at her, he sees her hand is raised. She had purposely thrown it at him.

“Nemy?” he says, as his blood gushes down his legs and he falls to the ground.

After Haroon had been escorted out of the lab, Dr. Chan looked down at his creation. She was on the ground, tears sprinkling onto her paper-white legs. He shook his head at the mess she had become.

“Have her memory wiped,” he said to the doctor next to him. “That asshole destroyed months of conditioning. We’re better off starting over from scratch.”

“What about the pregnancy?”

Dr. Chan thought about it as he wiped blood from his white tie.

“I’d like to dissect it,” said Dr. Chan, then he walked toward the exit. “Have an abortion arranged immediately.”

As Haroon bleeds to death on the roof of the hospital, he looks up at the sky. A helicopter flies overhead. A spurt of blood from an artery sprays up into the air. Then he sees his love leaning over him, her pale naked flesh glistening in the light, her eyes no longer narrow.

“At least I got to see you one last time,” Haroon says to her. “My beautiful Nemy…”

The woman bends down to him.

“My name isn’t Nemy,” she says. “It’s Nemesis.”

Then she rips her sword out of his chest, taking his insides out with it.

Scavy and Junko wake in an office on the upper floor of the white-bricked castle. The morning sun shines through on Scavy’s face. His yellow mohawk mostly flat to one side of his head. He didn’t get much sleep during the night. All the screaming and moaning from the zombie crowds outside kept him awake. Junko on the other hand slept like a baby. Curled up under the desk, snoring loudly for hours. He’s surprised her snoring didn’t attract the zombies outside.

When Junko stands up, she stretches and smile-yawns, as if she just had the best night of sleep in her life.

“How were you able to sleep like that?” Scavy asks.

“Practice,” she says. “I slept on the streets of Copper every night until I was capable of sleeping pretty much anywhere, even in the most dangerous sides of town. Contestants rarely get sleep in the Red Zone. Lack of sleep often gets people killed, especially on the third day.”

“Good thing for me we don’t have to worry about a third day anymore,” Scavy says.

“Don’t feel so lucky. It’s going to be damn near impossible to get to the helicopter before those merc punks unless we find some transportation.”

“What kind of transportation can we get out here? Bicycles?”

“Probably not even that. Skateboards maybe, but they would be useless on the street out there even if we knew how to ride them.”

Scavy doesn’t even know what a skateboard is.

“So what do we do?” he asks.

“Get lucky,” she says.