Zombies and Shit (60 page)

As he falls, Vine sees the helicopter exploding in the air above him. His eyes close, the tears raising into the air.

“I failed,” Vine says to the voice in his head. “It was all for nothing…”

When his body hits the ground, his brain splatters across the horde of hungry undead.

Scavy can’t look away from the fire in the sky. He can’t believe it just happened.

“Let’s go, Scavy,” Popcorn tells him.

“…what happened?” he says.

He puts his hand into his face.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Popcorn says. “You don’t want to spend your last moments as a living human at this hospital. Come on.”

Scavy lifts himself to his feet, using his sniper rifle as a crutch, and follows his ex-girlfriend out of the parking lot, to find a good place to die.

Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla chuckles to himself as he watches the helicopter explode repeatedly on his monitor. He rewinds and zooms in on Junko’s face, to see her expression as the rocket hits.

“BOOM!” he yells, as it explodes.

He laughs louder.

“Did you have something to do with that, sir?” asks his assistant, a mousy woman with too-short hair and too-large glasses.

He looks over at her and whispers, “Of course I did.”

He scans the room for anyone paying attention, then curls his finger at her to draw her in closer. She goes to him.

“Here’s a secret,” Wayne says.

He switches monitors to a different camera, then zooms up on a mechjaw with a rocket launcher on its back.

“You see this little doggy?” he says. “These things were built by the government of the USA sometime before Z-Day. Hell, they were the things responsible for Z-Day. Back then, the government would send orders to the dogs via satellite.”

He looks at the girl with anticipation.

“And?” she asks.

“
And
I figured out that how to hack into that satellite,” he says. “The mechjaws were following my commands the whole time!”

“You rigged the game?” she asks.

He shushes her, looks around the room, then leans in closer. “No, I just gave them a little nudge and sent them in the right direction. Those mutts would have sat around doing nothing otherwise.”

“But you had a mechjaw blow up the helicopter?”

Wayne blows a puff of air at her through his white goatee. “That’s because Junko was on it. I couldn’t let
her
win. That would be stupid.”

“Why would it be stupid?”

He waves away her question. “The government doesn’t want anybody winning the contest anyway. It was hard enough convincing them to allow
one
person to win
once
. They don’t want anyone from Copper moving up to the higher quadrants.”

“Then why do you bother offering them a prize?”

“Because the audience loves it when the winners get a prize. Otherwise, the contest would be just a tad bit too cruel for them.”

“So the show’s not too cruel as long as there’s a chance that the lone survivor might get a prize?”

Wayne doesn’t like her tone. He frowns at her.

“Why don’t you get me some more coffee, okay?” he asks, then goes back to his monitor.

She nods. As she turns, she catches a glimpse at a picture on Wayne’s desk. She does a double take, then looks closer at the image. It is of a young girl, about fourteen years old.

“Isn’t that one of the contestants?” she asks, picking up the picture.

“Hmmm?” Wayne says, glancing over from his screen. “Oh, yeah. The little prostitute.” Then he goes back to the monitor.

“Why do you have a picture of one of the contestants framed on your desk?”

“Hmmm?” he asks again, as if he has no recollection of the conversation. “Oh, yeah. She was my daughter.”

The assistant’s face widens at him as he goes back to watching Junko explode over and over again. She isn’t sure if he’s joking or not. How could Wayne seriously put his own daughter on the show?

Adriana was the daughter of Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla from a previous relationship. She never knew he was her father. Her mother never told her about him.

Wayne was married to a wealthy woman who held a powerful seat in the Platinum courts. He had married her for the money, but because she was so much older than him he really wasn’t interested in her sexually. Instead, he had a series of affairs with various women on the side. One woman he had an affair with had become pregnant. She wanted him to divorce his wife and raise the child with her. He refused.

When she threatened to go to his wife with the information, Wayne used his influence to get her sent to the Copper Quadrant where she would have no contact with his wife whatsoever. Several years later, his wife died and he inherited the money. That’s when he began to wonder what had ever happened to the woman he had impregnated. He was curious about whatever became of this woman and his daughter.

He tracked her down, but realized he was too late. The woman was already dead, raped and killed. A common death for a beautiful fragile woman in the Copper Quadrant. But he discovered that his daughter was still alive. She was working as a prostitute on the worst side of town. The idea that his daughter was a prostitute was not surprising to him, but it made him feel a little ill inside. He decided he might want to get her out of this life, bring her back to the Platinum Quadrant.

When he first met his daughter, she was a scrawny young girl just barely through puberty. She had been turning tricks since she was nine.

“Hello, little girl,” Wayne said to her, smiling in her bright blue eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Adriana,” she said.

Wayne brushed her dark red hair out of her eyes.

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Do you want a blow?” she asked. “Or a fuck? If you want it in the ass it will be double because I’ve got a colon infection.”

He stepped back.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t come for that. I wanted to tell you—”

“You can’t talk to me unless you pay,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll pay for your time,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

“Whatever,” she said.

After he paid her pimp, she took him into a small bedroom with a leaky roof and a mattress stained with brown menstrual blood.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I’m your—”

She pulled off her shirt and took off her pants. Wayne stared at his daughter’s body. It seemed very familiar to him, yet alien. Her bony ribs popping out of her pale skin reminded him of his own body, when he was a child.

When she went to him to take off his pants, Wayne grabbed her hands.

“I’m your father,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “If you want to role play I can do that…”

She took off his pants. He was surprised to see that he had an erection. The idea of having sex with his daughter was exciting him, and the idea that she didn’t know who he really was excited him more.

“I want you to call me daddy,” he said to her, a big smile forming in his white goatee.

She knelt down, grabbed his penis with her small bony fingers, and looked up at him.

“Okay, daddy,” she said, widening her baby-soft lips.

“Now,” he said, breathing deeply. “Daddy wants to feel the back of your throat.”