Zombies and Shit (61 page)

For the next year, Wayne Rizla became Adriana’s best customer. He would have sex with her in every way he could possibly imagine, always demanding she treat him as if he was her father. She never had a clue that he was really her father, that it wasn’t just a sick game. Wayne relished the thought of it, every time he came inside of her.

Then Wayne came up with the idea of putting Adriana on his show. He had put many of her prostitute friends on the show before. The idea of seeing his daughter as a contestant on
Zombie Survival
excited him sexually. It turned him on knowing that she never knew he was her father, never knew he was the reason she was sentenced to death. It was all his little secret. His and his alone. That is, until his assistant asked him about it.

“Is she really your daughter?” Wayne’s assistant asks.

“Yes,” Wayne says. “It’s a pity she didn’t last very long…”

The assistant puts down the picture and rushes to get her boss his coffee.

“Here’s to a great season everyone!” yells the director of photography, popping open a bottle of sparkling wine. “The best one ever!”

The camera crew cheers and holds out their glasses to catch the bubbling wine.Wayne gets up and peeks out from behind his desk.

“What are you all doing?” he yells. “It’s not time to celebrate.”

“But the show’s over,” says the director. “The helicopter blew up.”

“There’s still a couple of survivors out there,” Wayne says.

“But they’re all infected,” says the director. “They’re basically dead.”

“The show’s not over until each and every one of them is dead,” Wayne says.

“Okay…” the director says, frowning. “Everyone, back to work. Let’s film the final contestants as they turn into zombies…”

As the crew go back to their monitors, the director shakes his head at the producer.

“It’s going to be worthless footage,” he tells Wayne. “There’s nothing more boring than watching infected contestants turn into zombies.”

“Not necessarily,” Wayne says.

Wayne turns and goes back to his desk. He brings up the program he used to connect with the satellite system.

“I’ll just have to send the dogs after the scraps,” Wayne says to himself. Then he sends the order through the satellite to the mechjaws, commanding them to hunt down and destroy the final contestants.

Rainbow Cat is locked in a hospital room, sitting on the floor in the corner. Behind the door, dozens of zombies try to break through. They slam against the frame, trying to tear it down, screaming out for her brains.

In front of her, a camera ball films her face. It hovers in the air, in the position she had placed it. She had brought the camera ball into the room with her for a reason. She has something to say to the people in the Platinum Quadrant.

“My husband was Charles Hudson,” she says to the camera. “He was a contestant on this show, as you surely already know. He was the greatest writer on the island. Perhaps the greatest writer who ever lived. I brought him on the show so that you would pay attention to him again. After his publisher went out of business, he wasn’t able to get any more work out there for his audience to read.”

She pauses to wipe away her tears.

“In our home, in the drawer of his desk, is a copy of his last manuscript. The greatest novel he’s ever written. A masterpiece. This novel
must
be published. It is probably the most significant work of art of the past fifty years. I believe this with every ounce of my soul. I believe it so much that I was willing to sacrifice my own husband’s life, as well as my life, in order to bring this book to your attention.”

The door begins to split down the middle. Zombie fingers poke through the crack. Rainbow’s eyes widen and she begins to shake. She doesn’t have much time.

“Whoever is watching this,” she continues at a much faster pace. “If you’re a publisher or somebody with a lot of money who wants to invest in publishing this book, you must send somebody to Copper to retrieve the manuscript. You must publish it. I swear it will be worth it. Every one of you watching, I beg you to read it. I promise it will be the greatest book you will ever read in your lives.
Please
, I beg you. Publish his book.”

The door breaks open and the zombies spill in.

“Publish his book!” she shrieks.

Then, as she stares into the camera, she notices something off. The lens of the camera is missing. A tiny spark pops out of the top. She was so busy worrying about her message, that she didn’t pay attention to which camera ball she had grabbed. She took the one that Junko had slammed into her head. It’s broken. It hadn’t been filming anything she had just said.

Rainbow Cat looks up in a panic as the mass of zombies crowd around her.

Scavy and Popcorn walk down a street together, fifteen feet apart. Scavy limps along, using his rifle as a cane. The gnome is in his free arm with the solar-powered shotgun strapped to his back. Whenever a zombie comes near, he pulls up the shotgun and blasts out its legs. Then Popcorn kicks its face into the ground until it shuts its mouth.

“How are you feeling?” Popcorn asks.

Scavy shrugs. “In a lot of pain, I guess. Gogo sure fucked me up.”

“Sorry about that,” Popcorn says.

“It’s not your fault,” he says.

They walk silently for a bit.

“How about the virus?” she asks. “Are you starting to crave brains yet?”

He shakes his head. “No. I’m hungry, but not for brains.”

Another silence.

“She wouldn’t have made it, you know?” Popcorn says.

“Who? Junko?”

“Yeah.” Popcorn brushes her pink hair from her face. “They would have taken her out before she made it back to Platinum. I’m sure they’re pretty cautious about that kind of thing.”

Scavy nods. “I know… Still, I would have preferred not to know for sure.”

“Yeah…” Popcorn says. “I guess not.”

They stop. Scavy sits down on an iron bench and looks out at the wasteland around them.

“Ever think we’d end up dying out here?” he asks.

“Who’s dying?” she says, sitting on the street across from him. “We’re going to live forever. As zombies.”

“You ever imagine something like this would happen to us?” Scavy asks.

Popcorn smiles.

“Strangely,” she says, “this is exactly how I imagined we’d end up. Just you and me. Alone in a destroyed city. Though I always figured we would have been the ones to destroy it.”

Scavy laughs.

“It could have been worse,” he says. “We could have grown old together. Got married. Had kids. Worked on the docks for shit pay.”

“Ewww…” Popcorn says.

Then they sit in silence for a while, staring at the pink and orange light reflecting from the clouds on the horizon.

Rainbow Cat leaps to her feet and holds out her machete.

“I have to find another camera,” she says. “Where’s another camera!”

Gogo pushes her way through the zombies and lunges at Rainbow. The hippy stabs her through the chest, between her breasts. Gogo curves her body as if dancing on the stage of her old strip club, pulling the handle of the machete out of Rainbow’s hands.

As Rainbow tries to punch and kick her way through the crowd, Gogo grabs her around the throat and rips her head off. The zombies swarm her corpse as it hits the ground.

Gogo runs out of the room with Rainbow’s head, away from the other zombies. She cracks the head open like an egg, then tastes her first bite of fresh brain.

“Oh, hell
yeah
!” she moans, her eyes rolling in absolute bliss.

Gogo sits down, cross-legged, like a little kid eating her favorite sugary cereal. Using Rainbow’s skull as a bowl, Gogo chows down, scooping the brains out with her fingers and slurping them up with her tongue.