Zombies and Shit (49 page)

They arrive outside of the hospital with the paintings shifting on their backs.

“This is it?” Vine asks.

“This is it,” Xiu says.

They pause there for a moment, staring at the crumbled asphalt ground. None of them are ready to part ways. Zippo trembles at the thought of losing Xiu. When she departs, they will just be two empty shells, severed limbs lying on the ground, waiting to be eaten by ants.

“Good journey,” Xiu tells Vine.

She wraps her arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Zippo wishes she was hugging him instead of Vine. Because the unit is Right-handed, she decides to say goodbye to her favorite Arm instead of both of them. He wishes he could feel what Vine is feeling as Xiu cries on his shoulder. He wishes he would have been a Right Arm instead of a Left Arm.

When Xiu lets go of Vine, she turns to Zippo. His mouth widens in surprise as she embraces him as well.

“Good journey, Zippo,” she says, her hot tears dripping down his neck.

Then she grabs him by the face and kisses him deeply. She holds him with all of her strength, releasing all of her love into him through her lips, her tears running down his cheeks.

When she stops kissing, she looks Zippo in the eyes. She tells him she loves him in the telepathic way Heads communicate with their Arms. Although Xiu’s unit is Right-handed, it is only because Vine is the stronger warrior of the two and a better partner in bed. But in Xiu’s heart, she loves Zippo the most of the two. Zippo was her little sweetheart ever since they were kids. She has always loved Zippo. Leaving him is the hardest part of their separation.

“I’ll finish the mission,” Xiu says, her voice cracking. “Our death won’t be for nothing.”

Then she takes the paintings from Zippo and Vine, and straps them to her back. She bends down and clicks her jumper kneecaps on. Then she nods at her Arms in a last quick goodbye. They nod back.

Xiu’s mechanical kneecaps launch her into the air, up to the roof of the hospital. Zippo looks up at her as she flies, his lips curling into a smile. Although they are separating, it fills his heart with warmth to know how much she loves him. He watches her for every last second, not blinking, enjoying his final view of the woman who was his wife, his mind, his voice, his all.

He wants to yell up at her, tell her he loves her for the first time. He has never told her he loves her, because she has never ordered him to do so. In order to tell her this, he would have to speak with his own free will. He would have to do something he wasn’t ordered to do. Even though it is against everything he has been taught, he decides to do it. He has to.

As Zippo opens his mouth to tell Xiu he loves her, a glimmer of light flashes into his vision. Then blood sprays into the sunlight. Xiu’s body falls to the earth in two separate pieces.

When the two Arms see their Head’s body on the ground by their feet, they don’t know what to do. Without her to give them commands, they are just dead limbs.

Zippo looks up at the roof of the hospital to see Nemesis standing there, her white naked body blocking out the sun. She holds out her hand and her double-bladed S-shaped sword returns to her.

“You fucking bitch,” Zippo yells at the genetically engineered super soldier. “I’m going to kill you!”

Zippo climbs up the cracked wall with his scissor-hands, then leaps at Nemesis. He swings his shears at her, clipping at her cold lizard flesh.

Xiu is not commanding Zippo, but he believes that she is. There are thoughts and commands filling his head, telling him what to do. He assumes they are Xiu’s thoughts, giving him orders telepathically from beyond the grave. He doesn’t realize that the thoughts are actually his own.

Nemesis swings her sword at Zippo, but he catches it in his claw and tosses it aside. The voices in his head are telling him to kill this creature, to avenge the woman he loves. He cries out Xiu’s name as he jump-kicks into the air, foot-scissors widening toward the woman’s paper-white neck.

A memory flashes into Zippo’s head. Since his head has always been filled with Xiu’s thoughts, he had completely forgotten the memory until now.

It was a time when they were still kids. They were training in the Red Zone at night. Their mission was to learn how to sleep in the same vicinity as the undead.

While surrounded by zombies, they weren’t supposed to be talking to each other, but Xiu rarely did as she was told. She covered them with a blanket and lit a flashlight.

“I want to show you something,” young Xiu told Zippo.

She whispered as quietly as she could so she wouldn’t wake Vine or attract the undead.

Little Zippo sat up and faced her.

“I made them,” Xiu said, as she pulled out two tiny dolls. One of them had blonde hair and the other short dark hair, both of them wearing dirty black dresses.

“Someday we are going to have children just like these,” Xiu said. “Two little girls. One with blonde hair and one with black. I want you to be the father of the one with black hair.”

Zippo smiled at the little doll. Its face crudely drawn with charcoal.

“I want you to keep it,” Xiu whispered. “Protect her for me.”

Zippo nodded and took the doll. He held it firmly in his arms to keep it safe. His previous Head had never given him anything before. He had never heard of a Head giving an Arm a gift like this, especially not a precious toy.

“Let’s play,” Xiu said. “Let’s pretend they are our babies and we have to take care of them.”

Zippo nodded excitedly. Then she kissed him on the lips. He blushed and looked up at her pretty round face.

“You’re the daddy,” she said. “And I’m the mommy.”

Zippo straightened his back, pretending to be a strong confident father.

“You can break the rules,” she said. “You don’t have to do everything I say when we’re playing.”

“Okay,” Zippo said, though he wasn’t sure how to play without being given commands.

After a few minutes of playing mommy and daddy, they heard a zombie groaning somewhere nearby. Xiu turned off the light and pulled Zippo down, giggling at herself for being so mischievous. She shushed Zippo as they hid from the zombie, her arms wrapped around his body, still cradling their babies in their arms. Zippo could feel her smiling as her lips were pressed against his neck.

As the memory flashes through his mind, Zippo can still feel Xiu’s smile against his neck. He closes his foot-shears around Nemesis’ neck, tears filling the insides of his goggles.

Nemesis grabs Zippo by the ankle. She twists his leg, breaking it in three different places, and drives his foot-shears into his own chest.

Zippo falls to the ground. His body goes limp as the blades of his scissors cut through the outside of his heart. As he dies, he watches the clouds drifting overhead. Within the clouds, he hears Xiu’s soft, sugary voice. She gives him one last command.

“Come to me,” she orders him.

Vine stands next to Xiu’s body, awaiting her orders. She doesn’t give them to him. She is long dead. Like he did as a child when he lost his first Head, he just stands there, not able to think or act on his own. But an Arm’s job is to intuit his Head’s command before she even has to give him one. If she were alive, Vine would know exactly what she would tell him to do.

“Finish the mission,” she would say.

Nemesis drops down from the roof next to Vine. He looks over at her as she steps across the living works of art toward him, spinning her sword like a propeller by her side.

“Finish the mission.”

Nemesis swings her sword at Vine.

“Finish the mission.”

A wire springs out of Vine’s wrist, knocking the sword back. Another wire shoots out of him and hooks onto the roof above. Before Nemesis can attack again, Vine is pulled through the air to the top of the building. He runs across the roof and shoots his wire to the next building, then swings across. He shoots his wire at the next building, swings to that one, then the next building, and the next building, until he gets far away from the woman who killed two-thirds of his body.

As he flees, Nemesis stands above Xiu’s corpse, watching as the merc punk swings from rooftop to rooftop. She does not follow after him. That wasn’t what she was ordered to do.

It was Dr. Chan who approached Wayne Rizla about getting Nemesis on
Zombie Survival
.

“She’s ready to be field tested,” said Dr. Chan. “I want to get her in the middle of the Red Zone.”

Wayne smirked at the tiny man leaning on his desk. “No thanks.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dr. Chan. “She would be perfect for your show.”

“She would be boring,” Dr. Chan said.

“But she’s nearly invincible. Nobody would survive as long as she would.”

“That’s the problem,” Wayne said. “It would be too easy for her to win. Where’s the drama? Where’s the excitement? She’s immune to the virus, zombies don’t find her edible, she’s fast, she’s a perfect killing machine. Do you know how boring it will be to see her get all the way to the helicopter in half a day completely unharmed? The show would be over before even a quarter of the contestants were killed. No thanks.”

“But the government won’t give me the funding to airlift her out there myself,” said Dr. Chan.

“Not my problem.”

“There’s got to be a way,” the doctor said. “I’m telling you, she would be very fascinating to your audience.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe if we gave her a handicap?”

“A handicap?” Wayne asked, straightening himself up from his chair.

“What if she had the weakest weapon or something like that?”

Wayne shook his head. “She’s still invincible. No, it would have to be something else…”

Wayne stroked his goatee as he thought about it.

“How about this…” Wayne said. “Her handicap is that the helicopter won’t pick her up until all the other contestants are dead.”

“But what if she gets to the helicopter first?” asked Dr. Chan.

“Then she’ll just have to wait there and kill off any contestant who comes to her… until she’s the last one.”

Dr. Chan nodded. “I think this would work just fine.”

“Better than fine,” Wayne said. Then he smiled. “It will be golden.”