Alonzo looks over at the door leading downstairs. His gun is shaking in his hands. He doesn’t want to go down there.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Heinz says, raising his tone to him, his shiny pronounced forehead reflecting the fat man’s scared bulgy face back at him.
Growing up on an oil rig, Alonzo hadn’t seen many zombies in his life. The only time he had ever seen one was when he was a kid, the one that killed his little sister.
They thought they were safe. They had hundreds of miles of ocean between them and any landmass inhabited by the living dead. But one of them still got to them. Nobody is sure how it happened. The crew of the rig assumed it had been caught up in a riptide and was pulled out to sea or came up from the bottom of the ocean, from some kind of sunken ship.
Little Alonzo had heard stories about the walking dead, but he didn’t know what to expect. He had seen dead bodies before, but never anything like the creature that crawled on board that night.
He awoke to his sister’s screams across the hall. He was used to her nightmares. She would wake up screaming regularly, after having dreams about their house sinking into the sea, or about Father’s ship getting sunk by an infected whale while he was off on business. Alonzo always went to her room to comfort her. If he didn’t she would keep the whole ship awake all night.
When he left his room, he noticed the trail of black slime in the corridor leading into his sister’s cabin. The zombie had skipped his brother’s room and all of the other rooms along the way. It had chosen the one cabin that had left its door open. Alonzo’s little sister was too scared to sleep with her door shut.
The zombie was eating his sister’s brains out of her skull as young Alonzo entered her cabin. The thing was like a skeleton with gray patches of flesh dangling from the bones. Its chest was covered in barnacles and seaweed. Tiny fish were flapping around in its hollow chest, half-filled with water. A crab crawled across its shoulder and disappeared into its neck. Its eyeballs were like that of a sea slugs’.
His sister was no longer moving. The zombie flopped her corpse around like a doll as it ferociously tore the meat out of her split-open head. It gurgled and hissed as it consumed her. The image drilled a hole into young Alonzo’s mind. An image that he was never able to get rid of. After the adults came running to his screams, and pulverized the zombie’s bones under the bottoms of fire extinguishers, Alonzo understood the horror that his parents had been trying to keep from him. He prayed he would never have to face a creature like that ever again.
When Alonzo gets downstairs, the zombies are already banging on one of the boarded doors.
“Get some more wood on there,” he tells Adriana.
The teenager looks at him with a terrified face.
“Don’t think about it, just do it,” he says. “I’ll cover you.”
She runs to the wood. Her hands shaking hard as the door rumbles next to her. When she pounds a nail with the hammer, her strikes are timid and sloppy, causing the nail to drop from her fingers.
Alonzo looks to his right, through a hotel room window. He sees a swarm of zombies running through the street toward the building. Three times as many as had earlier attacked. Beyond them, in the distance, he sees explosions erupting from street corners, as if some contestant out there is trying to fight off the zombie horde with a grenade launcher.
When he sees the chaos outside of the window, his gun hand begins to quiver. He imagines the zombie he saw that night inside of his sister’s bedroom. Now he imagines a hundred of them, all outside, all of them coming to get him. Ever since that day as a kid, he has been having nightmares that zombies are coming to get him. Now he is living that nightmare. Looking down at the gun in his hand, he contemplates pointing it at himself in order to wake up.
Heinz finishes knotting a second sheet-rope. He breaks a power line with a piece of brick and attaches it to a satellite dish on a higher section of the roof. Then he ties the sheet-rope to a strap on his giant mountaineer pack and snaps the other strap around the power line. He lets the pack go.
The zombies swarm the yard below as the pack slides down the power line. When it hits the edge of the rooftop of the next building, the locking mechanism beeps off. Then Heinz pulls the pack back up the power line with the sheet-rope.
He can hear a commotion of smashing and banging noises in the hotel rooms below as the zombies fill the building. He doesn’t have much faith in the defense capabilities of a fat slob and a childish whore, but he hopes they can hold back the creatures long enough for him to put his plan into action.
Alonzo stands behind Adriana and points his gun at the door, his pockets filled with extra ammunition. He can see the young girl’s ass cleavage hanging out of her tight vinyl shorts. Her shiny mounds point up at him like she’s begging him to take her from behind as she hammers boards on top of the other boards. He licks his lips with his cracked dry tongue.
Adriana didn’t know it, but Alonzo was there last night when she was selected as a contestant for Zombie Survival. After he had murdered his nephew, Alonzo was in a rotten mood and needed some cheering up. He had to find a new business partner and had no idea where to look. The next morning, he planned to figure that out. But that night, he was going to release some stress.
The prostitutes in Copper were numerous. They were cheap as hell and wouldn’t object to anything the client wanted them to do. What Alonzo was most interested in was the underage prostitutes. In Copper, the prostitutes came in any age you wanted. Girls in their prime, girls on the mature side, girls in their teens, and girls who haven’t even gone through puberty yet. The only age group that wasn’t available were elderly women, just because the people in Copper didn’t live long enough to make it into their golden years.
A lot of girls end up in prostitution when they’re kids because their parents decide they can’t afford to raise them anymore and toss them out into the streets. Prostitution is the only job a kid can get in Copper, so that’s where the majority of them end up.
Adriana is a typical case. She lost her mother when she was nine and went right into whoring herself on the streets. By ten she was addicted to Waste. By eleven she had lost all sense of self worth. By thirteen she had her first abortion. By fifteen she was chosen to be a contestant on the Zombie Survival reality game show.
The producers of the show bring at least a few prostitutes into every season. They add an element of sex appeal that viewers at home can’t get enough of. Viewers love to see prostitutes trading sex for protection. They love to see their slutty little bodies torn apart by the undead. There’s no shortage of whores in the Copper Quadrant, so they never fail to make it onto the show. They have even thought about maybe doing an all-hooker season of Zombie Survival at some point in the future.
Alonzo saw Adriana in an alley as he prowled the redlight district. She was giving some guy a blowjob behind a ten-foot pile of refuse. He knew he should have minded his own business, but Alonzo decided he would check it out. He could tell the girl was young. He thought she might have even been thirteen, which was the age he was looking for. He was hoping she would be willing to give him a blowjob after she was through with the other guy.
Standing with a smug smile on his face, Alonzo watched as the man came inside of her baby-soft lips. The man moaned slightly through his white goatee.
“There you go, my darling,” said the man, his penis still dangling in front of her face. “How does it taste?”
Adriana stared up at the man with her cheeks full of his gunk.