He points the gun at the door as it breaks open. Smoke and zombies shuffle over the dresser, two of them on fire. He shoots them in their chests and heads, but they keep coming toward him. A bullet blows a zombie’s hand off of its wrist as it reaches out for him.
“Braains!” the zombies groan, as they close in on him.
With the hotel up in flames, Heinz’s job is done. He had attracted all the zombies in the vicinity to him, got them to enter the hotel, then burned it down. Fire is the most effective weapon against the undead. It is the only thing that can ultimately destroy them. He is pleased with the weapon that the producers of Zombie Survival had chosen for him. It will help ensure a victory for the leader of the Fifth Reich.
He walks through the smoldering corpses that crawl across the roof on their bellies.
One of them reaches out for him and whimpers, “Braaains!”
He steps on its head with his leather boot, crushing its skull into a pile of charcoal, as he walks to the power line he had used for his backpack. Wrapping his arm around the cord and gripping his other wrist, he slides down the wire and drops down next to Adriana’s pack. He scoops it over his shoulder, then walks casually out of the yard down the rubble-filled streets.
When he looks back, he sees the hotel being swallowed by the flames. He doesn’t know if Alonzo and Adriana are still alive in there, nor does he care. They served their purpose and are of no further use to him. They just saved him the trouble of having to kill them later.
As Alonzo’s revolver clicks empty, the zombies grab him and tear into his flesh. They suck the nerves out of his skin like angel hair spaghetti, the sensation of their chewing sends jolts of electrical pain through his body.
The zombie with the sunflowers growing out of its skull grabs Alonzo by the throat. Its flesh is now burned and blackened, the flowers charred to a crisp. When Alonzo sees the burnt sunflowers, he zones out. He doesn’t see it as a zombie anymore. Through the smoke, he sees the creature as his nephew, Tony. Fresh blood runs down Tony’s chest, over his black sunflower tattoos.
“You said I was like a son to you,” Tony says to him.
Alonzo shakes his head. “You got what you deserved, punk!”
“All I wanted was to raise my kid honestly, like my father raised me.”
“Your father was a damned idiot!”
Tony’s mouth stretches open so wide that his lower jaw touches his chest. Then he bites his uncle’s skull open.
“And I’m also a damned idiot for thinking you could have been any different!” Alonzo says, as Tony chews on a meaty strip of his brain.
Junko, Scavy, Popcorn, and Rainbow Cat are on top of a high-rise downtown, scanning the area. They needed the high vantage point to see which path would be safest through the city. But all the streets look the same. All are packed with the living dead. They use the sniper scope to look farther into the distance, but there are zombies everywhere.
“They’re waking up way too soon,” Junko says. “We should have been mostly clear for at least until the late afternoon.”
“So what do we do?” Rainbow asks.
“We need to keep moving,” Junko says. “It’s bad now but it is only going to get worse. Much worse.”
A few blocks away, explosions erupt along the street, blowing up sections of the zombie horde.
“That’s what is doing it,” Junko says, pointing at the explosions. “That asshole’s being too loud. He’s waking them up.”
Then they see the man who is causing the explosions. The old ex-military vagrant staggers down the street, tossing grenades at the zombies around him.
“That guy is punk as fuck!” Scavy says.
The old man heads toward the door of a building across the street from him. He tosses a grenade and it blows some of them apart, but then the rest of the undead close in on him, grab him by the arms. He pulls them with him, trying desperately to get through the door of the building, but they won’t let go, biting into his arms and shoulder.
He tries throwing another grenade but it lands only a few feet away. Lee’s grenade blows the zombies into pieces across the asphalt, but takes him out with them. His body flies though the glass door of an ancient city tavern.
“Well, that’s the end of that guy,” Scavy says, chuckling.
Junko frowns. “At least he won’t wake any more of the dead.”
Rainbow Cat looks down at the street immediately below them, and sees three of the other punks—Xiu, Zippo, and Vine—running through the zombie crowd. Vine leads the way, shooting out their knee caps with an AK-47 as they run. They don’t even bother going for the head. They just want to cripple them enough so that they can run past.
“Your friends look like they’re doing alright,” Rainbow says to Scavy.
Scavy looks down at the other punks. “Oh yeah, those guys.”
“They’re good,” Junko says. “How long have you known them?”
Scavy shrugs. “I don’t know. I just met those guys.”
“You mean they’re not part of your gang?” Junko asks.
“No,” Scavy says. “I just thought they looked cool so I let them join my crew. Never seen them before today. I don’t think they even speak English.”
Junko looks down at the trio of punks and examines them carefully. They move in formation, like trained soldiers. Xiu, their leader, tosses a throwing axe at one of them and dismembers both of its arms before it can latch onto Zippo’s back.
“Those aren’t ordinary street punks,” Junko says, as the axe boomerangs back to Xiu’s hand. “They’re merc punks.”
Junko knew the ratings for Zombie Survival had been going down. The past couple of seasons were very disappointing for fans and many of them were so outraged that they almost got the producer of the show, Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla, fired by the network. The show was becoming repetitive and boring. Last season, all the contestants died on the first day. Most of them were killed before even getting out of the safe house. Wayne was choosing too many weak, boring contestants. Just the same old vagrants, hookers, and street punks. The network said he had to do better than that. He had to get some contestants who would actually last long enough to make it to the helicopter.
Junko knew Wayne had chosen her for the show to help with ratings. He knew audiences would love to see the old host of Zombie Survival on the show herself. But she knew throwing on celebrities like Charlie and herself would not be enough to save his job. He had to get some badass zombie killers. There’s no better zombie killer than a merc punk.
While most of the human population stays as far away from the mainland as they can get, there are small bands of scavengers who live in ships along the coast of the mainland like pirates. When Z-day struck, many people survived not by fortifying themselves in bunkers or walled communities, but by constantly moving. They were post-apocalyptic biker gangs who kept on the road, stopping only to fill up on gas and supplies. They never stayed in one place long enough for the zombies to gather in a number they couldn’t handle.
Eventually, gas had become an issue. It was a limited resource that spoiled quickly. They knew it wouldn’t last them forever. So they went out to sea, living on sailboats instead of armored vehicles. They sail up and down the coasts of the Americas, stopping on the mainland to kill zombies and scavenge for food. For several generations, these punk pirates of the apocalypse have been surviving out there on the outskirts of the Red Zone. They even have their own culture they have developed over the years.
Over the past decade, the government of Neo New York had been hiring them as mercenaries to recover technology and important artifacts from the mainland. That’s why they’re called merc punks. Although they look and dress very similar to that of common street punks like Scavy and Popcorn, merc punks are a hell of a lot more dangerous.