But one day she was asked on a date by a handsome young man with emerald green eyes. She fell in love with him the first time she looked into those deep eyes.
“How can you do it?” he asked her, over dinner. “How can you work for that horrible show?”
Junko smiled and shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“But it’s so cruel,” he said. “Those people are being sent to their death for our amusement.”
“But people die everyday,” she said. “The world is a cruel place. That’s just the way it is.”
Then he said a single word, one that she never thought to use in her privileged life.
He said, “Why?”
Junko was taken aback.
“Why does it have to be that way?” he asked. “Why does the world have to be so cruel?”
“The living dead took over,” she said. “They turned society into a dog-eat-dog world. We have to do what we do in order to survive.”
“That’s no excuse at all,” he said. “Our government has all the resources necessary to make life better for everyone in Neo New York. Instead it chooses to make life even better for the privileged few, while making life even worse for the unfortunate lower class citizens.”
“But most of those people are criminals,” she said. “They rape and murder each other. They do drugs. They prostitute their children. Maybe the show is cruel, but if anybody deserves it it’s those people.”
“I can’t believe you said that,” he said. “Nobody deserves that kind of fate. Those people are just victims of circumstance. They would have turned out no different than you or I if our government spread out its resources to everyone evenly.”
Junko was confused by his statement.
“That’s stupid,” she said, then took a big bite of salmon.
“Compassion is stupid?” he asked.
Junko continued chewing her salmon with a full cheek. She saw anger in his beautiful green eyes. She regretted arguing with him. If only she lied he might have liked her better.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, standing up from the table. “But only on the outside.”
Then he left the restaurant.
The next season of the show, she recognized one of the contestants by his emerald green eyes. The rest of his face she didn’t recognized. He looked like he had gone through hard times in the Copper Quadrant. When she asked her boss, The Wiz, what his story was, he told her that he was an idiot. He was a wealthy fiction publisher who had decided to close down his company, move to the Copper Quadrant, and give away all of his money to the people who lived there.
“Why would he do that?” Junko asked him.
Wayne’s white goatee fluffed out as he smiled. “He did it out of protest. He said he was disgusted by our way of life in Platinum, so he refused to live here anymore. Can you believe the moron?”
The next day, when Junko saw the young man with the emerald eyes die in uptown Scottsdale, Arizona, his head torn open by crispy sun-burnt zombies, she left the television station mortified. It was the first time a contestant had been somebody she knew. She had seen violent deaths so much since she started hosting Zombie Survival that she had become desensitized to it, but it was different with him. His emerald green eyes lying on the sidewalk next to his corpse was an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She went to a bar and drank until morning.
Although she was under contract to finish the season, she wanted to quit right then and there. But she had no choice but to finish it. She did such a bland job hosting the show that Wayne was happy to get rid of her.
“You’re getting too old anyway.” Those were the last words he ever said to her.
Wayne would have just left her alone had she just left the show, but she didn’t think quitting was enough. She wanted to get the show cancelled. She led protests against the show, she spent much of her savings on a smear campaign against the television show. She also wrote a book about her experience on the show and gave tons of copies away for free. Eventually, she ran out of money and needed to find work, but she had been blacklisted. She was forced to move to Copper.
The second she stepped foot in Copper, she knew Wayne was going to put her on the next season’s show. The negative publicity was not something he was going to just ignore. He would have his revenge.
So Junko trained every day. She did the military exercises. She studied previous episodes of the show. She practiced every possible weapon, from guns to swords. If Wayne put her on the show, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of watching her die. She was going to win it.
Then, once she gets back to the island, she’s going to use her new passport to visit the Platinum Quadrant. Then Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla is going to die.
Scavy runs across the street naked except for his underwear and boots—the metal of the sniper rifle cold against his bare skin—following Junko and Rainbow Cat to a place where he can get some new clothing. The camera ball they had lost in the zombie fight finds them and chases after the trio.
“What’s this place?” Scavy asks, as they enter a dark windowless building. He closes the door before the camera ball can squeeze in behind them.
Junko is too busy digging out her flashlight to respond. She flicks it on and moves deeper into the black, to get far away from the entrance.
When Scavy turns on his flashlight, the beam brightens the face of a melty white zombie only inches away from him. The zombie’s hand raised to his face. Scavy shrieks and lowers his naginata spear into its head.
The zombie doesn’t fall. It doesn’t even move, frozen in place.
Junko goes over to the punk, “Shut the hell up.”
Scavy points at the zombie to show Junko why he screamed, but then he notices that the zombie doesn’t look much like a zombie.
“It’s just wax,” Junko says, pulling the spear out of the wax head. “We’re in a wax museum.”
The wax figure had been sculpted after Adolf Hitler, but over the decades the figure had melted into an unrecognizable blob. Adolf’s arm was raised in a sieg heil, but now the fingers had melted into gnarly curls. They look around at many other melted figures surrounding them.
“What did they use wax museums for?” Scavy asks.
“They made sculptures of celebrities and famous historical figures, probably so the public could pretend to meet them in person. Those clothes are real, though. If you can get them off of the sculpture you can wear them.”
Scavy nods and points at Hitler. “Who was this guy?”
“I believe he was one of America’s greatest presidents,” Junko says. “The one who freed the slaves.”
“Cool. I’ll wear his clothes then.”
As Scavy uses the blade of his spear to cut the melted wax off of the sculpture, Junko and Rainbow Cat patrol the area.
“We should get thicker layers of clothing for ourselves as well,” Junko says. “We at least need some gloves.”
All of the melted figures standing around them makes Rainbow Cat feel as if they’re in the middle of a zombie horde. Their faces are sagging in distorted ways, mouths stretched open, eyes popping out, necks melted away completely so that chins sink into chests or heads twist into awkward angles. In ways they are even more horrifying to Rainbow than the zombies.
She looks at one of the sculptures: a pirate man whose dreadlocks have melted and curled so much over time that he looks like a medusa. The sign below the sculpture reads, “Captain Jack Sparrow.” Bites have been taken out of the back of his head, as if a zombie had at one time thought he was a real person and tried to eat his brain.