He pulls out the machete and blood dribbles out of the wound. Rainbow grabs her neck wound, holding in the blood. Then she looks up at Bosco.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
The blade didn’t hit her jugular, so the wound isn’t fatal. But the idea that he came only a centimeter away from ending her life fills Rainbow with rage.
She charges him.
Bosco holds out his machete to defend himself, but it takes Rainbow less than a second to grab his machete arm and break it at the elbow. A sliver of bone tears through the skin of his upper arm and he cries so loud that it attracts zombies in from the street. She stomps on his knee, dislocating it, and he falls to the ground in front of her.
She wraps herself around his back, snuggle-raping him in the same way he had done to her, and puts him in a tight headlock.
“Wait…” Bosco cries.
She flexes her muscled arms around his head, and slowly breaks his neck against her body.
“Don’t…” Bosco says, just before the loud cracking sound.
His body goes limp in her arms.
She tears a piece of fabric from his clothing and wraps it around her throat to stop the bleeding.
“Braiiins,” says a skeleton as it staggers toward her. Four more zombies follow close behind.
She picks up the machete and wipes her blood off of the blade, ready to hack these living corpses into pieces. Before she charges into battle, she looks back at Bosco’s corpse. He looks even twice as pathetic now that he’s dead. She has no pity for losers like him. They are a waste. She could never respect a man who loved her more than anything in the world. The kind of man she loved was one who put his ambitions above all relationships, like Charles Hudson did with his writing.
Rainbow realizes that she did end up giving Bosco what he wanted after all. When she broke his neck, he died in her arms. As she chops the head off the first zombie that comes toward her, she kicks herself for letting the pathetic asshole get his way. She wishes she would have just used the machete to slice open a major artery, and then left him there to bleed to death all alone.
After they find all of the components necessary to build the weapon laid out in the blueprints, Laurence and Haroon look for a safe place to put them all together. They cross a street to a gas station and climb a ladder to get to the rooftop. Junko had told them that zombies were horrible climbers, so Haroon figures that’s the safest place for them at the moment.
On the mold-coated roof, Haroon empties the pack. He spreads out all of the items in the black slime. Then unfolds the blueprints to figure out how to construct the thing.
Haroon knows his way around building weapons, so this isn’t much of a challenge for him. He can tell it is some kind of gun. He puts together the barrel first, then the trigger and the power supply. In less than half an hour, the weapon is constructed: a mess of wires and cables formed into the shape of a rifle.
“What is it?” Laurence asks.
“It can’t be…” Haroon says.
“What?”
Haroon examines closely.
“It’s a completely different model than mine,” Haroon says. “But they perfected it.”
“Perfected what? Spit it out.”
“My solar-powered shotgun,” Haroon says. “This is it. The weapon I had been working on for years… But this thing looks like it could actually work.”
“Let me see,” Laurence says.
He picks up the weapon and aims it at a zombie in the distance. When he pulls the trigger, nothing happens.
“Brains!” the zombie yells at him from the distance.
“It doesn’t work,” Laurence says.
“No, it wouldn’t. Not yet. The power supply needs to be charged up, in the sunlight.”
“How long is it going to take? We don’t have much sun left.”
“I have no idea. We should wait at least an hour.”
“Fine with me,” Laurence says, reclining into a moldy puddle on the roof. “I could use a rest anyway.”
Haroon places the rifle onto a ledge in the direct sunlight.
“You looked like MacGyver putting that thing together,” Laurence says.
“MacGyver? You said that name earlier. Who the heck is MacGyver?”
“Oh, he’s an old television character who used to build laser cannons out of bubble gum and paperclips.”
“You have a television? In Copper?”
“No, this was a long time ago. Back in the 1980’s. I used to be on a show back then, too.”
“The 1980’s? You’re not old enough to have been alive in the 1980’s.”
“I was.”
“That’s impossible.”
Laurence grunts at the sky and says, “Nothing’s impossible.”
Then he tells Haroon his story.
Laurence’s full name is Laurence Tureaud, but he was widely known by the name Mr. T.
Back in the 1980’s, Mr. T was a television star and a cultural icon. Everybody loved him. He was the most badass motherfucker on television, the epitome of cool. But then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He spent several years coming to terms with his disease, fighting the cancer every step of they way so that he could spend as many years with his family as possible. But eventually, the disease got to the point where the doctors just couldn’t do anything for him anymore.
The thought of losing Mr. T was just too much for America. A fundraiser was started to help keep the national hero alive. Although no money in the world could cure his cancer, enough money was raised to have him cryogenically frozen. So for sixty-three years, Mr. T has been suspended in time. He missed Z-Day and the apocalypse, he missed the 50 years of struggle the world had endured since then.
A couple of years ago, a scientist named Jacob Wyslen brought Mr. T back to life. He was a researcher who had a lab on a small island off the east coast. After Z-Day hit, several research stations were put together around the country, all of them with a mission to put an end to the zombie problem. After thirty years, Wyslen’s was the only one that remained. He started with a staff of twenty scientists and soldiers, but these people didn’t last very long. He sent them on dangerous missions into the Red Zone and very few of them came back alive. One day, he realized he was all alone.
Because he couldn’t do his work all by himself, Wyslen decided to resurrect the people who were frozen in the storage. He went from chamber to chamber, trying to bring the bodies back to life. On all occasions, he failed… apart from one. He was able to resurrect Mr. T.
“This isn’t the world Mr. T was expecting to come back to, Doc,” he told Dr. Wyslen, as the doctor examined his motor functions.
“I can put you back if you want?” the old man said.
“No thanks,” said Mr. T. “I would rather help you take down those dead things than live like a dead thing.”
For months, Mr. T assisted the doctor with his research. He proved to be much more useful than the doctor had expected. Not only was he able to go on missions in the Red Zone and come back alive, he also proved intelligent enough to brainstorm theories with him.
“You see, Doc,” Mr. T told him in the large empty cafeteria, “you’re goin’ about this all wrong. You can’t just freeze the undead suckas. They crave brains, and the electrochemical impulses it sends out through the body. That means they must survive on these impulses. I say you work on a nerve gas that’ll take out their whole nervous system. Do that and it’s goodbye zombies.”
“But nerve gas would also kill the surviving humans in the area,” said Wyslen.
“There ain’t nobody left alive out there. It’s just zombies. Mr. T says gas the whole place and be done with them.”
“But nerve gas is pretty useless out in the open. It would just dissipate in the atmosphere.”