“But what about my wife?” he asks, hugging Rainbow to his waist.
“For starters,” she says, “she’ll slow us down. She’s dead weight. Secondly, couples never make it very far in this game. They always get themselves killed by risking their necks to save each other. Thirdly, trust is the most important thing I need from a teammate. If I can’t trust you then I don’t want you.”
“But why can’t you trust us?” Charlie asks.
“I can probably trust you,” Junko says. “I just don’t trust her.”
Charlie looks at Rainbow with her confused puppydog face, then back at Junko. “Why don’t you trust my wife?”
Junko glares at the hippy girl. “Because she’s the reason you’ve been chosen as a contestant for this show.”
Rainbow bursts into tears when Charlie looks back at her. He doesn’t know what the Asian woman is talking about, but based on Rainbow’s reaction whatever she is saying is likely the truth.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asks.
Junko tells him about how the producers of Zombie Survival pay a reward to any citizen who recommends a good candidate for the show. She can tell that Rainbow recommended her own husband for the show, expecting to retire from the reward money. Charlie’s celebrity status would make him an interesting contestant to the people watching back home.
“But you had no idea the producers never intended to pay, did you?” Junko tells his wife. “You might have heard rumors about the show and the reward, but you didn’t know that your only payment would be to share the fate of your husband. That’s what they always do.”
Charlie notices a floating camera ball above Junko’s shoulder, filming their conversation. Rainbow looks at Charlie with red watery eyes.
“Is this true?” he asks.
Rainbow nods her head and looks away.
“You didn’t have a job and we needed the money,” she says, her back to him. “I was sick of being the one who pays for everything all the time. I was sick of taking care of you.”
“You did it just for money? On our five year anniversary?”
“You owed it to me,” she says. “I work so hard to buy your food, pay your rent, support your alcohol addiction.”
“I hardly drink anymore!”
“This was the only way I could get that money back.”
“But, it’s just money,” Charlie says. “I’ve only been unemployed for the past ten months. When I was a novelist and we lived in the Gold Quadrant, you didn’t have to work for over three years!”
“I know!” she says, her eyes no longer tearing with sadness but with anger. “That’s why you owe it to me! You took that life away from me and I want it back!”
“I loved you…” Charlie says.
Her anger subsides.
“Loved?” she says. “You don’t love me anymore?”
“What the hell do you think?” he says to her, the camera zooming in on his face. “You sentenced me to death just because you were tired of paying the bills yourself. How the hell do you expect me to feel?”
“But they sent me here, too,” she cries. “We’re in this together now.”
He shakes his head. “You’re in this alone.”
Her lips quiver and then open as if to argue back, but she can’t find the right words. She turns and runs down the hall, to another room, collapsing on a mattress that crumbles to dust beneath her.
Adriana, the young prostitute, looks out of the window at the urban wasteland below. The zombie with the sunflowers in its skull is attracting the attention of other zombies. There are three more of them now, and five more headed in the direction of the hotel from down the street. Their soggy green and black flesh drips from their limbs. Some of them have debris melded into their flesh, as if they had been lying in the rubble of the wasteland for over a decade, waiting for humans to return. Like the sunflower zombie, some of them grow weeds, moss, or vines from their rotten flesh.
“Braaaaiiins…”
The girl steps away from the window, just in case the zombies look up. She wouldn’t want to excite them too much.
“So what the fuck are we going to do?” Bosco says. “The bitch said we only have three hours max before this place becomes unsafe.”
Junko scowls at him for calling her a bitch, even if she does agree that she was a bitch in that past life.
“And the sooner we get out the better our chances,” Laurence says.
Adriana looks out of the window again and sees a dozen more zombies approaching. And beyond them, in the distance, there is at least a dozen more.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Adriana says, her voice quivering as she scrunches her puffy short skirt.
They look at her.
“You can’t just stay here,” Junko says.
Alonzo steps forward. “I’m staying, too. I wouldn’t last ten minutes out there in my condition.” He jiggles fifty pounds of belly fat to prove his point.
“I agree,” another man says from the back of the room. He steps forward, a blond man wearing a black suit and leather overcoat. Charlie and Junko hadn’t noticed him before. They only know his name from the tag on his enormous mountaineer pack that reads: Heinz.
“I think staying back might be a worthwhile strategy,” says Heinz. His voice has a snobbish upper class tone to it, as if he thinks he is speaking to a group of inferior peasants. “If we lure all of the dead in the vicinity to one place, such as this building, they would be much easier to kill.”
“Don’t you understand what it takes to kill just one of those things?” Junko says.
“Of course,” says Heinz. “It will not be too difficult of a task.”
Junko shakes her head. “You’re crazy.”
“I think he could be right,” another man says. Haroon, a young man of Indian descent, who is wearing perhaps the nicest clothing in the room.
Junko says, “You all have to know that staying here is suicide. I’ve seen it happen every time. Every season, there’s always somebody too afraid to leave the starting point. They never last long.”
“Yeah, what the hell is wrong with you pussies?” Scavy says.
“That’s not what I mean,” Haroon says. “I think we should forget about the helicopter. Only one of us can survive that way. If we work together I think we can all survive.”
“How’s that?” Bosco asks.
“I’ve been studying the map,” Haroon says. “In order to get to the helicopter, we’d have to go through the most dangerous parts of the city. But what if we were to skip the helicopter and go for a boat?”
“Is it possible?” Alonzo asks.
Haroon holds up his map and points to a blue line along the bottom. “There’s a harbor along the river here. It’s farther than the helicopter but we’d travel through less dangerous territory. If we find a boat we can sail it downstream to the ocean. Then we’d be home free.”
“That’s never going to work,” Junko says. “It seems close on the
map but it is nearly three times the distance of the helicopter. There’s no way anyone could survive out there for that long. And even if you happened to survive the trip and find a boat it would be over fifty years old. It’s not going to be sail-worthy after rotting in disrepair for so long.”
“Maybe we can find a plane at an airport to get us home?” Adriana says.
“Or find an armored vehicle that could take us out of the Red Zone,” Alonzo says.
Junko groans and shakes her head at all of them.
“We’re talking fifty years!” Junko says, knocking on her head. “Do you know what happens to machinery, boats, and buildings after fifty years?”
Nobody answers.
“They become useless,” Charlie says. “She’s right. Our only option is to go for the helicopter.”