“This is it!” said the executive. “This is what every man in Platinum needs!”
It wasn’t even a real invention. It was just something Oro slapped together for fun and he hadn’t even planned to present the item to the executive. He didn’t even know what a football was for.
“Are you sure you don’t want this water filtration system? It turns salt water into fresh water.”
“No, no,” the executive shook his head. “I’d have no luck selling that. Now this,” he held up the football clock, “this I can sell.”
Oro was a bit disappointed that his winning invention took him only a few minutes to shove together, whereas his other projects took months.
“A football alarm clock…” The executive’s face brightened with excitement. “Genius. Pure genius.”
It was the only time he felt bad to be called a genius.
When he moved into Platinum, it was not at all as he hoped. The people there weren’t geniuses. Most of them seemed dumber than his low class father. They were a bunch of fat, spoiled, lazy morons. He couldn’t stand any of them. His football alarm clock sold well though, and he was able to live a comfortable life for a while. And more importantly, he was finally given the respect he rightly deserved.
He got used to the good life. He spent his time on the golf course or at the public swimming pools. He smoked cigars and drank purple martinis on rooftop bars overlooking the sea.
“Ahhh,” Oro would say. “The life of a genius…”
But the good life didn’t last. Oro couldn’t produce another invention as stupid as the football alarm clock and his funds ran out. He was quickly thrown back to Copper, back to his old way of life. The executive stopped making his annual visit to the junkyard. Oro thought he was doomed to stay there for the rest of his life.
Then Oro came up with a plan. While he lived in Platinum, he had seen the first season of Zombie Survival on television. If he could volunteer to go on the show and win then they would move him up to the Silver Quadrant. He would also have a passport to Platinum and could try to sell some new inventions there. He would then come up with the most ridiculous, superfluous inventions possible. He already had plans for creating pedicure slippers, giftwrap cutters, laser-guided golf clubs, and the baconator, which was a cooking device that could infuse any type of meat with the taste and texture of fried bacon. All he had to do was win the contest and he could live the rest of his life in luxury.
But just getting on the show wasn’t as easy as he expected. He had met with Wayne “The Wiz” Rizla at a bar in downtown Copper. He heard the rumor that if you knew an interesting contestant for the show you’d be rewarded greatly. He had the perfect contestant for him.
“So who’s this contestant you have in mind?” Wayne said.
“Me,” said Oro.
Wayne squinted at him. He rarely got volunteers. “You? Why would I choose you for the show? There’s nothing special about you.”
“I am a genius,” Oro said.
Wayne continued as if he didn’t even hear him. “Look at you. You’re a shrimp. You have no muscle, no agility. You’re ugly, so there’s no sex appeal there…”
“But I’m a genius!” Oro stood up in his chair. “I would survive longer than any contestant you could ever find. Perhaps I’m not the strongest, fastest, or most attractive contestant, but I can outwit anybody. You have never met an intellect as impressive as mine before.”
Wayne laughed. Oro slapped the smile off of his face, then found several guns pointed at his chest.
“Put me on that show and I’ll show you what kind of genius I am,” Oro said, stubbing out his cigar on the producer’s plate.
“Fine,” Wayne said. “I’ll put you on.”
Wayne waved at his men and they took Oro by the elbows. Then he said, “I could use another easy kill anyway. Not enough early bloodshed and the viewers get annoyed.”
A few weeks later they gassed him at his shack by the garbage dump. He saw them coming and greeted them at the door.
“Are you ready?” one of them asked.
“A genius is always ready,” was his response.
Oro knows that he can win this contest, as long as he can protect his glider-cycle. He knows where the intruders are hiding. He had seen a girl with blonde dreadlocks peeking her head out from the entrance to the banquet hall.
“You can’t hide from a genius,” Oro says, pointing his rocket launcher at the wall they are hiding behind.
He fires the rocket at the wall, knowing the explosion will kill everyone on the other side of it. The wall crumbles in the fiery blast. On the other side, through the window, the trio of intruders run across the street, safe from the blast. They survived, but at least he scared them away.
The explosion causes more damage than Oro had expected. After the inner wall goes down, the outer castle wall soon follows. Through a ten foot opening through the pile of debris, the walking dead enter Oro’s sanctuary.
“Get back,” Oro says to the scab-encrusted corpses.
Oro grabs his putter and stomps toward the zombies. He hits one over the head so hard it collapses to the ground.
“I don’t have time for your interruptions,” he says, slamming them left and right with his gold club. “I am a genius. I require solitude.”
“Brains!” the zombies cry.
“Exactly,” he says.
As he beats the zombies back with his club, he recognizes that the scabbed-over skin of one of the zombies looks a lot like bacon. It’s like all of its skin had been put into his future invention, the baconator. This gives him an idea for marketing it to the executives: “Even brains can be baconized!”
Oro continues to daydream as he fights the dead. He doesn’t kill any of them. Once they fall down, they just get right back up, but he keeps swinging at them one at a time without tiring. He’s got the adrenalin of his fantasies to fuel him. He’s got a bright future to think about.
“I am a genius,” he says to the undead. “You can’t possibly defeat me.”
As Oro clobbers them one at a time, another contestant passes by the castle outside. It is Heinz. He stops for a moment to look at Oro fighting back the mob of zombies. Then he moves on.
Heinz doesn’t mind the small white man when there’s a Japanese bitch that needs to be killed. He can see her just down the street, running through the wandering dead. He’s almost got her. He imagines how her flesh will smell when he burns her alive.
“We’re being followed,” Junko tells Rainbow and Scavy, as she chainsaws a zombie’s head down the middle.
Scavy looks back.
“Don’t look back!” Junko yells. “We’ve got to lose him somehow.”
“Who is it?” Rainbow asks.
A camera ball floating over her head zooms in on the conversation.
“I don’t know.” Junko leads them farther down the road. “One of the less friendly contestants, I’d say. We should move faster.”
They pick up the pace, but the zombies crawling out of the surrounding buildings make it difficult to get away. They can’t dodge them, so they have to hack their way through corpse after corpse. This slows them down. Even worse than that, because they are doing all the zombie killing, their pursuer is able to move down the street quickly without the need to fight the already-incapacitated undead.
“He’s gaining on us,” Rainbow Cat says.
They turn around to see Heinz charging toward them, burning the few zombies left standing with his flame thrower. Junko tries to avoid going face-to-face with any of the lumbering dead, but they just keep coming. A zombie with a newspaper beard grabs her by the chainsaw arm. She fires her 9mm into its head but the small bullets just barely hold it back from biting into her wrist.