Zombies and Shit by Iii Carlton Mellick

limbs, trying to get to the neural tissue. From inside of the horde below, Brick licks the blood off of his double-fisted sledgehammer. His eyes lock with Popcorn’s.
    “Brains,” he says to her.
    Popcorn shakes her head at the sight of her zombiefied boyfriend and jumps down to the other side of the wall.
    As they chew through Charlie’s flesh, Rainbow reaches down to him. When he sees her through his twitching eyes, Charlie reaches out for her.
    “I love you,” Rainbow cries, his fingers too far out of reach to meet hers.
    “I love you, too,” Charlie says with a bloody smile. “…you bitch.”
    The tips of their fingers touch for a brief moment, just barely. Then his body is ripped into eight different pieces.
    “No…” Rainbow says, still reaching out for his hand as his arm is taken away from his body.
    Junko pulls her back, but Rainbow won’t budge. She won’t take her eyes off of her husband’s severed head as it is pulled through the crowd.
    “Let’s go!” Junko yells.
    Rainbow finally turns away when a zombie cracks open Charlie’s skull like an egg, to get at the runny brains within.
    They jump down on the other side of the wall, and run down the street to get as far away from the horde as they possibly can. Junko shakes her head at herself as she runs, realizing that none of the people she is with now are people she would have chosen to team up with. She’s stuck with a useless bitch who backstabbed her own husband and two punks, one who’s infected and one who’s a complete idiot. Still, she knows it’s better than going on alone. Those who go solo from the start never make it very far.

The last thing Rainbow Cat wanted was for her husband to die so soon in the game. If she wasn’t there she knows he would have lasted much longer, perhaps even made it all the way to the end. He had ingenuity, charisma, strategy. He would have been a perfect hero for the show, the one everyone rooted for back home in Platinum. But then he had to go and get himself killed rescuing her.
    “That idiot,” she says, as they run into an alley to get off the main drag.
    Rainbow lied about her reason for getting Charlie on the Zombie Survival reality game show. She didn’t do it for the money. She did it because she wanted people to read Charlie’s new book. Even though he was her favorite writer, she felt his books had gotten worse and worse ever since his first major success. The four books he published while they were living together in the Gold Quadrant were borderline crap. They didn’t have that raw emotion as his early books did. It didn’t seem like he was even trying anymore. For all she knows, his publishing company might have gone out of business just because people were no longer interested in their bestselling author.
    But things changed after he was sent to the Copper Quadrant. He stopped writing for the money and started writing for the art. That is when he had created the greatest book Rainbow had ever read. A book about a couple struggling to make ends meet in the ghetto of Copper. It was a story about love and despair, isolation and hope. It was a story that everyone in Neo New York had to read. The kind of book that would change the way people think about how they live their lives.
    She tried to figure out ways to get people interested in Charles Hudson again. She had sent letters to his old publisher, sent a duplicate of his manuscript that she typed up herself during breaks at work, but she never received a response. His manuscript was returned unopened.
    That’s when she came up with the idea of getting him on Zombie Survival . She had heard the rumors of this popular television show. The people in the upper quadrants were obsessed with it and idolized the contestants more than any other celebrities. She knew if Charlie was on Zombie Survival he would capture the attention of the public again. He would become a bigger celebrity than he had ever been before. And she knew the public would