Zombies and Shit (35 page)

Xiu has only one throwing axe left, but with her two Arms she doesn’t even need a weapon of her own. Zippo and Vine are her weapons. In the middle of the two of them, Xiu directs her Arms to blast out a zombie’s knee, leap over a wrecked pickup truck, and slice through a line of undead to get to the sidewalk.

Zippo and Vine are so tuned in to Xiu’s commands, that they know what she wants them to do before she even has to tell them. The Mongols call it
unit telepathy
, which is kind of an intuition that Arms develop from following their Head for so long. When Xiu commands them, she feels as if she has tiny invisible strings connected from her fingertips to their brains, as if Zippo and Vine are living marionettes.

Cutting their way through the industrial district, lined with crumbling factories and warehouses, the merc punks are not able to conserve much ammo. There are just too many of those things. These are the kinds of circumstances merc punks are trained to avoid, rather than fight through. And the farther they go into the industrial district, the thicker the mob becomes.

“To that airplane,” Xiu tells them.

Vine cuts them a path toward the blackened remains of a Boeing commercial airliner that had crashed into a steel mill long ago. The tail of the plane is missing, so they head for entry to the plane on that side. The rest of the plane leans up the side of the half-collapsed building, like a ramp. When they get to the tail end of the plane, Vine and Zippo hold their ground as Xiu assesses the situation.

“We need to get off of the street,” Xiu says. “We’re going to have to cross this area from above.”

Entering the back of the charred aircraft, they climb the aisle upward toward the cockpit. The mob of zombies try to follow, but as they attempt to scale the slanted passageway they only slide back down across their slimy flesh.

The fuselage rattles as they make their ascent. They balance themselves. Zippo holds Xiu from sliding back into the mob below.

“Keep going,” Xiu says, as the building that holds up the plane begins to crumble.

They continue up.

A blackened skeleton sitting in one of the airplane seats nearby turns back and eyes them with black ash-filled sockets. As Vine passes him, the corpse reaches out with burnt twig-like limbs.

“Brains,” hisses the zombie.

But the charred undead corpse can’t reach Vine. Its seatbelt buckled around its waist keeps it securely fastened to the seat.

When they get to the cockpit, Xiu kicks out the door and the unit jumps out of the plane onto the third floor of the building. Once safely out of the plane, Xiu gives her Arms a smirk. Then, in unison, the three kick the side of the fuselage with enough strength to separate it from the building. The plane rolls down into the street, crushing several zombies below.

Xiu laughs at the destruction they caused, and her men laugh with her. But then the building rumbles and chunks of debris rain down from the ceiling. Sections of the floor break open as the building begins collapsing around them.

“Get to the roof,” Xiu says, leaping from a crumbling floor to solid ground.

Zombies come out from the shadows, lumbering toward them, as they head for the nearest stairs. They blast out the zombies’ legs, guarding each other’s backs, as the structure deteriorates quickly around them.

When they were teenagers, Xiu, Zippo, and Vine were the most unruly unit in the Mongol tribe. Raised in the wasteland, Xiu didn’t grow up with the traditions of the Mongols. She was used to doing as she pleased, any way she pleased.

They were supposed to be collecting food deep in the Amazonian rainforest of southern Columbia, but back then Xiu was easily distracted from her missions. Once she noticed there were zombies wandering through the jungle nearby, she wanted to hunt them down and kill them for fun.

Because they were not to be trusted traveling on their own, Xiu’s unit had to be accompanied by a guardian unit. All units are assigned to a guardian unit the day they are formed. This guardian unit becomes like their unit’s parents. The guardian unit raises the young unit, teaches it how to fight, how to scavenge, and accompanies them on missions. A unit is usually separated from its guardians the day the Head of the unit turns thirteen. That’s when the members of the unit are considered adults. And though they continue to train with their guardians, they are considered old enough to take care of themselves.

Xiu’s guardian unit was the same unit that found her in Chile when she was seven years old, the one led by Carlos.

When Xiu was fifteen, her unit still needed to be looked after by Carlos’ unit. At that age, they were one of the weakest, sloppiest, least organized units in the tribe. Her two Arms worked just fine. They did exactly what they were told. Xiu was the problem. She was a troublemaker. She didn’t listen to the Heads of her guardian unit or the other elder units. She did whatever she wanted.

“Let’s go,” Xiu told her Arms, as they snuck through the trees away from their guardians.

Carlos’ unit wasn’t watching them. They were busy collecting bushels of wild marijuana into potato sacks. Xiu led Zippo and Vine away from their guardians, through the trees, into the jungle, to hunt down the living dead.

As a youth, Xiu was fascinated by the different kinds of zombies that were out there in the world. She wanted to encounter every kind—from white American zombies, to Mexican zombies, to morbidly obese zombies, to midget zombies. But what she always wanted to find were the zombies from the indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest.

When she saw the first of them, Xiu smiled. The zombie stumbled through the trees, covered in mulched vegetation, beetles and grub worms burrowed in and out of its flesh. On the side of its head, there is a wasp nest covering much of its face.

“I get this one,” Xiu said, aiming a rifle at the corpse’s head.

When she fired, the bullet went through a section of the wasp nest before passing into its brain. The zombie stumbled back, then turned to face Xiu’s unit, wasps buzzing angrily around its head. The zombie groaned and stepped forward.

“Now everyone,” Xiu said.

And they all shot bullets into the zombie, as it lumbered toward them.

“Xiu!” called a voice from back the way they came.

Their guardian unit had heard the gunshots. Vine and Zippo looked to her for instruction.

“Keep firing,” she said, with a mischievous smile.

The bullets didn’t take the zombie down, but the three punks weren’t interesting in stopping it. They just wanted to use it as target practice. As the zombie came closer, the wasps began to swarm.

Zippo was stung first. He flinched a bit, but kept on firing. Vine was stung by three of them. The bugs left Xiu alone, so she continued firing her rifle. The two boys whimpered as more and more wasps stung them, crawling across their face and down the collars of their shirts. Xiu didn’t order a retreat. She continued shooting, giggling at the chunks of mulched flesh exploding from the corpse’s body.

“Are we going to leave soon?” Zippo whined, cringing at the bugs crawling on his face.

“No,” Xiu said, annoyed that her Left Arm was expressing an attitude different from hers.

The first wasp stung Xiu and she slapped it dead against her wrist, then continued shooting. As the zombie reached them, Xiu had them withdraw a few yards. They walked backwards through the jungle, right into the middle of six more walking corpses that were coming at them from behind, drawn to the sound of gunfire.

Just before one of the corpses grabbed Xiu by the back of her neck, a shotgun blast separated its head from its neck. Xiu turned to see her guardian, Carlos, coming through the woods after them.

“Get down!” Carlos yelled.

Xiu did not get down, so neither did the rest of her unit. They turned and fired on the zombies.

“I said get down!” Carlos ran up to Xiu and yanked her away from the shambling corpses. Then his unit hacked at zombies with axes and machetes, cutting off limbs and heads.

Forgetting about the original zombie that was coming at them, Zippo was grabbed from behind. He thrashed around to free himself form the zombies’ grasp, causing the wasp nest to break off the corpse’s head and land on his shoulder. Behind the newly exposed flesh, Zippo saw the wasp nest was not just on the outside of the zombie, the wasps had burrowed into its hollowed-out skull and chest. Dozens of wasps flew out of the zombie’s hive-like cavities, stinging Zippo in the face and neck.

When Xiu turned around, she was horrified at what was happening to her Left Arm. Little Zippo, barely fourteen years old, was covered in angry wasps, unable to defend himself from the zombie that had a hold of him. She was in too much shock to save Zippo. She was in too much shock to command Vine to save him.

Carlos went in with a machete and chopped the zombie away from Zippo, allowing several wasps to sting him as he pulled the boy to safety. As other zombies poured into the vicinity, the six of them rushed out of the jungle. Xiu cried as Carlos carried Zippo in his arms. The boy wasn’t able to walk on his own anymore. When Zippo weakly turned his head to Xiu, he saw that she was crying. This made him cry, too.

Back on the ship, Zippo was treated in the sick bay. He was very upset—not because he was in a tremendous amount of pain, but because Xiu was in trouble.

“You almost got him killed back there,” Carlos yelled.

Xiu shrank before him.

“You are a Head,” said Carlos. “You have a responsibility to keep your Arms safe. They are not your play things to take advantage of. They depend on you to make the right decisions.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, tears flowing down her cheeks.

“I don’t want you to apologize,” Carlos said. “I want you to grow up and take your duty seriously.”

“I will.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I promise.”

From that moment on, Xiu stopped messing around. She stopped thinking only of herself and started focusing on what was best for her unit. After five years of training hard, Xiu’s unit went from being the absolute worst unit in the tribe to one of the strongest. She didn’t do it for Carlos. She didn’t do it for herself. She did it so that nothing bad would ever happen to Zippo ever again.