Zombies and Shit (45 page)

As the smoke clears in the room, Scavy stands up and feels the tightness in his hip. He looks down to see the piece of shrapnel in his side and all the blood soaking his clothing. Because he can’t feel any pain, he realizes that the wound must be even worse than it looks.

“Fuck me,” Scavy says, then wheezes out a laugh.

Something shoots him in the back. A fiery pain at the base of his spine. He rubs the wound and lifts up his fingers to reveal a layer burnt skin. He turns around to the camera ball floating in the room with him. It shoots another laser at him. He jumps over the bed, but the blast gets him in the thigh.

He knew it was against the rules to fuck with the cameras, but he thought the punishment for that was the self-destruction of the cameras. Having other camera balls attack him with lasers was not something he had anticipated.

Scavy tosses a blanket over the camera, grabs his naginata spear, and runs out of the room. The camera ball blasts blindly through the sheet as Scavy closes the door on it. Out in the hall, he sees that all the movement is causing his wound to rip open even more. He needs to pull out the metal but worries that it’s the only thing keeping the blood in his body.

As he steps carefully down the stairs of the apartment complex, Scavy comes face-to-face with Heinz. Not only did the nazi survive the blast, he had come out of it without a single scratch on him. Scavy nearly topples over in shock at the sight of the guy, standing there with his flame thrower pointed at him.

Scavy freezes. His sniper rifle is aimed at the ground. He’s not sure if he can raise it up in time to shoot the nazi before he’s eaten alive by flames. But Heinz doesn’t fire. He too is frozen in his place as he examines what Scavy has on.

“You are a member of the Fifth Reich?” Heinz asks him.

Scavy looks down at the clothes he wears. The uniform he had gotten off of the sculpture of Adolf Hitler in the wax museum is similar to that of Heinz. They have matching swastika armbands. Scavy decides his best course of action would be to play along.

“Yeah,” Scavy says.

“You must be one of the operatives positioned in Copper. I had no idea there was another Brother in this competition.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Heinz notices the look of hesitation on Scavy’s face. He can tell the punk has no idea what he is talking about.

“Why would you help that Japanese cunt you were with?” Heinz’s tone becomes more aggressive. “A true Aryan would have not allowed her to live so long.”

Scavy considers lying and telling him that he was just playing Junko the whole time, and he planned to kill her once she proved useless to him, but he respects the woman too much for that. He’d rather go sniper on flame thrower than sell her out like that.

The camera ball blasts its way out of the apartment on the floor above them. Scavy realizes he’s trapped on both sides: the camera ball hovering down the staircase and Heinz pointing his flame thrower, convinced the punk is an imposter with no right to be in that uniform.

Scavy always finds himself between a rock and a hard place. It’s almost as if such situations seek him out. When Tim Lion and his men hit Domino’s hangout, after killing a good portion of the Diamond crew, he allowed Domino to explain himself. Lion had no clue why Domino would be stupid enough to try to get away with stealing his merchandise, so he was curious.

“How could you be so stupid?” Tim Lion said, pointing his index finger at his head.

Then, somehow, Domino convinced Tim Lion that Scavy set him up and that he had nothing to do with it. Domino mentioned his four dead men with missing jackets. There were four men who hit Lion’s shipment. The packages of Waste were left on the porch unopened. Nobody in their right mind would leave all of that on a porch unless it was Scavy sneaking in at night to frame him. All the pieces fit together. Lion believed him.

So then Scavy in his crew not only had the Diamonds after them, they also had Tim Lion coming for their heads.

“This is even worse,” Popcorn yelled at Scavy. “We’re all dead for sure.”

“Not necessarily,” Scavy said. “We’ve already taken out half of Domino’s men without a single casualty. I’d say we’re doing pretty good.”

“But what about Tim Lion?”

“Lion has no idea who we are. If we can just take out Domino then Lion wouldn’t know how to find us.”

“But he’ll find out eventually. The guy practically owns this quadrant.”

“Let’s just focus on one problem at a time.”

No matter how dire the situation seemed, Scavy had optimism. He knew there was always a way around a problem. He just had to figure it out.

With his fingers tapping on the sniper rifle, Scavy decides to just go for it. He’s going to shoot the guy. Perhaps he will get burned, but it’s possible he can kill the nazi before the fire kills him. As long as he doesn’t miss, he can take the guy out.

“The Japanese girl is smart,” Scavy says. “A lot smarter than you.”

This infuriates Heinz more than Scavy was expecting.

“You went after me and let her get away,” Scavy continues. “Dumb move. I’m not letting you out of here alive.”

Heinz laughs. “Brave talk, for an insect.”

Scavy chuckles with him, exposing his charred bloody teeth. Then Scavy raises the sniper rifle and fires.

The Diamonds knew that the only way to make peace with Tim Lion was to bring him Scavy’s head on a platter, so Scavy didn’t have to hunt down Domino. He just had to wait for the prick to come to him. Domino didn’t know exactly where Scavy lived, but he knew the side of town he hung out in. Scavy, Brick, and the rest of his crew were known to hang out in the Southeastern park by the shore. It wasn’t exactly a park, it was a wide open piece of land that was once a junkyard, where citizens of Copper often dealt drugs, got drunk, got into fights, played chess, ate lunch, and just hung out. Scavy and his crew were often seen patrolling the park like bulldogs. It was the first place Domino was going to check.

“I’ll hang out here, by myself,” Scavy said to his crew. “When they see me that’ll bring them out into the open. I want the rest of you to get them from behind.”

“That’s it?” Brick asked. “That’s your plan? It sounds like suicide.”

Scavy smiled. “All my best plans sound like suicide.”

Scavy gets off a round with his sniper rifle, but Heinz gets him first. The flames engulf Scavy with such force that he drops the rifle as it’s fired. The bullet misses Heinz completely. Unarmed and coated in fire, Scavy thrashes around, trying to put the flames out as he is burned alive. With each flame that Scavy puts out, Heinz covers him in several more.

Then Scavy stops thrashing around and jumps at Heinz, grabbing tightly around the waist. It catches Heinz on fire and they shriek in each others’ ears as they burn together.

“I told you I’m not letting you out alive,” Scavy yells at him.

Heinz screams, “You’re going to get us both killed!”

Then Scavy tears the hose out of a gas canister on Heinz’s back and breaks away from him. Heinz whips his arms around, trying to get the tanks off his back as the leaking gas catches fire.

Scavy dives for cover, just before the explosion. He jumps out of the stairwell into the third floor hall, then rolls on the ground until he puts the fire out on his clothes. His face is charred black, his mohawk burned off, and uniform melted to his flesh, but he’s still standing. He gets up and staggers back into the stairwell to retrieve his weapons. Grabbing his naginata spear, he sees Heinz looking up the stairs at him in anger. Although half-burnt, the nazi was able to get the tanks off before they exploded.

As Scavy grabs his spear from the steps, Heinz pulls out the double-fisted sledgehammer.

“I’m going to squash you like the vermin that you are,” Heinz says, as he swings the hammer.

The hammer smashes into the stairs by Scavy’s feet. The punk uses the chance to swing the blade of the spear at Heinz’s head, but Heinz catches it with his free hand.

“Not good enough,” Heinz says.

Scavy pulls the spear out of his grip, slicing open the palm of the nazi’s hand. Then he ducks as the floating camera ball comes in from behind, blasting its lasers at the punk. The particle beams pass over Scavy’s head and hit Heinz in the chest. Not enough to kill him, but enough to throw him back.

Scavy takes off running—in a hopping, limping, getting-blood-all-over-the-place kind of way—down the hallway of the third floor. Heinz chases after him. Scavy dodges into an apartment, then jumps down a hole to the second floor. As Heinz enters, he doesn’t see Scavy looking up at him from the floor below. Scavy drives the spear through the hole, into Heinz’s leg. The blade cuts through the calf muscle, scraping across his fibula bone. Heinz screams at the pain, then roars at the punk. He lowers the hammer down at the spear, breaking it in half.

Scavy laughs up at Heinz and flips him off. Then Heinz puts his blowgun to his lips and shoots a poisoned dart into Scavy’s forehead. The punk’s laughter cuts off as he sees the dart sticking out from between his eyes. He pulls it from his skin and examines it slowly, as if in a daze, then tosses it aside.

“What the fuck was that?” Scavy’s voice is soft and shaky.

Heinz laughs as he pulls the spear blade out of his leg.

“Fuck,” Scavy says, then takes off down the hall, before the camera ball hovering behind Heinz’s shoulder can take a shot at him.