Zombies and Shit (48 page)

They come to a chained door upstairs. After searching the entire museum, this is the last door they haven’t searched. Zippo cuts the chain with his right scissor-arm, and the chains clank against the floor.

“Let’s go,” Xiu says, as Vine kicks the door open.

Inside, the room is a vast hall. It had been designed for special exhibits, and there was no exhibit more special than the works on display here.

Xiu enters first, going toward a sculpture in the center of the room.

“This is it,” she says.

The sculpture raises its head and looks at her.

“Brains…” it says.

The piece of artwork is a zombie that had been torn apart and re-assembled into a twisted abstract sculpture, with steel bars woven through its flesh. The ribcage opened like butterfly wings, a black fist in its chest in place of a heart. A living, writhing piece of art created out zombie flesh.

There are dozens of them, abstract sculptures made out of the flesh of the living dead. Along the walls, there are paintings, also composed of undead tissue. Each one still shifting and wheezing, permanently frozen inside of their frames.

“Get as many as you can carry,” Xiu says. “We need to get them to the helicopter before dark.”

Her Arms nod at her, pulling sheets and twine from their bags, to wrap up the valuable works of art.

Their client is the grandson of a man named Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination. His grandfather was a controversial anatomist known for his
Body Worlds
exhibits, which blurred the line between science and art. He used the bodies of the dead, fixed with a formalin, dissected into unusual forms, dehydrated and gas-cured. This would preserve the bodies, shaping them into grotesque and fascinating works of art.

After Z-Day, Gunther von Hagens had found himself trapped in the United States, in the very city where this season of
Zombie Survival
is being filmed. Fifty years ago, he barricaded himself in an art museum and slowly went mad. Whether he admitted it to the public or not, Gunther was an artist and human flesh was his medium. Having found himself trapped in the middle of the zombie wasteland surrounded by the living dead, with an infinite amount of time on his hands, he decided to continue his work, but this time he used the flesh of the living dead.

His sanity had left him on Z-Day, when the sculptures in his
Body Worlds
exhibit had come to life. The sculptures had become infected by the first zombie he had seen, staggering through the science museum and puking green vomit onto his sculptures. The zombie was only freshly turned and security thought it was just a crazed drunk. They escorted it out of the exhibit and the crowd of bystanders turned their attention back on the exhibits.

The first sculpture to come to life was the infant inside of the pregnant woman sculpture. A man saw it moving in there, wiggling. He leaned in for a closer look, then the pregnant woman came to life, bit into his skull, and ripped out his brains with her plasticized teeth.

The crowd ran screaming as the exhibits came to life. A zombie split into three sections on top of a horse trampled through the crowd. A running male zombie with its muscles sprayed out like fans grabbed a woman from behind, weaved his rope-like muscles around her torso, then ripped her throat out. A soccer-playing exhibit staggered through the crowd with his soccer ball glued to his forehead. A paper-thin slab of an obese man gurgled on top of a table.

When he saw his specimens come to life, Gunther von Hagens fell to the ground, bawling. He looked over at his wife and saw blood spraying from the top of her head. A skinless corpse dangling from the ceiling by wires had torn the scalp off of her head. As he watched his wife shrieking, blood coating her dress, Gunther began to scream.

The zombie dangling from the wires looked over at him, chewing on his wife’s scalp. The sight made Gunther scream louder. This made many of his sculptures turn their attentions on him. They staggered toward him. Gunther found himself surrounded by his specimens. A basketball player growled behind his back, a male and a female joined at the crotch pulled themselves across the floor, a chess player with an open skull cried for his brains.

Gunther ripped an umbrella from the hand of one of his exhibits and used it to push his way through the walking dead. He grasped his shrieking wife by the wrist and ran out of there, through the chaos of Z-Day, and barricaded himself inside of the art museum.

This is where he spent the next decade of his life, constructing new works of art out of the flesh of the undead. Eventually, he was discovered by a band of soldiers scavenging the wasteland, and brought back to an outpost outside of town. He re-married, had children, and those children moved to the island of Neo New York. But his works of art were left behind.

His grandson hired the merc punks to retrieve his work from the museum, as many pieces as they could carry. The rumors of his grandfather’s work were spread wide through the Platinum Quadrant. He knew they would become popular gallery pieces. All he needed to do was hire some merc punks willing to go there. Unfortunately, merc punks didn’t travel that far into the Red Zone, they only went on missions near the coasts. That is, until he told the Mongol tribe about the
Zombie Survival
television show. He told them if he could get a merc punk unit on the show, he would reward them handsomely. Of course, only one of them would be able to come back alive.

“But make sure to get the one with the red dress,” Gunther’s grandson told the merc punks the night before their mission. “That was his masterpiece.”

“Red dress?” Xiu asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he said.

Xiu stares at Gunther’s masterpiece on the wall, a 4’ x 5’ painting using the flesh of a woman wearing a red dress. It was Gunther’s first wife. After she had become infected and turned into a walking corpse, Gunther decided to turn her into the most beautiful work of art he could create. He knew that she never wanted to become one of his sculptures, but it was the only way he could be with her and be safe from infection. She would not become an ordinary sculpture, though. She would become his masterpiece. Like the Mona Lisa, Gunther’s wife was transformed into artistic nobility within the frame.

“Mission accomplished,” Xiu says, as she takes the woman down from the wall, wraps her in a sheet, then ties her in twine.

The woman in the painting rolls her eyes into Xiu’s direction, her lips tremble, begging for mercy.

“Let’s go,” she tells her Arms. “The helicopter is only an hour away. Forty minutes if we hurry.”

Her two Arms nod at her. Zippo doesn’t nod very excitedly. He doesn’t want to hurry to the helicopter. He wants their mission to last forever.

Xiu’s unit sees this as a suicide mission. Even if they succeed, they will not be able to return home as a whole. Xiu will have to leave her two Arms behind. Mongol units are always willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe. The money that would be made if this mission is successful is enough to feed their tribe for a very long time.

After three months into the breeding period, Xiu learned that she was unable to have children. No matter how many times she had sex with her Arms, she could not conceive. This was crushing to her unit. It was what they wanted most in the world. Then Xiu’s unit was volunteered for this suicide mission. Because her unit was unable to reproduce, they were considered expendable by the Mongol tribe.

Zippo didn’t want to go on the mission. Even though Xiu was proud to be of service to her people, Zippo couldn’t help but disagree with her.

“I don’t want us to go,” Zippo said to his Head, the day before the mission. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Xiu kissed him on the head. Even though he surprised her with his disobedience, she decided not to punish him.

The thought of leaving them behind was horrible to her. She would rather stay in the Red Zone and die with her Arms than return home without them. There was a part of Xiu that hopes their mission will fail.

“We will always be together,” Xiu said, rubbing his curls out of his eyes. “Even after we die.”

“In Heaven?” Zippo asked.

“Yes,” she said. “On that day we will be combined into one body, together as we were meant to be, for all eternity.”

Zippo laid his head on her breast, a tear rolling from his eye, as she stroked his dark curly hair. Then she saw Vine ready to move out, so she got up and dropped Zippo face-first into the side of the bed frame.