Free Zombies and Shit by Iii Carlton Mellick

Heinz tugs and the bag yanks free of the zombie’s grasp, but now it is covered in purple slime-meat.
    Five more zombies go for the bag, they grab at it, fight over it. The rope goes loose as a knot in the rope comes undone. The bag is lost.
    Before the trio back away from the edge of the roof, the zombies look up to see where the sheet-rope is falling from. When they see the three contestants, their mouths begin to salivate a green fluid.
    “Fresh brains!”
    The zombies rush toward the building, a dozen more of them follow suit. In the distance, zombies recently woken from hibernation are heading their way.
    Heinz turns to Alonzo. “Go downstairs and hold them off.” Then to Adriana. “Reinforce those doors. I’ll be there in a minute.”
    “Who the fuck says you can boss me around, pal?” Alonzo says.
    “You’re the only one with a gun,” Heinz says. “Use it if you want to live.”
    Alonzo looks over at the door leading downstairs. His gun is shaking in his hands. He doesn’t want to go down there.
    “I’ll be there in a minute,” Heinz says, raising his tone to him, his shiny pronounced forehead reflecting the fat man’s scared bulgy face back at him.

    Growing up on an oil rig, Alonzo hadn’t seen many zombies in his life. The only time he had ever seen one was when he was a kid, the one that killed his little sister.
    They thought they were safe. They had hundreds of miles of ocean between them and any landmass inhabited by the living dead. But one of them still got to them. Nobody is sure how it happened. The crew of the rig assumed it had been caught up in a riptide and was pulled out to sea or came up from the bottom of the ocean, from some kind of sunken ship.
    Little Alonzo had heard stories about the walking dead, but he didn’t know what to expect. He had seen dead bodies before, but never anything like the creature that crawled on board that night.
    He awoke to his sister’s screams across the hall. He was used to her nightmares. She would wake up screaming regularly, after having dreams about their house sinking into the sea, or about Father’s ship getting sunk by an infected whale while he was off on business. Alonzo always went to her room to comfort her. If he didn’t she would keep the whole ship awake all night.
    When he left his room, he noticed the trail of black slime in the corridor leading into his sister’s cabin. The zombie had skipped his brother’s room and all of the other rooms along the way. It had chosen the one cabin that had left its door open. Alonzo’s little sister was too scared to sleep with her door shut.
    The zombie was eating his sister’s brains out of her skull as young Alonzo entered her cabin. The thing was like a skeleton with gray patches of flesh dangling from the bones. Its chest was covered in barnacles and seaweed. Tiny fish were flapping around in its hollow chest, half-filled with water. A crab crawled across its shoulder and disappeared into its neck. Its eyeballs were like that of a sea slugs’.
    His sister was no longer moving. The zombie flopped her corpse around like a doll as it ferociously tore the meat out of her split-open head. It gurgled and hissed as it consumed her. The image drilled a hole into young Alonzo’s mind. An image that he was never able to get rid of. After the adults came running to his screams, and pulverized the zombie’s bones under the bottoms of fire extinguishers, Alonzo understood the horror that his parents had been trying to keep from him. He prayed he would never have to face a creature like that ever again.

    When Alonzo gets downstairs, the zombies are already banging on one of the boarded doors.
    “Get some more wood on there,” he tells Adriana.
    The teenager looks at him with a terrified face.
    “Don’t think about it, just do it,” he says. “I’ll cover you.”
    She runs to the wood. Her hands shaking hard as the door rumbles next to her. When she pounds a nail with the hammer, her strikes are