Zombies and Shit (28 page)

Mr. T learned that the head of the drug trade was Tim Lion. He was the inventor of Waste, and he pretty much owned Copper. The moment he discovered that Tim Lion owned a club in the downtown area of the quadrant, Mr. T decided he was going to give the chump a visit.

He stormed into the club in his red jumpsuit, pushing strippers out of his way and knocking over platters of Waste that were carried by waitresses from table to table. He went straight for the big man in the back, the one in the green top hat.

Tim Lion was surrounded by armed men and naked women. He was drinking a cosmo and eating buttered lobster over pasta.

“Are you Tim Lion?” he asked the man. “Mr. T wants a word with him.”

“Who the fuck is Mr. T?” Lion asked.

“You’re looking at him, fool!”

The gangster was almost amused by Mr. T’s forwardness. He decided to hear him out before he had his men kill him.

“Mr. T don’t like the way you’re selling drugs to kids,” said Mr. T, leaning in as close as possible. “Scum like you give the good folks of Copper a bad name.”

“Is this guy for real?” Lion asked.

“I’m going to clean up this town,” said Mr. T. “Starting with you.”

Tim Lion looked at his men and said, “Get rid of this idiot.”

Mr. T clothes-lined one of his men over the back of his chair, and kicked over the table, spilling Lion’s food and drink into his lap. The entire bar looked over at them.

“Kill this asshole!” Lion yelled.

Mr. T grabbed a man’s wrist before he could draw his gun, then headbutted him, knocking him to the floor. As he raised his fist in Lion’s direction, three gunshots rang out across the table. The bullets hit Mr. T square in the chest.

Mr. T continues punching zombies as they come at him, knocking them to the street.

Haroon fires at the zombies furiously. “I can’t hold them off much longer.”

“Just get out of here,” Mr. T yells, tossing a zombie over his shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Haroon says.

“I’ll be fine,” Mr. T says, raising his fist to punch out another zombie.

Before he could throw his punch, a zombie grabs Mr. T’s fist and bites down on his arm.

“T!” Haroon yells, as the zombie’s teeth break through the fabric of Mr. T’s clothing.

Haroon turns and moves on. He knows his friend has to be infected now. There’s no hope for him. Haroon has to go on by himself.

As Haroon disappears down the street, Mr. T gives the zombie on his arm a growling face. The zombie growls back, with his arm in its mouth.

“How come this guy isn’t dead?” Tim Lion asked his men, as Mr. T still stood there in front of them with three bullets placed directly in his chest.

“He didn’t even fall down,” one of his men said. “That should have killed him.”

Mr. T just glanced down at the holes in his red jumpsuit, then looked up at Tim Lion with a snarl on his face.

“I’m not just Mr. T, fool!” he said, ripping open his clothes to reveal a robot body made of gold-plated stainless steel. “I’m the motherfucking T-2000!”

The zombie’s eyes roll with confusion as all of its teeth crumble out of its head. Mr. T throws the corpse to the ground and pulls off his hooded sweatshirt. His golden metal body glimmers in the twilit sky.

Then he swings his fist of steel through three zombies at once, their heads exploding into a splash of red soup.

When Mr. T was cryogenically frozen, they did not preserve his entire body. They only preserved his head. So before Doctor Jacob Wyslen resurrected him, he had built Mr. T a robot body. One that was powerful enough to go on missions into the Red Zone and still come back in one piece. He still had artificial organs and still had to eat, sleep, and breathe like a normal human, but Mr. T’s new body was not made of flesh. It was made of steel.

When Wyslen showed Mr. T his new body in a mirror for the first time, Mr. T nodded in approval. Then he pointed at the numbers on the chest.

“T-2000?” Mr. T asked.

“That’s the model number,” Wyslen said. “The previous one I built was the S-1000. This is the first one that actually kept its host alive. There are several earlier models, but this is the best of them.”

“Why did you build these things?”

“I used to think that the best way to survive in a world of the living dead was for mankind to exchange their flesh for machinery.”

“That sounds almost as bad as becoming one of those dead things,” said Mr. T.

“You’re not happy with it?”

“I didn’t say that, Doc. Living in a metal body is better than being dead with no body.”

“Good.”

Mr. T checked his metal musculature out in the mirror, noticing that his muscle size was even larger than his previous life.

“T-2000,” Mr. T said to himself. “I like the ring to that.” Then he looked more carefully at his hands. “But this drab metal color has got to go…”

“Oh?” asked the doctor. “We can paint it if you want.”

“Not paint,” said Mr. T, then he pointed at a mountain of gold jewelry in a crate near his cryogenic chamber. “Melt all that down. Mr. T’s metal body needs some gold-plating.”

Then he gave the doctor a big twinkling smile.

The T-2000 stood in front of Tim Lion in his men. Their mouths dropped open at the sight of him.

“Now do you want to promise to quit selling drugs, or is Mr. T gonna have to pound some sense into the lot of you?”

Machine guns opened fire on him as a response. The bullets ricocheted off of his body, sending sparks into the air. The T-2000 just swatted them away like mosquitoes.

Mr. T punched his fist through a gangster’s chest, ripping his heart out through the backside. As the heart stopped beating in his golden hand, Mr. T said, “If you had a
real
heart you’d stop selling drugs to kids.”

Then he used the gangster’s corpse like a battering ram and drove its head through a bald man’s stomach. The bald man puked up his guts as he died.

“All of these scumbags make me want to puke, too,” Mr. T said to the dead gangster.

After the T-2000 dismembered and decapitated every last gangster in the club, filling the room with blood and gore, he went for the big man, Tim Lion, who was cowering on the floor in the corner, hiding under his green top hat.

“You better listen to the T-2000,” he told the cowering drug lord. “Crime doesn’t pay. And even if it does pay, there’s taxes on that pay. And the T-2000 is the tax man, come to collect. And he makes sure you pay your taxes in full, on time. And you can’t write off nothing, not even a company car.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Tim Lion asked.

Mr. T thought about it and realized his metaphor had gotten a little too convoluted.

“Forget it,” Mr. T said.

Then he ripped the man’s brain out through the top of his top hat.