Zombies and Shit by Iii Carlton Mellick

but Lee didn’t get away unscathed. The blast took off flesh from the right side of his head, including his right ear. Both of his legs are mangled. He can’t feel anything in his left arm. There are also large shards of glass buried in his back.
    The corpses outside of the dilapidated tavern are in much worse shape than he is. The grenades he had tossed blew many of them into pieces. All of them are still alive, worming across the ground, pulling themselves by finger bones. The only one still standing wanders the street with nothing but a mass of pulpy soup for a head.
    Pulling himself up by his one good arm, Lee goes behind the bar of the old tavern. Most of the shelves have rotted away, breaking bottles on the floor below. But the bottom shelf is still standing and holds a single bottle of 55 year old sour mash Kentucky bourbon.
    Lee’s eyes light up.
    “Hello, beautiful,” he says to the bottle, before breaking it open and taking a swig.
    He plops himself down on a wrought iron barstool and exhales the smooth whiskey fumes.
    “Braains,” belches a severed zombie head on the bar next to him.
    “Cheers to that,” Lee says, and taps the zombie’s forehead with the bottle, like a toast. Then he takes another swig.

    When Lee separated from Junko and the others, he had only one goal in mind: he wanted to get drunk. He knew there was no way he was going to win the contest. He didn’t even want to win. Lee was fucking old and ready to die. Life is shit when you’re a 65-year-old homeless war veteran abandoned by your society. There’s nothing he wanted more than to just throw in the towel and die already. If he had the guts he would have hung himself years ago.
    Bosco was the only other contestant he had run into after leaving the yard of the hotel. The young redneck was hanging from a fire escape with zombies grabbing at his ankles. He called out to Lee for help but the old man wasn’t stopping for anything. He waved goodbye to the screaming man and just took off down an alley.
    When he opened his pack, he groaned at the sight of grenades. There were almost twenty of them, but they were heavy and not the type of weapon that he could use at close range. With all of those years of zombie-fighting experience, he knew that close-range defense is what matters most.
    He crossed a park, waking three of the undead sleeping there. They were half-submerged in the dirt, covered in grass and weeds. One of them couldn’t get up due to the roots of trees that had grown through its abdomen. He lost the other two that chased him by ducking into a liquor store. As the corpses passed, Lee watched them through a broken window: two dirt-coated skeletons whose flesh looked to be made of chewed-up clay. Their mouths and throats were so filled with mud and weeds that their voices came out of holes in their necks when they tried to say brains .
    When Lee turned around, what he saw was pure heaven. Lined up before him were shelves upon shelves of spiced rum, potato vodka, pear brandy, orange cognac, single malt scotch, and every other liquor he could possibly dream of. And it was old world liquor, not the cheap shit that people pass off as liquor these days in Neo New York. It was made back when people cared about the quality of their wines, their foods, their cigars. People lived well and died old. Their lives didn’t revolve around fighting every single day just to stay alive.
    Lee had grown up in this era, before the zombie apocalypse. He lived in the suburbs with his upper middleclass family. This period of his life he remembers well. He remembers playing basketball with his best friends, picking flowers for his first girlfriend, watching television with his parents. But he doesn’t remember much of Z-Day. It was like a distant dream, a time when everyone was in a constant state of shock as the chaos swept in around them. One day he was scribbling notes to his girlfriend during math class, and the next everyone he knew was dead and