ZombiePalooza - Anthology

#TeamFantasy Pt. II - @LeighWStuart's "Of Museums and Mafias"

"Of Museums and Mafias"

by LeightWStuart

Savvy hated to complain when basically the whole world was either on fire or being devoured by mindless, soulless, starving zom-folk, but couldn't the darn things figure out the difference between a real person and a Renaissance painting?

Screaming woman running for her life vs scantily clad Botticelli nymph dancing in the woods.

Man firing his shotgun at everything that moves vs Saint Sebastien shish kebabbed with arrows.

Marines digging pits and tossing hand grenades vs rich Dutch patron and his pregnant wife in front of a window.

Please.

Please.

The paintings might look real, but they didn't look that real. In all, Savvy had only managed to save a handful of the priceless works. The rest...chewed to pieces. Her museum was chaos. How could anyone keep anything organized or one piece in these conditions? Please.

At least everything from Impressionism onwards was safe for the most part. But then there were the Greek and Roman statues.

Savvy had to pick off the undead lickers several times a day. They managed to topple a couple of her favorites and she had no choice but to barricade and booby trap quite a few rooms.

Which meant the last remnants of humanity who stopped by the museum to admire the art before they died (they really did this, people needed art as the world crumbled to dust) were at grave risk of being maimed or killed by her traps. She put up signs, but most people were beyond reading signs by the time they wandered into the classical wings.

Handwritten warnings were worthless, in any case. The No Entry traffic signs she had picked up off the street saved a few people, though.

Fear was the law of the land. The rest of world was ruled by fear, but not her. She whispered the lyrics of her theme song, adjusting them to fit the occasion, and trained her crosshairs on a fresh zom-lady who had crawled onto the pedestal in the entry way and was trying to chew off a marble ear from her Wealthy Senator's Wife.

"I don't fear," she mumbled in a sing-song voice. "Rude zom-girl, get out of here."

The second the angle was good, Savvy squeezed the trigger, silently screaming at the mess it created.

The statue would have to be cleaned. Again. The dirt, hair, the slime, the rotting flesh. A complete pigsty to wash.

Or she would have to leave it because she couldn't afford to waste water.

By her calculations, she could live another three years and five or six months if nothing went wrong. In the lower levels, were several vaults filled with necessities: ammunition, food, water and water filters along with the surviving Renaissance paintings. Cans and bags of food were lined up in alphabetical order and arranged by date of expiration. She even had toilet paper for nearly a year.

Thanks Uncle Vin.

Having a paranoid hoarder mafia boss as an uncle had paid off. He had prepped the place to survive attacks from enemy families. When the creatures appeared that same night Frankie shot her finger off, she called up her parents to warn them, dropped the steel bars on the windows and doors and holed up in a safe to nurse her injury. When she came out, though....

The mess alone nearly gave her a heart-attack. But worse, none of her family ever made it to her museum fortress.

A zom-dude stumbled through the broken front doors. The rest of the doors and windows were locked and barricaded, she like to usher the undead in through the main entrance and pick them off nice and easy during the day. Then she locked up again at night.