Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (10 page)

Another flash cut
across my vision, and this time I did fall back. A searing pain
tore through my side. I touched the pain and saw blood on my hands,
brought my finger to my lips, licked it. Then spat it out. Fuck,
what was I doing? The clouds rolled away from the sun and heat
coursed back into me.

Jennie...
The thought was frantic but slurred, far away. The old
(
Jennie!
)
jabbed at me with the knife just as my brethren
(
It's Rivet,
shithead!
)
clamped his hands down on her shoulders and sunk his teeth into her
bicep. She screamed, shrill and piercing, and the sound carried me
swooning out of the abyss.

Oh shit, Jennie!
I lurched forward to stop Rivet. More
brethren—
zombies, not my fucking brethren, why did I think
that?
—were
stumbling down River in our direction, some running, others jerking
spastically, as if unsure how their limbs worked. I caught Jennie
on the arm and she screamed again.

"Get off me,
fucker!" She slashed out with the knife and I barely deflected it
from its collision course with my neck.

"Issme, Jennie. Issme. It'sme.
Fuck!
It's me." Why was it so hard to talk? Jennie stared
at me, wide-eyed, judging, making a split-second decision, then
turned away from me and shoved Rivet back. His teeth ripped the
fabric on her shirt, but he hadn't gotten a solid hold on her arm.
She cocked the hand with the knife, but I caught it before she
could plunge it into Rivet's chest.

"Give'm time," I
said. "You dose him too?"

"Of course I
fucking dosed him. Dosed you too, before you tried to eat me."

"It's the drugs.
It takes a few minutes. He swallow?" My head was clearing like the
burn-off of a thick morning mist. I looked down the street, sucked
in a breath. At least twenty of them, the closest just a few dozen
steps away. I knelt and scooped up my axe from the pavement. Hefted
it, felt the weight.

I'd never been
much of a lumberjack, but now was as good a time as any to
practice. My earlier reservations didn't seem as important as they
had. Maybe my head was still reeling from nearly crossing over, or
maybe the quick-release hydrocodone Jennie had fed me was affecting
my judgement. Suddenly, I wanted these things to die.

"He swallow?" I
repeated urgently.

"Yes! Yes...I
think so." She grunted and I glanced over to see Rivet locking his
fingers over her neck. I rammed the blunt edge of the axe handle
into Rivet's forehead. He stumbled back as if he'd been shot. I
reared back again, but the axe caught on something.

"Don't kill him,"
I shouted. "Feed him again. I'll keep them off you."

I swiveled to see
the zombie that had caught the axe head. "Oh, Christ," I murmured.
It was old, white-haired Mr. Collins, my former boss at the
hardware store. His eyes were milky pink in the bright sunlight,
and he held the axe tightly up in front of his gaunt face.

I rammed it
forward against his nose and heard the gristly cartilage snap out
of place. He moaned and let go of the axe. I let the steel head
drop without thinking, then used the weight to carry it around in a
full circle that came back around on the top of his head. The
tapered blade bit through three inches of skull before coming to a
stop and, almost as an afterthought, a thick rivulet of soupy blood
bubbled up out of the gash and ran down his forehead.

I stumbled back,
horrified at the sight. The blood continued to run, as if pumped by
an underwater spring that disgorged itself through this fallen
man's body. It was inconceivable that he carried that much inside
him.

But I didn't have much time to dwell on it. Even as Mr.
Collins fell, I heaved the axe free with a gutwrenching
schlurrp
and swung it sidearm at
the zombie stumbling up behind him, thanking the holy hosts that I
didn't recognize him. The axe struck him dead at the crease where
his neck became a shoulder, but the blade was too dull to go
through the soft tissue. It bounced away, and the impact sent the
zombie sprawling sideways. Its head cracked the road, and I skipped
closer and heaved all my weight into the downward swing, intent on
putting the blade through his ear. At the last millisecond, though,
just before the axe crunched through his skull and split the top
half away in a shower of red and white, jigsaw bone shards, leaving
his heart to pump away the rest of his blood onto the street, I
heaved my shoulders sideways and let the axe blade skip into the
pavement.

The impact jarred my arms, made my bones ring. The zombie
gasped up at me, blood pooling under its matted hair from where it
had struck the asphalt surface. It grasped my ankle weakly, unable
to lift its head, just reaching, scrambling, peripherally blind,
drawn to my flesh by some force it didn't understand. All it knew
was that it must kill me. I was an
old
, an abomination. I backed away from it, watched its
chest heave, each breath forcing unyielding tissue against sticky
phlegm, rasping, clawing, rasping. I watched it languish in the
agony of a death that would not come.

These were just
the first arrivals, the fastest. I could hear the others shambling
toward me, still distant, but closing the gap.

"How's it going
back there?" I called over my shoulder, and I nearly cried when I
heard Rivet say thickly, "Walk in the park, Rayman."

I risked a glance.
He was sitting on the pavement, staring at the ground and shaking
his head. Jennie knelt next to him, urging him up.

"Gonna need some
help," I said, turning back to the approaching zombies. They were
twenty, thirty feet away. "This is a three-man job."

"Two-man," said
Jennie, coming up beside me. She'd pulled the fireplace poker out
of Rivet's belt, leaving him with the shovel. "And one hell of a
woman." She held out her hand. There were two Vicodins in her
outstretched palm. I plucked them up and dry-swallowed. Sugar never
tasted so good.

"Quick thinking
back there," I said, looking at her. "I owe you one."

She wrinkled her
nose, then tucked the poker between her thighs and pulled an
elastic hair band off her wrist.

"Make that a
thousand and we've got a deal," she said, scrunching her brown hair
back into a ponytail.

"Deal," I said,
forcing a smile. On the other side of Jennie, Rivet shuffled up,
then dipped back and returned with the shovel. "Let's kick some
zombie ass," he said.

"Let's," Jennie
agreed, and rammed the fire poker through the soft part of
someone's stomach.

WE EVENTUALLY
figured out there's a learning curve to being a zombie. See, at
first, you don't know what the hell's going on. Something's
shouting in your head about Vitala, your hands and feet feel a
million miles away, random things in your body are shutting down,
and you're stuck doing this clumsy shuffle that only takes you
right to the business end of an axe or a bullet or whatever the
junkheads feel like slinging at you that day. Some people take
longer to get past that than others. Some people never really do.
Imperfect programming maybe, who knows.

Eventually, you
get the hang of it, figure out how to move like normal. At least, I
figure that's what it is. I've never gone that far, and I don't
ever mean to. I think of it like driving the same car all your
life, then switching to a different style. You've got all the
muscle memory for the first car, so there's a whole bunch of little
things that don't do quite what they're supposed to in the shiny
new one. But you learn. The zombies, they learn.

Mr. Collins was
sharp as a tack, and I knew he wouldn't touch a Tylenol if his feet
were chopped off, let alone anything stronger. When that first wave
hit, when it hit Rivet in my living room and he bit Jennie's ear
off, old Mr. Collins must have gone over like a slip in the
bathtub. All while we were killing Janet Wazowski, trying to figure
out what was happening, eating Lean Cuisines out west of town, Mr.
Collins was learning the zombification way, breaking in that new
car, so to speak.

So when we got
there, he was already close to a runner. Not a full-on sprinter,
but fast. The guy behind him, probably the same story.

The rest of them,
either dumber than shit or just had a tooth pulled or sneaking a
toke behind the back exit, so they didn't turn so fast. My money
was on all three. There wasn't much else you could count on in
Jericho Hill. Either because they'd gone over later or couldn't
figure out how their shambly new bodies worked, they were a lot
slower, and a lot easier to kill.

I saw four or five
form up in a line to take turns letting Jennie whack the shit out
of them with the poker. Rivet started working some half-cocked
Crouching Tiger moves into his sacred shovel technique, then he
just bashed and hacked, hacked and bashed, getting wetter and
wetter.

Blood is a
terrible thing.

You ever watched a
cigarette butt burning out in an ashtray? Your brain's lit from
some fresh powder—not Foley's tar shit, but the real primo, powder
so clean you can see the little crystals melting away in the spoon,
stuff a guy like me stumbles across once in a lifetime—and you're
sinking in, so deep you can't move to get the shoelace off your
arm, let alone reach out for the cig you left burning in the
ashtray, and the smoke is rolling up in a lacy spiral, real lazy,
silver and gold, just floating and twisting, and even though you're
trying, you know there's no drug in the world that could make you
as free as that little twist of smoke is at that moment, unbound,
untethered, splitting and spinning and twisting into a hundred
versions of itself, each one uniquely and beautifully different, a
diaphanous creature born of air currents so soft they barely exist,
spiraling toward the ceiling. Endless.

Blood's like that.
Primal. Untethered.

It forms its own
patterns in the air. Some blood mists, the particles too fine to
coalesce. Other times it's a gush, sputtery and thick. It catches
the light in unexpected ways, glistening and refracting, blood
rainbows prettier than an oil slick. And always different. No human
skull breaks exactly the same. The contours are different, changing
the faultlines and points of fracture. Some skulls crack, others
implode. Sometimes your axe blade hits on a dull edge and forces
just enough pressure into the cranium to burst it out the other
side in a dynamite geyser. Skull cavitation.

Rivet hitched up
beside me, puffing, looking like modern art where the only paint
left was red. He'd forgotten he was mad at me, because he draped an
arm over my shoulders, propped his shovel against his chest, and
lifted his safety goggles to his forehead. There was a
raccoon-patch of clear skin around his eyes.

"Lot of juice in
these fuckers," he said casually, with the jaded air of a
construction worker on a smoke break. We watched in silence as
Jennie punctured an old lady's jugular with the sharp end of her
fire poker. The black iron burst from the back of the woman's neck,
and when Jennie jerked it back, the recurved part caught like a
fishhook and tugged the woman forward. Jennie swung the old lady
around in a complete circle, then yanked back hard and tore the
poker free. The left half of the woman's neck ripped away with it,
leaving a concave opening from her chin to her shoulder blade. Her
blood was the gushing variety. The old woman fell to the ground
like an unloved doll and Jennie turned to see us watching. She
waved, and Rivet whistled.

"She looks like
Carrie," I said.

"She looks sexy as
shit," said Rivet.

"If that's your
thing," I said. "We need to get moving. These slow ones, we can
just work around." There were only five zombies left on the street
that I could see. They shuffled up slower than the rest, mostly
elderly, one missing his dentures, gnashing gums. They'd be a cinch
to avoid.

"Yeah, let's get
going. Jen!" he called. "Come on, hun."

Jennie took a
leaping swing at the toothless guy, shattering his cheekbone, then
trotted over to us. She was breathing hard.

"This is better
than zumba. Sickening, but what a workout!"

"Get over here,
slayer," Rivet pulled Jennie to him and kissed her. Jennie made a
halfhearted attempt to push away, but I could tell she enjoyed
it.

"Ew, Rivet. The
blood."

"We're moving on,"
Rivet said. We skipped around the last four zombies and trotted
into town. We were already close; as we'd fought, we'd steadily
worked our way about half a block up River, so the drugstore was
now visible on the right. Rivet was in the lead, followed by Jennie
and then me. Another stag worked its way across the hardware store
parking lot, but we ignored it. We'd be in and out before it even
reached us. The door was propped open, and I could see a cigarette
stand through the display windows. I knew where I was going
first.

As Rivet trotted
past the cars parked outside Dinkins, an explosive boom rang out
across the quiet town. The window of the car beside Rivet
shattered, and he ducked instinctively. Another gunshot, so loud it
left my ears ringing, and I swear I felt the air shake as a bullet
ripped past me.

"What the hell?"
Rivet yelled.

"Turn around!"
shouted a deep voice. It sounded like it was coming from inside
Dinkins.

"What's it matter
to you?" Rivet challenged. He was hunkered down beside a bright
yellow Chevy. Gummy safety glass from the shattered window littered
the ground at his feet. Jennie and I huddled behind the rear fender
of a black sedan right beside him.