Read Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial Online

Authors: Eli Nixon

Tags: #horror, #action, #zombies, #apocalypse, #zombie, #action adventure, #action suspense, #horror action zombie, #horror about apocalypse

Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (2 page)

BOOK: Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial
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Us? We were all
white, and we were all assholes.

Rivet was a junkie
from Fortuna, a leering stickman with sallow skin that took on a
weird gleam under the yellow streetlights, like a cast-off rubber.
He'd cleaned up for awhile and started pulling night shift for the
municipality, sorting through plastic bottles and tin cans at the
recycling plant just outside of town.

He told me
once that everybody was wasting their time sorting out their
recyclables from their trash because two thirds of it ended up in a
landfill anyway. Then he told me the same thing the next week, and
the week after that, each time acting surprised when I already
knew, and that's how I knew he was back on the grind. Made me glad
in a way, because it was just like the old days and that meant
things could go back to normal. Not that I wanted him back on the
junk—what kind of friend would that make
me?—
but the days had been getting lonely when he was trying to
straighten himself up. It was good to have a friend around that I
could trust.

Not that you ever
wanted to trust Rivet. He was a bastard like the rest of us, but in
the Heartland, bastards were good to other bastards, and I knew
Rivet would never pull anything on me.

The day the world
took a nosedive into hell, Rivet stopped by around noon looking for
a friend and a baggie. Now, you have to understand something about
Rivet. Most people, normal people, they might moan and groan about
waking up at seven or eight in the morning. Rivet, he usually
didn't crack his eyelids until about two o'clock on the westbound
side of noon. We were night creatures; our habit sort of dictated
that, so it's not like you can blame us.

I was still in bed
Monday morning when I heard Rivet's voice calling out downstairs,
and it took me a moment to place it. His wasn't a voice I often
heard at noon, and I figured at the time that was why it sounded a
little off-kilter. It was higher than normal, almost panicked.

I rolled over and
pulled a dirty sheet up over my head, trying to drown out his
voice, but then something about his words changed, like he'd
started having a conversation instead of the one-sided braying he'd
been doing, and I remembered Jennie downstairs. How could I have
forgotten? Suddenly I was out of bed and blinking bits of crust
away and scanning the bedroom for a pair of pants. This was a daily
challenge—my bedroom was an earthquake disaster zone on a good
day—but I spotted a torn denim hem peeking out from under a pile of
even dirtier sheets than the ones on my bed and I was hammering
down the stairs three seconds later, still fumbling with the buckle
of my belt as I trotted.

I took in Rivet as
I cleared the landing. He looked worse than usual, like he hadn't
slept. His short black hair was curling around the fringes, which
meant he'd forgotten to gel it this morning. A couple curly-Q's
bounced around his ears like thick fishhooks, and his eyes were
murder.

"What's
she
doing here?" he
yelled at me as I cleared the last few steps in a bound.

"Easy, man.
She just needed a place to crash. It wasn't anything like that," I
said soothingly, hands up and stepping forward slowly now, as if I
were approaching a temperamental zoo animal. I was telling the
truth, too. Jennie had stopped by around eleven last night looking
for a couch. I knew she and Rivet were...not quite a
thing
anymore, but moseying back toward
that point. I'd screw a person in a lot of ways, but I wasn't the
kind of guy who'd take my best friend's girl. Jennie was still
cozied up on the couch under my grandma's patchwork quilt, and
judging by the bleary look in her eyes, she was still a little
cozied up under last night's skag, too. Her eyes flitted between
the two of us—Rivet, feet spread unconsciously the way a man does
when he's ready to fight but doesn't know it yet, and me, skinny
and bare-chested in a pair of dirty jeans, hands out like a
cornered felon waiting for the cuffs.

"Got a hit?" The
anger in Rivet's eyes seemed to fall away like an insect shedding a
skin. It was replaced by a haunted look. Apparently, he had more
important things on his mind than stray affections.

"Should be
something lying around," I said, happy to take the out. It wasn't
that I was scared of Rivet; more like, in some backhanded way, I
valued his opinion of me, and it set my mind at ease to know he
believed me. "How about some breakfast first, though? Bowl of
cereal?"

Rivet ignored my
reply and began pacing, tearing at his hair with both hands.

"They're in me,
man. In my head. I can't...all night, they've been
talking...whispering...telling me things."

"Who has?"

"These, I
don't even know, man, these
voices
. And
like, I'm seeing this darkness.
It's so
deep
. I
haven't touched a needle in two days, but please, Ray, please. You
gotta help me out." He stopped pacing and turned to me, eyes
pleading. He'd burst a blood vessel in his left eye and a tributary
of red ran across the white from the pupil. He looked sick. I
noticed his hands, now held out to me like a beggar's, were shaking
slightly.

This wasn't the
Rivet I knew.

"Give him some,
Ray," Jennie's light voice floated up from the couch. I'd almost
forgotten about her, watching Rivet carry on like this. It was
frightening, in a way. "Can't you see he needs it?"

"I, uh...yeah, yeah
sure, man. Just let me..." I turned to look around the living room,
searching among the overflowing ashtrays and crusted dishes for
that little brown baggie filled with powder. Something pressed at
the inside of my skull, like that feeling right before a killer
headache. It was hard to think. I needed coffee, a cigarette, hell,
a hit of my own wouldn't go down too rough. "I uh...Jen, what'd we
do with it last night?"

"Kitchen?" She sat
up on the edge of the couch and let the quilt fall to her waist.
She wasn't wearing a shirt or a bra. "Oopsie," she giggled lightly
and bunched the quilt edge up to her shoulders. Rivet had stopped
pacing and was staring at her like a row of corn had sprouted from
her forehead.

"It wasn't like
that..." I started, hoping to head off another jealous outburst
from Rivet, but he wasn't paying attention. He just kept staring at
Jennie's forehead with that blank, lopsided expression, his eyes
wide, unblinking.

"...Rivet?" Jennie
said cautiously. "You okay, hun?"

Rivet licked his
lips. Then he calmly leaned down and bit Jennie's ear off.

Jennie screamed so
loud it was almost like I didn't even hear it. It was too shrill,
too piercing, and my senses just let it pass over them like a
surfer ducking under a wave he can't take. All I could do was stand
there while blood streamed down Jennie's cheek and ran past the
corner of her mouth. I could only watch while Rivet stood straight
and bit down again on something that crunched like chicken gristle
while he stared blankly at the wall in front of him and Jennie's
blood trickled down his chin and he chewed something that was
exactly what I knew it was but couldn't seem to make myself believe
it. I could smell the blood, but I didn't believe it.

Then the world took
over again and Jennie's shriek was hammering at my ears and I
lunged forward and pulled Rivet away from her, shouting something
at him that I can't remember now. He just gave me a dumb look while
his jaw kept working up and down and the wet pop of gristle
slithered out of his mouth every time his teeth came together, and
then he swallowed, used his tongue to clean a scrap of Jennie's ear
off his molar, and said, "What's wrong, Ray?"

I punched him
so hard his nose shattered and sprayed little red droplets over the
gray wall three feet away. I know now that he wasn't completely
gone, because something about that punch knocked him back into his
own head. He writhed on the carpet, screaming again about voices in
his head while I backed slowly away. I had no idea what to do. I
looked at Jennie, hoping she could tell me something, but her eyes
were wide and teary and just as confused as my own. She'd pressed a
hand to her ear, and when she pulled it away now it made a
sick
shhlurrp
sound and
little slimy strings of blood trailed back to her head like
spiderwebs.

Rivet had gone
quiet and was lying facedown on the floor. Every few seconds, he
inhaled with a shuddery rasp that shook his whole body, but besides
that he didn't move.

That headache
thing, it was getting worse. I was trying to wrap my head around
Rivet, around the whole goddamned morning, but there was something
in my skull fighting back, trying to keep me from connecting the
dots. There was something important about all of this—even then I
felt the pattern—but there were claws in my brain pulling me away
from figuring it out.

Rivet gave a
shuddering breath. Jennie had quieted to a whimper. Nobody had said
anything. It had been over a minute. It was like we were all
paralyzed.

I shook my head and
bashed a palm into my forehead, trying to clear out the cobwebs.
Coffee, a cigarette, a hit. Something to get back to normal. But
then there was the matter of my best friend turned cannibal on my
living room floor, and it didn't feel like "normal" existed in the
same universe as me anymore. Still, something had to be done.
Jennie was still bleeding; she needed attention. I figured that was
the logical first step; then I might have a shadow of an idea about
what to do with Rivet.

It might be a
testament to our lifestyle back then that I didn't even consider
calling the cops. When you become a junkie, you learn to deal with
your own problems.

Heroin gives you a
perverted species of strength.

 

 

Chapter 3

 

RIVET AND I had
been friends since the third grade. He'd been sitting in the back
of Mrs. Johnson's class, already something of an outcast in his
shabby hand-me-downs, when I walked in two weeks after the school
season started. I'd spent my whole life up to that point in Hong
Kong before heading back to the states, and I guess I was as
backward as could be in that sleepy Missouri suburb community just
outside of Jericho.

Grade school is
tougher than most adults remember. I was only a few weeks late for
the ride, but friendships that would last the whole year had
already been sealed in cement, so it was just social chance that
Rivet and I had gravitated toward one another, both outcasts in our
own right.

Back then,
Rivet was known as Ritchie Whales, which was either a cruel joke or
his God-given name. At about thirteen, we started calling him Rivet
because he'd gone and gotten his ear pierced – not
ears
in the plural,
just the one ear, the left one –
and only a week later he lost the little stud earing he'd bought at
the parlor and took to sticking an aluminum welding rivet in the
hole so it wouldn't seal up on him. It was sort of a joke at first,
a temporary gag by a teenager who barely even knew what being a
teenager was yet. But over time, in that gradual, molasses-slow way
things have of gelling into place, it became his
thing
, a piece of Rivet that was always there, just
like his eyes and ears and nose.

Now, ten years
older and a hell of a lot less than that wiser, Rivet's rivet
glinted a ricocheted ray from the bright light beyond my living
room window as he heaved another painful breath into his lungs.

I stepped over an
old pizza box on the floor and came up beside the couch. Jennie
looked up at me mutely, a lost animal in pain. She'd apparently
been shocked into silence, which was a rare thing, but I doubted
anything like this had ever happened before. The blood had already
congealed a bit on her cheek, although it was still streaming
bright red from the fleshy lump that had once been an ear. Her
auburn hair lay matted against it, glued to her temples and dark
with the wetness.

"Come on, Jen," I
said. "Can you stand?"

A sound gurgled out
of her throat, and I was again reminded of a wounded animal. There
was pain in her eyes, which I expected, but also a hurt expression
of betrayal, which I hadn't expected. Did she care that much for
Rivet?

"It's okay, don't
try to talk. Just try and stand up. Let's get to the bathroom."

I didn't hear Rivet
get off the ground, but I saw a shadow flash across Jennie's eyes
just before they went wide with terror. I spun, throwing an arm up
to guard my face out of reflex, and Rivet's teeth tore into the
meaty flesh of my forearm. Pain lanced up my shoulder, all the way
into my gut, and I cried out and got a mouthful of Rivet's fingers.
His hands clawed and slashed at my face, ripping for my eyes. I
shut them tightly and we went down in a heap over the glass coffee
table, shattering it into a thousand winking suns. Ribbons of glass
flew around us, slipping across my hands and arms and chest with
teeth.

The force of the
fall wrenched Rivet's teeth loose from my arm and I planted my hand
on his face, flattening his nostrils with my palm and digging my
nails into his forehead just under the hairline. I locked my elbow.
Even at arm's length, his nails still scraped across my own face,
tearing stripes into my cheeks. His teeth gnashed below my palm,
bloody and putrid. My cheek was pressing into something sharp in
the carpet—glass, I suppose—but I couldn't break free, so we
struggled like that, side-by-side on the floor.

His legs came up
and wrapped around my torso. It was getting harder to keep my arm
straight. I tried to grab at him with my other hand, but he
squirmed out of my grasp like an eel.

BOOK: Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial
8.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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