Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (3 page)

"Rivet!" I shouted.
"It's me!"

No use. He wrenched
sideways and my hand slipped off his face. He lunged into the gap
and brought his teeth within inches of my neck before I could clamp
both hands around his head. I felt his hot breath under my chin,
smelled the reek of fresh blood, felt wet spittle spray across my
Adam's apple.

He jerked closer
with raw, dumb, animal strength. More strength than I had. His
chattering teeth were practically scraping the nape of my neck.

I'd have to break
his neck to survive. Just a twist; my hands were already in
position. Amazing how survival instinct makes it so easy to kill
your best friend.

I tensed my biceps
and dug a fistful of hair into each hand, ready to twist his head
and snap his spine, when all of a sudden he went limp. Just like
that, the fire left Rivet's body and he slumped in my arms.

I shoved him off me
and clambered to my feet. The thin clear body of a hypodermic
syringe stood erect on the back of his shirt, right at the base of
his neck above the shoulder blades. The plunger was pressed in all
the way. Behind him, Jennie, shivering and hugging her shoulders.
She was dressed only in a pair of blue panties and covered in blood
all down her left shoulder. In the struggle, I hadn't seen her
leave the couch and sprint to the kitchen.

I bent over with my
hands on my knees to catch my breath and looked up at her.

"How much was
that?"

"I don't know." She
was shaking. "Maybe like, half the bag? I just sort of dumped it
out. Barely cooked it."

"Jesus..." I
muttered, looking down at Rivet's inert form. He was sprawled
across the carpet like a murder victim. Which he very well might be
now, I reckoned. The bag in question had been a fresh gram baggie,
minus the pinch we'd used last night, so dear old flesh-eating
Rivet now had something close to 500 milligrams of Mexican
black-tar heroin coursing through his veins. Unless it hadn't
cooked. Was he breathing? I couldn't tell.

I sat heavily on
the couch, unable to tear my eyes from Rivet's body, then
remembered myself and stood back up.

"Come on, Jen.
Before we do anything else about..." I nodded in Rivet's direction.
I couldn't form the words. "...let's get a bandage on your
head."

I put an arm around
her shoulder and together we shambled into the half bathroom just
down the hallway from the living room. I flicked the overhead on
and took one look at her in the harsh white light and vomited in
the toilet. I'd never seen so much blood outside a movie. When I
tried to pull Jennie's hair away from the pulped gash on the side
of her head, it stuck fast. I told her we'd have to cut it off, and
she shook her head violently, still shaking, still rubbing her
hands against her bare shoulders.

"Stay here," I
said, and ran back to the living room for a blanket before she
could reply. Rivet's body was motionless and a thin trail of foam
had begun trickling from the corner of his slack lips, a grotesque
reminder of the frailty of our lifestyle. I fought the urge to blow
chunks again.

When I walked back
into the bathroom, quilt in hand, Jennie was at the mirror with a
pair of scissors in her left hand. Two rough snicks later and a
matted clump of brown hair—usually so neatly brushed and
straightened—was clinging to the side of her head like a tenacious
rodent. She looked up at me in the mirror as I entered. I tried to
offer an encouraging smile, but it came out closer to a
grimace.

"It has to be
done," she said briefly, splashing water onto a washrag before
dabbing it onto the clotted mess of hair. I draped the quilt over
her shoulders. She shrugged into it like a lover.

"Let me," I said,
gently tugging the washrag from her quivering hand and going to
work on her ear. The water loosened the matted blood and released
ratty clumps of hair onto the white rag, turning it rosy, then
crimson. I rinsed it periodically in the sink and kept going until
the wound gleamed naked and pink.

Rivet hadn't taken
the whole ear – just the top half and a few pieces of the lobe. It
had ripped away in a lagged crescent around the hole of her ear
canal. She'd never regain her full hearing on that side, but at
least she wouldn't be completely deaf. I moistened the tip of a
clean rag and dug a slug of blood from inside the canal. I looked
up to see Jennie watching me in the mirror.

"What was that?"
she asked, voice barely a whisper. "Ray, what happened back there?
Rivet...I mean..."

I shook my head.
"Don't. Not yet. One thing at a time." I wasn't ready to think
about it, much less talk about it. Even less, talk about it with
the girlfriend of the guy who'd gone psycho. There are only so many
things a body can process at one time.

There was a roll of
surgical gauze in an ancient first-aid kit at the back of the
hallway closet. It took some digging, but finally I spied the dull
red box behind a pile of moth-eaten beach towels. As gently as I
could, I daubed a thick layer of antibacterial cream over Jennie's
shredded ear, then pressed a cotton pad over it and gave her a
lopsided headband with the gauze.

Dusting off my
hands theatrically, I stepped back to look at my handiwork. Despite
myself, I laughed. It came out dry, cheerless. Jennie wrinkled her
nose.

"What?" she
said.

"It looks fake," I
said. "Like a costume in a play, an old war thing or
something."

Jennie looked at me
funny for a second, then laughed too.

"It does, doesn't
it," she said, angling her head in the mirror like a model showing
off the season's hottest fashion trends. "Trench chic."

For a moment I'd
forgotten my dead best friend, but just a moment. When it came
back, it was sobering.

"We should
get..." I started to say, but never got the chance to finish.
Suddenly, lightning agony raced through my brain with a physical
force. I grabbed my forehead and bent over the sink, retching from
the pain of it. It felt like a whole colony of ants had taken up
residence inside my skull and started carving out little pieces,
shredding the gray matter and nerve endings. I think Jennie was
saying something – I felt her hands on my shoulders – but her words
were muted and dull. Some sense of reality shifted, faded the world
on a dimmer switch. The bathroom got hazy, dreamlike, as if
that
was just a fragment of imagination while the
real world grew inside my skull.

I scrunched my eyes
shut against the vertigo of the feeling and the darkness behind my
eyelids opened up like an endless vista. Shapeless forms danced and
crawled through the blackness, faces appeared for an instant only
to shrink back into the shadows. Whispers came at me from every
direction. I was in a cloud of them, a swarm, hissing voices that
buzzed behind and above me. Saying...saying...

I must have
stumbled because when I opened my eyes I was hanging from the
bathroom sink. My legs felt like jelly; my fingers were locked into
white-knuckled claws against the smooth inner bowl. Shreds of
Jennie's lopped-off hair clung to my wrists and forearms. Jennie
was shaking me, and when I looked up there was terror in her
eyes.

For a gutwrenching
moment, the bathroom and the bottomless chasm in my head grappled
with each other, trying to claim me, and then the bathroom won and
my senses flooded back over me. The stringent scent of antiseptic
spray. The cold, smooth porcelain sink. The hard tile under my
knees. Jennie's hands, still gripping my shoulders, but hesitantly,
as if she were afraid I might roll my eyes back in my head and take
a bite out of her like Rivet had.

"Ray, please don't
do this. Please..."

She was pleading
with me. She didn't want to be left alone. I groaned and struggled
to my feet.

"You're sick," she
said. "Your arm. Where Rivet..."

I looked down at
the gash in my forearm where Rivet had locked his jaws onto me. It
had been getting steadily more painful, but I'd all but forgotten
it trying to get Jennie fixed up. It had stopped bleeding, but
there was a perfectly clean chunk torn away from the meat just
below my elbow. Tooth grooves sloped down from the surface like a
dental record.

Jennie had already
taken a washcloth and was wiping the blood away, just as I'd done
to her.

"What was that?"
she asked. "What happened to you?"

"Just a
little queasy, I guess," I replied, avoiding her eye. Before Rivet
had gone crazy, he'd been raving about darkness and voices. I knew
now what he meant. But what good would it do to scare Jennie any
more than she already was? We had no idea what was happening, and
panic would only stop us from figuring it out. Movie scenes flashed
through my head, and I agreed with them. There was something
painfully familiar about all of this, but to give voice to the
thoughts would just grant them strength. There was no way it was
actually happening. It didn't; not in real life.
When there's no more
room in hell
, I thought,
then grit my teeth against the sting as Jennie splashed iodine over
my arm.

"You guys need some
of this. Now."

Jennie shrieked and
clamped a viselike hand directly over the bite on my arm. I didn't
even notice the pain. All I saw was Rivet leaning heavily against
the bathroom doorway, a syringe in his hand.

HEROIN IS
like jumping into a hot tub. No, that's not quite right – heroin is
like going swimming in an Arctic river and
then
jumping into a hot tub. It's a warmth that sweeps over your
body and thaws out sections you didn't even know were frozen until
suddenly they're melting like a slab of butter and all you can do
is lean back wherever you happen to be sitting and shut your eyes
and let that soothing water steal across your skin and
soul.

At least, that's
how it feels at first.

Then comes
the nausea, the kind that hides in waiting until you do something
as innocent as reach for a cigarette or try to scratch that
fuzzy itch on the
bridge of your nose. That's when it leaps out and wrings your
stomach like a soaking dish towel and you spend a good five minutes
taking shallow breaths while you try to will your roiling stomach
to calm down. Sometimes you win the fight, sometimes you
don't.

When Rivet stepped
into the bathroom, I took a running lunge at him, because right
then my mind wasn't working exactly right. See, zombies don't talk,
and as far as I've seen, they never offer you drugs. But my brain
sort of skipped over those two little details and fixated on the
fact that a man who'd clearly been dead was now standing in front
of me. The blood caked all over his face didn't do anything to
dissuade me from my instant assumption that Rivet was now a living,
breathing, motherfucking zombie.

I
hit him shoulder-to-chest in a linebacker's charge, and even though
he was clearly high as a kite, he had the wherewithall to aim the
pointy end of the syringe at my charging shoulder. I went down in a
heap of blankets and decided to just lie there for awhile while
that deliciously warm hot-tub water wrapped around my body. Rivet
made the appropriate
oomph
sounds when I rammed his solar plexus, but he managed to spin
out of the path of my falling body and keep his feet.

I was just able to
watch him through a golden haze as he advanced into the bathroom,
syringe held in front of him, while Jennie screamed and shrank down
into the far corner.

And just like
that, the shadows around my brain shrank away.

Five minutes later
we had gathered in my living room, all of us in various stages of
debilitation. Rivet and Jennie were on the couch, Rivet's arm
around her shoulders. Jennie had slipped on her clothes from last
night. I was spread out over the stuffed armchair, still shirtless,
cut and scraped from the glass, listening to Rivet run through his
story for the second time.

"I was just a
passenger, it felt like," he said slowly, staring at the shattered
coffee table between us. "There were these flashes where I could
actually see what was happening, but no matter what I tried, I
couldn't stop myself from doing it. I'm so sorry, Jennie. God, I'm
so sorry." He tightened his embrace with almost frenetic urgency,
as if she was an anchor that could hold him in reality. I had an
idea of how he felt.

"What you were talking about," Jennie said. "The darkness and
all that. I think I saw something, too. It wasn't much, but what
I
did
see felt...weird. Like
something choking my thoughts." She stopped and wrinkled her nose,
thinking. The expression bunched her freckles into little knots on
her cheeks.

"That's exactly it," Rivet said. "It was choking my thoughts,
only then it started stealing them away. I couldn't think of
anything, there was just this
hunger
, like going cold turkey and all you can think about is
scoring a hit. I wanted
more
. More of...something. I don't know what."

I watched both of
them. There was no need to add anything to the conversation; we'd
all felt the same thing, apparently. But there was one question
beneath everything.

"What?" I said. "What
is
it?"

Rivet looked at
me. His earring gleamed dully. He'd cleaned up his face, but there
was still a black crust clinging to his patchy sideburns that he'd
missed. The puffy parts around his nose were quickly darkening to
an ugly shade of midnight blue.

"The only thing I know," he said, "is that this–" He pointed
to the empty syringe on the sofa arm. "–pushed whatever
it
is back. It let me think again. I
think it was just in time, too. I was still there, just a little,
but even that part was going fast."