Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (6 page)

I flinched inside.
Rivet was twenty-four, and he hated being called "kid," but he was
just staring.

"Sorry, Mrs.
Wazowski," I said. "We didn't mean to bother you. We were walking
down the street and thought we saw someone inside. Rivet—my friend
here—just wanted to make sure nobody had broken in or anything. I
told him about that time you helped me out after...after my
parents, you know..." I trailed off and made a show of studying my
shoes. I should have gone into improv. That was beautiful.

"Of course, dear,"
Janet's wan smile faltered, then steadied.

"Rivet just wanted to repay the favor. If it was needed, you
know. Like I said, we saw someone, and we couldn't walk by without
at least checking. You're here, though. Again, sorry to bother." I
jabbed Rivet with my elbow,
let's go
.

"You feeling okay,
Miss Wowski?" Rivet asked.

"Caught something,
that's all. Must be one of those bugs going around."

I nodded knowingly
and made to leave.

"A bug..." Rivet
wouldn't take a hint. "Could I ask you a personal question, Miss
Wowski? Are you taking any medication?"

"It's Wazowski,
dear. Just some pills for this cricky leg of mine." She slapped her
thigh lightly. "Old war wound. That's a joke," she added when Rivet
didn't smile. Her left eyelid fluttered. "That's a joke," she said
again.

"When's the last
time you took one?" Rivet asked. He backed away a quarter-step.
Barely noticeable. But Janet saw it, and she matched it with a step
forward.

"That's a joke,"
Janet said. Her frame filled the doorway and she tottered slightly
on the raised metal strip at the threshhold. Her eyelid fluttered
again, and the left side of her mouth sank, turning her polite
smile into a narrow sideways "S." I backed up, too, and Janet
stepped over the threshold onto the concrete stoop. Fuck.

"Why don't you run
inside and take another one, Mrs. Wazowski," I suggested. I was
rolling the BIC pen in my pocket between sweaty fingers.

"Old w-war wound.
That's a j-j-joke," Janet stuttered, then snagged Rivet by his
short black hair and jerked him toward her.

I wish I could say
I reacted sooner. Wish I hadn't just stood there, shocked, while
Janet used her weight to yank Rivet to the ground by his hair. His
legs slipped back and his head cracked the concrete and he tried to
squirm away but Janet had his head in both hands now, crouched
down, and one of her hands came free with a thick mat of Rivet's
hair which she held to her face and sniffed before she turned to me
and shoved the black wad into her mouth. Tiny hairs stuck out
between her lips like spider legs, and she snarled and chewed.

Rivet was slapping
at her with both hands, on his back, his feet kicking out in the
air past the narrow stoop, unable to get any leverage to knock her
away, screaming my name.

And I just stood
there, a living lawn ornament.

It was the eye
that finally got me. When Janet looked back at me, her left
eyeball, the twitchy one, had clouded over with a thin haze of
pink, like bloody glaucoma. When I saw that pale orb staring up at
me, I finally snapped free and drove a knee right into Janet
Wazowski's kind, friendly face so hard her lip split under my
kneecap with a caterpillar squish. She tumbled backward into her
dark house. Rivet rolled and sprang to his feet, then rushed
through the doorway after her.

I followed, all
action now, take me off the bench, coach. The light shining through
the open front door illuminated the entranceway to Janet's house,
but all the other interior lights had been switched off and the
blinds had been shut, shedding darkness over most of it. Directly
through the door, past a small open area for taking off your shoes,
was a hardwood staircase that rose up into shadow. On the left of
this stairway was a couch and two armchairs arranged in a
semi-circle in front of a television—the living room—and to the
stairway's right was another open space with what looked like a
dining table.

On the stairway
itself, lolling on the lowest three steps with her thick feet
splayed over the floor toward the door, was Janet. She moaned
weakly and pressed both hands to her face, looking for all the
world like someone with a killer hangover. Rivet had run past her
into the gloomy recesses of the dining room and disappeared God
knew where, and here was Janet. All hundred and eighty pounds of
her, twitching on one side at the bottom of the staircase and
asking for help, saying it was dark, too dark, it hurt, the
darkness, who were these people, these people talking to her, she
didn't know them, it was so dark.

So I said the
first thing that popped into my head: "Want me to turn on a
light?"

Janet's head
jerked toward my voice and now both of her eyes were that muddy
pink. They were almost luminescent in the arc of watery brown
outside light. I don't know how she did it, but Janet went from
helpless on her back to her feet before I could blink. She got her
hands to my chest and shoved me against the wall beside the door. I
grabbed her wrists and tried to twist away, but fuck that woman was
strong. Her head whipped closer, got my shirt front in her white
teeth. Yanked it. Let go. Teeth again, closer. They pinched the
skin of my chest and ripped back, staining the shirt red.

I screamed.
Punched at her head. My knuckled popped against her skull, hurting
me more than they hurt her. She bit in again, going for the blood.
Got a solid grip that time and pulled a thick fold of skin away
from the pectoral, stretched the skin into a tent under the shirt.
More blood blossomed down the front of my shirt as her incisors,
evolved over a million years for slicing meat, did their job with
gusto on my skin.

Screaming,
punching, slapping, I couldn't budge her. Her teeth were working
deeper now, burrowing through all the layers of skin and into the
muscle tissue beneath. Her eyes were closed with an expression of
rapture. I worked both hands flat over her forehead and pushed,
fighting against the pain, and finally her teeth sank through that
flap of skin far enough to sever it from by body with a sound like
ripping corduroy.

Her anchor
suddenly gone, Janet's head snapped back in response to my shove,
just as a brass lamp stand, sans shade, swung in from the other
direction and crunched into the heavy plate at the back of her
skull. I slid down the wall, knees weak, and looked up to see Jenny
heaving air into her lungs. She cocked back the lamp stand like a
Little League hero and swung for the fences, burying the brass pole
into Janet's upturned face. The woman crumpled the way the Towers
had fallen, top to bottom, into a heap on the entranceway floor.
She came to rest beside a pair of neatly arranged Birkenstocks.

"Fuck," I
breathed, blinking away tears of pain and gingerly feeling the
circle of flayed flesh on my chest.

"Fuck," Jennie
agreed. She was trembling.

"Fuck!" shouted
Rivet, rounding the stairs with a wide garden shovel in his hands.
He brought it down on Janet's head over and over again, spraying a
fine crimson mist with each downward swing. At long last, he
dropped the shovel and sank onto the lowest stair. He was laughing
softly, manicly, staring at the thing that was now unrecognizable
as a person. He was coming apart.

"We killed her,"
Jennie said, slumping down beside Rivet. The bandage I'd tied
around her ear had come loose at one end and now draped over one
shoulder like a pirate's bandana. Nobody seemed capable of
standing. Janet quivered gently on the floor between the three of
us. Deep in the middle of the blood and bone pieces, a single pink
eye blinked once.

"We had to," I
said. "Right? We had to. She went crazy, like..." I trailed off,
but Rivet glanced sharply at me.

"Like me," he
finished for me.

"Something's going
on," I said. "Will you at least agree to that now, Rivet?"

He nodded, along
with Jennie.

"Something bad," I
continued. "I don't know what happened to her, but—"

"If it walks like
a fish and talks like a fish..." said Jennie.

"...then it must be a zombie," Rivet finished, his voice
heavy. "Congratulations, Rayman. You were right for once in your
life.
And
you got yourself an
early ticket for the ride."

"Huh?"

Rivet nodded to my
shirt, where the blood had now soaked an inverted tree down my
stomach.

"Oh...shit." Crazy Janet had bit me.
Zombie
Janet had bit me. Rivet stood and reached for
the shovel on the floor, and like a miracle from on high, I could
walk again. I leaped to my feet and sidestepped into the dark
living room, hands out, watching Rivet. Jennie rose and put a hand
on Rivet's shoulder. Rivet barked a cold laugh.

"Calm down, guys.
I'm not going to kill him. Just..." he brought the spade head down
on Janet's neck and pressed it to the floor with his foot,
"...finishing business," he grunted. Janet's body finally
stilled.

"You're not?" I
asked cautiously.

"We're ahead of
the curve on this, so let's think it out," Rivet said. "We know
three things. One, nobody bit me before I crazied up, which means
it probably doesn't work like that. I bit both of you, remember.
And you're still peaches. Two, you hear that bitch rambling about
darkness? Yeah, we've been there. So maybe we can figure out why
it's happening."

"Janet wasn't a
bitch," I said. "She was...nice." I tried not to look at her body,
at the blood pooling into the cracks of the floorboards.

"What's number
three?" Jennie asked.

Rivet fished in
his shirt pocket and pulled out the baggie of heroin. His eyes
flashed. "We know how to kick its ass."

LIFE.

It washed through
my bloodstream on a silken tide, cleansing my sins with fingers
soft and sure. Nobody'd brought a needle, so we settled for toot. A
fingernail each. Just enough to keep the demons howling at the
ramparts. They'd been creeping in again. Quieter this time. Harder
to sense. It was a dangerous cliff. Once you lost the edge, nobody
was sure how far you could fall before it became impossible to
climb back to the top. Nobody was keen to find out.

We were good now,
but nothing lasts forever. Especially brown sugar. That gram bag
was little more than wrinkled cellophane by now, a shell of itself.
We'd sucked all the meat out.

Jennie and Rivet
and I were in Janet's living room, catching our breaths on her cat
fur-carpeted sofa. We'd flicked on a small table lamp, but Jennie
wouldn't let us turn any more on. The blinds were still tightly
drawn, the front door now shut, locked, the garden shovel wedged
between the doorknob and the flat front of the second stair to keep
it from swinging inward. Janet's mangled corpse sprawled like a
morbid Halloween decoration on the bloodstained hardwood beneath
the shovel's shaft. Her head rested beside it, the neck part facing
the wrong way. We were high.

Life was good. So
good.

"Anyone got a
cigarette?" I asked.

Jennie shook her head. She hadn't taken her eyes off me the
whole time we topped up, and I understood why. I even empathized.
At the first signs of a zombie apocalypse, her boyfriend had tried
to eat her and her best friend had been bitten—twice. It was the
kind of horror story the heroes usually watch in passing on their
way to the safe zone, the scene that shows the audience how
dangerous the infection is. Damn, poor guys. I sure hope
we
don't end up like them.

Honestly, I wasn't
sure what would happen to me, either. We're always the heroes of
our own stories, no matter how short and fucked they wind up being.
And here's the shit: Looks like I wasn't making it past the
prologue. Everybody dies in Joshuah Hill.

"Where's the cat?"
asked Rivet.

"Upstairs, maybe?"
I suggested, not really caring. "Outside. Ran away. Maybe Janet ate
it."

"Sick, Ray."
Jennie.

"Do you feel like
eating any animals?" Rivet asked, eyeing me around Jennie, who was
between us on the sofa.

"Yeah," I said. "A
cow. Ground up, on a bun. Or fresh human. Are those animals?" It
was a joke, but Jennie leaned away all the same. "If nobody has a
cigarette, I'm taking a look around."

"Good thinking,"
Rivet said, standing. "I'll come with you, check out the upstairs.
Jen, wanna take the kitchen and any bathrooms down here?" He
already knew what I was going for—the best of friends always
knew—but for some reason he wanted to keep an eye on me.

"What if the police come?" Jennie ventured. "I know, okay? I
know. But we could still be overreacting about this whole thing.
What do we really know? Even if there's some fucked up virus going
around, it could just be on this street. Or this neighborhood. Or
stuck in Joshuah Hill, or...we killed someone, guys. Jesus, we
killed a woman in her own home. Even if something bad is happening
now, what happens when it blows over? People don't forget a
murder
."

Rivet sat lightly
on the couch and put his arm around her. He brushed a few damp,
dangling brown strands from her face. They hitched up against the
bandage swathed across her forehead. "You could be right. Even if
we say it was self defense, who's going to believe a couple
low-life junkies, right? No matter how beautiful one of them is."
Jennie sucked in a quavering breath, smiling in spite of herself.
"So we do what we always do. We stay alive. That's all we've been
doing for years in this shithole town, isn't it? We're survivors,
Jen. All of us. Even chewed up Rayman over there." I flipped him
off. "There hasn't been a storm rough enough to take us down yet,
and you know more than anyone it's not for lack of trying. Waves
are getting bigger, that's all. We've weathered 'em before, we'll
do it again. Do you believe that?" He tilted Jennie's face toward
his own.