Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (7 page)

A tear worked its
way down the hill of Jennie's cheek and clung to the bottom of her
jaw. She was smiling through quivering lips. "You're such an
asshole, Rivet," she said. "Those were my lines." Rivet kissed her
lightly, and Jennie leaned into it. I studied the bannisters. I
wasn't jealous. Jennie had been untouchably Rivet's for years now,
even during the breaks. Their's was a relationship rockier than a
truckload of gravel, yet they always found a way to work it out.
Yeah, I'd had my chance with her, and yeah, I'd blown it. We'd
moved on and, thank God, stayed friends. I was happy that she'd
found someone like Rivet, someone she could really trust. Even so,
I was ready for the moment to end. This house and its dead shadows
were getting to me. I cleared my throat.

"Yep," Rivet said,
pulling away. He held Jennie's eyes, winked. Her laughter was the
warm tinkle of champagne flutes.

"Sorry, Ray."

"Onward and
upward," I said kindly, hiding my anxiety.

"I'll search the
downstairs. What do we need? Vics and oxys?"

"Anything," I
said. "Grab everything and bring it to the dining room. I'll look
it over."

"Ray's what you'd
call a pharmacopeia," Rivet explained. "If anyone's getting through
this, it's him."

"We all are," I
said. I fingered the plastic ballpoint pen in my pocket. "And this
time, let's get some real weapons."

We reunited ten
minutes later. Jennie acquiesced to turning on another light in the
dining room, but made a show of turning off the living room light
first. "Let's not draw any attention to the house," she said.
"From...whoever."

" 'Whomever,'
doll," Rivet corrected primly, then drawled: "Ain't no call for
guttermouthin' 'round this here doomsday."

I spread the
prescription bottles out on the cherrywood dining room table. Rivet
and I had gleaned a half dozen from the master bedroom and its
adjoining bathroom, while Jennie had only found three of the
translucent orange tubes, but made up for it with a bundle of steak
knives and a meat cleaver. Nobody had found a cat. The cutlery was
arranged at the far end of the table while I used the closer half
for a pharmacology inspection.

"Anything good,
doc?" Rivet asked. I pushed away four bottles. Nausea meds. After a
brief hesitation, I added a fifth to the cast-off pile. Rivet
picked it up and read the label. "Promethazine?"

"It's a weak sedative and an even weaker antipsychotic," I
explained, "but it's mainly used for motion sickness and insomnia.
It might work—hell, I don't know how
any
of this works—but it's probably not worth the risk.
If anything, it'll just knock you cold for ten hours. It'd make us
too vulnerable. I'm going to make a ruling and say anything heavily
sedative is out."

"So we don't fall
asleep fighting zombies," Rivet said. "I second that."

"Which leaves us
with a half full bottle of oxycodone and a mostly full bottle of
Vicodin, and like..." I shook the last two tubes, "...maybe twelve
of these Percs from her oral surgery two years ago."

Since heroin
worked to keep us from getting crazy, my thinking was that other
things like it would probably do the same thing. Everything I'd
picked out was an opiod analgesic, synthetic versions of heroin or
morphine or opium, take your pick, all taken from or inspired by
the humble poppy and modernized for our cleaner world. Some of the
most illegal substances on the planet, unless you had a little
sheet of paper from the doctor giving you the right to use them.
All this time, Janet had been right down the street getting just as
high as the three of us. The only difference was, she had society's
permission. I wondered if she'd have come over for a beer if I'd
ever asked.

I suddenly
realized that Rivet had taken off without a word, leaving me and
Jennie with the drugs. He did that a lot. I looked at the four
bottles. Thirty-ish generic oxycodone, fifty-ish Vicodin, twelve
Percocet. The oxycodone, 80-milligram pills, was by far the
strongest of the three, so we could halve those. Vicodin—5
milligrams of hydrocodone bitartrate—being the weakest, would
probably take two pills per pop. If we rationed, this little supply
would keep us going for...I counted silently, using my fingers. A
hundred doses, probably, and we'd each need at least three a day.
With three of us, we had—

"Ten days," Jennie
said. I glanced up and saw that she was studying the bottles, too.
"Maybe eleven."

"About what I was
thinking," I agreed. Not bad. For a junkie, ten days was a lifetime
supply.

"We have to be
good with them," Jennie added. "Good" meaning we don't binge
through them in two days. A tall order. "I love Rivet, but I don't
want him carrying them."

"Agreed again," I
said. "You hold onto them." A screen door banged at the rear of the
house, near the kitchen. "Preseeents!" Rivet called in an
effeminate tone. He slumped into the dining room under the weight
of a gardener's wet dream: another shovel, a hoe, a pickaxe, and a
regular axe. Cradled in the crook of his left arm was a small lump
of mewing fur. "There's a shed out back. Found Whiskers, too."

I helped Rivet
offload the tools while Jennie liberated the small cat. It was all
black with bright yellow eyes, barely older than a kitten. It
looked up at Jennie and favored her with a soft, prattling coo,
like a pigeon.

"Aren't you
adorable," Jennie said, stroking the cat just behind the ears. It
began to purr.

I hefted the hoe.
A thick smear of rust had claimed the metal, and the wooden handle
was split by a hairline crack from top to bottom. "You check for
the secret compartment under the floor where she hides all her
ex-Special Ops weapons?" I asked.

"Stomped all over
the place. Not a bunker, not a hole. Not even a chainsaw, but if
you ever lose your hand, I swear to God I won't rest until I find
one."

"My sweetheart," I
said dryly. "I guess this is what we have to work with. Dibs on the
axe."

"Drugs?" Rivet
asked. I told him how we'd figured it. He nodded. "Jennie should
hold them for us," he said. I tried to hide my surprise but I guess
it showed, because he said. "I don't trust myself with them, and I
sure as hell don't trust you, Ray, so she's the one. I'll see if I
can scrounge up some backpacks or something." Jennie followed him
out, still holding the black kitten, and a moment later I heard
cabinets banging in the kitchen.

Left alone in the
dim dining room, I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw that it
still had no bars. Somehow, that single fact, more than being
attacked by a psychotic Janet Wazowski, drove home the reality of
what was happening to us. How alone we were now. The table was lit
by a small lamp on a counter that was fixed onto the wall and ran
parallel to the table, and it cast a quiet yellow wedge of light
across the center of the table. Shadows held their ground at the
rigid edges of the light, claiming this territory for their own. I
supposed it belonged to them now. How long would the power last? It
was so quiet. I hadn't really been listening, but I couldn't
remember hearing a single car driving by outside.

It was one in the afternoon according to my phone—Jesus, had
all this happened in only an
hour?
—but even on this quiet street, we usually had some sort of
mid-day traffic. Blue-collars coming home for a quick lunch,
parents driving kids who'd had doctor's appointments, the usual
smattering of people just, you know, having lives. Being normal.
Was that already gone? Was normal just a memory? I hated this
quiet. Shoving the phone back in my pocket, I went to the living
room and found the remote. Switched on the TV.

Snow. Snow. Blank.
Snow. There—channel 16 still showed the morning newsroom, but
nobody was giving the news. The big, curved desk behind which the
anchors usually sat stood like a monolith of an ancient culture
that had been wiped out centuries previously. The station's logo
was frozen on the massive green screen behind it, flanked by
polished wood panels and soft pockets of fluorescent insets behind
smoked glass. The tops of three red, wheeled chairs peeked over the
desk. Simply existing, part of the props. It looked darker than it
should, and I realized that the bright camera lights, off-screen,
must be switched off.

It must have been
a monumentally coincidental series of mistakes that left this image
here. Somebody forgot to turn off the camera. Someone forgot to
stop broadcasting. Somewhere else, the relay was still firing to
send the signal out to the faithful viewers of this once-beloved
news station. Everything was as it should be, but for one tiny
detail: There were no people. They'd just left, abandoned ship, the
way invading soldiers in World War II often entered vacated homes
to find the table still set, the stove still burning, the food
still warm.

How long would
this last?

"Kind of creepy,
isn't it?"

I jumped at
Rivet's voice. He had an armload of bags, packs, and satchels of
varying colors and designs, which he dumped unceremoniously on the
floor. I should be moving, doing something. Staying busy like
Rivet. He already understood how important that was. Sitting still
and thinking was poison.

"Take your pick,"
Rivet said. We're loading up and heading out."

"Why can't we stay
here?" I said.

"For one, Janet's
got a grocery list on her fridge longer than the Bible, so there's
not much food around here. For two, hell no. There's a corpse in
the foyer and I'm not spending the apocalypse down the street from
where I spent my life getting high. Call me crazy, but I don't want
to kill any zombies I went to school with."

The son of a bitch was actually enjoying this. I'd recognize
that gleam of excitement in his eyes blindfolded. Worse, I couldn't
find a reason to blame him. Hadn't I felt a similar thrill while
going through the medication in the dining room? I'd been washing
dust off windshields and selling bathroom tile sets so long I'd
forgotten the simple, innocent pleasure of
purpose
. Of tromping through those woods, gripping
that Nerf gun tightly, checking again that it was cocked when I
knew it was, analyzing every minute sound and leafy sway, senses
heightened, escaping. Parents didn't argue out in the woods.
Fathers didn't have a reason not to come home. Mothers didn't have
a chance to lock themselves away from a little boy for hours at a
time. Not in the woods. The air was too crisp, the sun too warm, to
allow such nonsense. Despite the terrible wars Rivet and I imagined
into existence, nobody died in the woods.

"Where are we
going?" I asked, surrendering the decision to Rivet.

"Dinkins," he
said. Joshuah Hill's only pharmacy. I didn't mention my house, the
water we'd managed to stockpile, any of that. What we really
needed, we couldn't find there. Dinkins Drug was the logical
place.

A plastic bottle
struck the floor in the dining room. I raced around the stairway
and saw Jennie scrambling to put the prescription bottles back
where they'd been on the table.

"What are you
doing?" I asked.

"Titan knocked
them down," she explained, swallowing.

"Titan?"

"The cat." She
nodded. It was on the far edge of the table, eating dry kibble from
a little bowl surrounded by knives. "The name was on his
collar."

"We're heading
out," Rivet said behind me. "Grab some food and pick a good
weapon." He thrust a small blue backpack at Jennie. "That's for the
meds. Let's go."

JANET HAD a silver
Mazda four-door in her garage. Like us, it was gassed to the rim
and ready go. For us, a round of Percs had done the trick. I set
the alarm on my phone for six hours later, 7:30 PM. If the voices
didn't come knocking before then, it was the signal for
dinnertime.

For our other
dinnertime, we had a duffel stuffed with canned goods, a pile of
frozen Lean Cuisines, and a twelve-pack of Coke, plus our personal
gear. It was bizarre how quickly we'd adapted. I don't think we
really knew what was happening back then, like it hadn't sunk in
yet. For Rivet, and to a lesser extent, me, it felt like we were at
the beginning of an adventure. Jennie's always been the efficient
type, and that hadn't changed, but I couldn't tell what she thought
about the whole thing. She took Titan.

At the last
minute, we decided not to take the Mazda. It was Jennie's
suggestion that we go in the green Ford pickup out front. There was
more space to store supplies, she said, and it would probably have
an easier time getting past...

She had trailed
off, not quite ready to give voice to the thought. Rubble,
destruction, bodies, Armageddon. I didn't know what she'd meant to
say, but I knew what she meant by it all the same. At that point,
we'd only seen one halfy—a half-changed person—and none of the
full-fledged zombies. Definitely no stags at that point, a word
Rivet coined for staggerers. Those wouldn't come until much later.
Stags, rotters, walking agents of stinking putrefaction—the zombies
that had already begun to decay and slow down. I think we were
riding pretty high on what we thought was going to be a walk in the
park. My chest still smarted, but I'd bandaged it up and thought I
looked pretty fucking swag in my bloodstained shirt. Weren't we
cool, making up witty names for dead people.

We had no
idea.

So here's how our
gear stacked up, all tidy and packed away in three backpacks, plus
one extra duffel:

Jennie
—Six
cans of food (peaches, red beans, black beans, asparagus, kidney
beans, peas). Four bottles of semithinthetic opioid narcotics
(outer pocket, for easy access). One large steak knife. One bag of
dry kitty kibble (salmon). One flashlight. One pair of scissors.
One black cat (asleep).