Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (12 page)

The first zombie,
the one who'd presumably broken the window, stepped barefoot onto
the glass shards. It was one of the secretaries from the
courthouse. Her teeth did a little jittering dance in her half-open
mouth, like she was freezing and trying to suck in icy breaths. Her
feet began to leave red prints on the pharmacy floor. I didn't know
why the hell she was barefoot. Maybe she took her heels off at the
desk to keep her feet from getting sore during the day.

Behind her, the two other pantsuited zombie ladies staggered
through the gaping window frame, then the trotter from the hardware
store parking lot, and...
oh, goddammit
...a little boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a
torn Orioles jersey and a pair of baggy khaki shorts drenched in
blood. His lips were pulled back in a sinister, leering grin that
looked carved onto his face, and he had a spongey loop of
gore-soaked intestines in his hand.

"Grab the shit!" I
yelled, scooping medicine into my backpack. Rivet yanked the rifle
out of Jennie's hands. Jennie unslung her pack and held it down at
the level of the counter and swiped a wide armload of bottles into
its open mouth. Plastic tubes pattered and bounced on the floor,
little green and yellow and white and pink pills clattering in all
of them. The open bottle of triazolam tipped over and sent a
cascade of sky-blue ovals over the edge of the counter. Dinkins
watched us all with half-shut lids, his lips quivering.

The hardware store zombie, a thin, bearded man with a
baseball cap askew over thick, curly brown hair, bumped into a
magazine stand and sent issues of
People
and
Time
sprawling over the tile floor. Rivet raised the rifle barrel,
sighted, and pulled the trigger. I barely heard the tiny
click
among the echoing
rattle of medicine bottles. Rivet swore and tried again.

"Take off the
safety, shithead," Jennie shouted over her shoulder. She was on her
knees, stuffing fistfulls of fallen prescription bottles into her
backpack.

"I did! I
did!"

"Did you cock
it?"

"Of course I
fucking..." There was a rasping sound of metal slipping over metal,
then an ear-splitting thunder clap. The rifle barrel jerked up in
Rivet's hands, and somehow, like the random details you remember
from a dream, I saw a miniscule puff of dirt rise out of the lawn
in front of the courthouse across the street.

"Missed!" I
called.

"Thank you," Rivet's voice held enough sarcasm to dam the
Mississipi. He pulled on the metal knob in the side of the rifle,
ejecting a long brass tube. He pushed the slide back
and barely took time to
aim before he deafened us again. I felt like I was standing inside
a massive bell while mighty Goliath whacked it with a sledgehammer.
Beside the little boy, a bottle of shampoo exploded.

My ears were
ringing with a constant, high-pitched whine, I was shouting
something, couldn't hear myself, Jennie shouting too, yanking the
rifle out of Rivet's hands, bayonet blade flashing. Mr. Dinkins
slumped sideways, offsetting his center of gravity and sending the
wheeled chair shooting away. He dropped heavily to the floor.
Jennie had the rifle now. Rivet was arguing. I couldn't hear,
couldn't hear a damn thing, and then Jennie fired it again and the
brunette secretary's neck erupted in three directions like a
watermelon. The woman's head sagged to the side, down behind her
shoulder, a rapidly deflating ballon. I could see a jagged shard of
her spine sticking straight up between her shoulders, and she kept
walking toward us, blood cascading down the front of her shirt,
head still attached but hanging so far behind her it wasn't even
visible from the front.

Jennie raised the rifle again, took a slow breath, squeezed
the trigger. The woman's left breast spewed blood and the dangling
head behind her shoulder blades
swung up
, over her shoulders, a tetherball on a flap of
skin, with a small, neat hole in the left cheek and a gaping chasm
over the left ear where the bullet had disintegrated in her skull
and sent shards of metal screaming out through the bone plate. The
woman crumpled with one foot still in the air for her next
step.

Jennie lowered the
rifle barrel with the butt still pressed to her shoulder, observing
her handiwork with a calm, satisfied air. A gust of wind swept
through the shattered front window and swept her auburn hair back
off her shoulders, revealing the graceful curve of her neck, her
slight jawbone, her glowing white skin remarkably unblemished by
the blood that covered the rest of her body. Reflected sunlight lit
up her face in a wash of silver, piercing her eyes, lighting up the
speckled green-brown of her irises as if a hot fire burned bright
just behind her soft brows.

God damnit, that
girl was beautiful.

Jennie turned and
saw me staring. I hadn't realized I was. She wrinkled her nose and
smiled with one side of her mouth and said, "What?"

I stuttered
something unintelligible, my mind emptier than the distance between
planets, suddenly reduced to an imbecile who couldn't even form
words. Jennie cocked her head and looked at me strangely, then
Rivet's heavy hand was yanking on my shoulder and we were in a
pharmacy again and my ears were ringing and zombies were shambling
over scattered housewares to eat us alive.

"Let's get the
fuck out of here," he said.

"We're taking
Dinkins," I said abruptly.

"Like hell we
are." His backpack rattled as he slung it to his shoulders, but the
sound was drowned out as Jennie fired again and the bearded man
half-somersaulted backward in a fountain of his own life. She
dropped the rifle and ran over to us, scooping her own filled
backpack off the counter and onto one shoulder as she moved.

"Where's that back
door?" she asked Rivet.

"This way. Come
on, Ray."

"Not without Dinkins." I knelt beside the old man. He looked
like a bizarre wax doll escaped from a museum in his pressed,
antique military uniform, face sallow and still. I held my face
over his nose and felt the thinnest push of air. Still alive.
Unbidden, the memory rose from the mire of my mind, like a corpse
dredged from a muddy riverbank. Leaning over a face, calm and
still, feeling for breath that
had
to be there, it had to be. Weeping when it was, just a hot
trickle on my cheek.

"Fuck him, Ray!"
Rivet protested. "He tried to shoot us."

A metal shelf
rattled somewhere beyond the counter. It sounded close. The wet
sound of rolling phlegm, the staccato clatter of teeth on teeth,
carried over to us.

"Jesus," I heard
Rivet say, followed by a hollow click. They both swore.

"Out," Jennie
shouted.

I gripped Mr.
Dinkins under his armpits and started dragging him across the
floor. His slight body slid easily on the tile.

"Shit, my shovel,"
Rivet said. "I left it out there."

"Take this,"
Jennie said, indicating either the poker or the rifle. I was
focused on Dinkins.

"Nah, this'll do."
Metal scraped briefly on tile. "Not like Ray's using it."

Dinkins began to snore. It was a good sign. Even better would
be...I took a precious second to scan the shelves beside me. I
could hear Rivet and Jennie walking away behind me, down the length
of the narrow aisle behind the counter. Opposite the counter, a
metal shelf tumbled, and someone—some
thing
—shrieked in rage.

"There's a storage room back here, and a door out," Rivet was
explaining. "Dammit, Ray,
come on!
"

Come on, come on, come on...
there!
I spied a small plastic-wrapped syringe and shoved
it into my pocket, then gripped Dinkins again and heaved. Something
swished on my right, fabric sliding on something hard. Jennie spit
a warning, and a pair of scissors sliced into my shoulder. I cried
out and slapped at the pain with one hand. My fingers closed on
something wet and round and hairy. I twisted my head and saw a
small, sideways face leering inches away, its tiny pearl teeth sunk
deep into my shoulder, its little pink eyes so high in their
sockets they were almost blank, staring up at me.

The boy shook his
head like a rottweiler. Muscle tissue ripped. Spasms of agony shot
down my arm. I tried to blank out the pain but it was too sharp,
too present. It consumed the right half of my body. The boy's thin
upper lip worked up and down, exposing glistening gums. I was so
close I could see the root bulges of the teeth under the pink. His
small hands clawed at my face. I couldn't get a grip on him,
couldn't push him away. His nostrils flared. His teeth sank deeper,
sparking fire-brand pangs on my tortured nerve ends.

Then something
flashed just behind him and the weight of the boy was gone. I'd
been struggling away from him, pulling back unconsciously, and the
sudden freedom pitched me into the row of shelves. Orange cylinders
fell around me like hail. Gasping, I saw a round stump filled with
gristle and pumping tissue on the faux-granite countertop, sending
a Niagra of blood down the white drawers set into its rear.

"F-f-fu..." I
stammered.

"Hold still, Ray,"
Jennie's voice came to me through a heavy mist. "This is going to
hurt." I felt pressure on my right shoulder, then the sensation of
sandpaper scraping my wound. Dimly, fingers pulling back on teeth,
and then Jennie had a little boy's decapitated head in her hands.
Behind her, Rivet's blurred form swung the axe at something beyond
the counter.

Whatever shock had
faded reality for those brief seconds burned away and I gasped as
pain came flooding back into my shoulder. I flexed my fingers,
lifted my arm. Everything still worked. Jesus, it hurt, but it
worked.

"Go," I croaked, then said it louder. "
Go.
" I rolled and grabbed Dinkins again, pulling
mostly with my left hand. The deluge pouring from the boy's
headless body slowed to a river, then a stream. The tile floor was
slick with his blood. My feet slid out, dropping me onto my ass,
and I pushed against the shelves, the drawer handles, scooting
backward, dragging Dinkins with me. Rivet stepped over us so we
could pass and swung again. A piercing howl filled the pharmacy,
and Rivet roared back. Jennie stabbed at something with the
bayonet, then slung the rifle over her shoulder and lifted
Dinkins's feet. The old man had begun to snore.

With Jennie
lifting some of Dinkins's weight, I was able to scramble to my
feet. Together, we carried him to the end of the aisle and into the
dark storage room at the back. His body was limp and uncooperative.
My right hand gave out and I nearly dropped him, but somehow I
managed to catch his shoulder again and keep stumbling backward.
Through the narrow doorway to the pharmacy, I could see Rivet
swinging wildly with the axe. Two sets of hands reached for him. He
shoved them away, swung again, then turned and sprinted after
us.

"...get us fucking
killed, Ray," he muttered angrily as he shot past. Then an
emergency bar clinked and sunlight streamed into the storage room
on the wings of a hot breeze. Jennie and I pushed through, Dinkins
snoring peacefully between us. The last thing I saw before the
heavy door swung shut behind us was a bloodstained secretary
clambering over the countertop and crawling toward the storage
room.

"IT'S IRRESPONSIBLE. Idiotic. This isn't about you and your
heroic delusions, Ray. It's about all of us. It's about staying
alive. How are we supposed to fucking do that if you keep forcing
us to wait while you try to save everyone you meet? Huh? Fucking
answer me
that.
What
about
us?
Don't we
matter?"

Rivet was pacing
in front of me, shouting and twisting his earring. Now and then he
paused and illustrated a point by shaking a finger at me, then went
back to wearing a groove in the beige carpet. I sat on the padded
armrest of a paisley sofa and watched him, trying to work in an
explanation, but Rivet never paused long enough to get a sentence
out. Mr. Dinkins reclined on the sofa beside me, his head propped
up on a pillow, breathing shallowly but steadily. I checked his
pulse every few minutes, making sure he didn't slip away under the
heavy sedatives. On my other side, close at hand on the small end
table, was the epinephrine syringe I'd grabbed in the pharmacy. I'd
already unwrapped it so it would be ready at the first sign of
respiratory failure.

"It's naive more than anything," Rivet continued berating me.
Titan scooted out of the way of his stomping feet. He ignored the
cat. "You know as well as I do that you never check to see if the
fucking
zombie
is
okay. Think for once in your life. That's all I'm asking.
Think
. Use
that chickenshit brain. Hell, we
planned
for this, didn't we? What about all the times we
talked about killing zombies for real? Don't remember saving the
psycho war vets in there anywhere, do you? We grew up ready for
this. We're living it, Ray. Dream come fucking true."

We'd gone
overboard after getting back to the abandoned house where we'd left
our food. Way overboard. But it was deserved. We'd all agreed on
that. I was swinging low on a handful of oxys, the bite of my
shoulder dulled to a slow, manageable throb. I couldn't even feel
the gash on my chest unless I took an extra deep breath, but
narcotics had a pleasurable way of dissuading you from deep
breathing. For the first time since that morning, I felt in
control. It was hard to believe that all of this had started just a
few hours ago. It seemed like a lifetime since I'd woken up in my
own bed to the sound of Rivet shouting downstairs.