Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial (13 page)

Rivet had gone the
other way, speedballing Adderall and Percocet. His movements were
becoming more erratic as the amphetamines soaked into his blood,
punctuating his anger with spots of pure rage. The sun had set, and
candlelight gave a demonic cast to his face. I didn't get why he
was so pissed, why trying to help someone offended him so much. It
was getting on my nerves more than a little bit. He wouldn't shut
up about it, just kept ranting, repeating himself, pushing himself
into my face and then going back to pacing.

I glanced down at
Mr. Dinkins. Felt the pulse, faint but present, in his neck. Maybe
Rivet was right. Why did I want to keep this guy alive so badly
that I'd put my best friends in danger to do it? Was it merely a
buried impulse of humanity, loyalty to a fellow member of the
tribe? No...tribalism was a tenet to which I'd never ascribed. I'd
always been a loner. Born ten thousand years earlier, I would have
been tribeless. Outcast. Doomed to a lonely death without the
protection afforded by numbers. In the earliest days, mankind had
grown into a tribal society by sheer necessity, and even in the
emotionally disconnected modern world, our actions were still
dictated by the need to gather, to coalesce, to share. Was that the
way of man, or something vestigial our DNA hadn't yet learned how
to cast off? Was communalism the emotional equivalent of a
tailbone? It certainly seemed like it.

So why was it
impossible for me to let Mr. Dinkins die? Not mercy—it would have
been much easier to simply slit his throat and leave him. Perhaps
that would have been an even greater mercy than dragging him into
the bleak and unknown future that faced us. I had no answers. Maybe
in a past life I could have found a reason, but not now. Now,
action and thought were dictated by the chemicals within me,
chemicals that held me in an even tighter grip than they ever had,
because I couldn't escape them even if I wanted to. They were now
as vital as water and breath. The heartland had turned me into a
junkie, and the junk had, in turn, kept me chained to the
heartland. Hell, it seemed, was the only escape.

Jennie poked her
head into the flickering living room, then seemed to remember
something and disappeared again. She'd volunteered to get everyone
dinner, but it had already been thirty minutes. It didn't matter
much. I doubted anyone was hungry. I think she'd gotten into the
Valium, so I didn't harbor much hope for a decent meal anyway.

"Are you even
fucking listening to me?" Rivet asked. He snapped his fingers at
the bridge of my nose, then favored my cheek with a light, echoing
slap. It was the last straw. I lunged off the sofa and hurled him
against the wall.

"What the hell is your problem with me, Rivet?" I roared,
moving forward to pin his chest with my elbow. My fist flew into
the drywall beside his head, knocking a framed picture of horses to
the floor. "You're not my goddamn girlfriend. You're not my
dad.
You're not.
My fucking. Mom.
" I punched the wall again, deepening the depression my fist
had left on the first blow. Blood pounded behind my skull, making
my vision pulse. "I don't have to answer to you, get it? If you
don't like what I do, leave. I'm not stopping you."

Rivet's anger
drained from him in a visible rush. He stared at me, wide-eyed,
face pale behind the black blotches that crowded my vision. "It's
me, Ray. It's me. Jesus, what's gotten into you?"

"What's gotten
into
me?"
I repeated. "What's gotten into me is you crowding my balls for the
last half hour. What's gotten into me is the blood all over your
fucking shirt. What's gotten into me is the pile of human bodies we
left in the middle of River. What's gotten into me is everybody
I've ever known turning into a goddamn cannibal in front of my
eyes. What's gotten into me is I'll never be able to be sober
again. For life. Forever, Rivet. Do you get that? Because every
time I close my eyes, there's something waiting for me. Because
every time the stupid fucking party starts to end, I start to lose
my mind, and one of these times, it won't be enough, and I won't be
fast enough to stop it, and I'm going to turn into one of
them.
What's gotten into me
is there's a guillotine hanging over all of our heads, and it's
never,
ever
going
away.

"Is that enough for you, Rivet? You're having a great time
now, a
grand
old
time, aren't you? All the drugs in the world, waiting for us to
seize them. But what's going to happen in a week? In a month? In a
year? What happens when there aren't any more pharmacies. Are you
going to laugh when you chop
my
head off like you did to that little boy? You gonna high-five
Jennie and make a Christ-fucking pun when
my
blood's soaking into your shirt? You're talking to
me about survival, but you're still thinking about this like a
fucking junkie. This is forever. And Mr. Dinkins over there, well
he just might be the last living human we ever meet. So excuse me
for trying to hold onto that. Life just got a lot more
rare."

I glared at him a
moment longer, then shoved away and stomped back to the sofa to
check Dinkins's pulse. It was stronger. Rivet was still standing
against the wall, watching me like I might transform into a
rattlesnake and sink my fangs into his hand. I guess we all had a
right to be suspicious when someone started acting crazy. Was this
our destiny? Paranoia, constantly looking over our shoulders,
waiting for our best friends to start eating us?

I listened to Mr.
Dinkins breathe awhile longer, then stood up. "I'm going to bed," I
announced to no one in particular, then took a candle and made my
way deeper into the strange house to find a bedroom.

THE ONLY time I
can remember praying was in the hospital six years ago, but now I
paused before falling asleep to thank God for putting me in a
bumfuck town like Joshuah Hill. I couldn't bring myself to imagine
what was happening in the rest of the world, where people were
packed in more densely. In the dark bedroom, under the itchy,
unfamiliar quilt, enveloped in the heavy silence you only get miles
away from civilization, it was hard to imagine anyone else still
alive on the planet. There was too much horror even in our little
scab of a town; what was it like in New York City, or LA, or London
or Paris or Beijing?

So I thanked God
that I lived in Joshuah Hill, but I wasn't naive enough to thank
Him for making me a junkie. He didn't have shit to do with that. It
had been my own choice. My own conscious choice, just like it had
been my mom's. There was no divine intervention in that, no
heavenly hand guiding us to destruction. We chose our own paths to
hell, and each and every one led there as sure as the tides will
rise and fall.

I dreamed that it
was raining bodies, and when I woke up, the sun was glaring hot and
bright through the bedroom window and building vivid shadows in the
corners. The strange room disoriented me for a moment, but then the
previous day stitched itself back together in my mind and I shot
out of bed, inducing a streak of pain in my shoulder. I grit my
teeth and ignored it. What time was it? I used my left hand to
awkwardly dig my phone out of my right pocket. 10 AM. Shit. I
didn't like the way the shadows looked. They were too hard, almost
sinister.

I was almost
sober.

Jennie reached the
living room at the same time as me, each of us with the same
thought. We looked at each other and wordlessly dug into my
backpack. As panicked as I was, though, I only swallowed one
Vicodin. It was time to start thinking forward, and I wanted my
head as clear as it could be.

"You feeling
okay?" I asked Jennie after she'd managed to gag down a Percocet. I
opened a can of Coke from the duffel in the corner of the room and
handed it to her. She took a long draft and nodded, wiping her lips
with the back of her hand. She'd apparently found some clothes that
fit, because she was wearing a pair of running shorts and a tight
t-shirt that framed her body like a second skin. Hadn't found a
bra, it seemed.

She caught me
looking and gave me that same half-smile she'd given me in the
pharmacy. Embarrassed, I quickly turned my head to Mr. Dinkins,
still asleep on the couch. There was no sign of Rivet.

"He was up most of
the night," Jennie said, as if reading my thoughts. "He'll probably
be out a few more hours. It was the damn Adderall." I didn't ask
how she knew he'd been up so late. I didn't want to know.

"He's not...he's
still alive, right?" Jennie asked, stepping up beside me to watch
Mr. Dinkins sleep. Her arm brushed mine, and I unconsciously leaned
away. Jennie was about five inches shorter than me, and I could
smell shampoo in her hair. Lavender. She must have bathed with some
of the water bottles from the pantry. I tried not to picture
it.

"Yeah, he's alive.
See his chest moving?"

"What the hell did
you give him?" Jennie asked. "Strong shit." Was it my imagination,
or did she purposely move closer so our arms touched again?

The air felt too
thick. I cleared my throat and said, "Triazolam. Way too much of
it, but he's not in any danger anymore."

"What you did for
him," Jennie said softly. "It was good of you not to leave him.
Most people wouldn't have done a stranger like that."

"I couldn't have done it without your help," I said. I looked
down at her and she was already looking up at me. Our faces were
almost touching. Her eyes were wide, alive, staring into mine. What
was she thinking? Shit, what was
I
thinking? We stayed like that for a breathless
moment, the warm living room frozen in time, and Jennie asked, "If
the time came, would you do me like that?"

I broke and looked
away, feeling my neck flush. "Of course," I muttered. "I would
never leave you." My hands couldn't find a place to rest, kept
brushing my jeans, picking at my shirt. This was too much. I left
Jennie in the living room and went into the adjacent kitchen. Out
of sight, I leaned my forehead against the cool wall and took a
deep, calming breath.

Fuck.

Jennie and I had
dated once in high school. The relationship had lasted about a
month, up until I kissed her the first time. Looking back, I think
it was more of a comfort thing than anything else. We'd always been
friends, so when we got to that age where our bodies were changing
and the opposite sex held more appeal than it had before, we
gravitated to each other naturally. She'd lived down the street
from me since, well, since we were both born, I guess. I can't
really remember when she wasn't around. But after that kiss—we
never went further than that—things got awkward. She broke it off
with me and I got a little bitter, but a few months later we were
friends again, like we always had been.

Whatever she was
doing now, if it wasn't all in my head, was reaching out for that
same comfort, nothing else. Her and Rivet got along fine when they
got along, and I supported them. I wasn't jealous. They were my two
best friends, had been forever. Nothing else I could say about it.
Sometimes life gels in the strangest ways, and as long as you keep
rolling with it, it won't hold you down when it finally
settles.

"Better get in
here, Ray," Jennie called from the living room. I took my time, and
when I got there I saw Mr. Dinkins sitting up and rubbing his head.
I offered him a Vicodin and said, "If you'd rather go back to your
usual, we probably have that here, too."

Dinkins looked up
at me like I was a ghost, then like I was crazy, then like I might
attack him, all in about two seconds, then sighed and took the
little white oval out of my palm. He stared at it, his face wearier
than Methuselah's.

"It's for the..."
Dinkins waved his hand toward the window, the outside world, the
freaks somewhere beyond the glass. "...isn't it? Keeps it out. This
doesn't work the same as that movie."

I nodded. "Don't
ask me how, but this does the trick. Coke?" I popped a warm can
from the duffel and handed it to him.

"Vitala..."
Dinkins murmured, then dropped the Vicodin onto his tongue and
tipped back the Coke.

I felt Jennie
tense at the word. "Do you know what that is?" she asked.

Dinkins rubbed the
corner of his eye, wiping away the last vestiges of sleep, then
favored Jennie with a kind smile. "Funny thing to hear coming from
your own brain, that's all," he said. "Where's your asshole
friend?"

"Rivet's
sleeping," said Jennie. "I'm Jennifer Hartford," she added, holding
out her hand. Dinkins shook it without standing and asked, "Related
to Jack Hartford?"

"Yeah! He's my grandfather. Shit.
Was
my grandfather."

"Heard he passed,"
Dinkins said. "I know it's a few years too late, but I'm sorry for
your loss."

"Did you know
him?" Jennie asked.

"We did business a
few times," Dinkins said vaguely. "Good friend of mine, once upon a
time. You got his stubborn streak in you, I can tell already. And
his mouth."

Jennie blushed,
and Dinkins turned to me. "Suppose I oughta thank you for what you
did back there," he said.

"Anyone would have
done it," I deferred, looking away.

"Wish that were
true, sonny. I really do. But the fact is, it's a lie, and you know
it as well as I do. This world moves too fast for an old-time sack
of bones like me, and most would have left me to die. Or killed me
outright, seeing as I was squatting in your gold mine. Sky starts
raining shit like this, you see who really has the balls to keep
swinging. You got 'em, kid. Thank you."