Read Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary Online

Authors: Eli Nixon

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Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary

BOOK: Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary
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THE
DREAMS OF FEAR
SERIES

 

HEARTLAND JUNK

A Zombie Thriller

 

by

Eli Nixon

 

 

Part II:

SANCTUARY

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers...who will wipe this blood off us?

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute sanity.

 

Shirley Jackson

 

 

Chapter 1

 

              DARKNESS LIVES in all of us, and always has.

              The house on River Street where we holed up at the end of that first day was a three-story, five-bedroom American Foursquare that looked and felt like it had been standing for over a century. I supposed it had; most homes near the center of Joshuah Hill were leftovers from the post-colonial epoch, early twentieth century at the latest. Brown brick exterior with a wood-slat front porch and a wood-everything interior. The wall paneling was maple, the stairway was hickory, the tables and endtables were an eclectic mix of both.

              I'd slept that first night in a guest bedroom on the ground floor, but the second night found me in a long, narrow bedroom on the second story. A massive, king-sized bed stretched nearly from wall to wall, and there was one window set at the far end, opposite the door. I think that's what I liked most about it. Windows had begun to give me the creeps at night. It seemed like only a matter of time before I'd look out one and see a ghostly white face staring back at me, pink eyes blazing in the darkness beyond.

              Jennie and Rivet bunked up in the master bedroom, just down the hall from my own bedroom. I heard them arguing about it once; I don't think they realized how thin the walls were, since I didn't make much noise on my own. Jennie wanted her own bedroom, but Rivet wouldn't let her. Later the same night, I lay awake to the bedframe's rythmic pounding on the hard maplewood wall. I guess they made up.

              The days passed slowly at first. The first two or three, all we did was sit in the living room, just like old times. But then some combination of boredom and restlessness drove me to get up and do...things. Something. My hands wouldn't stay still. My mind was miles away all the time. I didn't know what to do, at least at first. But I couldn't just sit around all day and get high and bullshit. The high was a given, but I was also finding it easier to regulate my doses so that I didn't wind up drooling at the ceiling for a few hours everyday. I think part of those hours, I was waiting for Mr. Dinkins to come back, but he never did show.

              On the fourth day, I pulled out of it. We had drugs to last us months, but the food was already running low. One of the good things about being high all the time was you never had much of an appetite, but I also knew that we couldn't sustain ourselves if we kept going the way we were. Even in those brief days, Rivet's thin frame had gone even more skeletal, and Jennie's waist was nearly two sizes smaller than it had been. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror as much as I could, but I could see my wrists thinning, feel my ribs a little more than usual.

              Shit had to happen. It was the irony of drug use: You're always on the hustle for more junk, but give a junkie an unlimited supply and he'll die before he goes through half of it.

              That wasn't my idea of a future. Maybe it had been, but not anymore.

              The first day, after Dinkins left, Rivet had begun tearing apart furniture and securing it over the windows with a hammer and a box of nails he'd found in the attached garage. He got one window done before giving up. On the fourth day, I got up and started finishing the job.

              The ground floor of River House, as we'd begun calling our small haven, was simple enough. The front door opened into a foyer with no windows. To the front, left, and right were high, arched doorways with no doors that led to the living room, music room, and a hallway, respectively. The foyer had no windows.

              The music room—we referred to it as that because there was a large grand piano in it—led from the foyer on one side to a dining room on the other side. It had two windows.

              The dining room, past the music room, had three, two in the front face of the house and one on the side face. There was a massive oak dining table in the center of the room, and if you stepped in from the music room, the wall on your right had a doorway that opened into the kitchen.

              The kitchen had one window over the sink that looked out on the side yard. Directly opposite the door adjoining the kitchen to the dining room was a wooden door that opened onto a small, screened-in porch and then a brief stairway that took you down into the backyard. The house was built on something of a hill, so while the front door was level with the ground, the back door was about ten feet up.

              The kitchen had another door which led to the living room, and through that you could reach the foyer again, making the whole arrangement sort of a boxy circle. The living room had four windows along the house's back wall, but like I said, these were pretty high off the ground.

              Then there was the hallway. This led out of the foyer to the right. The first thing you came to was a wide, curved stairway on the left that led up to the second floor. Beyond this was a door to the basement, and beyond that were a bathroom and a guest bedroom opposite each other.

              I found a pile of lumber in the basement and grabbed Rivet's hammer and started with the windows in the music room, then made my way all around the circle and into the living room. After a moment of thought, I started hammering boards into the living room windows, too. Maybe the zombies knew how to make ladders.

              The fact that we hadn't seen any zombies up close since leaving Dinkins Pharmacy was both refreshing and worrying. I'd be fucking thrilled if I never saw another one, but at the same time, I had to ask: Where were they all? Joshuah Hill only had a population of around 20,000, spread out over most of a county, but we should be seeing more than we were.

              At night, I could sometimes see them in the distance. Just their eyes, little pink points floating somewhere way down River. But during the day, it was like they went into hiding. Of course, that was ridiculous. I'd seen how they acted when they turned, seen the animal ferocity, so I couldn't picture them having the forethought to bunk down for a daily siesta.

              Then again, what the fuck did I know? Nothing about the freaks was the way I'd pictured from the countless films, games, and books I'd absorbed over the years. This wasn't a virus, or the dead crowding out of Hell. They didn't transmit shit. Everyone was affected, seemingly regardless of age, sex, or proximity to other zombies. They came from inside us somehow, as if they'd always been there, sleeping and waiting for the chance to wake up.

              What chance, though? Why now? Why, of all the fucking people, us? If God could pick one group of people to be immune to the madness, why fucking junkies? I felt like the punchline to some cosmic joke, God sitting up there laughing, ha ha, look at the scum of the Earth, see how they squirm. As if our lives weren't shit already, we get the burden of being the last sane people in the world. If that's the future, send the nukes, drop the bombs. Blow it all to kingdom fucking come. Skip the tedious middle and get right to the twist: We're just another rock in space that couldn't make the cut for intelligent life.

              The high spirits that I'd felt on Friday had by Sunday quietly dissipated, leaving depression in their place.

              The house began to suffocate me. Always dark but for flickering candlelight, always quiet but for the staccato bursts of argument from Jennie and Rivet. We lived within the same walls, but by the time a week had passed, I barely saw either of them. The third floor of the house was a finished sitting room that ran from wall to wall under the sloped eaves of the roof. Hardwood floors, white-washed siding, a single window in each of the four walls. I escaped to this room more and more often in the interminable afternoons. I spent hours staring out the windows in solitude, high above the ground. The King of River Street. I watched for Torrance Dinkins to return. I watched for zombies. I watched for mushroom clouds on the gloomy horizon. It rained one day, and I watched the rain fall.

              On Monday, exactly a week after everything began, Rivet and Jennie went to the supermarket on the eastern rim of town. They commandeered a beat-up but serviceable Jeep Renegade from a garage two houses away from our own, and Rivet spent an hour laboring over the weapons he would take while Jennie urged him to hurry up before it got dark. They needn't have worried. They were back in thirty minutes, Jeep struts sagging under a mound of loose food. I saw them coming from my third-story lookout and was at the foot of the back-porch steps when they pulled the Jeep around the house.

              "Get any cigarettes?" I yelled. Through the open window, Jennie lifted her palms to the sky, empty. I waited until Rivet shut off the engine and they climbed out, then asked, "Any trouble?"

              "You wouldn't believe it, Rayman, but the town is fucking empty," Rivet said. "Not a single fucker in sight."

              "But you went on Troutman," I said, "around town. You wouldn't have seen anyone anyway." I grabbed an armload of gallon-sized water bottles from the back of the Jeep.

              "We went out that way, yeah," Jennie said, following me up the stairs and into the kitchen. "Then there was nobody at the store. Not a single thing, Ray. It was weird. So Dipshit decided to drive back along River the whole way."

              "That was dumb, Rivet," I admonished. I wedged one of the water jugs in front of the swinging door and heaved the rest onto the kitchen counter. "What if you'd gotten trapped? What if the Jeep had broke down?"

              "Give it a rest," Rivet snapped. "It didn't happen, so don't whine about it."

              "That's not the really weird part, though," Jennie said. "There weren't..."

              "How am I whining?" I asked Rivet, cutting Jennie off. She wrinkled her nose in annoyance, and Rivet made a theater sigh. He stopped in the open doorway and turned to me.

              "It's all you do anymore," Rivet said. "You sit up there alone all day, and when you
do
decide to grace us with your presence, it's just whine, whine, whine, like a little bitch."

              "Guys..." said Jennie.

              "Well
maybe
I'm tired of the party," I raised my voice. "It doesn't seem to bother
you
much. Since when do you care what I do?"

              "Ray, listen to me," Jennie interjected, but Rivet spoke louder.

              "Care about you is the
last
thing I do, you selfish fucking prick."

              "Selfish?" I repeated. "
Selfish?
You're
the one who's been sneaking more than your share of the meds. You're the one keeping up me up at night with your constant fight-and-make-up fucking. And you didn't even
tell
me about the bipolar thing! How long has
that
been going on? How many—"

              "
Shut the fuck up!
" Jennie shouted. "Both of you. You're best friends, and listen to you two. Squabbling like a couple mother hens. Kiss and make up already. It's getting old. Rivet's been diagnosed with bipolar for three months. And Ray, you've been acting prissy. Let's all hug and get over it and focus on the important thing: Ray, on the way back through town, there
weren't any bodies in the street.
"

              I was about to retort when the significance of her words hit me. I looked at Rivet, for confirmation, to make sure I wasn't losing it, and he nodded curtly and stepped back outside.

              "What do you mean there weren't any?" I asked. "The ones we killed?"

              Jennie nodded her head. "The whole road was clear. We left at least two dozen. Remember how we could barely get around them after we left the pharmacy?"

              "What happened to them?" I asked, incredulous.

              "I don't know, maybe the other ones ate them."

              "No," I shook my head slowly. "They wouldn't have...remember when Rivet and I started to go right before that? When you force-fed us the pills?" Jennie nodded, watching me carefully. "When the thing really gripped me, I wanted to kill you," I continued. "I wanted to...tear you apart completely. Eat you until there wasn't anything left. I saw you as a..."

              "An abomination," Rivet said, joining us again. He'd gone to the Jeep, but his hands were empty. "That's what you were. Something so evil it had to be utterly destroyed."

              "He's right," I said. "That's exactly how I felt about you. But the other zombies, they weren't like that. I didn't want to eat them, couldn't have cared less about them. They were...they were on my team."

              "Brethren," Rivet chimed in. He knew what I was talking about. He'd been through the same thing. What the hell had I been doing, hiding away from them? Fuck, they were my last line to the real world, the world where people didn't eat each other.

              "Brethren," I repeated. "They must have taken the bodies," I realized. "Brothers in arms, right? You don't leave your dead on the battlefield."

              "That's crazy, though," Jennie said. "No. I don't buy it. They're mindless. Just animals. They wouldn't have gone back to clean up the dead ones. What'd they do, bury them?"

              "Ray's right," Rivet said. "That's what they did. I don't know what they did with them after, but they went back and took the bodies."

BOOK: Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary
10.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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