Heartland Junk - Part I: The End (A zombie apocalypse serial)

Chapter 6: Plan

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.

"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. "Isn't there a cat here somewhere? Look at all this hair. There has to be a cat."

"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.