by Eli Nixon
THE DREAMS OF FEAR SERIES
HEARTLAND JUNK
A Zombie Thriller
by
Eli Nixon
Part I:
THE END
Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day they will be terrified, stricken by the LORD with great panic. They will fight their neighbors hand to hand.
Zecharia 14:12-13
But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them.
Revelation 11:11
Chapter 1
THE ZOMBIES were closing in fast; not the ones outside, but the ones in my head.
I could feel them crowding the edges of my thoughts, reaching with rotten, dead fingers into my psyche, whispering with the voices of the damned. I dropped to the cold linoleum floor and curled into a ball, hands pressed against my temples like vice grips, and with a quaking voice I yelled, "Leave me alone!"
Fuck me, though: That shout attracted the attention of the shambling flesh-eaters outside. They knew I was in here, knew something was in here, even if they didn't know exactly what. They were still milling around the overgrown front lawn like the residents of a retirement home who couldn't remember when their loved ones were coming to visit.
The first shuffling sounds from the edge of the broken window forced me out of my fetal crouch. I side-skittered on hands and knees to the wall directly under the window. If I craned my neck, I could see a few inches past the sill.
They were converging on the source of a shout, sniffing it out like bloodhounds. I watched a stiff head jerk past the window in profile. Its cheek had decayed to the consistency of cottage cheese and, with the noon sun shining directly down like a spotlight, I could see a ball of maggots squirming in the flesh. The creature stumbled on something below the window and the mass of stumpy white grubworms dislodged, shaking free like raindrops. Some of them landed on the windowsill; one bounced farther and fell onto the floor beside me. I watched it writhe, fat, blind, and bulbous, on the faded yellow flower patterns of the chipped vinyl linoleum.
The stag passed the window without looking in, once again forgetful of its reasons for shambling so close to the dilapidated bungalow. As long as I kept quiet, I might be safe from them for awhile longer.
The zombies in my head, though, that was a different matter. They could find me anywhere.
A low gurgle drifted through the window and I knew there was another one approaching. This one was even farther gone than the last one, which meant now was my time to make a move. See, zombies don't last forever. Once they're dead long enough, once the rot has time to really take hold, they get more and more useless. Eventually, their hearing goes, too. That's what had happened with this one. I could lead a high school marching band right beside him and he'd never so much as glance in my direction.
Staying low, I slid across the floor to the porcelain bathroom sink. It was an older job, one of those sinks with a lone basin over bare pipes that snaked through pre-cut holes in the floor. I pressed my back against the U-curve of the stainless steel drain trap and risked another glance at the window. It was getting harder to see. The bathroom around me dimmed in slow, pulsing throbs, and a streak of lightning shot across my brain.
They were getting in. The whispers, unheard by everyone but me, were getting louder, taking form and weight. I caught a glimpse of my own hand and for a second I was mesmerized by the ripe, living flesh, warm blood flowing so close to my powerful teeth. A gnawing hunger unfurled inside my belly like a living thing. Despite the fact that I'd eaten less than an hour ago, I was ravenous.
And in my head, the voices gnawed into my sanity with the same voracious appetite.
You are one.
You are a part of Vitala.
I shut my eyes and grit my teeth. In the darkness behind my eyelids, their presence was even more powerful. Horrible shapes formed out of the undulating retinal patterns. Scenes of decay and death and murder floated past like dandelion seeds on the wind. Looking for a place to root.
The shout must have wrenched itself past my lips without my knowledge. Glass tinkled from the window like a gunshot and I opened my eyes to see their faces crowding against the broken window. Their pink eyes gleamed in the hot lights, teeth stained black with blood gnashed through the opening, reaching, grasping. Dead hands missing two, three fingers, congealed stumps with no hands at all. They clamored against each other to climb through the window.
Their sight was like a bucket of cold water over the voices picking through my brain. My vision cleared slightly and I remembered why I was there in that cramped bathroom in the forlorn house, once a home to a family long since departed.
I stood and tore open the mirrored medicine cabinet set into the wall over the porcelain sink. As I did so, my reflection flashed back at me through a layer of streaked grime. My own wild, haunted eyes taunted me as with a dark intelligence, one that lived within me and resented its own prison with hateful malice.
Then the image of myself gave way to a row of little orange bottles. A soggy thump from the direction of the window told me that the first stag had climbed through. Without reading the labels, I scooped out every pill bottle I could carry, shoving the first handfuls into my pockets and then racing out of the bathroom with the rest clenched between my shaking fingers.
I tried to read them as I ran, my careening path taking me through a maze of dark hallways in the direction of what I hoped was the kitchen through which I'd entered the house. In the dim light, the labels were impossible to read.
CONSUME THE FLESH. LIVE IN VITALA.
I pitched forward as if I'd been shoved. Orange tubes skittered across the hardwood floor, tiny white and yellow and red tablets ricocheting inside them. The voice was no longer a separate entity; it was a command from my own mind. I was running out of time. Down the hallway at my back, the bathroom door which I'd slammed shut as I passed collapsed in a splintery roar under the weight of dozens of bodies. This close to their prey, the deadwalkers lapsed into a blood frenzy as some dark instinct kicked in and overwhelmed the lethargy of their decomposed flesh.
Fighting the urge to transcend to the dark side, I scooped the two closest prescription bottles off the floor and lunged to the right, up a flight of carpeted stairs that opened straight into the wall of the hallway. I took the steps like an animal, hands and knees and feet, anything I could touch to the ground to propel me up the flight faster. The rough carpet fibers tore and burned against my knees and palms.
The stairway switched back on itself after a small landing and culminated in a second-story hallway built directly over the first. Gutteral shrieks sounded from the doorway to the flight of stairs. The first searching heads appeared below the bannister, pink eyes burning like fireflies in the shadows of the unlit stairway. I hit the top and my head swiveled wildly, looking both ways down the hallway.
To my left, at the end of the upper hallway, a door stood ajar. Something grazed my ankle and I took off running toward the open room. Framed faces smiled at me from the walls, blurred by the speed of my flight. They were a family once, as most of us were. Where were they now? What were the chances that a member of this family was even now pursuing me through the halls in which they'd lived and loved in a past life?
I reached the room, threw the door shut, and dropped to the carpet in front of it, pressing against the wood with my back. It was a bedroom, a little girl's by the looks of the pink bedspread and mountains of stuffed t
oys spilling out of an open closet. Sunlight beamed through a window and smacked every surface with a golden glow. The light beams had an edge to them, though. They were sharp and deadly. Innocence took on a shade of menace in the grip of Vitala. All good things died and were replaced with abominations of thought and sound and smell. Deep in its clutches as I was, I felt a thrill of terror even here in this pleasant relic of a child's happiness. Every shadow held a mouth, every dim corner and closet held a searching pink eye. Even beauty could bite.
The first thump against the door at my back brought me clawing back up the slippery slope of my own mind. Back to reality, where tangible forms and impressions solidified from my nightmares.
Quickly, I scanned the two bottles in my hands. Nizatidine, 150 milligrams. A histamine H2-receptor agonist used to treat heartburn. I pitched the bottle across the room. It came to rest against the fuzzy brown arm of a toppled teddy bear.
I looked at the next label. Lubriprostone, 24 micrograms. Use for chronic constipation. Who were these people? Another body slammed into the closed bedroom door, knocking my head forward and making me bite painfully down on my tongue. The taste of copper flooded my mouth as I dropped the second bottle and dug through my torn jeans for one of the bottles I'd shoved in my pockets. I scraped them out like a shovel and three more translucent orange tubes tumbled to the carpet beside my butt. My eyes scanned them like a man searching a riverbank for his drowned lover.
Fluconazole, an oral antifungal. Useless.
Wham. The door jerked under my back.
Cimetidine, another heartburn chem. No good.
Wham. A shower of splinters and chipped paint and dust fell into my hair.
Darvocet, an opioid analgesic for the relief of minor pain. It'd have to do.
My fingers were jittering like water in a frying pan and it took two tries to pry the child-safety lid off the Darvocet bottle. After what seemed like the heat-death of the universe it came free with a smug little pop and I upended the bottle straight into my mouth. The door shuddered behind me again and one of the hinges shrieked free of the jamb. The incessant, phlegmy chatter of the zombies came through the opening with heightened frenzy. Fingers wormed their way under the opening. I tried to imagine what they looked like on the other side, heaped over each other like a mound of debris, squirming with their insatiable hunger, the ones against the door being slowly crushed as more and more of their brethren came barreling down the hallway in response to some unheard signal. The signal of prey, of flesh.
I chewed up the Darvocet as well as I could before swallowing, helping it into my system by way of the mucus membranes in my mouth. The tablets crumbled into a dry, bitter chalk, and I gagged as I tried to dry-swallow. Tiny chunks mixed with bloody spittle flew from my mouth before I clamped my teeth shut and forced myself to swallow again.
Darvocet is the name brand of propoxyphene napsylate mixed with acetaminophen. The latter is your basic Tylenol, good for a sprained ankle but more useless than a dead cat for beating back Vitala. In this case, the propoxyphene was the kicker, the breath of life for my tortured brain. It's a weak narcotic that binds with the mu-opioid receptor agonist in your brain. Sort of a poor-man's Vicodin.
Duration: Three hours, give or take.
Onset: Twenty minutes. Give or take.
I was a walking medical dictionary; it's what had kept me alive so long. But all the knowledge in the world wouldn't make it any easier to get through this next twenty minutes.