by Eli Nixon
Chapter 2
IT CAME at you first like an unexpected chill breeze on a warm day, the kind that makes you wrap your arms around yourself and shiver involuntarily. Most people never had a chance to figure out what was happening before it was too late. Only the lucky ones, the ones already ruined, like me, were able to defend ourselves.
I wasn't always alone like this, not in the beginning. In the beginning, there was a team. An unusual team, sure, but in our own way we were just as strong as any handpicked cast of characters you'd find in a movie about the apocalypse.
They'll never make a movie about us, but fuck that. This was real life. We didn't have a politically correct grouping of racially appropriate stereotypes. We didn't have the funny black guy, the smart Asian, the strong white leaders (a blonde male and brunette female, respectively, fuckers). There was no marketing team handy when the three of us clumsily managed to bash in the gnashing teeth of our first halfy, some of us crying, one of us laughing, all of us worried about going to jail for murder because it was still talking to us and we didn't know that the world had already stopped caring.
Us? We were all white, and we were all assholes.
Rivet was a junkie from Fortuna, a leering stickman with sallow skin that took on a weird gleam under the yellow streetlights, like a cast-off rubber. He'd cleaned up for awhile and started pulling night shift for the municipality, sorting through plastic bottles and tin cans at the recycling plant just outside of town.
He told me once that everybody was wasting their time sorting out their recyclables from their trash because two thirds of it ended up in a landfill anyway. Then he told me the same thing the next week, and the week after that, each time acting surprised when I already knew, and that's how I knew he was back on the grind. Made me glad in a way, because it was just like the old days and that meant things could go back to normal. Not that I wanted him back on the junk—what kind of friend would that make me?—but the days had been getting lonely when he was trying to straighten himself up. It was good to have a friend around that I could trust.
Not that you ever wanted to trust Rivet. He was a bastard like the rest of us, but in the Heartland, bastards were good to other bastards, and I knew Rivet would never pull anything on me.
The day the world took a nosedive into hell, Rivet stopped by around noon looking for a friend and a baggie. Now, you have to understand something about Rivet. Most people, normal people, they might moan and groan about waking up at seven or eight in the morning. Rivet, he usually didn't crack his eyelids until about two o'clock on the westbound side of noon. We were night creatures; our habit sort of dictated that, so it's not like you can blame us.
I was still in bed Monday morning when I heard Rivet's voice calling out downstairs, and it took me a moment to place it. His wasn't a voice I often heard at noon, and I figured at the time that was why it sounded a little off-kilter. It was higher than normal, almost panicked.
I rolled over and pulled a dirty sheet up over my head, trying to drown out his voice, but then something about his words changed, like he'd started having a conversation instead of the one-sided braying he'd been doing, and I remembered Jennie downstairs. How could I have forgotten? Suddenly I was out of bed and blinking bits of crust away and scanning the bedroom for a pair of pants. This was a daily challenge—my bedroom was an earthquake disaster zone on a good day—but I spotted a torn denim hem peeking out from under a pile of even dirtier sheets than the ones on my bed and I was hammering down the stairs three seconds later, still fumbling with the buckle of my belt as I trotted.
I took in Rivet as I cleared the landing. He looked worse than usual, like he hadn't slept. His short black hair was curling around the fringes, which meant he'd forgotten to gel it this morning. A couple curly-Q's bounced around his ears like thick fishhooks, and his eyes were murder.
"What's she doing here?" he yelled at me as I cleared the last few steps in a bound.
"Easy, man. She just needed a place to crash. It wasn't anything like that," I said soothingly, hands up and stepping forward slowly now, as if I were approaching a temperamental zoo animal. I was telling the truth, too. Jennie had stopped by around eleven last night looking for a couch. I knew she and Rivet were...not quite a thing anymore, but moseying back toward that point. I'd screw a person in a lot of ways, but I wasn't the kind of guy who'd take my best friend's girl. Jennie was still cozied up on the couch under my grandma's patchwork quilt, and judging by the bleary look in her eyes, she was still a little cozied up under last night's skag, too. Her eyes flitted between the two of us—Rivet, feet spread unconsciously the way a man does when he's ready to fight but doesn't know it yet, and me, skinny and bare-chested in a pair of dirty jeans, hands out like a cornered felon waiting for the cuffs.
"Got a hit?" The anger in Rivet's eyes seemed to fall away like an insect shedding a skin. It was replaced by a haunted look. Apparently, he had more important things on his mind than stray affections.
"Should be something lying around," I said, happy to take the out. It wasn't that I was scared of Rivet; more like, in some backhanded way, I valued his opinion of me, and it set my mind at ease to know he believed me. "How about some breakfast first, though? Bowl of cereal?"
Rivet ignored my reply and began pacing, tearing at his hair with both hands.
"They're in me, man. In my head. I can't...all night, they've been talking...whispering...telling me things."
"Who has?"
"These, I don't even know, man, these voices. And like, I'm seeing this darkness. It's so deep. I haven't touched a needle in two days, but please, Ray, please. You gotta help me out." He stopped pacing and turned to me, eyes pleading. He'd burst a blood vessel in his left eye and a tributary of red ran across the white from the pupil. He looked sick. I noticed his hands, now held out to me like a beggar's, were shaking slightly.
This wasn't the Rivet I knew.
"Give him some, Ray," Jennie's light voice floated up from the couch. I'd almost forgotten about her, watching Rivet carry on like this. It was frightening, in a way. "Can't you see he needs it?"
"I, uh...yeah, yeah sure, man. Just let me..." I turned to look around the living room, searching among the overflowing ashtrays and crusted dishes for that little brown baggie filled with powder. Something pressed at the inside of my skull, like that feeling right before a killer headache. It was hard to think. I needed coffee, a cigarette, hell, a hit of my own wouldn't go down too rough. "I uh...Jen, what'd we do with it last night?"
"Kitchen?" She sat up on the edge of the couch and let the quilt fall to her waist. She wasn't wearing a shirt or a bra. "Oopsie," she giggled lightly and bunched the quilt edge up to her shoulders. Rivet had stopped pacing and was staring at her like a row of corn had sprouted from her forehead.
"It wasn't like that..." I started, hoping to head off another jealous outburst from Rivet, but he wasn't paying attention. He just kept staring at Jennie's forehead with that blank, lopsided expression, his eyes wide, unblinking.
"...Rivet?" Jennie said cautiously. "You okay, hun?"
Rivet licked his lips. Then he calmly leaned down and bit Jennie's ear off.
Jennie screamed so loud it was almost like I didn't even hear it. It was too shrill, too piercing, and my senses just let it pass over them like a surfer ducking under a wave he can't take. All I could do was stand there while blood streamed down Jennie's cheek and ran past the corner of her mouth. I could only watch while Rivet stood straight and bit down again on something that crunched like chicken gristle while he stared blankly at the wall in front of him and Jennie's blood trickled down his chin and he chewed something that was exactly what I knew it was but couldn't seem to make myself believe it. I could smell the blood, but I didn't believe it.
Then the world took over again and Jennie's shriek was hammering at my ears and I lunged forward and pulled Rivet away from her, shouting something at him that I can't remember now. He just gave me a dumb look while his jaw kept working up and down and the wet
pop of gristle slithered out of his mouth every time his teeth came together, and then he swallowed, used his tongue to clean a scrap of Jennie's ear off his molar, and said, "What's wrong, Ray?"
I punched him so hard his nose shattered and sprayed little red droplets over the gray wall three feet away. I know now that he wasn't completely gone, because something about that punch knocked him back into his own head. He writhed on the carpet, screaming again about voices in his head while I backed slowly away. I had no idea what to do. I looked at Jennie, hoping she could tell me something, but her eyes were wide and teary and just as confused as my own. She'd pressed a hand to her ear, and when she pulled it away now it made a sick shhlurrp sound and little slimy strings of blood trailed back to her head like spiderwebs.
Rivet had gone quiet and was lying facedown on the floor. Every few seconds, he inhaled with a shuddery rasp that shook his whole body, but besides that he didn't move.
That headache thing, it was getting worse. I was trying to wrap my head around Rivet, around the whole goddamned morning, but there was something in my skull fighting back, trying to keep me from connecting the dots. There was something important about all of this—even then I felt the pattern—but there were claws in my brain pulling me away from figuring it out.
Rivet gave a shuddering breath. Jennie had quieted to a whimper. Nobody had said anything. It had been over a minute. It was like we were all paralyzed.
I shook my head and bashed a palm into my forehead, trying to clear out the cobwebs. Coffee, a cigarette, a hit. Something to get back to normal. But then there was the matter of my best friend turned cannibal on my living room floor, and it didn't feel like "normal" existed in the same universe as me anymore. Still, something had to be done. Jennie was still bleeding; she needed attention. I figured that was the logical first step; then I might have a shadow of an idea about what to do with Rivet.
It might be a testament to our lifestyle back then that I didn't even consider calling the cops. When you become a junkie, you learn to deal with your own problems.
Heroin gives you a perverted species of strength.