Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  I don’t really want to say this next thing, because I’m afraid she’ll take me up on the idea, but I feel strangely obligated to remind her. “You don’t have to stay with us, you know.”

  “So you can blog about how big of a prick I am for bailing on you?” She gives my shoulder a quick squeeze. “Not a chance.”

  “You’re not how I imagined you.” It’s not the first stupid thing I’ve said to Renni Ramirez, but it certainly is the latest.

  “You’ve imagined me, have you?” She looks at me askance and arches a single eyebrow at me. I might as well have used the word “fantasized.”

  The best I can hope for is that my rising fever hides my blooming blush. “Well, I mean, um. My girlfriend’s really into your movies.”

  Just then, Brad and Cherry come scrambling back into the break room, breathing hard and—if it’s even possible—looking more ashen. Brad immediately drags the table from its ineffective position at the break room door to in front of the loading dock door. Since this door opens in, he gets no argument from Cherry.

  After a moment, Cherry collects herself enough to explain: “I was right. There are more of them.”

  Brad expands, “Motherfucking beasts got one of them poor bastard drivers, other driver fucking took off, about shit his balls, man, fuck.”

  “They’re swarming over the parking lot out there,” Cherry continues. “Some of them are real…real fresh. They almost trick you into believing they’re human, until they get close and you can see their eyes….” She shudders.

  Brad stops piling things in front of the door long enough to wrap an arm around Cherry. She buries her head in his shoulder, and he strokes her sweat-tinged hair, softly cooing platitudes curiously devoid of obscenities.

  “Okay,” Renni says. “You two stay here.”

  “What?” Brad says. He and Cherry look at her.

  “We’re going. I’ll send back help.”

  With that, she grabs my left wrist and drapes my arm over her shoulder, holding me by the waist with her other arm, so I can lean most of my weight on her, and she walks us to the break room door. She studies it for a couple of seconds, ignoring the sobbing protests of Cherry and mumbled arguments of Brad. I feel her body tense against mine, every muscle going rigid with anticipation. She pulls her right knee up to her chest, bares her teeth like a tigress defending her cubs, and releases her leg into the door with all the power of a raging bull. The jamb splinters the door frame as the door swings back, knocking with a bone-vibrating crunch into the blind zombie, who stumbles back into the opposite wall on impact. The door bounces off the zombie’s destroyed face and swings back toward us. Renni elbows us over the threshold.

  In the hall, maybe a foot from the zombie, we can hear its death rattle-cum-zombie-moan gearing up for an encore in the back of its throat. Black gunk seeps out of its eye holes and spills from its perpetually open mouth. If possible in the last ten minutes the thing has decayed even further, unless I just never noticed its corpse-gray skin, some kind of mucus leaking out of the pores on its outstretched arms.

  Outstretched arms. The zombie is coming in for another attack.

  Renni Ramirez has had enough of this zombie’s shit.

  As we pass by its leaking form, without even breaking stride, Renni lets go of my left arm, squeezes me a little tighter around the waist with her right arm, and lets loose her left arm like a force to be reckoned with. Her left hook connects with the zombie’s loose jaw, sending its remaining teeth up into its skull with a sound like Gallagher sledgehammering an unsuspecting watermelon. Immediately, the rattle-moan cuts off, and the zombie falls to the ground like the pile of inert bones it was always meant to be.

  Continuing toward the front of the store, Renni calls over her shoulder to Cherry and Brad in the break room, “Get out here and lock these fucking doors.”

  I try not to look at Biff’s body as we step over him. At the automatic glass doors, our feet trample over the sensor that dongs our position. Renni pauses just long enough to kick the masticated thigh of the old man—already attracting enormous flies—out of the way. The glass doors slide closed behind us. I crane my head around to look over Renni’s shoulder, and watch through the glass as the blurred images of Cherry and Brad use Biff’s key to lock the doors. Cherry splays her palm on the glass and mouths, “Good luck.” I nod back at her.

  Renni whispers something that the wind whips away from me.

  “What was that?” I ask loudly.

  Somewhere to my right, the familiar death rattle begins to swell, quickly followed by a rising moan to my left. I look around quickly and it doesn’t take me long to assess the situation: we’re boned.

  All across the parking lot, from behind beat-up Pintos, wood-paneled station wagons, twenty-foot pick-up trucks, and sensible sedans, come the zombies. Some crawl, missing parts of themselves, others drag their loose parts behind them, while still others, the healthy ones—the fresh ones, as Cherry called them—appear from around the side of the building, their footing terrifyingly sure. There are women, men, young and old; I don’t have a lot of time to scrutinize their faces beyond their dead and empty eyes, but I would not be surprised to find I know some of them.

  Without stopping, and through pinched-tight lips, Renni says, “I said, we can make it. As long as we’re quiet.”

  Chapter 3: The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Dead

  Me and Carmelle have lived in this crappy studio apartment for about four months now. (In fact, I think the rent is due on Tuesday. Maybe my landlord is a zombie now, or a corpse, and I won’t have to deal with it this month. Upside!) She’d been to my place many times before she accepted my key, but I don’t think she realized how small it was until the night she moved in. She had a U-haul full of furniture that just wasn’t gonna make it, but we compromised and swapped out some of my stuff for hers. For example, in exchange for her Papasan chair, I gave up the futon I’d salvaged from Ashbee’s recycling program (it was only slightly stained, had three perfectly good legs, and the odor really wasn’t that bad once you got used to it, though I did find myself waking up with a hankering for SpaghettiOs with hotdog meat most mornings); she gave up her vanity mirror to let me keep my vintage 90210 locker replica (she used it to hang up her dresses; before that, I’d been using it as a place to store my comic books). We had to go to Ashbee’s for a new bed because the futon had been it, and there we squabbled not over prices but how much room we could afford to spare.

  “If we get the king size, we’ll have two inches of side space each,” I told her.

  “We can press it up against that one corner,” she countered.

  “Then you’ll always have to climb over me to get to the bathroom.”

  “No, you’ll always have to climb over me. I sleep on the right side.”

  “You’ve always slept on the left side.”

  “That was out of courtesy when I was staying over at your place. Now it’s my place, too. I sleep on the right.”

  I wouldn’t really call it bickering, more like playful ribbing, until one of us caved (me) and we got a double bed, the ancient Victorian kind with four posts and a thin veil thing that wraps around, for privacy. It’s the fanciest thing we own and it looks ridiculous. Even with my discount, I’m still paying off my half. Anyway, the rest of our stuff went to storage until we can save up for a new place, which is a long way off if Carmelle keeps buying things like this: a thirty-seven-inch flat-screen TV. It’s nice because we can mount it on the wall and sit on the bed to watch movies together, which we did a lot before she stopped being too interested in touching me. I was kind of annoyed at the extravagance of it until Carmelle came home one day with an Xbox 360 and my world was changed.

  First person shooters. That’s where it’s at. I used nine sick days in the first two weeks we had that thing, going head to head with Carmelle or some friends when she wasn’t around. There were western shooters, space shooters, ninja shooters, spy shooters, and, that’s right, zombie shooters.
This may not be that exciting for anyone who’s grown up with this type of thing, but my family has always been frugal out of necessity, and I’d never even owned a TV. I indulged in these games like a fat kid indulges in sugar-glazed carbs, and to be honest, I got really good, unless Carmelle played me (she hoarded the good weapons and always kicked my ass, but I mean, I let her. Partially.).

  Even though the apartment is kind of obnoxiously small sometimes (Carmelle used to joke how her dorm room was bigger, and I didn’t want to start anything by reminding her the only reason she had such a big dorm was because her roommate was bulimic and had to go back to rehab midway through the semester), we could sit for hours and play these games in these expansive terrains and forget all about how cramped up we were, and how long it’d been since we’d last seen each other naked.

  All of this to say, I am an excellent shot.

  So when Renni Ramirez and I are seconds away from becoming the main course for an extended family of very hungry zombies popping out of the parking lot like the asphalt is spawning them, I let myself panic for a fraction of a second, and then I suck it up and take action.

  I let Renni pull me along as I lift up my injured leg, wincing at the stab of fresh pain, and hop along, trying to wedge my fingers under the heel of my Skecher.

  “What are you doing?” Renni sounds annoyed.

  “Keep moving,” I say, a little more frantically than I’d intended.

  The moaning becomes like a roar the closer the zombies get. They must be strategizing instinctively or telepathically or something because they’ve got us surrounded in a quickly tightening circle. The nearest one is about eight yards ahead and to the left of us. Of course, I could be wrong about this; I haven’t checked behind us yet.

  “Almost there,” Renni assures me, gripping my waist like a vise as she pull-pushes me along.

  I nod but it just looks like a consequence of all the hopping. Finally, I dig my fingers around the heel of the shoe between my socked foot and the tennis shoe fabric and pull my swelling foot free. When the cold air hits my foot it’s the best feeling I’ve had all day, a born-again feeling, a hot bath after a crappy day feeling. But I can’t relish in it for too long. I scan the parking lot for the most expensive looking car. There, three parking lanes over near the return cart corral: a silver Beemer. I sure hope I am right about this; between the two of us, I only have three more chances, three more shoes.

  Like I said, I don’t have to worry about my aim.

  Adjusting for my inability to put weight on my now shoeless right leg, and the velocity of my hop-hobble, I pull back my right shoulder, kiss the cloudless sky for luck, squint into my last hope, and chuck the Skecher as hard as I can at the Beemer. It connects with the windshield, the impact drowned by the zombie moans, and bounces onto the minivan parked next to it. And my luck is even better than I’d thought: both the Beemer and the minivan have car alarms, and both blare out into the day now.

  Alarmed and intrigued by this new set of boisterous blinks, beeps, and blarts, the zombies pause in their travels and, one by one, begin to peel off their original trajectories and scrape-crawl-limp-shuffle away to investigate this new development.

  Renni shakes her head, and I can’t tell if she’s smiling or grimacing.

  Our path clear, we’re at her parking space in about ten seconds. She leans me up against her pale green hybrid and plunges a hand into a pocket of her camo pants.

  “This a rental?” I inquire of the Hybrid.

  She sneers at the car and blows air out through her lips, like ppbbbbllttt, which makes me laugh. “Not mine. That’s mine.”

  She points to the space she’s standing in: a motorcycle. I’m no expert on models or makes, but it looks like a Harley Davidson to me.

  “Is it a rental?” I ask, joking.

  Renni swings her leg over the bike like a pro and leans back to open one of the saddle bags. She pulls out a solid black helmet. “Come here. I only got one.”

  There’s not a lot of space on the back seat of the bike, barely a seat really, so I have to sit pretty close to her, my pelvis pretty much wedged into the small of her back. She bonks the helmet over my head and the world is muted by the insulation. Her scent engulfs me, I almost swoon. She ate chicken salad for breakfast. Somehow, the sunglasses she’d clipped to the bust line of her dress before this all began have survived; I watch her through the lightly fogged plastic of the helmet’s visor as she puts on the shades, gives me one more look and quirk of a smile, then turns back and kicks on the motor.

  She doesn’t have to tell me to hold on tight. I might be kind of a dummy, but I’m also an opportunist. My arms are snug around her waist before we’re barely doing twelve miles per hour to clear the parking lot.

  Zombies whoosh by on all sides of us; some reaching out to us, others still fooled by my ruse, fruitlessly banging away on the windows of the Beemer and minivan. I can’t count them all. As we zoom by other closed-up shops along the strip, I strain to see in their windows to find survivors, but my eyesight’s not functioning too well behind this visor. It could use a good washing.

  The lights are out at the four-way stop leading to the freeway on ramp, and there are other cars around, obediently waiting their turn to pass through. Oblivious to the massacre playing out only a block down the road. I hope no one is thinking of going shopping today.

  We speed up the on ramp. The rushing wind is cold against my exposed skin, but it feels good along my injured leg, which has heated up by the minute. I think of infection, and then I think of Infection. If those things are zombies, and if any zombie lore can be said to be consistent, it is always that once bitten, you become one. Undead. Living dead. Zombie. Me.

  The more I try to convince myself that isn’t going to be happening—none of this is happening; it’s a dream, just like Cherry said—the more solid Renni Ramirez’s back feels against my chest, the harder I hold her. This is real. Somehow, this is real.

  I have to tell Carmelle.

  My cell phone is still in my pocket. A blue hospital sign careens by on the side of the road, and seconds later we are slowing down to take the off ramp. Once we get to the hospital, have a chance to clean up and get some antibiotics, send someone out for Cherry and Brad and to put down those poor bastard zombies, I will find a quiet corner of a room somewhere and call Carmelle. I wonder if she experienced her own attack, or if she’s just calmly going about her business, shelving dildos and alphabetizing hardcore DVDs, like normal.

  The freeway exits onto a commercial road that rolls us by three used-car dealerships, two gas stations, four Taco Bells (what is the deal with that?), and a lone bait n’ tackle shop (the nearest lake is fifteen miles southwest of here, technically in Indiana). I try to make out the activity on the street or in the parking lots of these places, to see if anyone is fleeing for their lives or hobbling in search of brains, but all seems normal, even calm. We turn right, then take a slight left, and we’re here, the large brown four-story building of Saint Mercy hospital. I was actually born here twenty-two years ago, but then it was called Francis Bacon Care Center, so I’m not sure if it counts as the same place anymore.

  There’s the normal amount of hurried activity around the entrance to the emergency room. Renni Ramirez pulls right up to the double doors, parking her hog on the sidewalk and killing the engine. I pull off the helmet, sad to let her scent go, but grateful to be able to hear fully again. An ambulance pulls up pretty close behind us, and the two attendants open the back door and usher out an older gentleman with an oxygen mask glued to his face. They walk him into the building and glare at us as a nurse comes out the doors, headed for us.

  “Excuse me, you can’t park here,” she says. She waves agitated hands at us and frowns.

  “It’s an emergency,” Renni calmly explains. “My friend’s injured.”

  She takes off her sunglasses and wipes a hand through her wind-tousled hair. The messier it is somehow the sexier it is. I have to force myself to stop looking
at her.

  The nurse gasps at the sight of Renni’s broken nose, and then blinks a few extra times as she realizes who the nose belongs to. “You’re both hurt,” she tells us, like it’s news to us.

  “Seems like,” Renni says, swinging a leg over the bike and helping me off.

  “Okay, well, I’ll get a wheelchair for the girl,” the nurse offers. “You just pull that thing over here, away from the entrance.” She points to a spot near the bicycle racks and heads back inside.

  Renni stands me up. “You good?”

  I give her the okay sign with my fingers, and close my eyes to keep from getting dizzy. But of course this doesn’t help, it only makes me forget I’m standing and causes some troublesome rumblings in my stomach, so I have to open them again. The nurse wheels out a chair for me and eases me into it. Renni comes back over and surveys the parking lot.

  “Pretty average day here?” she asks the nurse.

  “Oh, no day at the emergency room is average,” she says, but she’s oddly cheery about it. “Just this morning we had a man come in with the strangest…predicament.”

  We talk as we walk (and I roll). I think the breath catches in both Renni and my throats when the nurse brings up this strange man, but she goes on. “He had this…well…he’d inserted an object into someplace…into an Exit Only, let’s say.”

  “But he was alive?” I want to make sure.

  The nurse laughs, a far more jovial sound than her stern face would make her seem capable of delivering. “He’s fine, a little embarrassed, but the doctor was able to retrieve the item.”

  “What was it?” Renni wants to know. I look at her like, really? She shrugs and gives my shoulder a little punch.

  “A little plastic toy car.” The nurse shakes her head. “It was his son’s. We went ahead and let him think we believed his story of having slipped stepping out of the shower and falling on it. He’ll be back next week with a similar ‘accident,’ ten to one.”