Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  “No,” I tell her, bravely maintaining eye contact. “I’d prefer it if you stayed.”

  Another reason I know this is not a movie, or a dream, or a hallucination: no one comes into the room to interrupt our moment at just the right time. Seriously, a nurse should have walked in by now, somebody, so we can both relax here. But no, we have to sit here with our words hovering between us (mostly my words, all stupid and formal—“I’d prefer it if you stayed”—Jesus Christ), both of us too stubborn to break eye contact or the silence, just kind of looking at each other, trying to decide how much of this is real, and how much we’re making up as we go.

  Finally, Renni breaks the spell by gracefully punching me in the knee. “Hey, you should call those coworkers of yours. See if they made it out okay.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, feeling slightly ashamed that I hadn’t thought to do that immediately. I pat down my paper hospital gown until it dawns on me that I’m wearing a paper hospital gown. “They took my clothes.”

  Renni rolls her eyes and pushes away from the bed. My clothes are folded in a neat pile on top of the chair by the window. Renni ruffles through the khaki pockets and lobs the phone onto my lap.

  Cherry answers on the first ring. “Devin! You’re alive!”

  “You too,” I say, less excitedly not because I’m not happy to hear her voice, but because it’s just not my personality to let that kind of thing show.

  “Oh my God, would you slow down? Drive like a sighted person, please!”

  “Who are you talking to?” I ask. Renni is only half-listening to my side of the conversation, having picked up the remote and resumed her trolling of the television for breaking news.

  “Bradley. He’s driving like a maniac.”

  “So you guys made it out of Ashbee’s?” I am the queen of stupid questions. Bow down, peons, bow down.

  “Yeah, as soon as the sirens blew down the street, all the dead heads went nuts. They—”

  “’Dead heads’ sounds like you’re talking about Grateful Dead fans.”

  “—What?”

  “Just say zombies.”

  “Whatever.” Cherry may not have appreciated my insight, but it got a cute little huff out of Renni. “All these police cars showed up, fire trucks, ambulances—I’m telling her, Brad, just drive!—all these cars with loud-ass sirens. They just drew the dea-zombies, drew the zombies like flies to sugar. We didn’t stick around to see what happened next. We booked it out the loading dock and jumped into Brad’s car and we were gone. Devin—you should call Carmelle.”

  My heart—at least Renni was right, I am still alive—double-times its beats. “Why?”

  “We cut down Main Street—Brad’s taking me to his uncle’s place in Indiana, to get out of town until we know what’s up, you know?— Anyway, we turned down Main Street, and, Devin, oh man—”

  “Christ, Cherry, just fucking tell me.” But I’m already kicking at the safety rail, trying to get up. My IV catches and I rip it out of the back of my hand. Kind of hasty; it hurts like a motherfucker.

  From Cherry’s end of the phone I hear Brad’s hurried expletives. Cherry screams at him, “Shut up! I’m telling her! Okay, Devin, listen, I’m not saying it means anything—”

  “Cherry!”

  “There was a mob of them outside of the Onion. Zombies. It was like a crowd…uh…I couldn’t see much, we were driving fast but, I couldn’t see inside or anything, but…it looked like they were trying to get in. Devin—”

  “Thanks, Cherry,” I say, rushed. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  I hang up and finally untangle myself from the bed. The back of my hand is bruising quickly and dripping blood, but I ignore it. I ignore, too, Renni’s look of concern and mild irritation, and the fact that my paper hospital gown has no back and I am wearing my pink cotton laundry day underwear that Renni can plainly see as I move around her to retrieve my clothes from the chair.

  Behind me, she whistles like the clichéd construction worker. “Fancy.”

  “Shut up,” I hiss and tug on my khakis. I’m trying to dial while I slip my shirt over the paper dress, but it’s not working too well.

  “Here,” Renni steps forward to help me. “You’re spazzing out. God, those clothes are ruined.” They are covered in various stages of drying blood. “Take those off.”

  Renni Ramirez just told me to take off my pants. Now she is pulling her sundress over her head. I drop my phone.

  Under her sundress, Renni wears—what else?—a white tank top with spaghetti straps, which I had earlier taken to be her bra straps. She must be wearing some kind of strapless bra or had some lift-and-stay surgery at some point because I can’t say as I can make out any bra in the traditional sense. I can’t look for too long, though, because she’s holding the dress out to me.

  “Put this on,” she says. Then, with a smirk, “You dropped your phone.”

  I take the dress from her. “Turn around.”

  She arches an eyebrow at me, and I shoo her away with my backhand. She shakes her head and smiles, and she turns around.

  Quickly, I shed the scratchy paper gown and slip Renni’s dress over my head and shoulders. She is taller than me, which is the only way to explain how her dress can fit so well around my decidedly more pear shaped body. I take a moment to smooth out the wrinkles, and breathe in her particular smell, tinged with a spot of cinnamon now, which I guess must be the work of her deodorant. The dress on, I scramble around on the floor for a minute and find my phone under the chair.

  Renni says, “Can I turn back around now, princess?”

  A little shiver passes through me that I attribute to some invisible draft. “Sure,” I say, and find Carmelle’s number in my contacts list.

  “Looks good on you,” Renni says, but I can’t tell if she’s joking.

  Carmelle has her ring tone set up to play obnoxious trance-dance music into my ear in intermittent bursts. It plays the same two-point-five seconds of song on a loop about seven times before her voicemail clicks on. “Fuck,” I say before the beep comes, and flip the phone shut.

  “What’s up?” I forgot Renni has no idea what’s going on.

  “My girlfriend. Cherry said she drove past where she works and it’s surrounded by zom…by rioters. She’s not picking up her phone. Fuck.” As I speak I’m frantically scanning the floor for my shoes, but they seem to be missing.

  “Okay, call the store,” Renni says.

  I look at her. “You’re a genius.” I find the store’s number and dial, but that phone just rings and rings and rings. “Goddammit.” Whenever I swear this often, you know it must be bad.

  “I can see your panty line,” Renni says.

  “What?” I look down at myself.

  “Right there,” Renni points to my butt. I crane my neck around to see. “Right here,” Renni says, and pinches the line of fabric with her fingers and snaps it back against my skin.

  Despite myself, I laugh like a giddy school girl, and play into it. “Stop! I can’t see it.”

  “I can clearly see it,” she says, and goes to snap it again. I bat her hand away and giggle some more, and then I drop my phone again. “Clumsy,” Renni admonishes, and bends to pick it up. Our game has gotten the better of me and I do the dumbest thing I could possibly do in this situation: I spank Renni Ramirez’s ass.

  And that’s when the nurse comes in.

  “Oh, you’re up!” the nurse chirps. She’s wearing powder-blue scrubs and scuffing along in white paper shoes. She carries a purple clipboard on which I assume my medical information is clipped, and she marks something off with a red pen, then dips the pen beneath her wavy blond hair at the side of her face and it disappears behind her ear. Her big blue eyes shine only marginally brighter than her large white teeth. “How are you all feeling?”

  Renni has bolted back up and, out of the corner of my eye, I see her drop my phone into the thigh pocket of her camo pants. To the nurse I say, “Fine.”

  “Wonderful! Oh no….
” The nurse has seen that I’ve torn my IV out of my skin. “What happened here?”

  I slap my left hand over the tiny hole in my right hand, which has already begun to scab over. “I didn’t really need it anymore. I feel much better. I think I’m ready to go home.”

  The nurse, well-seasoned as she must be to all manner of please-let-me-go-home pleas, frowns and cocks her head at me like a curious puppy, as she deftly circles the bed, picks the remote up from the bedside table, and clicks off the buzzing television.

  “Now let me just take a quick look at you, dear,” she says, her use of the term “dear” grating on me because we are probably the same age, or close enough. “Then I’ll tell the doctor you’re feeling up to leaving, and we’ll get you processed out. How would that be? Hm?”

  Before I have a chance to respond dramatically, Renni swoops in with a distraction. “Did the police make it out to the site of the riot okay?”

  The nurse looks at her, blinks a couple times to make sure she’s awake, then proceeds professionally. “Oh that’s right,” she says, consulting the chart on her purple clipboard. “You all are the ones involved in the riot earlier today, aren’t you. Well, don’t you fret. We just received a call from a couple of our ambulance drivers and they are on their way here with a handful of injured, but other than that, activity at the strip mall seems to have trickled off by the time they got there.”

  Something catches in my chest. The same something that catches in Renni’s as her voice struggles to move past it. “Injured?”

  The nurse waves off her concern and plucks the pen back out from behind her ear. “You don’t need to worry about that now. Now, come on, little missy.” She pats the hospital bed. “Up you go. Let’s have a look at you.”

  Just then, as if on cue, sirens rise like smoke in the distance. Renni and I both turn and move closer to the window, practically pressing our noses to the glass, our collective breath steaming up the pane. We don’t see anything for several seconds as the siren’s wail grows louder, but then there it is: the first ambulance, followed by a second, coming down the emergency ramp to the drop-off point in front of the entrance, which we have a clear shot of, only a few yards from us outside. Everything appears normal, except they’re going too fast; both vehicles take the curve leading to the drop-off too fast, the first spins out, and the second barrels into it. From behind us, the nurse, hearing the crash, gasps, and steps up behind us, putting one hand on my back, and the other no doubt on Renni’s back. How brazen of her, I think, and then I remember my own transgression just minutes before.

  Outside, the ambulances have both stopped, perpendicular to each other, the side of one caved in, the front of the other letting off steam from its bashed-in engine. The drivers of both vehicles kick open their doors and jump out, running away from the scene, toward the hospital entrance. They meet a group of hospital workers—other EMTs, orderlies, nurses, drawn by the commotion—and pause only long enough to gesticulate wildly and scream, and then continue running by.

  “What is going on?” the nurse breathes behind us.

  Renni’s arms shoot out and she manhandles the window open, ducks her head under it and shouts at the personnel, “Hey! Get away from the ambulance! Hey! Don’t open those doors!”

  But either they can’t hear her over the still-screaming sirens, or they ignore her. Either way, they open the doors. And the zombies are on them like flies on sugar, to borrow a phrase. We watch for only a moment as the first orderly is topped by a young woman in church clothes—drab brown skirt to her ankles, plain yellow blouse spotted with blood, open and flapping in the wind, hair pulled back to reveal the ashen and leathery pull of her facial skin that I’ve come to recognize as the calling card of the dead, or undead, as the case may be. She tucks her knees into the orderly’s armpits and rips into his skull with her incisors. Before anyone knows what’s happening, another man leaps from the ambulance and brings down a nurse. At the second ambulance, an old man and a young boy fight over the dripping arm of a freshly amputated EMT woman.

  The nurse behind us lets out a shriek more piercing than the wailing sirens, drops her clipboard, and flees the room. Half a second later, some alarm rips through the walls of the hospital, and we can hear distorted voices and hurried footsteps in the hall.

  “You want to get to Carmelle, right?” Renni asks me, bringing me back to our current reality.

  “Yeah, I have to,” I say, believing it.

  “Then we’re going out the window,” she says, and pops a leg effortlessly over the sill.

  “Wait,” I grab her shoulder—brazenly—and pull her back in. “It’s insane out there. You can’t go out there.”

  “My bike is right there.” She points past the chaos and I see it, leaning on its kickstand near a bush by the entrance doors. “We can make it.”

  “As long as we’re quiet,” I echo her earlier warning to me.

  She nods and smiles. “As long as it’s worth it.”

  I don’t answer her, but I push her through the window. I take three deep breaths, push out all questions of how crazy I am from my brain, and climb out behind her.

  The zombies here in the hospital parking lot are simple enough to evade; they have their mouths full, after all. It’s the horde outside The Sweet Onion that make my metaphorical balls shrivel up to dried prunes and escape back into my abdomen, from which they never descended because they’re metaphorical.

  Chapter 4: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth Two if You’re Dead

  As we head down Main Street, it is clear that something bad has happened. Like birds taking flight from trees during an antelope stampede, human people have spontaneously fled their morning routines or obligations, leaving behind their debris: coffee cups and half-eaten crullers at the outdoor cafés, dog-eared books strewn across the threshold of Mick’s Used Books, renegade oranges rolling out of dropped shopping bags in the parking lot of Whole Foods. Cars have piled up in both lanes, causing blockages that Renni deftly snakes around by angling her bike onto the sidewalk. Doors to shops have carelessly been left open, strollers abandoned, and in two tragic instances, tiny yapping dogs left tied to fire hydrants. We start to hear the cause of this desertion before we see it: the underwater swell of the choking rattle, then the steady rise of the deep, monotone moan.

  Renni pulls up behind a ditched Tacoma and cuts the bike’s engine. Without the hog’s loud roar, the horde’s collective moan grows, even though they are still three blocks up. I see them surrounding the store at the corner of Main and Lemon Tree: twenty or thirty of them, pressed together like pigs in a slaughterhouse, flesh slapping, jaws dripping, hands clawing, mouths moaning. Fucking zombies.

  Above their heads hangs the hand-painted wooden sign for The Sweet Onion: a white chalk drawing of an onion that used to just be a plain old onion when this was a mom-and-pop grocery store, but now has a face—one arched cartoon brow, one suggestively winking eye, a touch of red to mark two innocently bashful cheeks. The owners of the now porn shop—excuse me, adult store—decided to keep the name and original sign, with those slight alterations to the onion, and this: a slogan painted in sweeping calligraphy that reads, “Layers of Fun!”

  Renni looks at me over her shoulder. “What do you want to do?”

  “Go in,” I say. Carmelle is trapped inside that store, and maybe if it were still a grocery store I wouldn’t have to worry too much about her—what better place to hole up during a zombie attack, right? Except maybe a hospital (well, not the one we just came from)—but racks of hentai DVDs and variously flavored lube aren’t going to sustain her for long. Besides that, there’s a huge blacked-out window in the front wall of the store that won’t stand up to those undead fists pounding on it all day.

  “All right, Rambo,” Renni says, “You want to charge in, bare fists flying? Be my guest.”

  Stupidly, I look at my hands, clench my fists a few times, then drop them at my sides. “You’re right, we need a distraction.”

  She shakes
her head, all-knowing. “Not gonna be enough this time. Too many of them. And whatever’s in there, they want it bad. Listen.”

  I listen. She’s right. Aside from their own slobbering moans, there’s a plethora of natural and man-made alarms sounding off all over these blocks: dogs barking, televisions left on in storefront windows, car engines running, a few car alarms going off. This group of zombies is a hell of a lot more focused than the last group we faced (well, evaded).

  “Okay,” I nod, thinking. “Okay, then….”

  “Weapons,” Renni says. “We need lots and lots of weapons. Guns, preferably.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” I say, like she’s nuts.

  She takes her sunglasses off specifically to roll her eyes at me. “Are you kidding me? I’ve seen at least twelve pick-ups sporting truck nuts in just these last few blocks alone. Look, look right there.” She points to the tailgate of the Tacoma in front of us. Sure enough, hanging from the back bumper like an afterthought, a bright blue plastic scrotum. “The ratio of truck nuts to guns and ammo stores in a town this small has got to be at least six to one.”

  Her logic is sound. “There is one over on Geary Street. And if you open a savings account at Third National, they give you a free hunting rifle.”

  She laughs at me and kickstarts the hog. “We’ll try Geary first.”

  Geary is a few streets over, this block abandoned as well, though not quite as hurriedly. Quick Shot Guns & Ammo shares a rectangular parking lot with two other stores: a Check & Go, and Quick Shot Liquors. Some years ago there was talk of putting in a Quick Shot Mini Golf course across the street, but the town ultimately decided against adding to the confusion.

  Lucky for us, whoever runs Quick Shot Guns also ran away when the zombies attacked. All we need to get in is the brick Renni has somehow managed to find and is now lobbing at the front window. As it shatters, an alarm goes off, and I scream, “Are you crazy?”