Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  “Not a bad thing if the cops show up, is it?” Renni shrugs, kicks away some excess glass with her combat boot, and steps over the sill and into the store.

  I have to get used to the new rules of this sudden reality. Alarms are okay as long as no zombies are around, or if you’re trying to distract zombies. Breaking and entering is okay as long as it is in service to taking down zombies. Killing is okay as long as the people are already dead. Check, check, and oh God I think I’m gonna puke.

  A wave of nausea slams into me as I gingerly climb over the sill, avoiding the broken glass shards. Once on the floor I have to kneel down to fight back the urge to vomit, but I pretend to be inspecting the hand guns in the window display. I can hear Renni in the store behind me, picking up guns and clicking their chambers open, then opening drawers behind the counter, rummaging for bullets.

  When she comes back over to me, I stand up. She hands me a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun. “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I burp, and wipe my mouth. Renni looks at me dubiously, but I take the shotgun.

  “Ever shoot before?” She asks.

  I open the extended magazine and load up six shells from the box Renni holds out to me, slap the mag back in place and load a round into the chamber. “Buck hunting trips every other summer since I was ten.”

  “Must have a pretty cool dad,” she says.

  I grab the box of ammunition from her. “My mom took me.”

  We load up, filling a backpack with extra rounds and packing two handguns apiece, one .22 rifle with a sight for Renni, and my trusty rosewood shotgun. In addition, Renni insists we carry mêlée weapons: for her, two butterfly knives, a hatchet she shoves through her belt loop, and a break-glass-only-in-emergencies axe, for which she fashions a sort of sling from her belt and straps it to her back; for me, an eight-inch hunting knife safely secured in a leather sheath tied around my waist with light nylon rope, two pair of brass knuckles—wear one now, save one for later—and police-issue baton secured to my back with the same rope.

  I feel encumbered, but I also feel empowered. Then I think about all the carnage we’re about to expose ourselves to—we’re about to cause—and how all the zombies we’re about to bash in—if they really are zombies—were all once people.

  “What happened, do you think?” I ask Renni as we’re loading up her bike’s saddle bags with extra guns and ammo.

  “With what?”

  I gesture to the world with my eyes. “With them. The zombies.”

  Renni looks around at nothing in particular, then back at me. “What always happens: someone got stupid, or bored, or creative. Voilà.”

  “You think someone made the zombies?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s hear your explanation.”

  I look around at the same nothing as Renni, and come back with just as much of an idea. “I don’t have one.”

  “Great.” Renni drops her leg over the bike. “Try Carmelle one more time.”

  I dial her cell and then the store. Nothing.

  Renni tosses me her bike helmet. “Saddle up, partner.”

  It takes a minute to get back to The Sweet Onion on the corner of Main Street and Lemon Tree Lane. While Renni drives us there I think of exactly several things, plus one:

  1. In the hours (two or three at the most, though I haven’t consulted a timepiece lately) since meeting Renni Ramirez I have stopped referring to her by her full name—Renni Ramirez—in my head. It feels strange that her name should feel so familiar to me now, but then again, I do have her blood under the skin of my knuckles. Everything’s relative.

  2. Stranger still, I haven’t referred to Renni Ramirez out loud to her face as anything—not Renni, or even “Hey You.” I haven’t had cause to scream it in alarm or fear either, so I’ll count this one as a plus.

  3. If Brad and Cherry hook up as a result of all of this, I will shit a brick. But they’ll probably pull a Speed and decide relationships based on intense situations (or sex) never last, and everything will be ruined by the sequel (which will bomb).

  4. I really want some chocolate-covered bacon, which makes me think I must be about to start my period.

  5. How shitty would it be to die while on your period? Although I think everyone shits themselves at the moment of total body shutdown, but even so. Unseemly.

  6. What if Renni and I end up kissing?

  7. I met Carmelle long before she started working at The Sweet Onion, even before I knew she was a stripper, at a frat party off campus. She was outside by the pool, dancing despite the music from inside having mostly faded out here. Her hair was loose and streaming around her shoulders, which were bare in her black spaghetti-strap dress. She held her shoes in one hand and her red plastic beer cup in the other. She was maybe a little drunk, as was I, which was the only reason I approached her. “Want to swim?” I asked. There were a few couples in the pool, doing the opposite of swimming—by which I mean they were having sex, or something close to it; and one guy off in the far corner, peeing like a cherubic fountain.

  “Do you have a car?” she asked me.

  I drove her home and she was silent most of the way, but it wasn’t far and I didn’t mind listening to her breathing. I stopped outside her dorm building, tires crunching over glass from the street lamp someone had previously vandalized. This wasn’t my car; I had borrowed it from my friend Darryl who was out of town for the weekend as payment for feeding his mom’s thirteen cats—all Siamese, nearly identical but she could tell them apart—so I was a little bit worried that Carmelle would puke in it.

  I leaned over to undo her seatbelt and she leaned her nose into my hair and I heard her smell me. Then she grabbed my left wrist. “What’s that?”

  She’d noticed my tattoo. “It’s an emotional beet.” It was a little cartoon beet, more like a red turnip, pounding its head with Mickey Mouse gloved hands, and crying overly large cartoon tears, surrounded by motion lines to indicate its shaking.

  “A what?”

  “I took this creative writing class last semester and some guy used the term ‘emotional beat,’ B-E-A-T, and I thought of this.”

  “What’s an emotional B-E-A-T?”

  I shrugged. “Something the class thought all my stories lacked.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, and I thought she’d go then, just pop open the door and roll right out, but instead she grabbed my head with her clammy hands. “Come here.”

  I thought it was a one-night stand, but she answered her phone when I called the next day and we went out for coffee.

  8. Renni hasn’t noticed my tattoo, or if she has, she hasn’t mentioned it. There has been a lot of blood flying around and dead people walking the streets to distract from it though.

  Speaking of blood, we are back at our spot behind the Tacoma. Once again, Renni cuts the engine, then hops off. She takes a second to adjust the weapons on her person, check the sight of her rifle, and clip her sunglasses to the bust of her tank top (which reveals more cleavage than the dress had—or does on me). The sound of the zombies’ incessant moaning is almost white noise, and now there’s a smell, like wet cement and festering dog poop. I dismount the bike.

  “Here’s the plan,” Renni says, pointing the barrel of her rifle at the building directly across from The Sweet Onion. “Those look like apartments above that deli. I’m going to break in and cover you from there. Don’t go in until I’ve cleared a path. Got it?”

  “Renni,” I say out loud, testing the taste of it on my tongue, memorizing the vibrations it makes against my throat as my larynx pushes out the air.

  She looks at me, expectant. I realize more must be said than just her name. But my brain can’t settle on any one thing, the nausea returns in the center of me, my leg begins to heat up (or I begin to notice the heat that’s always been there), and my sphincter closes up tight, so that the only thing that comes out next is a softly blurted, “Ramirez,” trailing enough on the final syllable to sound prophetic.

  Renni does all
of this in the same second, like some sexy gorgeous flirtation gymnast: she curls her lip into her signature smirk, rests the butt of her rifle on her jutting hip, pulls the rubber band out that holds her hair together, shakes out the voluminous honey-brown waves, and says, “No formalities now, sugar tits. We’ve already been intimate.” And just to emphasize the memory, she slaps my thinly covered ass as she walks by me.

  The heat has moved from my leg into my face. If I had no words before, I’ve certainly lost them indefinitely now. I follow a few paces behind Renni, trying not to look at her butt the whole way, trying, instead, to picture Carmelle’s butt, which is slightly smaller and not as solid, but feels good between my teeth and tastes like the baby powder she always freshens up with before bed. Before she passed her silent embargo on sex, that smell would arouse the shit out of me, but now, when she’s right there next to me reading or clipping her nails or popping her gum while she reads and clips her nails, doing anything but touching me, I just resent it.

  We slink along the wall of the deli, keeping one eye on the zombie horde and one eye on the shadows. Nothing moves that isn’t supposed to—well, except for all the dead people.

  Even though our voices will most likely be drowned out by the zombie moans and car alarms and barking dogs and—is that a helicopter?—we still dare not speak this close to so many zombies. Renni points to herself, makes a little ascending walking motion with her fingers through the air, mimes popping off a few rounds, then points to me, and points to The Sweet Onion.

  I shoot her a thumbs up. She disappears into the deli. I wait in its cold shadow, observing the slovenly attack across the street. There are three lines of zombies, one overlapping the other, the zombies in the third line attempting to climb the backs of the zombies in the second line, and so forth. Each one ignores all the others, as if only it existed, only it can exist—it, and its food trapped inside. These are decidedly less fresh than the ones we met in Ashbee’s parking lot. I can tell this by the maggots flopping out of their ears, the spiders laying eggs in their hair, the flies forming a cloud around their heads, and by the pungent stink of poop. Judging from the majority of the attire donned by the predominantly male crowd—gray or brown suits that may have once been light blue or black, conservative low cut skirts and long-sleeved blouses—and the amount of dirt that crumbles down the mountain of their shaking bodies as they thump-thump-thump the shatter-proof glass, these zombies had once been people who died long enough ago to have been buried.

  One of the zombies in the back row falls to his knees as his head explodes. His liquefying brain matter sprays a fellow zombie, who does not even turn around, and the one’s skull ruptures and his knees give out. I can’t even hear the report of the rifle until she’s taken out six of them and their moaning has thinned. It’s about that same time that some of them start to turn around, and notice me.

  I have seven rounds in the shotgun and a nylon rope belt holding onto a couple mêlée weapons. If the zombies were attacking one by one, I might not be afraid to start firing, might be able to take down enough of them, with the help of Renni’s sniper bullets, to make it safely to the door. But the zombies choose this moment to recognize each other and shift seamlessly into their mob mentality. More than twenty of them come at me at once, moving impossibly fast now that my scent is on their tongues (the ones that still have their tongues, at any rate).

  I tuck the shotgun under my shoulder, two-fist it and squeeze. The shot blows apart the nearest zombie, whose squishy bits splatter in all directions, including onto me. Another shot takes out a woman whose family apparently had her buried in an American-flag-patterned jumpsuit. The third shot only clips the leg off one, who continues to pull itself along by his arms, and then I have to grip the still-hot barrel and swing the shotgun like a baseball bat at the nearest zombie jaw and make a mad dash for the door because there are too many of them too close now.

  I scream as a callused, decayed hand clamps down on my arm and then falls away under the pressure of Renni’s bullet. I run across the street, not looking behind me, faintly hearing the moaning, the rolling thunder report of the rifle, and the bottle-cap popping of hollow skulls exploding.

  At the door, I tug and twist and push and pull at the handle, hoping the zombies couldn’t get in because they’d forgotten how to use their thumbs, but no luck, the door is locked. Then there’s pain in my left shoulder and I whip back and around but the damn thing is on there good, and more are coming. I slam back into the door, hard enough to knock the zombie’s teeth loose, dislodging him from my body, and stomp on his head without looking. My foot lodges into his skull, but before I can process how gross this is, I have to turn back to the onslaught and fire three blind rounds to buy myself time. Clunkily, I shake the zombie slop off my bare foot, pretending the slimy, inky brain goop is just rain water. I turn to the door, release a wild animal-slash-Xena Warrior Princess battle yodel, level the shotgun at the glass, and fire.

  Inside, I have to move fast, not only because I just blew a large human or zombie-sized hole in the only barrier keeping them out and any moment now they’re gonna come scraping in after me, but also because my adrenaline rush is quickly losing out to my exhaustion and rapid blood loss.

  I move through the debris of phallic sex toys and blow-up vaginas, to the opposite side of the store where the cash register is. Behind the counter is the door to the office and I slam into it, bad shoulder first, and nearly pass out. Everything gets kind of fuzzy at the edges, and I hear the deadbolt snap back and watch the doorknob turn.

  “Fuck off, we’re fucking closed,” some naked chick yells into my face. Her eyes widen as she takes me in. I feel myself peeing and try to pretend it’s just zombie brain goop. “Oh my God,” she breathes.

  Behind her, Carmelle, wrapped in a plastic Twister game mat where all the colored circles are shaped like dicks, slides into view.

  When she sees me, the mat almost falls off her. She opens her mouth but doesn’t say anything. I step back once, then my brain overheats, my vision goes wobbly, and I collapse.

  Chapter 5: Dead if You Do, Dead if You Don’t

  The thing about all this is I saw it coming. Long before this, before I’m splayed out in a puddle of my own urine, the dangling breasts of my girlfriend’s lover nipping against my nose as she catches my head before it can crack against the tiles (great reflexes, bet she’s a gymnast in the sack) and flexes the muscles in her thighs to ease my dead weight onto the dirty floor (who has time to sweep up when there’s fresh pussy to be eaten, am I right?). I saw it coming the first night she rolled away from me, and when I tried to spoon her, she mumbled something about cramps, and then the next night she didn’t smell like baby powder, she smelled like honey almond perfume, the kind of scent you want to eat up quick, lick the last sugary dregs from the corners of your mouth and go back for seconds, thirds, a lifetime supply. And I got a reminder the other night when, with a sigh, she unzipped my pants and gave me a gift so obligatory after two months of nothing that I couldn’t even get off. And now this naked chick, she smells like honeyed almonds; her breath smells like honeyed almonds, her hair, her fingers. And coconut. Where the hell’s that coming from?

  So if I knew it, if I saw it coming, why do I faint? Well, I knew it, but I forgot it, I let myself forget it. A rough patch, I thought, and maybe it is only me, it is only me, she’ll come around, or I will, it will all work out. Then the zombies, then Renni Ramirez, then Biff. It could be the blood loss too. It could be the image of them, curled up warm and fucking under a novelty Twister game mat in here, while zombies maim and kill their friends and neighbors out there, until those zombies are magnetized to this pot, to The Sweet Onion, because they can sense the flesh inside, heated up and ready to serve.

  Mostly, I’m gonna go with: it’s the look on Carmelle’s face. She looks hurt, like I slapped her with my presence, like I betrayed her by interrupting her affair. I’d be pissed if she looked annoyed, crushed if she looked happy (like, finally, I
can stop pretending), and numb if she looked sorry. But she looks pained, physically pained, to have had me see her wrapped up in the scent of another woman.

  And so I pee (my body just lets go), and so I faint (my mind just follows suit), and so I’ve got a pretty good vantage point when Renni Ramirez races into the store, and in a blur of misunderstanding, pistol whips the naked woman standing over me with the butt of her thirty-eight special.

  “Mudderfudder,” naked lady yelps as she falls back, holding her mouth. It reddens but doesn’t bleed.

  “Sorry,” Renni says, sounding hard. “Thought you were a zombie.”

  Renni’s heroic entrance didn’t go as easy on her outfit as our previous evasion tactics had. Her white tank top is gray with various zombie matter, her navy camo pants spotted black with something that may have been blood or embalming fluid at one time. Her bare arms are streaked with scratches—that’s right, don’t your fingernails continue to grow after you die? Built-in mêlée weapons, sneaky zombie fucks—but I can’t see any bites. I’m coming around from my haze, and the vertigo is wearing off.

  “Get ’em all?” I ask her. She flicks her eyes to me briefly and nods quick, then returns her attention, her stone-cold glare, to the two naked people in the room.

  “What the hell is going on?” Carmelle shrieks. “Devin?”

  “No time for Q and A,” Renni says. “Get dressed.”

  “Holy shidt,” the naked lady says, spittle flecking her swelling lip. “You’re Rebbi Rabirez.”

  “And you’re deaf,” Renni says. “I told you to get dressed.”

  The naked woman starts to cry, and I feel sick again. Carmelle looks from Renni, to me, and lingers on me. I don’t know what to do with this, so I look away. “Come on,” she says to her lover, and guides her back into the office, closing the door behind them.