Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  In the shower, I savor the cold water as it steams against my skin. It’s like burning, in a way, and numbs me somehow, and I’m grateful. In the closed-in space I can really start to smell myself, and I gag a little. I use almost the entire mini bottle of shampoo and packet of conditioner, scrubbing between my legs and my armpits especially, in case Renni decides to do any more lifting. I’m cautious around the wounds, as they’re both tender, especially the shoulder. I pick glass out of my skin and hair and drop it down the drain. When I’m finished, I towel dry, wrap the towel around my body, and step into the main hotel room.

  Renni is pulling t-shirts out of her duffel bag and throwing them onto the bed. She stops when I come out. “Feel better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You smell better.”

  I go to the bed—the single unmade queen bed that takes up the middle of the room—and lift up a generic black t-shirt. “I could probably fit this one.”

  Renni swipes it back from me. “Are you crazy? That’s my lucky shirt.” I can’t tell if she’s joking. She stuffs the shirt back into her duffel bag. “Here, wear this one.”

  It’s another plain black t-shirt. “Are you sure?” I say, teasing.

  Renni ignores me, pulls out a pair of blue jeans and tosses them on the bed. “These might be big on you, but I don’t have anything else. We could go out and scavenge again….”

  “I’m really tired,” I say, feeling the exhaustion more acutely as I give voice to it.

  “That’s what I thought,” Renni says. She rummages through the plastic bags from the pharmacy, pulls out bottles and places them on the table near the window. “Take some of this stuff,” she says, clearly very medically inclined. “Don’t overdo it. There’s a mini-bar under the sink over there, take whatever you want. I’ll help you with your bandages when I get back.”

  “Where are you going?” I ask, fighting back a clingy don’t leave me.

  Renni lifts her duffel bag off the bed and heads for the bathroom. “Shower,” she says. “Relax.” She touches my arm reassuringly, and disappears into the bathroom.

  I hear the shower switch on and try not to picture Renni naked under its stream of water. It’s no use; it’s all I’m seeing. Then suddenly I’m seeing Carmelle, and then I have to try really hard to push this image out with the image of a giant penis showering, which gives way to an image of Cherry showering, and then I’m back to the image of Renni showering. I can’t win.

  I take a five-dollar bottle of Evian water from the mini-bar and down a few pills, mostly antibiotics and anti-inflammatories because the pain killers aren’t really doing anything so I leave them off the plate. There’s some peanuts and almonds and fancy cheese and crackers in the little mini-fridge but I’m not hungry, even though I can’t remember the last time I ate, but I think it was some time last night. It’s getting into late afternoon and the sun is starting to burn off into its pink haze. I close the curtains and turn on a light instead.

  Before putting on Renni’s clothes, I bandage up my leg wound, covering it with Neosporin first. Renni’s jeans fall loosely over my hips and trail a good six inches over my feet. I roll up the cuffs, and try to tie the rope that used to hold up my weapons around the waist to make a belt, but I can’t get it tight enough so I toss the rope aside. I put on the t-shirt and it fits nicely, meaning it must run fairly small on Renni. It’s a tight v-neck so it doesn’t show anything off, but it’s pretty obvious I’m not wearing a bra. The cotton fabric scratches against my shoulder wound, and I remember I was supposed to wait for Renni to bandage it, so I take off the shirt and wrap the towel back around my chest when Renni steps out of the bathroom.

  She got dressed inside the bathroom and now wears a pair of sleek red basketball shorts and what I can only assume is her lucky black t-shirt. I was right, it does fit her snugly, and I have to look away to keep from staring. Her hair is still wet and kind of curly now, sticking to her neck a little. She smells good, like the motel’s shampoo but also like something else, something…good. I don’t know. Is it getting hot in here?

  She drops her duffel bag against a wall, grabs a water from the mini-bar, and joins me on the bed. I sit against the headboard with my legs out, my injured calf propped up on a pillow because all I remember from Girl Scouts is you’re supposed to keep sprained ankles elevated and this comes close enough. Renni sits cross-legged at my side—man, what gorgeous legs, so close to mine—and starts going through the medical supplies I laid out on the bed next to me.

  “This is gonna sting,” she says, and pours some iodine out onto a washcloth and dabs it against my shoulder wound. I wince a little but really the pain is nothing compared to the bite that created the need for it. She applies a bandage and wraps it up with expert fingers. “You take some of these?” She shakes the bottle of antibiotics, and I nod.

  Renni gathers everything up and puts it back on the table. “You should eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Besides, sitting here on this bed feels so good, I can’t imagine ever standing up again.

  “Then you should sleep,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That will probably happen.” I feel my eyes getting heavy, my whole body getting heavy, but I fight it, because I just thought of something else and I have to know. “Renni,” I say, only the second time I’ve said her name. She looks at me. “Why did you come back?”

  “They wouldn’t let me leave,” she says, and runs her finger over the severely shallow cuts on her arms, more like minor scrapes she could have picked up from falling into a rosebush or something. “Not taking any chances. Probably wanted to quarantine me too, but I bailed. That other chick made it out though.”

  “But you came back for me.”

  She shrugs and sits down at the table, takes a drink of water. “I don’t know anyone else in Ohio.”

  “Oh,” I say, and pinch my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. My headache is renewing itself.

  “That not what you wanted to hear?”

  “What? No. Yeah. It’s fine.” I remember her question to me in the hospital, asking me if I wanted her to leave. She’s not asking now.

  “Shit’s gone crazy,” she says. “I’m not really sure what I’m doing. Are you?”

  “I’m pretty much dying,” I say, not trying to be dramatic, but there it is. “Or turning into a zombie.”

  “Quit with that zombie shit,” she says, taking another drink, pulling from the plastic sixteen-ounce bottle as if it were a fifth of Jack Daniels. “If it was gonna happen, it would have happened by now.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But you might want to book a separate room for yourself, just to be safe.”

  Renni sets her water on the table, gets up and comes over to the bed. She presses her palms to the headboard at either side of me and leans her face close enough to mine that I can smell her freshly brushed teeth (spearmint toothpaste, the best kind).

  “I’m not scared,” she says.

  This next moment is either the biggest mistake of my life, or the greatest moment I’ll ever experience, but I don’t let myself dwell on the hypothetical duality of this moment’s nature, I just do it, because it feels, if not exactly right, at least necessary, inevitable.

  I tilt my chin up an inch to meet hers and I kiss her. I just plant one on her, the same way Carmelle planted one on me over a year ago. And Renni, she does this amazing thing: she closes her eyes. Our lips are pressing together and then parting slightly and pressing again, tongues just beginning to enter the equation, when I figure I should be polite and also close my eyes. And this is when I realize I couldn’t possibly have made the biggest mistake of my life by kissing Renni, because that honor will have to go to having just closed my eyes. Because immediately the room spins, the bed swooshes out from under me and I’m falling, even though I can still feel her lips on mine, and I know I have to open my eyes but they’re too heavy and I can’t do it, and then my stomach drops out, my throat swells up, I feel something pushing, crawling,
gasping to be released, and I can’t hold it down, the pressure builds and builds and builds, and I have to let go.

  My eyes open as I vomit into Renni Ramirez’s mouth.

  There isn’t even a sound to warn her, it just comes out slick and silent, a pinkish white liquid that is comprised of mostly bile, I’m guessing, as I haven’t eaten anything in over eighteen hours. It splashes onto her bottom lip and her eyes fly open and she jerks her head back.

  “Mother of shit!” she says, spitting onto the floor, and then she’s doubled over and vomiting herself.

  I grab my mouth with my hand and run to the bathroom, because there’s still vomit dripping between my fingers and more on the way. I make my deposit into the toilet, flush it down, and then just sit there. I can’t even cry anymore, even though I desperately want to, but my body just doesn’t have anything left to give. I rest my head on the lip of the toilet bowl and close my eyes, and feel my consciousness carried off by the weight of the day.

  I’m woken up sometime later by the sound of a large insect buzzing against the end table. I peel my eyelids back just enough to blurrily make out a dark, boxlike shape on the table next to my head. Not an insect, my phone. It’s on vibrate, and someone is calling me. Carmelle, I think, and reach for the phone.

  Bad idea. I’m lying on my stomach, so I reach out with my right arm, the uninjured arm, but the movement still pulls along my shoulders and sends the pain stab-stab-stabbing through me again. It’s a ripple effect that jolts my whole body awake, and I gasp a little at the suddenness of it. Then the phone is in my hand and I’ve pressed the talk button.

  “Ugh,” I say, meaning hello.

  “Devin, you’re still alive!” It’s Cherry’s voice on the other end, sounding annoyingly jubilant. “At least, I think you are. Are you?”

  “Cherry?” My voice comes out kind of scratchy, kind of deeper than usual, almost sexily husky. “Where are you?”

  “Yay! You are alive!” I hear her clapping on the other end, and then a loud staticky clatter. A second later she comes back on the line, laughing. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. Where are you?”

  “I’m still in the city. Isn’t Carmelle with you?”

  “No, I thought she was with you,” Cherry says. “What do you mean you’re still in the city? The news said they evacuated everybody. That’s why I’m calling, to meet up.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” The bed shifts next to me and I crane my neck around a little—stabby pain stabbing again—to see Renni roll over on her side so that her closed eyes face me. She still looks asleep. I lower my voice to a whisper. “I’ve been bitten, so they wouldn’t let me out. But Carmelle should be in Indiana. She was supposed to find you. Give her a call.”

  “I will, but Devin, no, you can’t stay there.” Cherry’s annoyingly chipper vibrato becomes alarmingly…alarmed.

  “I can’t leave yet,” I say. “They want to quarantine me. God knows what that means.”

  “But Devin, they’re moving into the city, all the military guys, with guns, and…and…and….”

  “What, Cherry?”

  “…They have orders to shoot anything that moves! We saw it on the news. Oh God, Devin, please get out of there. They said it, they said they’re not looking for survivors because anyone left in the city will already be infected by the nerve gas—”

  “Gas?”

  “—Yeah, gas, the terrorist bullshit, you know? They said they’d already be infected and they can’t risk the spread of infection. They said they’ll continue broadcasting the evacuation procedures until six a.m., but then the whole city’s getting quarantined, and they’re sending in soldiers to burn out the infection. Meaning, I guess, you.”

  I swallow hard. My phone starts to beep at regular intervals, meaning my battery is about to die. “Cherry, what time is it now?”

  “A little before midnight,” she says. “We just watched the special report on the eleven o’clock news. Go to an evacuation station, Devin, they’re all over the major streets out of town. Let someone know you’re alive.”

  Renni’s knee juts into my hip as she tosses and turns again. “No,” I tell Cherry. “If they’re coming in here ready to kill anything that moves, what do you think they’ll do to me if I show up, admitting to having been bitten by two zombies?”

  “Two?”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “I don’t think they’d hurt you, Devin, I really don’t. Maybe they would if…if….”

  “If I started changing?”

  “But they won’t if you look fine.”

  I’m not sure how I look, but I sure do feel like shit, kind of a running theme. Sleep did help clear my head a little though; a lot of the pressure has dissipated, and my vision has cleared up, the constant throbbing in my head died down a little. My phone beeps into my ear. “I have to go, Cherry. Phone’s dying. Call Carmelle, make sure she’s safe, okay?”

  “Okay, Devin, but—”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “We?”

  The phone shuts down, and I drop it back onto the end table. Cautiously, but with a fair amount of wincing despite this, I roll over onto my back, and turn my head to look at Renni. She’s lying on her back now too, one arm splayed out to the side, the other curled against her stomach. Her hair is strewn across her cheek, hiding her face from me, and I want to move it but I don’t. Her left knee still juts out far enough to touch my own leg, her other leg sticking straight out in her basketball shorts. I listen to the soft sounds of her breathing, and try to think about what to do next, but watching her sleep is the best plan I can come up with, so that’s what I do.

  The room doesn’t smell like vomit, so I figure she must have cleaned it up. There are some dark stains on the carpet leading to the bathroom. I smack my lips together and taste the inside of my mouth, which tastes vaguely like spearmint toothpaste. I notice she dressed me in her black t-shirt before tucking me into bed. She’s saved my life more than once today, and all I’ve done is break her nose and thrown up in her mouth. She’s taken such good care of me, when I’ve done nothing to deserve it. Unfortunately, I need her to carry me just a little bit farther.

  I reach out and shake her shoulder a little. “Renni, Renni. Get up.”

  She struggles against waking, throwing her head from side to side. “Five more minutes,” she mumbles, like a reluctant school child.

  “No can do,” I say, still shaking her. “We need all the minutes.”

  She shoots her right arm across her body and grabs my wrist, twisting as she lifts up and slams my body back on the bed. I cry out, and she releases me, then her eyes open. “Oh shit, I’m sorry.”

  I hold my poor wrist to my chest and rub down the soreness. “No problem.”

  “Shit, I wasn’t even awake.” Her eyes glisten in the dark and her forehead creases in concern. It’s cute.

  “Master reflexes,” I say, trying to smile so she’ll see I’m okay.

  “You’re good?”

  “I’m good.”

  She punches me playfully in the ribcage. “What the hell’d you wake me up for?”

  I sit up. “Bad news. What else?”

  “Let me pee before you give it to me,” she says, leaping off the bed like it’s Christmas morning. I guess the sleep helped her energy level too.

  While she’s in the bathroom, I hobble over to the mini bar, stretching out my legs. My back cracks a little, but I enjoy it, it means I’m alive. Still alive, not dead, or undead. This infection is taking forever. Unless I’m immune. Could I really be that lucky? I have Renni Ramirez as my guardian angel, and now my blood is immune to the zombie virus. I just can’t let myself believe it.

  When Renni gets out of the bathroom, I have a smorgasbord of cheese and crackers and mixed nuts and chocolate candies waiting for her on the bed. We eat it all as I go over the news Cherry shared with me, letting the sounds of our chewing fill the gaps of silence where both of us try and fail to come up with a
suitable plan.

  “There has to be a way out that the brass hasn’t thought to block off,” Renni says, stuffing a handful of ten-dollar Ritz crackers into her mouth. “It’s your town,” she says with her mouth full. “Got any ideas?”

  I do have one idea, but it involves staying here in this hotel room, naked and together under the covers, sharing a beautiful thing with each other until the gunmen knock our door down at six a.m. There are worse ways to go.

  “I don’t know,” I say, picking the skin off a peanut. “We could try to sneak over the fences they’ve made. Unless they have guards linking arms across the entire perimeter, there’s gotta be unprotected gaps we could sneak through.”

  “That’s risky,” Renni says, pinching her bottom lip with her fingers as she thinks. “Zombies I can handle; they don’t have guns. Bullets are harder to fight against, that’s why I’m usually fighting with them.”

  “You could still go,” I say. “They’d let you out.”

  “If you remind me that I can go one more time, I will,” she says, eying me under inscrutable eyebrows. I don’t say anything, preferring instead to play with the fringe on my pillow.

  Renni redirects back to the subject at hand. “Is there like a, a lake or river or something that they wouldn’t think to block?”

  I shake my head. “No. This county is pretty dry.”

  “What about like, the sewers? Or—”

  I nearly jump up off the bed, startling our empty paper plates and snack cartons onto the carpet. “That’s it! Not sewers—’cause ew, gross—but tunnels. You remember like ten years ago when there was that whole trenchcoat mafia thing scaring the shit out of suburban schools?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, my high school took measures in case of attack. They planned out these elaborate escape tunnels that go straight to the police station, the hospital, and—guess where else?”

  “Indiana?”

  “Indiana! ’Cause that’s where the nearest SWAT-team unit would assemble, should they become necessary.”