Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  “And these tunnels are just running all over beneath this town?”

  “Yep. We can get to them from my high school; it’s closer to us here than either the hospital or the police station, plus I don’t know where to find the tunnels at those locations. But the school’s tunnels start in the basement, near the boiler room. I know right where it is.”

  “Wait, so, your school had these tunnels built to safely evacuate students in the event that some kid went homicidal and started shooting his classmates, right?”

  “That was the idea. They never got any use, though. Thankfully.”

  “But everyone knew about them. You’d just post a guy at the entrance to the tunnels and take out rows of kids lining up to evacuate like it was a fire drill.”

  “Look, I didn’t say it was a good plan. But hey, tunnels! We can get out!”

  “All right,” Renni says, slapping her thighs for emphasis. “Let’s load up.”

  Renni still has her rifle, her axe, a couple handguns, two hunting knives, and loads and loads of ammo. Now that I’m wearing pants as opposed to a dress, I can stash a handgun in one pocket and two extra magazines in the other, and clip the knife to a back pocket. Renni retires the axe from her back, slings the strap of the rifle over her shoulder, and pockets extra ammo and the second handgun and knife. She’s changed back into her camo pants, still in her lucky black shirt. She also had an extra pair of sneakers in her duffel bag, which fit surprisingly well on me. We each pop a couple of painkillers and head outside, this hotel room—and everything that happened inside—soon to be forgotten.

  We quickly realize that taking Renni’s motorcycle to the school is not an option. The streets are crawling with zombies. Should I say shuffling with zombies? Although a few of them that don’t have legs are actually crawling, pulling themselves forward with their elbows. Anyway, there are a lot of them roving around, pretty scattered, so I’m guessing not on the hunt. We observe them from the second floor of the hotel for a few minutes; they seem fairly aimless. They run into still objects, into each other, and just bounce off, maybe moaning awkwardly, and turn around and try out a new direction. It’d be comical if my shoulder and right calf didn’t throb with the reminder of what these things are capable of.

  Without saying anything, Renni and me just look at each other to confirm what we both know: no bike. It would make too much noise and draw their attention. It’s time to switch into stealth mode.

  Renni takes the lead down the stairs, which apparently lethargic zombies have a difficult time climbing as we encounter no surprises on the way down. In the parking lot, we duck behind cars and scuttle along as quickly as possible. My knife clatters to the pavement once, and I wince, but I manage to pick it up and shove it back into my pants without arousing any zombie interest.

  Once we make it out of the parking lot and onto the streets, it becomes increasingly easier to avoid the zombies. They all seem to be heading in the same direction, toward the center of town, where I imagine they are drawn by the residual scent of all those humans—otherwise known as fresh meat—who recently swarmed there, waiting for evacuation instructions. Renni falls back and lets me take the lead, and I take her down a couple side streets, where it’s so quiet you can hear the hum of people’s refrigerators inside their abandoned houses, and then onto a little dirt road shortcut that zigzags into someone’s multi-acre farmland, where the full bright white light of the moon shows us there are no zombies for hundreds and hundreds of yards.

  I point into the darkened distance. “There’s a hill just beyond those trees on this side of the silo, see it? We pass over that and cross a cow pasture, then there’s the Baptist church, and we can cut across Old Mill Road to take us back to Lineman Street, which hooks up with Delaware, which is where the high school is. It’s kind of an indirect route, but it seems safer, don’t you think?”

  Renni shrugs and trudges along behind me. “You’re the boss.”

  As we walk in silence, trying not to dwell on how much time we have left before more things try to kill us (T minus four hours and fifty-six minutes), I think about what it will be like to see my high school again. Even though I still live in the same town, I haven’t been back to the school since I graduated four years ago. I didn’t think I’d go back until my ten-year reunion, and even then I had a long list of stipulations that my life had to live up to before I would go back for that either (for example, I would be married or at least allowed to be married and have a longterm partner, I would have traveled to at least three different countries, and I’d have either a bachelor’s degree in something that sounded impressive or a job title that sounded even more impressive, and that’s just for starters). It’s not that I had the worst time ever in high school, it’s just that I did exactly two things in high school, which probably had a strong correlation to each other: I ate my feelings, and I never got laid. I had a great group of friends, none of whom knew I was gay and all of whom I haven’t spoken to in three years, and I stayed under the radar of most bullies. But I was a different person then, completely. Now look at me, I have my own place (a four-hundred-square-foot studio apartment above a decrepit pet store that’s probably actually a meth lab), a longterm partner (who has at least one of her own partners, but I’ve forgiven her for that), a recent promotion within a promising and financially stable company (an outlet furniture store, but everyone flubs their résumés ), and while I haven’t been to any other countries (or any other towns), it has only been four years and who knows what the next six will bring?

  Okay, trying to stay upbeat about this is really not working. Maybe I’ll turn into a zombie by then, and show up all cracked out on my own insatiable need to feed, and bring down a couple of the former jocks and chicks who got pregnant and dropped out early to get their GEDs. Or maybe I’ll end up with some awesome blood abnormality that produces a natural cure to zombification and I’ll reverse all the zombies into people again (though then they’ll still be dead, but still, lesser of two evils here) and I’ll be this like local folk hero and someone will write a song about me. And then I’ll roll into the old cafeteria with Renni Ramirez draped over my arm and we’ll sip wine coolers and regale all my former classmates-cum-superfans with the story about our disastrous first kiss.

  I’m pulled from this delightful reverie by a sudden chill that brings with it an annoying moisture. I hold out my hand like the rest of me isn’t exposed and wriggle my fingers in the rapidly falling droplets.

  “Fuck,” Renni says, looking up at the gray clouds moving through the dark black sky. “I just washed my hair.”

  I laugh a little, kind of one of those polite laughs I usually reserve for customers who think they’re funny—“I need another chaise longue like I need a hole in the head, har har.”—but for some reason it just keeps going, I just keep laughing, and then I’m laughing because of how absurd it is that I keep laughing, and the cycle renews itself.

  Finally, Renni grabs my wrist, slick with the falling rain, and jerks me to attention. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” She doesn’t say it mean, though, but kind of like she finds it amusing.

  “You’re funny,” I tell her.

  “Of course I’m funny,” she says. “My acting coach told me I had a real sense for comedic timing. Hey.” She holds my wrist closer to her face. “You have a tattoo?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s an emotional beet.” We’ve stopped walking at this point, about halfway up the hill. The moon is brighter here, despite the clouds rolling through and breaking open on us. It bathes Renni’s skin in a pale light that makes her look like she is glowing.

  “An emotional beet, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I take my wrist back and massage the tattoo. “Carmelle thought it was funny.”

  Renni blows air out of her nose that steams in the rain, and looks away.

  “What?” I ask her, curious about her sudden rigidity.

  “Nothing,” she says, in a tone that insists it’s something.

  “You don’t
like Carmelle? To be fair, you didn’t really properly meet her.”

  Renni turns back around, eyes wide, and presses her hand to her chest. “I didn’t properly meet her? Me? What about you? Have you met her? Because I think you got it backwards. I met her in that porn shop back there, and you refuse to.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I say, starting back up the hill.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Renni says, following me. “Whatever princess wants, princess gets, even if it’s your dignity.”

  I spin around at her, surprised at my own vehemence. “What the hell are you even talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how you let that bitch walk—”

  “—don’t call her that.”

  “—all over you. You let her fuck someone else right in front of you and then you just walk it off, like maybe she just fucking slipped.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, spit and rain flying off my lips as my voice rises. “You don’t even know Carmelle, or me, or anything about us.”

  “Sure, you’re right, I don’t know you. So tell me then. Tell me you don’t let her do whatever she wants without explanation, even when it hurts you. Tell me you don’t bend over and take it.”

  “Fuck you,” I yell, and push her. She slides down the hill a little bit, the earth having gone soft under the rain’s pelting, but comes back at me, getting closer.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck me, great. Fuck you, and fuck her. She’s leading you around by your goddamn clit and you’re just pleased as fucking daisies to follow her.”

  “What the hell happened to you that you’re projecting all your shit onto me?”

  “Projecting? I’m just observing.”

  “Some guy must have really dicked you over good—”

  “This isn’t about me—”

  “—for you to come on this strong—”

  “—this is about your bitch girlfriend—”

  “—lecturing me about a situation where you know nothing—”

  “—and her naked friend, shitting all over you—”

  “—no one is shitting on me!”

  “—and when this is all over, you’re gonna go back to her and say, please, please, Carmelle, shit on me some more, I fucking love it!”

  “And what the hell are you gonna do, huh? What loser piece of shit are you gonna go back to? The guy who ditched you on your cross-country tour? Or some other Hollywood shit bag?”

  “Oh, why do you care?”

  “Why do you care?” I throw my hands up, rain sloshing off my arms. Renni is inches from me again, and I feel the urge to push her again, but I don’t. I just scream louder. “What the hell business is it of yours?”

  “What, you think I can’t care about you, or any of this crazy shit that’s going down here? You think I’m just Renni Fucking Ramirez, hitting a snag, a little inconvenient snafu, on my fucking million-dollar vacation to Buttfuck, Ohio?”

  “Yeah, that is what I think, sure. You are just Renni Fucking Ramirez, you don’t care—”

  “—I don’t care?”

  “—You don’t care—”

  Her face comes at mine so hard our foreheads crunch together before our lips do. Her mouth suction-cups to mine and the only thing I can do to keep standing up is to press my mouth into hers. Her tongue gropes around inside my mouth, searching for my throat, battling against my own tongue, which darts and parries and generally enjoys itself. She buries her fingers in the neck of my t-shirt and holds me to her, swallowing my face, and I have little choice but to wrap my arms around her head and follow suit. This isn’t some wimpy half-assed trial kiss extended hesitantly on a cheap hotel mattress seconds before exhaustion, blood loss, and uncertainty come bubbling up through your stomach and spill out all over the already awkward moment. No, no. This is a raw, primal, desperate kiss, a life-and-death kiss, a hang-on-tight-’cause-this-ride’s-just-getting-started kiss.

  We push our bodies into each other, until the physicality and heat of our grappling overwhelms our sense of the wider world, which spits rain down on us like a drooling god and harbors demons in its soggy shadows. I don’t feel anything other than her mouth—her pressing lips, her licking tongue, her smooth chin that bobs and juts against my own. At one point, I know I knock against her nose with my own and it hurts her—she makes a yelping sound in the back of her throat—but it doesn’t stop her; in fact, she presses into me harder. I can’t tell if the wetness on and around my mouth comes from her saliva or from the rain.

  Eventually, she overpowers me in our erotic struggle, and my heels slip on the increasingly muddy grass, and I go down, slamming hard on my tailbone. My fall pulls us apart for a fraction of a second; I don’t even open my eyes. Renni is on top of me, kissing me just as forcefully as if there had been no interruption. She spreads her legs around mine, straddling my thighs, and the heat of her lower half on mine ignites me. I pull at her shirt, jostling the equipment she still has strapped to her back by her makeshift belt. Wordlessly, she breaks apart from me briefly to slip the thing off over her head and then she’s back on top, pressing me into the soft, wet earth.

  We grope around like this for a long time. At least, I think it’s a long time. We’ve entered some kind of angry, sexy vortex where time, much like the physical world, does not exist. When I start to feel the mud gripping onto my elbows, I just adjust my position so my arms are wrapped around Renni, my fingers buried in her hair, or pawing at her breasts underneath her shirt. When the wetness of the grass seeps into the butt of my pants, I just thrust my pelvis up into Renni’s thigh and concentrate on the heat there. She pulls at my hair and sucks at my face and rolls me around and I’m sure she doesn’t feel anything outside of me either.

  The painkillers are doing their job, numbing the impact all this jostling should have on my poor shoulder and weak calf. My blood surges with adrenaline, and in a fit of inspiration I maneuver my legs around Renni’s waist and push up from the ground, rolling her onto her back. I grind myself into her, and I open my eyes and look at her, her wet hair splayed about her face, rain stinging her cheeks, which have flushed red with all this effort. She opens her eyes too, and suddenly we’re seeing each other, and I’m afraid for a second that this will break the spell, but then her hand slips underneath the loose waistband of my jeans and I stop worrying.

  It’s about this time that I notice some movement near the tree line at the bottom of the hill. I glance up, peering out under my dripping brow, and watch a small group of zombies—maybe six or seven—slither out of the forest like upright tree slugs. They’re ambling, the way zombies do, and they’re quite a distance away from us; maybe two hundred yards.

  Renni’s fingers have found their way inside me and I gasp and look back down at her. She hasn’t noticed the zombies. She stares at me intently, breathing through her mouth as she works inside my pants, and I’m sure my face twists and contorts with each new trick she tries. I look back up to the zombies, who haven’t advanced much. Renni grabs my hair with her free hand and lifts herself up, so that she can attach her mouth to my neck. The dual sensations at either end of my body send spasms rippling up my spine. I make some kind of wet, surprised sound, and my eyes flutter closed, my body goes rigid, all the heat bursts away from me, out of every pore, every crack and cranny in my skin, and then I relax.

  Renni retracts her hand. She presses both palms to either side of my face and kisses me, a different kind of kiss, a softer, graceful kind, but still with a little tongue. I try to return the kiss, but suddenly I am cold all over, as the world comes rushing back to me—the rain, the wind, the mud, the moaning, the scrape-slosh-scraping—and my wounds begin to throb.

  I break apart from her, not very kindly, and look back to check on my pack of zombies. They’re about a hundred yards away now, and seem to be quickening their pace (as much as their brittle and broken legs will allow), heading right for us, releasing their low, ghostly moans of anticipation. Renni tilts her head back and sees what I see; I feel h
er body tense up beneath me.

  That’s when I hear it fully, the scrape-slosh-scraping, that couldn’t possibly be coming from this pack of zombies a football field length away. The rain makes it harder to triangulate the position, but my heart catches in my throat, my bowels churn deep inside me, and I roll off Renni just in time to see we are surrounded.

  They come from the top of the hill, sliding down impossibly fast; they come from the left and from the right of the hill, the mud tripping them up here and there, but mostly helping them along with its slick, rapid surface. Before I can even push myself to my feet, the moon is eclipsed by a trio of twisting, dripping bodies, and my ears are plugged with the sound of their moans like screeching.

  “Renni!” I scream, and clutch at her slippery hand. Then the undead bodies fall on us, enshrouding us. And the rest is silence.

  Chapter 7: And You Will Know Us by Our Trail of Undead

  Okay, I lied; the rest isn’t exactly silence (I

  stole that line from a bad ’90s movie, or maybe Shakespeare) so much as it is a cacophony of noises that all become one, deafening noise: the sound of me screaming.

  The things that I see happening all around us—after the zombies fall away from me, parts of their heads and brains blowing into my face, getting caught in my teeth, my nose, the corners of my squinting eyes—must surely be emitting some type of sound, but like I said, me screaming. Here are the things I see, all at once, but ordered here for a clarity I don’t possess in the field:

  A. As stated, a zombie’s face blown apart by a soundless bullet.

  B. A zombie, fresh hole in its head, falling onto Renni as another behind it explodes from the neck up, and falls, decapitated, onto the first zombie. Renni twists beneath them, mouth forming angry words, but she’s pinned.

  C. The band of zombies that encircles us silently taking a knee as if in prayer, as pieces of their heads and faces plop onto the soggy ground. Lights jump behind them, casting them into silhouetted relief, which makes them slightly more horrifying as the more or less intact ones continue to advance.