Eat Your Heart Out

by Dayna Ingram

  Renni doesn’t say anything. I pipe up, “What about the other psychosomatic zombies? All those people hobbling around out there, injured and delirious, thinking they’re zombies? We can’t just leave them all out there.”

  “We don’t have the manpower to wrangle up all those pseudos,” Fury says, stuffing the cigar back in his cheek. “But you don’t have to worry about them. Once we explain everything to the Army out there, they’ll reverse their tactics, send in a couple of rescue teams to obtain and rehabilitate the afflicted. They’ll send in another team to ascertain the identities of the actual zombies, and take them down.”

  “How can you know that?” I ask.

  “Because it’s what I would do,” he says, puffing up his chest. “And I used to be in charge of this mission. All us military rats tend to think the same when it comes to strategy. Even those of us not raised in a lab. Anyway, you don’t really have to come with us, it’s safe to stay behind now. But I’m offering you a ride, if you want to take it. Meet us in the gymnasium in twenty if you’re coming with us.”

  He gives us the three-finger Boy Scout salute again, turns on his heel, and marches out of the classroom. The yellow lights stay on in the classroom, and under them, Renni and I look each other over.

  “Well,” I say, knocking my wrists against the sides of my waist. “I guess it’s over.”

  “Kind of anti-climactic,” Renni says.

  As if to emphasize that the danger is indeed behind us, a chorus of school children begins to sing. Their earnest altos rise up from the floor below us, vibrating our feet. Renni and me both look down. I can’t make out words, only harmony and pitch, but it sounds like they are singing some sort of Christmas carol. I can only assume all this singing is the jubilant reaction of the other survivors Fury and his soldiers rounded up before coming to our rescue. Probably he delivered the good news and this is how they are rejoicing.

  “That’s fucking annoying,” Renni says under her breath, in the tone of voice she might use with a cat who just dropped a freshly decapitated mouse proudly at her feet. We meet each other’s eyes and our laughter boils out of us like a pot left on the stove a minute too long.

  I swipe at the moisture building in the corners of my eyes. “Shit, Renni,” I say. “I’m gonna miss you.”

  Renni waves this sentiment away. “By the next zombie outbreak, you’ll have forgotten all about me.”

  The singing below us fades away as the survivors are marched from their holding pattern in the library to the gymnasium. Very distantly, we can hear engines starting up.

  “Here,” Renni says, scanning the room. She trots to the front of the room. “Wait here.”

  But of course I don’t wait. I follow her, leaning my butt against a left-handed school desk in the front row. When I was a student here, I always sat in the front row, unless we had assigned seats. Sure, it made the back of my head a primary target for spit wads and partially chewed gum, but it also allowed me to focus on the teacher and the lesson, to block out the unseemliness all around me, and to see only what I wanted to see. Now, I focus in on Renni, who is busy rifling through the drawers of the teacher’s desk. She emerges with a thick, black Sharpie marker.

  She comes around the desk to stand in front of me. “Give me your arm.” She curls her fingers at me impatiently.

  I hold my right arm to my chest protectively, pouting a little. “What for?”

  “Come on,” Renni says. “Trust me.”

  How can I not, after all of this? She takes my wrist and turns my arm over, so that the smooth skin of the underside is revealed. She uncaps the marker with her teeth, holding the cap in her cheek like Fury holds his cigars. She begins to write on my arm; the ink of the mark is cold. I shiver.

  “What are you writing?”

  She slurs around the marker cap in her mouth, “My autograph.”

  When she’s finished I see she’s written down ten digits. “Don’t let me see that number on some blog, you hear me?” she smirks as she recaps the marker.

  I look at my arm as if it’s grown scales but I’m not too worried about it; scales are pretty good for guarding your skin against the elements, and reptilian humanoids are kind of cool. Still, it’s strange. I pull my gaze away from my arm, finally, and look up at Renni. She’s leaning casually back against the teacher’s desk, observing me.

  “So,” I say, clearing my throat, “what will you do? After this.”

  She raises one eyebrow at me, but looks down, sucking in wet air, drumming her fingers along the ridge of the desktop. “I don’t know. Go back to L.A., I guess. This vacation’s kind of sucked. Well, most of it. You?”

  I look around for some idea of what to say in the posters of George Washington and Mount Rushmore and the map of America adorning the classroom walls. The inanimate objects that fill this room are not very forthcoming tonight. “I think I’ll…you know.” I shrug, stalling for time. “Just…keep going.”

  “With Carmelle?” Renni asks, looking at me again.

  I soften my own gaze, but confirm, “With Carmelle.”

  She doesn’t say anything then. We lean against our respective desks and listen to the engines downstairs, the motions of tires on linoleum, feet running up and down stairs, marching through hallways. It sounds like the rain is letting up outside. Renni swallows. I swallow. The clock above the door ticks away our remaining minutes together.

  “Renni,” I start, taking a deep breath. “I wouldn’t have survived this without you.”

  She looks at me for a few seconds, almost long enough for me to cough and try again as if she might have missed what I said, and then she says, “I know. You owe me.”

  I laugh wetly, kind of more of a snort, and look away, shaking my head, trying to suck the tears back into their rightful, burning place in the center of my chest. “Goddammit, Renni.”

  I hear her move away from the desk and then my cheek is buried in her hair, partially dry now but still smelling vaguely like the chemically treated water of the school’s showers. She wraps her arms tightly around me and hugs me close, careful of my injured shoulder. I return the embrace with everything I have.

  “I still don’t get it,” I say into her earlobe.

  “Get what?” Her lips reverberate against my tragus.

  “Why you stayed with me. Why you came back.”

  “Can’t we just call it fate?”

  “Do you believe in fate?”

  She backs her head up just enough for her mouth to tremble against my left temple. “I believe in not ruining a beautiful moment with unanswerable questions.”

  “But—”

  “Shhh,” she admonishes, and kisses her way across my forehead—still slightly tender and bruising from my run-in with the dashboard earlier—down my eyes, over my nose, to linger on my lips.

  It’s our last kiss, and it isn’t long or deep enough, but it will have to do. The clock’s ticking.

  We leave the classroom, hand in hand, and walk through the halls of my old high school like sweethearts, like Homecoming Queens.

  As we near the gymnasium, the cacophony of revving engines, jolly singing, and jubilant, shouting voices intensifies. Inside the gym, it’s enough to drown out my own conflicting thoughts, for which I am grateful. The wide double doors at the far end of the gym have been flung wide open as if there is nothing left to fear. One by one, a caravan of vehicles buses through them and out into the night: Jeeps carrying the dressed-in-black soldiers, still with their guns raised, and a handful of white golf carts shuttling the unarmed civilian survivors. I recognize a few faces as they queue up to exit: there’s Walt, the scrawny eleventh grader who bags my groceries at Whole Foods; there’s Edna Mae and Stephen, an elderly couple who caused a big ol’ ruckus amongst the church gossipers a while back for moving in together and never marrying (I’m glad to see they made it through this, arms around each other and smiling big, as usual); there’s that family of six who come into Ashbee’s at least once a month to stare at the giant
HD televisions they’ll never be able to afford. I wave to them as they pass, but none of them looks my way.

  The dirt bikers circle loudly up to us. Renni tenses a bit, as if preparing for a confrontation, but they stop well short of us. Two riders disembark and take off their helmets. They hold them out to us. “They’re yours if you want ’em.”

  Nick Fury comes up behind us and barks, “Hell yeah, they want ’em!”

  Renni drops my hand and takes the sleek black helmet from one of the riders. “You serious?”

  “Those two’ll ride in the Jeep with me,” Fury confirms. He pats his breast pocket for a second, but it appears he is out of cigars. Not to fret though; the boy with the blue bucket appears momentarily, holding a fresh stogie out to his hero.

  “What is that all about, anyway?” I ask, figuring this will be the last time I interact with this Fury—or Mister Machina, as it were—so might as well speak my mind.

  Fury shrugs and hitches up his belt of bullets, taking the cigar from the kid. “Privileges, my dear.” He bites off the end of the cigar, and spits it into the boy’s ready bucket—plunk! The boy beams. “We all have to carry the blue bucket at some point in our lives. Don’t we?”

  Before I can respond with more than a half-curious, half-dumb look, Renni calls my name. She’s straddling one of the dirt bikes already and proffering the other helmet. “Light a fire under your ass!”

  I’ve never ridden anything with more power than a ten-speed bi-cycle, but somehow I’m not nervous to try this. The dirt bikes are small, and I figure if I wipe out on one of these tonight, after everything else I’ve survived, at least the irony will be beautiful.

  It’s wobbly going at first, but I follow Renni out of the gym without incident, and once in the parking lot she keeps her pace slow so that I can keep up. We’re trailing the rest of the convoy a good deal, but I don’t really care. I keep my eyes trained on Renni’s back, watch the wind rustle her shirt, the chill of the rain still with us, stinging my exposed skin awake. I hug the dirt bike with my legs, trying to drive it by feeling and instinct without overthinking. It’s kind of Zen.

  Renni decelerates a bit more so that we’re riding parallel. We look at each other through the tinted visors of our helmets. I shoot her a thumbs up. She shoots one back. And that’s when the zombies attack.

  Two of them dart out from the dark, cavernous space between two parked vans, and dive for Renni. They don’t time their joint leap quite right, and they end up barreling into the bike’s back tire, which sends the whole thing spinning out and throws Renni to the pavement. I desperately try to brake as her bike whips by me, sparks flying as the metal and plastic frame skids across the double yellow line. Finally, my hand finds the brake and I come to an abrupt halt, and jump off, not bothering with the kickstand, or to even turn off the engine. Thirty or so feet back, Renni is on her side, her helmet having flung off when she hit the ground, and the zombies are inches from her, salivating almost as loudly as they’re moaning.

  I still have my handgun tucked into my pants from after the shower, as well as the hunting knife. My instinct is to go for the gun, but I take up the knife instead. Because these two zombies didn’t amble or shuffle or limp to take down Renni, they ran. And zombies simply do not run.

  Trusting my impeccable aim to guide me even though I’ve never thrown a knife like this before, I grip the business end like I’ve seen in movies and let it rip. Both zombies are crouched low, picking at Renni, who seems to be unconscious. My aim does prove true, but my knife throwing is for shit; the handle thromps into the side of one of the zombie’s heads, and he stumbles back, knocked off balance. He clutches his head with one hand and moans, until his moan becomes a very audible, “Ow!”

  His companion looks up, mouth dripping with Renni’s blood and a bit of cloth from her t-shirt, looking quite confused.

  “You’re not a zombie!” I scream, running up to them. Both dudes look at me. “You’re not a fucking zombie, asshole!” I reach the trio and kick the bloody guy in the face. He falls back, clutching his mouth.

  “What’s going on here?” The other guy whines. He’s sitting on his butt now, rocking back and forth, hugging himself. The guy I just kicked starts rolling to and fro, crying.

  “Shut up!” I don’t have time for either of these guy’s issues. I kneel down by Renni and appraise her wounds. It looks like only one pseudo-zombie took a bite out of Renni’s forearm, and even that was more cloth than flesh. Her shirt is ripped at the chest where the other pseudo-zombie had tried to scratch his way to something deeper. I roll her onto her back and brush the hair away from her face. She’s bleeding from a wound on her forehead, but it’s pretty shallow. Her nose is bleeding again, too.

  “Renni,” I say loudly, shaking her. “Renni.”

  Some moaning from the side of the road draws my attention. Coming down the block is a band of zombies who look the part; only three or four of them have fully intact faces, at least two of them are shuffling forward on broken ankles, and they’re all dressed in their finest drab suits and dresses of muted colors.

  “Come on, Renni, you gotta get up!” I slap her cheeks lightly but get no response. I think back to how easy it was to wake her in the hotel room and wish for that ease back. But without it, I have no choice. I punch her in the vagina.

  She bolts upright and slugs me across the jaw as she curls up tight to manage the pain. “Fuck,” she bellows.

  “Zombies!” I shout, pointing with one hand at the rovers who are just now stepping off the curb, and rubbing my jaw with the other.

  “Too many of them,” Renni quickly assesses. She touches her fingers gingerly to her nose. “Shit, I think I re-broke this.”

  Then from behind us comes an echo of moans. There’s another band, double the size of the first one, pushing in from the opposite side of the street.

  “Start shooting!” Renni yells.

  I quickly scan this new group. “Not all of them are real zombies!”

  Renni leans forward and rips the gun out of my waistband. She positions herself on one knee, leveling the gun over her other leg, holding steady with a two-handed grip, like a pro. She pops off three shots at the first band, skimming a shoulder here, a neck there, but no head shots; the zombies shuffle on.

  “Shit, I can’t focus!”

  “That sounds familiar,” I mumble, thinking of her role as my namesake in Rising Evil. Her character was bitten and slowly succumbing to the virus, which weakened her ability to focus.

  “Oh God,” one of the pseudo-zombies, still rolling on the asphalt, starts talking to himself. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” The other pseudo-zombie just starts screaming.

  “Renni!” At the sound of my voice, Renni whips around and fires off a shot in the direction of the second band. It goes wild, and the zombie who occasioned my shout, a mite quicker than his friends, reaches us. I kick at his knees and he stumbles to the ground, causing Renni’s second shot to whiz over his head and implant itself into the thigh of another zombie. This zombie screams—“My leg!”—and goes down.

  “Sorry!” Renni yells at him.

  The other zombies realize he isn’t one of them and turn on him.

  I kick frantically at the pseudo-zombie nearest me. “Get up and fight! You’re not a fucking zombie, so get up and fucking fight!”

  The zombie I’d kicked before reaches out to grasp my ankle, and I drop my heel into his face, shattering his cheekbone but leaving his brain unharmed. I quickly rectify this by digging my fingers in his disgusting hair and slamming his head into the ground until I hear a slopping splat-sound that makes me gag. He doesn’t move, but it’s too late anyway; all of a sudden, zombies from both bands are on top of us.

  I hear Renni shoot a couple more rounds until the gun runs out of ammo, and then she starts swinging it. We fight with our backs to each other, flailing and screaming, spitting and bleeding, periodically connecting with a pseudo-zombie who wakes up at the hit, and taking a number of scratches and bit
es ourselves. I’m sure we’re going down, but goddammit, we’re going down hard.

  A noise like thunder breaks through the collective moans of all these zombies, and suddenly we’re bathed in bright white light. A second later, I see the bumper of the Jeep just as it connects with my hip. I fly back from the impact, falling onto a couple of sharply dressed older female zombies. I elbow them both simultaneously in their mouths and get back to my feet before the pain of the collision has time to set in my bones.

  All around me lie prone zombie bodies and pseudo-zombies. Most of the zombies are quiet, some of them are trying to crawl forward or pull themselves up futilely on their broken legs, and the pseudo-zombies are kind of freaking out. I help Renni up and we stare into the blinding white light.

  The lights go off, and in the Jeep I can see now the three most beautiful faces I have ever seen: Cherry in the driver’s seat, Brad in the passenger’s seat, and Carmelle—sweet, beautiful, complicated Carmelle—standing up in the back, rifle raised high and hair blowing back wildly in the wind.

  “I’m sorry,” Cherry squeaks out from the driver’s seat, turning off the engine. “I don’t know how to drive a stick. The brake and the clutch are so close together.”

  “Cherry,” I exclaim. “Get out here and fucking hug me.”

  “Fuckin’ right on, fuck yeah,” Brad says. Everyone hops out of the Jeep and soon I am embraced by six pairs of arms, and one pair of lips, that I hope belong to Carmelle because I’ve closed my eyes and can’t really be sure. Our reunion is cut short by the sound of Renni stomping in zombie brains and kicking pseudo-zombies in the ribs, just to remind them they’re alive. When everyone sees her, and she sees them, a silent agreement seems to pass through everyone, and they surge toward her, encasing her in an inescapable three-way bear hug. Despite her initial look of surprise and discomfort, she smiles broadly.

  “All right, all right,” she pushes them back playfully. “What the hell are we still doing here?”