Heartland Junk_Part 3_Vitala Rising

by Eli Nixon

  Dinkins was right—these creatures were changing. Evolving almost. Getting smarter. They weren't zombies the way I'd always thought of them, soulless, mindless bodies brought back from the grave. My subconscious hesitation to kill any of them suddenly made more sense. Had I sensed it all along? No, fuck no. That was giving myself way too much credit. I'd been thrown into this desert as callously as anyone else. Whatever I had, whatever Dinkins thought I had, others had more of it.

  "We need to get going," I said, standing. Dinkins nodded, his hat brim flopping with the motion.

  "All I'm saying is think about it. You didn't kill her."

  With that, Dinkins strode into the kitchen to pack up the rest of the uneaten food.

  Chapter 4

  The sun was still blazing with merciless fury when we left the little farmhouse, but neither I nor Dinkins paid any attention to the sudden blast of hot air as we stepped out the front door. A horde of deadwalkers had crept up to the borders of the farm while we'd been inside. They stood shoulder to shoulder along the perimeter of the fence line. We stood on the sagging front stoop and just stared at the nightmarish sight.

  "Well I'll be fucking damned," Dinkins breathed. "They found us."

  "What are they doing?" I asked in a whisper. The air felt taut, as if too loud a noise would cause it to shatter.

  There must have been hundreds of them, all staring in our direction with unblinking pink eyes. I stepped around to the edge of the porch and leaned over the railing to see behind the house, and saw even more, all crowded into a perfect line where the tobacco-colored soy field met the woods.

  They'd reached the borders of the farm and just stopped, as if by some secret signal known only to their feverish minds. Back in front of the house, the street disappeared under the mass of crowded bodies, but not one toe touched the grass leading up to the house. Inside my backpack, Titan mewed.

  "Freaky," I whispered.

  "You said it, kid," Dinkins replied in a hushed tone, as if he'd also sensed the fragile quality of the situation. Slowly, ever so slowly, Dinkins walked to the edge of the porch, stepped onto the grass, and angled over toward the left side of the house.

  The creatures on the road were close enough for me to see their eyes. They didn't so much as flicker.

  "Ray," Dinkins whisper-shouted from the side of the house. "Go the opposite direction as me."

  "What the hell for?" I hissed. "You want to separate? Have you lost your mind?"

  "Just for a moment. Just do it, but go slow."

  Christ. Shooting a glare at Dinkins that would have killed a lesser man, I followed his instructions. Like him, I moved with the speed of glaciers, one foot, then the next, down the three stairs at the front of the porch, onto the withered grass. On the left, Dinkins nodded. Keep going.

  I made my way toward the right side of the house and immediately understood what Dinkins was doing.

  As a single mass, the sea of pink eyes turned to follow my progress. More than anything else that had happened so far, that subtle movement turned my blood to ice. My heart began to pound. They were watching me. Me. What the fuck were they watching me for? I wanted to scream at them, shake the answers out of their disfigured, rotting faces. But I stood still as a statue until I heard Dinkins whisper, "Okay, come on back. Keep it slow. Keep it slow."

  We met back in the middle in front of the porch.

  "What do we do?" I asked.

  "How the hell should I know?"

  "You're the one with all the fucking answers! You knew they were going to come for me, didn't you? That's why you were in such a hurry to leave the other house where you killed those four zombies, isn't it? How do you know this stuff?"

  "Okay, yeah, I knew. Are you happy now? It's not going to get us out of here."

  "Why didn't you just fucking tell me? That's one of the things you tell a person. 'Hey, by the way, all those zombies out there are following you wherever you go.' See, was that so hard?"

  "I had to be sure, Ray. It was just a guess until now."

  "Well you seem to be pretty fucking good at guessing."

  Our argument took place in raised whispers, like two cats hissing at each other in an alley. At first, neither of us noticed what was happening on the street.

  "You're wasting time getting mad at me when we should be figuring a way out of this," Dinkins snarled.

  "A way out? Of this?" I said, incredulous. "We're surrounded, Torrance. In case you hadn't noticed—"

  I cut myself off as the motion on the street became more apparent. The zombies were shuffling their ranks, moving aside into two groups that revealed an open swathe of roadway between them. A single shape walked up through the opening. A shape I recognized, but refused to believe. A shape with dark, spiked hair on its head. With a little stud on its ear that winked in the sun as it came closer. With a white bandage wrapped around its left bicep. A bandage I had put there two days ago.

  Rivet walked up to the grass on the road's shoulder, hesitated, then came forward two more steps before stopping. There was a weird patch of pure white on his jaw, around his lips. His eyes glowed pink. Behind him, the horde of zombies seeped together and closed the gap. Rivet stood before the multitude, Moses leading the Israelites to the promised land.

  "Fuck...fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck." My vocabulary had fled, too terrified to face the implications of what now stood in front of me. The rest of my mind felt like it might follow at any moment.

  To his credit, Dinkins never backed away from my side. Anyone else would have run back into the house, started boarding up the windows, let these things have me if that's what they wanted, but Torrance Dinkins didn't waver.

  Hello. Raymond.

  The voice swept through my mind like a school of fish, hundreds of pieces come together as a whole. Rivet's voice.

  "What are you?" I asked in a whisper, still afraid to raise my voice. Even though he was at least forty feet away, Rivet seemed to have heard.

  It's me. Rivet. Don't you recognize me.

  His hand jerked up, waved at me grotesquely, forearm dangling from the elbow like a marionette on a string. A marionette, that's what he was. A puppet. These fuckers had turned Rivet into a fucking meat puppet. I'd been thrown into the Twilight Zone from hell. I had to be dreaming. Maybe I'd passed out on the couch, maybe...

  Why won't you join us. We want you to join us. Be together.

  "What the hell did you do to my friend?" I asked, seething. "That's not him. Don't you tell me that's him."

  Look at me Raymond. Don't you recognize me.

  "Why are you coming after me? Answer me, shitheads!"

  "Ashley and Angelica," said Dinkins's voice, a million miles away.

  "Huh?" It was more a grunt than an audible word. I couldn't take my eyes off Rivet. He just stood at the edge of the lawn, watching us. I couldn't remember if I'd been answering him out loud or in my head.

  "My granddaughters. Those are their names."

  I waited for another wave of thought to shriek through my brain, but it was like Dinkins had broken the spell. Was it all a hallucination? I'd been in a state of inebriation for nearly three weeks straight. Even for me, that was a marathon. Was my brain finally cracking under the strain?

  "They weren't gone when I got to the house," Dinkins continued, a little louder now. "My granddaughters. I lied about that. I found them locked in the bathroom with their mother trying to beat the door down to get inside. She'd already eaten her boyfriend. Ralph. I never liked the guy, but still. She'd eaten him from the legs up and was trying to reach her daughters so she could eat them, too."

  I finally wrenched my eyes away from Rivet and turned to Dinkins. He was staring at the zombies, staring beyond them maybe, looking into a past which he'd probably resolved never to speak of.

  "Why are you telling me now?" I asked. Again, Dinkins ignored the question.

  "I shot her in the back of the head. My own girl, I shot her down without hesitating for a second because she was almost throug
h the door, Raymond, she'd scratched her nails off and then kept going until the skin wore away, too, and I took one look at that and understood right there that this madness has no place in the natural world. So I shot her dead and called to my grandbabies to open up, pappy was here, they could come out."

  Dinkins's voice cracked, and Rivet, I'd swear it, Rivet cocked his head to the side like he was listening, comprehending.

  "Let's get out of here," I told Dinkins. "If you still feel like telling me when we're safe, I'll be happy to listen..."

  "Nobody answered me in the bathroom," Dinkins continued shakily. "So I broke down the door, thinking maybe they were starving or hurt. It was all I could fix on. Getting my grandbabies out. I was too late. Sometime while they'd been locked in that bathroom, Ashley turned on her sister and ripped her throat out with her teeth. Angelica was still alive, but Ashley was already eating her."

  "Look at me, Torrance. Look at me." Dinkins turned his head. His cheeks blazed with tears. "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Promise me something, Raymond."

  "Listen to me..."

  "Keep their love. I'm giving it to you. Promise me you won't let it go. Their names were Ashley and Angelica. Keep them for me, Raymond. Promise."

  "I don't..."

  "Promise!"

  "I will," I said. "I'll keep your granddaughters."

  "Thank you," Dinkins said, smiling through the tears. He looked as if a weight had been suddenly lifted from his shoulders. "Figure out what you have to do to end this. That bike won't make it through. Here." He fished a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to me. They belonged to the old pickup, which was parked around the side of the house.

  "Mr Dinkins...whatever you're about to do..."

  "Find the answers, Raymond. Let your demons go and find the answers."

  Without another word, Dinkins chambered a round into the rifle, took aim at the lone figure on the grass.

  "Wait," I whispered. "Wait." Dinkins paused. Now or never. We were at war, whether I wanted to believe it or not. It was time to join the fight.

  I pulled the nine-millimeter handgun from the holster on my waist, felt the cold steal rebelling against the heat of my palms. Pulled back the slide...

  We will always find you.

  ...and put a bullet into Rivet's chest. Rivet slumped in the grass and Dinkins took off running around the side of the house, shouting, "Who wants a piece of this here fag? Come and get it!"

  Maybe it was the crack of the handgun or maybe it was Rivet's death, but as soon as I had fired the shot it was like a great switch had been thrown, sending an electric spark into the minds of the thousands of zombies lined up around the farm. They surged forward, so many that the ground shook under their feet.

  Dinkins disappeared around the side of the house, then reappeared moments later with a big red gas can and a hand-pumped pesticide sprayer.

  "Get the hell out of here, Raymond," he yelled at me as he knelt in the grass and pried off the lid of the sprayer. "They're thinner down in the corner of the field there. Go!"

  Dumbly, I watched them come. In the backpack, Titan began to snarl, perhaps sensing the unseen change. Men and women and children of all ages raced toward me like a tidal wave. They were different than they had been yesterday. The skin was sloughing off—some left patches of skin behind like sheets as they ran—and flaking away to reveal the muscle tissue beneath. Only it wasn't normal tissue. It was pure, glistening white. All the shades of the human race were peeling away to give rise to this uniform white, still streaked with blood from the shreds of skin.

  The zombies approached in various stages of shocking transformation. Some had barely started, the white merely peeking through gaps in their normal skin. Others were fully halfway finished, whole limbs or most of a torso gleaming bone white against the torn edges of what little skin remained on their bodies.

  "Fucking run, Ray!" Dinkins shouted. He was pouring gasoline onto the grass in a circle around himself. Just before I took off toward the truck, I saw him kneel again and flick a lighter to the wet grass. It blazed and traced the ring of gasoline, surrounding Dinkins completely in a low wall of fire. He turned to me and winked, then—fucker!—pulled out a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

  The nearest zombies were now only fifteen, twenty feet away from the farmhouse. I sprinted around the side to the blue pickup and wrenched open the door just as a wiry teenage girl slammed into the opposite side of the truck. Half of her face was white, sinewy muscle, the other half spray-tanned under dyed blonde hair. She snapped her teeth at me and began climbing onto the truck's hood. I fired two shots from the semiautomatic into her stomach and then leaped inside and slammed the door shut. The girl began beating on the windshield, leaving bloody fist marks on the glass, bleeding two rivers from her abdomen.

  The truck shook. Another zombie crashed into the passenger-side door. I tossed the gun onto the seat beside me and jammed the key into the ignition, wondering crazily if I was going to be the dipshit in the horror movie that drops the keys. But it slid in on the first try and the pickup roared with life. I dropped the emergency brake and lurched forward into the throng of people.

  The blonde girl slid off the hood, snapping the rearview mirror as she tried to find a handhold. The truck lurched as the rear tires bounced over her rolling body. My foot couldn't have been pressed tighter to the gas pedal if they'd been glued together. The truck shot past the edge of the house and thumped heavily into two men running side by side. One scrabbled against the hood and then dropped out of sight under the truck. The other's head whipped down into the hood and split his nose into a mashed grape, blood flinging in all directions as the truck bounced and shook.

  I could now see to the other side of the house where Dinkins stood in the middle of a ring of fire with the spray can in one hand and the rifle in the other. A zombie tried to pass through the flames and Dinkins sent a spray of gasoline toward him from the pesticide spray nozzle. The mist ignited in a miniature fireball around the zombie. The thing lit up like a torch and flailed through the ring before crashing to the ground on the other side. Dinkins cackled and fired his rifle one-handed at another interloper coming in from his left.

  The fire was spreading quickly in the dry grass, emanating away from Dinkins's little safe spot. Already, tiny flames were licking at the porch boards, a serpent of black grass behind them to mark their path through the lawn.

  He meant to burn the whole fucking farm to the ground, take as many with them as he could.

  I prayed that he'd make it out alive, but I couldn't enjoy the show for long. The truck tore through an old woman, separating one arm that had begun to rot around the shoulder. The woman went down, and the arm cartwheeled through the air to thump onto the windshield. I turned on the wiper blades. The glass smeared with blood. I didn't see the next zombie I hit, or the next, just knew they were there by the thud of the impacts.

  The truck was now cutting across the field beside the house, angling toward the road where the field formed a corner with the graytop and the treeline.

  There was a zombie every five or six feet, in a rough checkerboard pattern, spreading out as they ran at varying speeds from the road and the woods and the distant parts of the soy field. The truck bumped over plowed furrows, crashed into bodies, separated limbs and crushed spines and necks and skulls. Blood ran up the windshield in torrential rivulets. I turned off the wipers; all they did was smear it and make it harder to see.

  Old Man Dinkins's plan seemed to be working. Many of the zombies ignored me and the truck completely, mesmerized by the crackling flames. I stole a glance at the rearview mirror and saw that the fire was now eating away at the left side of the house, climbing its dry siding in an attempt to reach the sky. The field was ablaze for fifty feet in every direction. Black shapes writhed and twirled in the flames. I couldn't see Dinkins at all, but the occasional pop of the rifle assured me that he was still alive. For now.

  A fat man ex
ploded on the fender and then the truck was flying over the shallow drainage ditch between the field and the road, splinters flying from the rickety pioneer fence that separated the property from public land. Tires squealed, the engine roared in second gear...and I was on the road, speeding away from Rivet and the farmhouse and the sickly sweet smell of charring flesh.

  Chapter 5

  The truck chewed up the road with a ravenous appetite, more beast than machine. It roared with anger and pain and guilt, bellowed its rage in the black smoke pouring from the tailpipe. The blue hood was black with dissected human viscera, fueling the bloodlust of this creature come alive beneath me.

  I had no control over the metal demon. Under its own free will, it carried me away from everything I'd always known, the town I'd loved and hated and worn over me like a skin my whole life, all the dust and the comfort and the misery. Four pumping cylinders tore away that skin by the mile, leaving its tattered remains on an empty road which no human would ever traverse again.

  I was the last of my kind, the sole remnant of a dying breed. Within a few years, this road wouldn't even be here anymore. The forest would creep back to take its own. Roots would break through the asphalt, first cracking it and then burying it forever.

  On the passenger seat, Titan climbed out of the mouth of the backpack and cooed, then curled up and went to sleep. I reached over to rub the cat behind the ears, felt it purr beneath my fingers.

  The truck seemed to know our destination, seemed to pull the details from my mind. I had no memory of the miles slipping away beneath the tires. I just knew that we went and that death chased us. The faster we went, the quicker the death caught up.

  There is no escaping death. It lives inside us from the moment we're born and grows and grows until, at the ends of our lives, death becomes us and we sink into the darkness of all souls. Every moment of every day, we die just a little more.