Vitala Rising

by Eli Nixon

  The sudden motion and the now-heavy codeine buzz threw me off balance. Instead of a solid hit on his temple, the hook of the crowbar swiped across Sid's nose and crunched it flat. A crimson mist puffed into the still air and freckled Sid's face. He lurched sideways with the blow and flew past me into a heap on the gravel driveway.

  The other three just watched.

  I stepped over Sid's wriggling form and raised the crowbar over my head. Sid twisted and growled at me, pink eyes flaring. Drops of blood washed over his open irises but he made no effort to blink them away.

  Just before I could bring the crowbar crashing against his skull, a gunshot rang out and Sid's head erupted like a watermelon dropped from the Eiffel Tower.

  "Fuck!" I shouted. "Damn it!" That one was mine.

  I twirled and scanned the fields, looking for whoever had fired the shot. I'd kill him if I had to. Then as suddenly as it had come over me, the rage subsided and I sank onto the hot gravel. Rivet deserved better than me.

  Three shots later and the other three zombies were lying at my feet. I hadn't lifted a pinkie to make it happen.

  And across the field, a dry, cackling voice called, "Well, fuck an old fag. If it isn't Raymond."

  Chapter 3

  Torrance Dinkins ambled across the dying field like a lone gunslinger after a nuclear war. His old war rifle was slung over his shoulder, bayonet gleaming in the sun. A wide-brimmed hat was slung low over one brow and his belt was studded with brass ammunition. Fucking pharmacists, Rivet would have said.

  He ducked and stepped between two slats in the wooden fence lining the drive, walked over to the shirtless kid leaking a scarlet puddle onto the gravel, unzipped his fly, and started pissing on the corpse.

  "You look like you're enjoying yourself," I said, bitter. He'd enabled my own weakness. Dinkins angled his head over his shoulder and grinned.

  "You know what my old sergeant used to tell us before we went into a firefight?"

  "I had this under control," I said.

  Dinkins acted like he hadn't heard me. He zipped and turned around. "If you can't beat 'em, fuck 'em, buy 'em, or ply 'em," he said, "mow the fuckers down and worry about it later."

  "Sounds like a real lady's man."

  "My point being," Dinkins continued, now digging through the deputy's pockets, "you were standing out here so long I thought you might be trying all those things." He pulled a handgun out of the deputy's holster and stuck it in his own belt. "You let these things make the first move and they'll run all over you. Maybe not one, or two, or even these four, but one thing they've got is numbers. Dumber than a sack of apes, but that don't much matter when there's a dozen pulling you down. You hesitate, you might as well give up. Hmm, thought he'd have something on him, fresh as he was." He mumbled the last to himself, studying the dead deputy.

  Finally, Dinkins straightened and cocked an eye at me in the shadows beneath his hat brim.

  "Good to see you again, kid."

  --

  I sparked up a bowl and took a long pull, letting the acrid cannabis smoke soak into my lungs. After a moment, it began to work, soothing the codeine jitters threatening my stomach and casting a soft glow over the inside of the kitchen. We'd finally found an old orange bottle of amoxycillin, a milky, chalky syrup that left a slimy paste on the roof of my mouth. I could still feel the fever burning under my skin, but the bottle was mostly full and it should be enough to see me through the worst of it. Fresh bandages covered my innumerable scrapes and wounds, some of them still stinging from the iodine and rubbing alcohol.

  The bite on my forearm from the deadwalker who'd sprung the trap on me in the field was the worst. It had grown yellow around the edges, small blisters leaking with pus. Deep inside the gouge, the muscle gleamed salmon pink where the tissue was still good, black where it had begun to putrify. To my horror, I'd found a maggot in one of the black sections, a little wriggling white rice grain segmented by lines of pale yellow. I'd gagged and tried to pry it out with my fingers, but Dinkins happened to walk into the bathroom right then, and he stopped me. He told me to leave it in; it would eat all the dead tissue and keep the wound clean, he said. It was the most horrifying, disgusting, gut-churning idea I'd ever heard, but fuck me, I did what he said.

  I could feel it squirming inside my arm now as I sat at the table, but that might have been my imagination. Dinkins said to flush it out with gasoline in a few days. Old bush trick he'd picked up in the war.

  Old Torrance Dinkins, that maggot-loving devil himself, sat across the table from me, cleaning his rifle and counting shells. The angled sunlight coming through the windows carved shadows into the wrinkles on his face. His forehead was a mountain range of ridges, creased in concentration while he rubbed the tip of an oiled rag over the inside of the cartridge chamber on the rifle. Titan sat on the table and watched his movements closely.

  I exhaled, shivered with a fever chill, and held the glass pipe across the table for Dinkins. He looked at it, looked up at me, then went back to cleaning.

  "Gotta stay sharp. You oughta know that, smart as you are."

  We'd left the old farmhouse together, me on my Kawasaki and Dinkins in an old pickup he'd parked down at the bottom of the field. He wouldn't let us stay around the bodies for long; as nonchalant as he'd been at the start, he'd begun looking around nervously as the minutes ticked by. For what, he wouldn't say.

  By virtue of mutual humanity, we'd agreed to stick together. People were now a rarity, good people more precious than oxygen. We'd motored north another hour before picking a house to break into for lunch.

  "Got a cigarette?" I asked, not holding out much hope. Dinkins shook his head. The man was an oddity, that was for sure. He'd found his daughter's house empty as we'd predicted when he left us all those nights ago, and then he'd gone on the hunt to restock his supply of morphine. I wondered how long he'd been taking it. Probably since the war. He'd joked that at least one good thing had come out of that shitstorm, so I figured that was an admission of sorts.

  After leaving his daughter's house down in Mayfield—a little residential pocket about twenty minutes south of town—he'd picked his way through the neighboring houses, following a search pattern that was already becoming second nature for all of us: Bathrooms, kitchen cabinets, night stands. Weird when you thought about it, how everybody in the world had the same spots to stick their prescriptions.

  Weirder still what you found out about people when you nosed through their drug habits. His grandkids' neighbor two doors down had been a closet cokehead, he'd told me. He'd found a couple baggies, some full, most empty, in a shoebox in the guy's closet.

  "He brought his kids to my granddaughter's birthday party once," Dinkins had said, shaking his head. "Nicest feller in the world. No way you could have known."

  "What were their names?" I asked, breaking the silence again. "Your granddaughters." Dinkins stopped polishing the rifle's barrel and stared at it for a few minutes, as if deciding how to answer the question. He hadn't said anything about them other than the brief fact that they weren't there.

  "You got a mom?" he finally asked, turning the conversation around in his usual custom. "Got a dad?"

  "I did," I said slowly. I hadn't talked about them to anyone in years, and I think I was beginning to understand. "My mom died a few years ago. Dad's been gone for fifteen and a half. He took off one night and just never came back."

  "You loved her?"

  "She was a mess after he left," I said. Something hard and tight unfurled slightly in my chest. "She wasn't perfect before, of course. I mean, who is? But she was there at least. She paid attention to us. Acted like..." the lumpy mass moved into my throat. "...like a mom. Like my mom. After my fucking dad walked out...well, let's just say that if she hadn't died then, she'd still be alive right now."

  Dinkins nodded in understanding. "Life kicks us all in the balls. Gotta fall on something."

  He looked at the table again. "My point here is you gotta hold onto that love with
all you got. Don't go sharing it around with nobody. Keep it close, right here." He jabbed a finger into his chest. "It's yours and nobody else's. My grandbabies, their love, it's mine. No offense meant, but I intend to keep them with me as long as I can."

  I understood. I'd been doing it ever since I came home from work and found my mom sprawled on the bathroom floor with vomit crusted to the side of her face. I'd kept the good parts to cherish because those were the pieces I chose to live with. Her smile, her laugh, waving at me from the doorway, fussily parting my hair before school, only for me to muss it up again as soon as I turned the block onto the next street. The life before the death that'd hit her as a junkie. How long had she been dead before her body finally decided to catch up?

  "Love's all we got, but it don't have to be sad, son," Dinkins's voice yanked me back to the present.

  Shit, I was crying. I wiped my arm roughly across my cheek and left the room before Dinkins could say anything about it. I dropped onto the clean leather sofa in the abandoned living room and took a pull from the codeine bottle in my pocket. I didn't really need the boost, but I wanted it. The next moment I was hurling the bottle across the room. It thumped softly against the wall. Lately, all the fun had gone out of getting fucked up. I could feel the maggots moving in my arm. Titan crept up to the couch and licked my fingers, cooed as if trying to reassure me of something.

  I wondered if my sister Rachel was still walking aimlessly around Joshuah Hill with no arms, looking for someone to kill. I wondered if my dad was still alive, wherever he might be. With this world's sense of justice, he probably was. I wondered if my mom could have weathered the storm. Been a little stronger, if not for her then for me and Rachel. Wondered why she hadn't realized how close she was getting before going over. Wondered for the millionth time if she'd done it on purpose.

  Dinkins's soft footsteps came into the living room, followed by the creak of an armchair across the room.

  "You never told me how you know so much about medicine," his dried-out voice said. "Could have used a head like yours in the pharmacy."

  I stared at the back of the couch, years in the past, thinking of a similar couch beside a coffee table piled high with medical books borrowed from the library.

  I'd spent months on that couch just reading about pharmaceuticals. Pills and powders and syrups, solutions and suspensions. I did terrible in chemistry as school, but at home it was my only vocation. I had to find an answer. Somewhere in those dry, dusty tomes lay the Philospher's stone that would save my mother's live.

  See, she'd been fucked up well before the heroin habit sucked her dry. Liver cancer, a bum deal of the cards from an incomplete deck. It was one of the rarest forms of cancer, even more so in women, but my mom drew the one lucky straw out of millions.

  The doctors said it was also probably why her heroin addiction had gone on unnoticed for so long. There aren't really any symptoms at first. A little nausea, a little stomach pain.

  Sound familiar? It gets worse.

  In later stages, as the cancerous cells eat up more and more of the liver, your skin gets a little yellow, like a tallow candle. You heave up after every meal, or if you haven't eaten—because you don't have shit for appetite—you heave anyway and get a little trickle of greenish bile. Stomach acid. Do it enough, and you start burning your esophagus with it.

  You're losing weight this whole time until your skin sags baglike on your bones.

  I'm pretty much describing a hardcore junkie right here, so you can see how nobody saw it coming.

  The year she was diagnosed with cancer was my third year in high school. Doc McGavin, the local Joshuah Hill practitioner, had her sent up to a specialist in Lincoln. I drove her the whole way and tried to keep my eyes on the steering wheel each time we pulled over so she could lean out and vomit. Some of those spells came as a result of being dosed to the gills on black tar, but like I said, we had no idea.

  The specialist in Lincoln, a real gung-ho cancer guy named Dr. Rosenbaum Ph.D., you got the feeling he was rooting for the cancer. Championing it along. He said she'd had a tumor stuck to her liver for a year and a half now, and he said it almost with a smile.

  That was the first time I really let myself go in front of my mom. I told Dr. Rosenbaum Ph.D. I was going to beat him until he fucking bled cancer if he didn't take this case more seriously, shouting and carrying on like the dumb teenager I was. We never went back, but my mom gave my hand a little squeeze in the car on the ride home. It was the first sign of affection she'd shown in weeks.

  After that, things went downhill in a hurry. Between the cancer and the heroin, my mom's liver was sinking like the Titanic. I looked up everything about it. Learned the quack cures, studied the research going all the way back to a century ago. There had to be something in those books.

  I learned medicine the way a fisherman learns the rhythms of the sea. From antihistamines to antipsychotics, capsaicin salves to glycerin enemas. Inadvertently, I learned the language of psychotropics. Benzos, opiates, CNS suppressants and depressants, dopamine and serotonin receptor agonists. There was no island in that sea I didn't touch.

  I thought maybe my dad would hear about the cancer and come back and fix it all. He never did.

  The coroner's report from her death showed that it was unequivocally an overdose. She'd had more heroin in her system when she died than William S. Burroughs went through in a month.

  Yeah, the cancer was still just sharpening its claws for the big show. She beat it to the punch by six months at least.

  I told all this to Torrance Dinkins with my face to the back of the couch, then turned around to look at him. There was compassion in his eyes, his face. I hadn't expected that. Pity, maybe. Or understanding of the shitty job I'd done with it all.

  Because in the end, I hadn't learned enough. I'd let her down. Just like I'd let down Rivet and Jennie and Abby and Theo and Rachel and every other fucking person in my life. Just like good ol' dad. And every time I thought about her smile and her laugh, waving goodbye and fixing my hair, I knew I'd never see any of those things again because I hadn't been good enough.

  Dinkins had the rifle over his lap. His wide-brimmed Stetson was back on his head, and all the brass cartridges had been returned to his belt. Back in cowboy mode.

  "We ought to saddle up," he said, unwittingly completing the illusion. I just stared. What a fucking guy. I liked him. He had that carefree, fuck-you attitude that you only got when you'd been through the shit and then grown old enough to look back on those experiences with the wisdom of time.

  "Did you ever get married, Mr. Dinkins? Sorry...Torrance. You have a daughter, but you've never talked about her mother."

  "Kid...," Dinkins said slowly. I sighed, recognizing the signs. He was about to maneuver around my question. "...you got the sharpest mind I've ever seen in this town," Dinkins continued. "You spent all that time learning medicine, sure, but I've got a feeling there's more to it than that. You remember things, things you probably don't even realize you know. Let me ask you something: In my pharmacy, there was a poster on the wall behind the counter. What was it?"

  Had he gone crazy? "How the hell should I know?" I said. "What does that have to do with—"

  "Humor an old man. Think about it."

  I didn't want to—this was pointless—but my memory went back there anyway, almost against my will.

  "It was a Sufedrine advertisement, a woman sneezing and little cartoon germs getting crushed under the box." The words surprised even me, but the memory was there, clear as day. It had been tacked to the wall over a shelf laden with little boxes holding inbound prescriptions waiting to be filled. Pink background, brunette woman. The cartoon anthropomorphic germs had been wearing blue sweaters for some reason.

  Dinkins smiled at my answer, the half-curve smile of someone thinking I told you so.

  "Okay, I got lucky," I said. "I still don't see what that has to do with you being married. Can't you ever just give a straight fucking answer?"
/>   Dinkins's smile broadened. "No need to get testy, Raymond," he said lightly. "I'm still figuring this out, too."

  "Figuring what out?"

  "I was married for two years. It didn't work out, of course. I've liked men since I was a boy. But it was proper for the time and age, so I went for it. She was a wonderful woman, but I can't say I really loved her. Best thing to come out of it was my daughter and my two grandbabies."

  "What are you still figuring out, Mr. Dinkins?" I pressed.

  "Anyone ever told you you got a photographic memory?" Dinkins asked.

  A harsh laugh escaped before I could stop it. "Not even close, Torrance," I said. "Even if I had had something like that, the junk washed it away years ago. I'm a failure in every sense of the word. Nice try, but I'm not buying it."

  Dinkins eyed me shrewdly. "Y'ain't got a tall opinion of yourself, that's for sure. But listen to me now, Raymond. You're special. Lots of people out there going to survive this thing for awhile. But not forever, Raymond. Not forever. These things're changing into something else, something that'll finish everything. I got a feeling you might be the only person alive in the whole world right now can stop that from happening. You'll figure it out, sooner or later, if you give yourself a chance to get out your own fucking way and let it happen.

  "You been down the black road more'n once already. Anybody can look in your eyes and see that. You've been there, been part of these monsters more intimate than any lover. And you're changing cause of it. Don't know how yet, or what you're changing into, but the fact's there clear as day. You watch yourself and don't let your guard drop for a damn minute. Each time you go, the harder it is to come all the way back. You're bringing pieces of them into you."

  I thought of Abby, so close to catatonic from being shoved down the "black road," as Dinkins called it, so many times. But that wasn't all that had happened to her, was it? Something in her mind had been unlocked, something that felt—and I couldn't explain why I thought this, just that it felt right—something that felt old, primal. Something in our genes that had lain dormant for millennia was waking up and putting down roots, sending out tendrils of itself to reconstruct the fabric of our humanity.