Heartland Junk_Part 3_Vitala Rising

by Eli Nixon

  Four incomplete bodies, nailed spread-eagle to the wall above padded booths where tired motorists had once eaten greasy tavern burgers and fries.

  Each and every one of them was missing its head. Congealed black blood caked their shirt fronts, slathered down in rivers and streams from the gaping holes in the tops of their necks. It took me nearly a minute to cover the whole grisly scene with the narrow beam of light. The whole time, muttering "Shit" and "Jesus" under my breath.

  They'd been beheaded, and then crucified. Or crucified and then beheaded. The circle of light moved lower, past a bloody leg stump wriggling with maggots, and God help me I jumped back again.

  "Christ!"

  Their heads were arranged in a pile on top of one of the booth tables. The entire surface was covered in the last leaking blood from the flesh-spotted skulls, and each of the heads' eyes were wide open, staring at me through glaucoma pink.

  This wasn't the work of zombies setting up a trap. It was too sloppy, too erratic for the calculation the stags were now showing. People had done this, I was sure of it. The human race had been split down the middle, monsters on either side.

  A pattern in the blood on the wall caught my eye. I'd missed it the first time. It was hard to read it, piecemeal as I had to, because the blood had gone brown with age and blended into the wall. The lettered scrawl ran all the way across the wall, painted over the bodies of the decapitated zombies.

  It read:

  THIS IS HOW WE DIE

  Somehow, that one phrase made me shiver more than the sight of the dismembered corpses nailed to the wall.

  I had to get out of here. Until that moment, my body had gone almost catatonic, the only functioning parts my eyes and the hand that held the flashlight. Then, suddenly, energy surged through me. Cigarettes forgotten, I grabbed the backpack off the floor and vaulted the bar. Sprinted toward the door. At the very last second before passing through into the cooling night air, I slid to a stop. Written in blood on the inside of the door, about waist height in a child's scrawl, were the words:

  PLEASE RAY

  The words drove the whole universe through my skull to erupt screaming out the other side. Everything crashed around me.

  Please Ray.

  Low, written by a child. A plea for help—my help—in the midst of this desolate wasteland.

  Theo.

  It had to be.

  This macabre presentation was the work of their psychotic kidnappers. Theo was still alive. At least, he had been a day or two ago. But for how long? And Jennie? Abby's telepathic memories flashed through my head.

  Blood. Chains. Laughter.

  What were they doing to her even now?

  I raced out into the night.

  Chapter 7

  I holed up that night in one of the shanty-houses behind the service station, as far as I could get from the horrors of the biker bar in that woods-hemmed pitstop. I used the crowbar to break the window on the back door and stumbled inside, delirious with fear and nausea.

  I don't remember much else about the night. Titan followed me, although I have no recollection of him doing it. Once inside the trashed, dilapidated home, I upended the bottle of cheap vodka in my mouth, choked on the bitter stream, gagged, then forced more into my belly. Anything to break free from the hell of the sobriety that would force me to think about Jennie and Theo.

  Morning found me slumped against a dead refrigerator on cold, cracked linoleum that flickered with moving shadow, a headache the size of Nebraska trying to fit inside my skull. Every movement brought a knife's edge slicing into the space between my eyes, and for a horrifying moment I thought the light flashing through the kitchen was the silent, lightning-flicker onset of Vitala. Then a crash came from outside the kitchen window and I saw that the light was changing because there were bodies moving between the house and the rising sun, casting their shadows through the dirty pane.

  God.

  Damnit.

  Fuck.

  My mouth felt like a lizard had died in it. My stomach was a frothy sea of Slim-Jims and vodka that threatened to explode all over the kitchen floor when I rolled over onto my side.

  And they'd found me again. How? How was this shit happening? Why me? I'd never be able to escape them.

  I slid a blue Percocet onto my sandpaper tongue and couldn't even work up enough saliva to dampen it, so I dug in the backpack for a water bottle and guzzled the whole thing dry in three seconds of crinkling plastic, then tossed it across the kitchen.

  Kitchen swirling, I stood, the motion driving the icicle shards of the hangover even deeper, sawing against my brain matter. There was nothing up there but mush and chunks.

  And they'd found me again.

  I stumbled over to the window over the sink and hunched, leaning on the counter as much to keep my profile low as to keep myself standing. Through the grubby pane of glass, I saw a zombie shuffle past, upper lip shivering and lower jaw missing completely. His upper incisors hung in open air like tombstones in an inverted world. This one didn't have the pearly white underskin that I'd seen on the zombies that had surrounded me and Dinkins the morning before. Then again, it also didn't have the chilling, hive-like intelligence the others had displayed, either. He paid me no attention, shambling on past the window.

  It was like they sensed my presence in the area, but couldn't pinpoint it.

  I slid down the kitchen cabinet and leaned against it. Tried to think, tried to sort this all out. Titan walked into the room from God knew where in the house and curled up on the floor beside me.

  I furrowed my eyes shut, trying to think through the hangover and the last few ounces of vodka rolling around in my empty stomach.

  Okay, food. Something to soak up the alcohol. I'd been here before. Not here, in this house surrounded by zombies, but here in this particular circle of mental hell. I dug through the backpack, searching more by touch than by sight. Found a smushed, packaged muffin. Blueberry.

  I took giant bite and swallowed, then puked it all up on the floor, on the leg of my jeans. Shit. I tried again, reeling with the sharp slice of pain in my head brought on by the tensing pressure of my stomach. I took a smaller bite, forced myself to swallow. Something crashed outside. Another bite. Finished the muffin, gnawed down a strip of beef jerky. Water. More water. I chugged half a bottle. A hand rapped against the kitchen window. Another length of jerky, then a candy bar.

  Fuck, no, no, nonono...I leaned over and heaved, sending half of the masticated junk food spraying over the yellowed linoleum. It felt like there was a midget in my stomach forcing everything back up.

  Another muffin. Slower now, no need to panic. A thud sounded from a different part of the house, flesh on wood. More water. Should I take another Percocet? Had I thrown up the first one?

  Crash. A window breaking. They were like moths, circling around a light over and over, closer and closer, until dumb chance brought them slapping up against the hot bulb.

  Against the wills of gods, my stomach began to settle. The headache receded, just a little, a wolf creeping backwards into his den, vigilant. It could spring back at any time. But now, at this moment, an itty bitty slice of peace.

  Okay, options, plans:

  Step one: Get the fuck out of here.

  Question: How?

  Question: Why were these zombies different?

  Something else thudded against the window over the sink, accompanied by a crinkle that sounded for all the world like a hairline crack working down the glass under a pressing, dead hand.

  They'd shown intelligence, something more than animal instinct. That was obvious. But it seemed to ebb and flow, as if their guiding light had only so much power to draw on at any given time. It surged, then fell back and regained strength.

  I'd seen something that made me feel like that was right, or at least as close to the truth as I could get at the time. But what? What had I seen? Feelings, impressions, that was all, like trying to remember a dream.

  Dinkins had been right. I
did have a photographic memory. I'd been trying to hide it from everyone since grade school. Just trying to fit in. It wasn't perfect, prodigious, but memories had a way of sticking around with me, filed in my mind's cobwebbed basement until I needed to draw on them.

  And Dinkins had been right about another thing: I'd seen enough to understand these fuckers, what drove them, fueled them. What created them.

  My own instincts so far had been led by these impressions, what a grizzled detective in a noir would probably call a gut feeling.

  Right now, that gut feeling was telling me to get the hell out of here.

  It needn't have bothered. The window over the sink, over my head, crackled again, then shattered inward with long, razor-edge shards. They showered over me and broke still further on the floor, skittering off under the legs of the kitchen table. Titan's head shot up. I grabbed the backpack, grabbed Titan around the belly, and lurched to my knees. I turned and saw a rotten torso climbing through the little window, glass embedded in his shoulders like stegosaurus spikes, blood and a putrid, snotty yellow liquid streaming from the fresh puncture wounds. It saw me, pink eyes flaring, and chattered its teeth. Black saliva hung in dribbled strings from its decayed gums.

  I tried to slide away from it, struggling to get one of the bag straps over my shoulder, but the zombie's hands scrabbled against the counter tile, pushing itself in, and reached down and snagged me by a thick clump of hair. I screamed and beat at it with my free hand, but the grip was iron. Beneath the spongy flesh, the hand was made of vice grips. I shouted again, felt the hand drag me back, saw a flash as it smacked my head against the cabinet door.

  Something jabbed my other hand and I thought it was glass but it was Titan, squirming out of my grip. The cat leaped onto the kitchen counter beside the zombie and hissed, then—this motherfucking cat—swiped at the zombie's cheeks. Little scraps of flesh fell away under its claws, sloughing off like tender roast beef.

  The stag let me go and the arm clumped toward Titan and he caught the cat around the midsection. I dropped to the floor, rolled away, now cutting myself on the glass slivers. Titan yowled and thrashed so quickly I lost sight of all his limbs, clawing and biting at the grayish hand holding him down. Any sane man would have dropped the clawed dervish, but this thing was impervious to the pain. Titan buried his hind claws into the stag's wrist, kicking with both legs like he was trying to dig a hole. A bloody, red-black-and-yellow groove appeared in the wrist under Titan's thrashing legs, bits of flesh stripping away in ribbons, until Titan was scraping bone down at the bottom of that flesh-rimmed ravine.

  The zombie lifted Titan into the air and brought the furball to its mouth.

  "Get your hands off my fucking cat," I said, and swung my crowbar into his temple as hard as I possibly could. The iron bar dug three inches into his skull and sprayed the room with that weird, runny snot fluid tinged crimson with normal blood. I wrenched the crowbar free and hit him again, crunching the skull plate like a flower pot. The zombie spasmed and stilled, still halfway through the window, head leaking a gallon of red and yellow pus into the ceramic sink. Titan squirmed free, leaped to the floor, and sat beside my food and began licking his paw as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn't just attacked a zombie.

  "Good kitty," I breathed, looking down at him, panting from the close call. Titan looked up, met my eyes, and did his weird-ass pigeon coo. I wondered why I'd never been a cat person.

  I took a step toward the kitchen door and looked down to see if he'd follow. He did. Another step. He walked when I walked. Stopped when I stopped.

  "No more room in your backpack," I told him. "You cool with that?"

  Coo.

  The zombie with the crushed skull in the window jerked as if coming back to life, then slid out and thumped into the ground outside. More stags crowded into the empty space.

  "Let's go then."

  I hadn't searched the house the night before, but I did it quickly and came up with nothing more useful than over-the-counter Benadryl.

  Down a little hallway from the front door was a door leading into the attached garage. Most of the floor space was filled with a green Camaro on cinder blocks, the walls covered in shelves holding cardboard boxes. The back of the garage, farthest from the rolling door, was taken up by a long toolbench with racks of power tools hanging over it. Must belong to the person who owned the service station, I figured. Makes sense he'd be a mechanic.

  I scanned his collection—cordless drills, socket wrenches, bench grinder, power saws. A big orange Husqvarna chainsaw. A thrill went through me at the sight of the chainsaw. I didn't know shit about engines if it broke down, but damn it, it'd make Rivet proud. I was just reaching for it when I spied the shotgun propped up under a mounted pair of deer antlers. It was, of all colors, hot pink with a camo barrel and the word "Hilda" stenciled in black cursive on the pink pump lever. A fat box of shells rested on the work bench beside the gun.

  Finally, I'd come to the right place.

  Without hesitation, I grabbed the gun. Probably just kill myself accidentally with the chainsaw anyway. The shells in the box were a mix of colors, black and red. I figured that differentiated them between slugs and buckshot, but increasingly loud thumps from the main house told me I didn't have time to sort through them.

  I looked the gun over. Fuck, it was a mystery. I'd never gone hunting. Something fell over in the hallway. I prodded the various chambers at the bottom of the barrel. There was an oblong rectangle on the shotgun's top right side, but I couldn't figure out how to push the metal plate away to load the shells. Maybe it was already loaded?

  I pointed the barrel at the ceiling, shut my eyes against the impending boom, and pulled the trigger. It wouldn't depress. Okay, safety. I knew that. I scanned the trigger guard, pushed the little button so it came out red on the other side, and did it again.

  Click.

  Okay, okay. The connecting door between the garage and the house rattled. I was breathing a little heavy, but not panicking, not panicking. It wasn't loaded. That was all.

  How do you load this thing? I couldn't find any other opening.

  "How the fuck is this so hard?" I shouted at the Camaro. Something else banged against the door, and then the big rolling aluminum door shook with an impact. They were converging.

  Chapter 8

  In a video game, you find a shotgun and just start shooting. It's just how it goes. There's no cutscene showing you the proper way to load your new weapon, how to clean the barrel of debris to keep it from jamming, how to use a dab of Pinesol on a clean rag to polish zombie brains off the walnut stock.

  You grab the fucking thing and shoot.

  Same thing in movies. They...

  A film scene played through my head: a shotgun, man in a warehouse, a finger pushing against a trapdoor.

  I flipped the shotgun over and saw it, a little outline between the stock and the pump mechanism. Pressed it. It gave under my finger, sprang back when I released it.

  "Now we're in business," I told Titan. "Ha ha! Now we're fucking doing it!"

  I grabbed a handful of plastic shells from the box, both red and black, and started feeding them into the spring-loaded port. The shotgun swallowed five shells before refusing to take any more.

  Five shots. I was learning. Alone, terrified, high, and ready to piss my pants. But I was learning.

  The latch of the connecting door gave way in a splinter of wood and a pile of bodies burst through. Pink eyes sought out my warm flesh. Their teeth chattered, lightspeed jitters.

  I pumped the shotgun, metal sliding smoothly on metal. God that felt good.

  Took aim...fingered the trigger...

  ...and fuck that's loud!

  The roar of the shotgun in the garage slammed into my eardrums with sledgehammer force, almost physical. The stock crunched back painfully into my shoulder, twisting my whole body sideways. At the door, an elbow disintegrated and dropped a forearm onto the concrete floor.

  Christ, I'd need earpl
ugs just to use this thing.

  The throaty roar died away into an incessant ringing that wouldn't fade. Under it, the chatter of the zombies. The one I'd unarmed lurched toward me, a fountain of red-black spraying the power tools on the bench. The rest crowded behind him.

  I pumped the shotgun again, pressed it firmly to my shoulder.

  The armless zombie's head disappeared. Just vanished, replaced by a million red glittering pieces that splattered the ceiling and walls and zombies. His body crumpled, still geysering from the Old Faithful neck hole.

  "Now we're fucking doing it, Titan!" I shouted to the cat, blood churning, speedballing on Percocet and adrenaline. The hangover was a thing of the past. What a fucking rush, taking control after so long.

  Pump. Blaam! Pump. Blaam! A symphony of metal and gunpowder, Beethoven's warzone sonata in Z. The zombies erupted to the tempo. The Bellagio fountain didn't hold this much liquid.

  Pump. Click.

  Right.

  Buzzing hard, loving the smoothness of the action, I slid five more cartridges into the pump-action and made five more chest cavities vanish in a random serving of buckshot and slugs. I couldn't hear a fucking thing, and I was glad of it. If I never heard another phlegmy, chattering, gurgling zombie noise in my life I'd go to the grave with a Joker grin.

  The walls, floor, ceiling, and cardboard boxes for five feet around the doorway were an even, smooth coat of red with a few trailing strings of the yellow slime. Beyond that, the splatterwork spread out in spiderweb lines and lent the canvas personality. Six or seven bodies were piled in front of the door, slumped over each other three feet high. But behind the pile of corpses, dozens more pink eyes flared in the darkened hallway. At the front of the garage, the aluminum rolling door shook

  Eyes on the pink fireflies heading my way, I began stuffing my jeans full of shells. The rest I upended into the open top of the backpack, letting them slide down into the cracks between the liquor bottles and food packages. I shook the bag, settling them, and piled in more shells.