Heartland Junk - Part I: The End (A zombie apocalypse serial)

Chapter 1: Voices

It came at you first like an unexpected chill breeze on a warm day, the kind that makes you wrap your arms around yourself and shiver involuntarily. Most people never had a chance to figure out what was happening before it was too late. Only the lucky ones, the ones already ruined, like me, were able to defend ourselves.

I wasn't always alone, not in the beginning. In the beginning, there was a team. An unusual team, sure, but it's not like there was marketing team handy when the three of us clumsily managed to bash in the gnashing teeth of our first halfy, some of us crying, one of us laughing, all of us worried about going to jail for murder because it was still talking to us and we didn't know that the world had already stopped caring.

Us? We were all assholes.

Rivet was a junkie from Fortuna, a leering stickman with sallow skin that took on a weird gleam under the yellow streetlights, like a cast-off rubber. He'd cleaned up for awhile and started pulling night shift for the municipality, sorting through plastic bottles and tin cans at the recycling plant just outside of town.

He told me once that everybody was wasting their time sorting out their recyclables from their trash because two thirds of it ended up in a landfill anyway. Then he told me the same thing the next week, and the week after that, each time acting surprised when I already knew, and that's how I knew he was back on the grind. Made me glad in a way, because it was just like the old days and that meant things could go back to normal. Not that I wanted him back on the junk—what kind of friend would that make me?—but the days had been getting lonely when he was trying to straighten himself up. It was good to have a friend around that I could trust.

Not that you ever wanted to trust Rivet. He was a bastard like the rest of us, but in the Heartland, bastards were good to other bastards.

The day the world took a nosedive into hell, Rivet stopped by around noon looking for a friend and a baggie. 

I was still in bed when I heard Rivet's voice calling out downstairs, and it took me a moment to place it. His wasn't a voice I often heard at noon, and I figured that was why it sounded a little off-kilter. It was higher than normal, almost panicked.

I rolled over and pulled a dirty sheet up over my head, trying to drown out his voice, but then something about his words changed, like he'd started having a conversation instead of the one-sided braying he'd been doing, and I remembered Jennie downstairs. How could I have forgotten? 

Suddenly I was out of bed and blinking bits of crust away and scanning the bedroom for a pair of pants. I spotted a torn denim hem peeking out from under a pile of even dirtier sheets than the ones on my bed and I was hammering down the stairs three seconds later, still fumbling with the buckle of my belt as I trotted.

I took in Rivet as I cleared the landing. He looked worse than usual, like he hadn't slept. His short black hair was curling around the fringes, which meant he'd forgotten to gel it this morning. A couple curly-Q's bounced around his ears like thick fishhooks, and his eyes were murder.

"What's she doing here?" he yelled at me as I cleared the last few steps in a bound. "Easy, man. She just needed a place to crash. It wasn't anything like that," I said soothingly, hands up and stepping forward slowly now, as if I were approaching a temperamental zoo animal. 

I was telling the truth, too. Jennie had stopped by around eleven last night looking for a couch. I knew she and Rivet were...not quite a thing anymore, but moseying back toward that point. I'd screw a person in a lot of ways, but I wasn't the kind of guy who'd take my best friend's girl. Jennie was still cozied up on the couch under my grandma's patchwork quilt, and judging by the bleary look in her eyes, she was still a little cozied up under last night's skag, too. Her eyes flitted between the two of us—Rivet, feet spread unconsciously the way a man does when he's ready to fight but doesn't know it yet, and me, skinny and bare-chested in a pair of dirty jeans, hands out like a cornered felon waiting for the cuffs.