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

Chapter 2: Syringe

Rivet and I had been friends since the third grade. He'd been sitting in the back of Mrs. Johnson's class, already something of an outcast in his shabby hand-me-downs, when I walked in two weeks after the school season started. I'd spent my whole life up to that point on the East coast before my dad found a job in the Heartland and packed my mom, my sister, and me into the battered old Aerostar minivan and drove us halfway across the country. It was supposed to be a fresh start, a new beginning for all of us, and I guess I was still young enough to believe it back then. 

When we reached that sleepy Missouri suburb just outside of Joshuah Hill and pulled up to a little two-story house near the end of a dusty cul-de-sac, tired brake pads squealing, my dad had had a thousand miles to woo us with stories of how great our lives would be out here. I think even my mom had come to terms with it by that point. I know I had, and I could see in my sister Rachel's face that she had too.

Grade school is tougher than most adults remember. I was only a few weeks late for the ride, but friendships that would last the whole year had already been sealed in cement, so it was just social chance that Rivet and I had gravitated toward one another, both outcasts in our own right.

Back then, Rivet was known as Ritchie Whales, which was either a cruel joke or his God-given name. At about thirteen, we started calling him Rivet because he'd gone and gotten his ear pierced – not ears in the plural, just the one ear, the left one – and only a week later he lost the little stud earring he'd bought at the parlor and took to sticking an aluminum welding rivet in the hole so it wouldn't seal up on him. It was sort of a joke at first, a temporary gag by a teenager who barely even knew what being a teenager was yet. But over time, in that gradual, molasses-slow way things have of gelling into place, it became his thing, a piece of Rivet that was always there, just like his eyes and ears and nose.

Now, ten years older and a hell of a lot less than that wiser, Rivet's rivet glinted a ricocheted ray from the bright light beyond my living room window as he heaved another painful breath into his lungs.

I stepped over an old pizza box on the floor and came up beside the couch. Jennie looked up at me mutely, a lost animal in pain. She'd apparently been shocked into silence, which was a rare thing, but I doubted anything like this had ever happened before. The blood had already congealed a bit on her cheek, although it was still streaming bright red from the fleshy lump that had once been an ear. Her auburn hair lay matted against it, glued to her temples and dark with the wetness.

"Come on, Jen," I said. "Can you stand?"

A sound gurgled out of her throat, and I was again reminded of a wounded animal. There was pain in her eyes, which I expected, but also a hurt expression of betrayal, which I hadn't expected. Did she care that much for Rivet?

"It's okay, don't try to talk. Just try and stand up. Let's get to the bathroom."

I didn't hear Rivet get off the ground, but I saw a shadow flash across Jennie's eyes just before they went wide with terror. I spun, throwing an arm up to guard my face out of reflex, and Rivet's teeth tore into the meaty flesh of my forearm. Pain lanced up my shoulder, all the way into my gut, and I cried out and got a mouthful of Rivet's fingers. His hands clawed and slashed at my face, ripping for my eyes. I shut them tightly and we went down in a heap over the glass coffee table, shattering it into a thousand winking suns. Ribbons of glass flew around us, slipping across my hands and arms and chest with teeth.

The force of the fall wrenched Rivet's teeth loose from my arm and I planted my hand on his face, flattening his nostrils with my palm and digging my nails into his forehead just under the hairline. I locked my elbow. Even at arm's length, his nails still scraped across my own face, tearing stripes into my cheeks. His teeth gnashed below my palm, bloody and putrid. My cheek was pressing into something sharp in the carpet—glass, I suppose—but I couldn't break free, so we struggled like that, side-by-side on the floor.