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

Chapter 4: Outside

"I feel like an idiot."

Rivet slapped me on the shoulder. "You'll be fine, bub. You look like John Wayne."

We were standing on the front porch of my house waiting for Jennie to join us. We'd taken it easy with the dope this time. Just a tiny pinch for each of us. Maintenance doses, Rivet called them.

"Seriously," I said. "An absolute idiot."

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Rivet was scanning the street for activity. So far, we hadn't seen a single person or vehicle on the road. My house was in a quiet suburb that was a tad on the lower edge of middle class.

Directly across the street from us was a dilapidated yellow bungalow that was sagging dangerously on its foundation. Could have been sold to a blind family as a split-level, but even real estate agents didn't stoop that low in Joshuah Hill, so for the past two years it had sat empty while its front lawn grew up like a jungle. Most of the windows had been nailed up, but a few of the boards had been removed by neighborhood teens and junkheads. Two broken windows in the front glared out across the street like a pair of menacing eyes. It had always given me the creeps. I looked away and up the street, where the houses were in decidedly better condition. That was where actual families lived.

Down the other way was an oblong cul-de-sac with a few more vacant homes in various states of disarray. My house was the first one on the street that was lived in, and as such it felt at times like there was a plague creeping up the lane from the cul-de-sac on the right and my home was next in its path of destruction.

If I was forced to be honest, my house wasn't in much better shape than any of the vacant ones.

"What if we actually run into trouble?" I asked Rivet. I looked down at the object in my hand. 

"This won't do anything."

"Poke 'em," Rivet said, eyes still down the street. "What's that car doing?"

"Where?"

"There at the end, the truck near the stop sign."

I squinted into the afternoon sun and saw a little green Ford pickup parked at the curb near the intersection with Bloomingdale Lane.

"Oh, that's Janet Wazowski's second car. I think it used to be her husband's. Or ex's; she's divorced. She uses her Mazda and leaves that one parked on the street."

Rivet silently resumed his search.

"They'll be right up on me before I can even touch them," I spoke into the strained silence. 

"Wouldn't a knife or something be better?"

"If there isn't anything wrong, a junkie walking down the street with a steak knife is going to get the cops called on us. And we can't afford that." He patted the chest pocket of his button-up shirt as if to prove his point. He'd wanted to bring the junk in exchange for letting me and Jennie carry weapons. When I'd calmly pointed out that it wasn't his goddamn place to decide whether we could arm ourselves, he'd gotten sullen and uncooperative, so of course I had to let him have his way.

Jennie slapped open the screen door and joined us on the front porch. Rivet ignored her, and she watched him scan the street for a moment before looking down at my hand.

"Is that a ballpoint pen?" she asked.

"Yeah. It'll work," I said defensively.

"What're you going to do with it? Sign a check to make them leave?"

"I can, you know, poke them with it. Gouge out an eye."

"Better than this." She hefted a bright yellow umbrella still in the store's plastic wrapping from when I'd bought it years ago. I noticed she stood with me between her and Rivet. "We ready?"