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

Chapter 10: Dinkins

We eventually figured out there's a learning curve to being a zombie. See, at first, you don't know what the hell's going on. Something's shouting in your head about Vitala, your hands and feet feel a million miles away, random things in your body are shutting down, and you're stuck doing this clumsy shuffle that only takes you right to the business end of an axe or a bullet or whatever the junkheads feel like slinging at you that day. Some people take longer to get past that than others. Some people never really do. Imperfect programming maybe, who knows.

Eventually, you get the hang of it, figure out how to move like normal. At least, I figure that's what it is. I've never gone that far, and I don't ever mean to. I think of it like driving the same car all your life, then switching to a different style. You've got all the muscle memory for the first car, so there's a whole bunch of little things that don't do quite what they're supposed to in the shiny new one. But you learn. The zombies, they learn.

Mr. Collins was sharp as a tack, and I knew he wouldn't touch a Tylenol if his feet were chopped off, let alone anything stronger. When that first wave hit, when it hit Rivet in my living room and he bit Jennie's ear off, old Mr. Collins must have gone over like a slip in the bathtub. All while we were killing Janet Wazowski, trying to figure out what was happening, eating Lean Cuisines out west of town, Mr. Collins was learning the zombification way, breaking in that new car, so to speak.

So when we got there, he was already close to a runner. Not a full-on sprinter, but fast. The guy behind him, probably the same story.

The rest of them, either dumber than shit or just had a tooth pulled or sneaking a toke behind the back exit, so they didn't turn so fast. My money was on all three. There wasn't much else you could count on in Joshuah Hill. Either because they'd gone over later or couldn't figure out how their shambly new bodies worked, they were a lot slower, and a lot easier to kill.

I saw four or five form up in a line to take turns letting Jennie whack the shit out of them with the poker. Rivet started working some half-cocked Crouching Tiger moves into his sacred shovel technique, then he just bashed and hacked, hacked and bashed, getting wetter and wetter.

Blood is a terrible thing.

You ever watched a cigarette butt burning out in an ashtray? Your brain's lit from some fresh powder—not Foley's tar shit, but the real pree-mo, powder so clean you can see the little crystals melting away in the spoon, stuff a guy like me stumbles across once in a lifetime—and you're sinking in, so deep you can't move to get the shoelace off your arm, let alone reach out for the cig you left burning in the ashtray, and the smoke is rolling up in a lacy spiral, real lazy, silver and gold, just floating and twisting, and even though you're trying, you know there's no drug in the world that could make you as free as that little twist of smoke is at that moment, unbound, untethered, splitting and spinning and twisting into a hundred versions of itself, each one uniquely and beautifully different, a diaphanous creature born of air currents so soft they barely exist, spiraling toward the ceiling. Endless.

Blood's like that. Primal. Untethered.

It forms its own patterns in the air. Some blood mists, the particles too fine to coalesce. Other times it's a gush, sputtery and thick. It catches the light in unexpected ways, glistening and refracting, blood rainbows prettier than an oil slick. And always different. No human skull breaks exactly the same. The contours are different, changing the faultlines and points of fracture. Some skulls crack, others implode. Sometimes your axe blade hits on a dull edge and forces just enough pressure into the cranium to burst it out the other side in a dynamite geyser. Skull cavitation.

Rivet hitched up beside me, puffing, looking like modern art where the only paint left was red. He'd forgotten he was mad at me, because he draped an arm over my shoulders, propped his shovel against his chest, and lifted his safety goggles to his forehead. There was a raccoon-patch of clear skin around his eyes.