Read Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial for Free Online

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?"
    "Ready as I'll
ever be," I said. "Let's go, Rivet."
    Finally, he turned
to us. The sun was dipping slightly in the sky behind him and from
the left, outlining his features in severe golden light. One eye
glinted at us from the soft shadow cast by the bridge of his nose.
He looked almost majestic, in a disheveled way. Somehow, that
chipped wooden porch with peeling paint felt like a dock at the end
of the world. A neighborhood I'd known my entire adult life had, in
the blink of an eye, become an unknown, a dangerous realm where
shadows held killers and danger lurked just beyond the visible.
    Then the moment
passed and I couldn't help feeling foolish. It was just a regular
afternoon and we were taking a stroll down the street. My
imagination would do me in one of these days. I brushed past him
and started down the cracked concrete walkway to the street.
    "Come on," I said
over my shoulder. I heard the creak of the wooden stairs as they
followed me down.
    On the street, I
cut left, heading toward Bloomingdale Lane and Janet Wazowski's
lone green pickup. There were no sounds on the street, the entire
neighborhood seemingly caught in a muffled hush. Even the footfalls
of our rubber sneakers sounded mute on the asphalt. Jennie and
Rivet quickened their pace to catch up and sidled up beside me, one
on each side. Maybe it was the surreal atmosphere that had
descended over the afternoon, but the three of us floated away from
the curb and, in a straight line, marched boldly up the center of
the street.
    Was the world already ours? It felt that way. I'd be lying if
I said there wasn't a little thrill working up my spine. I was a
child again, playing guns and swords in the sparse woods down by
the trickling creek full of runoff from the uptown manufacturing
plants. Crouched in the weeds, every sense tuned for the crack of a
twig or the whisper of fabric sliding across a tree trunk, Nerf gun
spray-painted black at the ready in my tiny hands. Ready to take
down the approaching threat, the enemy at the gates, the world , if
that's what it took.
    A calming sense of
nostalgia settled over me as Jennie, Rivet, and I paraded down the
middle of the deserted street, pen and umbrella and drugs at the
ready. Why had we even grown up in the first place? We hadn't asked
for it, for this so-called gift of adulthood. Life had been so much
simpler as boys, before the jobs and worries. Before the junk. Just
me and Rivet making adventures as we went along, never stopping to
appreciate the opportunities laid before us in a wide swathe. The
future was distant, and we were young. We had only to conjure a
dream to make it true.
    You learn a lot
growing up in a small town, but one thing you never learn is how to
really experience something. To us, Joshuah Hill was a jumbled
canvas onto which countless generations had tried to paint their
own Rockwell of normal life. Kids laughing in washtubs, a happy dog
sneaking away a sock. Smiles, nostalgia, infinite shades of dusty
brown. It wasn't real, though. That was the problem. None of those
paintings stuck; they just smeared under each new rain and left the
canvas a little dirtier, a little more worn, than before. Nobody
ever, truly gave a shit about Joshuah Hill, so as the years passed,
nothing actually changed.
    The junk was our
whitewash. Just our own version of it, like so many others that had
come before it. Painted it clean, like. Ready for our own
projections. Maybe that's why it was so easy to get into the stuff.
After awhile of hopscotching from one part-time to another, the car
wash, the washed up bowling