Heartland, Part 5: Carrion and mercy

Bathtub Lady (as I had taken to calling her inside my brain) shifted in the tub like a caterpillar that had never passed pupae stage and aged in its cocoon, or a child returned to the basinet after an exhausting adulthood.

“There is a center to all things,” she began. She ripped a page from New Moon and held it aloft. Then she took a handful of cloudy water from the tub and let it fall in the middle of the page. It shook in her grasp.

“The center feeds the rest of the system,” she continued. The drop spread across the paper in a widening circle, and the ink started to bleed. “But it also erodes it.” She poked the growing spot with a talon-like fingernail and left a jagged hole. “A saturated thing collapses in on itself.”

“Aw shoot,” I said off of her significant look. “Now we’ll never find out if Edgar marries the bitch.”

“EDWARD!” she hissed. This woman scared the shit out of me, but I was still doing my best not to show it.

“Fine. So what’s saturated and collapsing that I should know about?”

She smiled, a wide, horrid smile that created a whole new pattern of cracks and wrinkles, shifting the landscape of her features. “Well most of the continent, for starters.”

Heartland, Part 4: The place she’s lately gotten to

People are always shitting bricks about how big Texas is, but no one ever mentions how goddamn flat it is. Like Ohio, but with all the water and rednecks sucked out and replaced with rattlesnakes and even worse rednecks. These were the thoughts that chased through my mind on the 293 interminable miles to Sterling City. That, and how much my arm felt like a bag of chainsaws.

Scats seemed to be determined to take my mind off it all with long, one-sided conversations about nothing in particular. I discovered that he had an uncanny knack for talking endlessly without actually saying anything at all. Every time he dipped into his magical pocket pharmacopeia (which was staggeringly often, even by my measurements), he was guaranteed to spend the next half hour and change careening down some mental byway, full of fantastical dead-ends and cagey detours. Every pill-pop, like clockwork. He was the Old Faithful of bullshit.

“I stole this guy’s ride once,” he said. His feet were propped up on the dash, the passenger-side floor being occupied entirely by his giant, creepy, stinky duffel bag. “Real nice one, too. Hell of a lot nicer than this tin can.”

“There are so many reasons I would like to punch you right now,” I said.

Heartland, Part 3: Westbound and rolling

“I can drive, you know.”

“Fuck you! It’s my car!” I was pretty much just growling at this point, steering with my left hand while my right arm bled freely and my right foot slammed on the gas. Yes, this might not have been the best idea. But I wasn’t about to let anyone else behind the wheel of the Old Man, let alone this creepy motherfucker who ate rabbits and talked about basset hound people.

We were on the open road now, but I could still see something looming in my rearview. “Are they still behind us?”

“I think we lost ‘em. Keep gunning it, though.” Scats was twisted around in his seat, looking out the rear window and cocking the rifle I’d handed him. Since when did I have a wingman? He turned back to me and I saw his eyes travel along the shaft of the arrow, which was still very much sticking out of my bicep. “I think we oughta find you a hospital.”

“No way,” I said. For a garden variety of reasons, hospitals were not places I went. Ever. Even when my whole right side was screaming at me.

“Seriously, lady, we gotta get you to a professional here. I don’t know if you got the memo when you were busy trying to prove how badass you are, but there’s an arrow in your arm.”

World’s End, Part 3: Satan

As it turned out, I wouldn’t have long to wait for Satan. Walking up Parsonage Lane with the bag of ginkippers and a cobbled-together thirty-rack tucked under my arm, I ran right into the bugger. He wasn’t nearly as tall as you’d expect.

“Mortal!” Lucifer bellowed when he saw me, pointing a jagged hoof in my direction. I cowered a bit.

“C-can I help you?” I sputtered, trying to collect myself.

“I demand to know who’s in charge here!” he shifted his leg, and flames shot from a nearby phone box. The sound of the displaced receiver’s dial tone filled the air.

This was a difficult question to answer. “Well I’ve heard the Prime Minister’s still at 10 Downing, but he’s a zombie now, so–”

“Fool!” he interjected, “That was a trick question! I, Lord of Chaos and Wicked Deeds, I am in charge!” His loud cackling drowned out the dial tone. He impaled a passing cat on his pitchfork and bit off its head.

“I think,” I said, taking a steadying breath, “I think—that may not be true.” I wasn’t sure where I had gotten this newfound fearlessness. Maybe it was the fact that I’d be undead soon, so I didn’t have all that much to lose. Besides, Satan was being such a git.

World’s End, Part 2: Beer run

I clambered through a broken window to a blast of hot, sticky air that caught in my throat. The liquor store had about it the atmosphere of a swamp, with the melted water from the freezers pooled a half meter deep on the floor. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I thought I detected a small movement in the corner.

“Hello?” I called tentatively into the haze.

At once, a great clamor of falling bottles and splashing water filled the room. A stumpy figure raced toward me out the black, brandishing what appeared to be an old crucifix.

“Back, demon!” he cried in a Yorkshire brogue, waving it in my face. He smelled even worse than me, which was saying something. “I said back, ye prowler of the night! Ye’ll naught sink your fangs into this neck.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can’t be serious,” I said.

“You think I don’t know a vampire when I see one?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Everyone knows there’s no such thing as vampires.”

The man’s eyes were trapped beneath a layer of unspeakably dirty hair that hung in purplish ropes over his forehead, but I could tell he looked scandalized. “Ay?” he grunted, “Then whaddya call them things prowlin’ around outside?”

This time I laughed openly. “Zombies, old man. Not some sort of fairytale monster. Just the reanimated undead hungry for human brains. Honestly. And that,” I said, indicating his crucifix, “Won’t stop them. You need one of these.” I held up my pistol.

World’s End, Part 1: Mrs. Feebing

Ned nearly tripped on a corpse hauling the industrial generator upstairs. Probably someone who kicked it the night before, judging by the level of decay. Though it was hard to say these days—those of us still breathing often resembled walking cadavers ourselves, flesh hanging limply from our cheeks and limbs, falling free willy-nilly. We’d only learned recently, after the hospitals had all been burned and the doctors evacuated to higher ground, how valuable staplers, duct tape, and industrial glue could be.

Not the clumsy sort, Ned stepped over the body with a hangman’s grace and made it to the second landing, where he let the bulk of the generator fall to the carpet.

“Fuck me,” he muttered.

“Who is that, Ned?” I asked, running up to examine the rotting heap.

“Does it even matter?”

It had fallen face down, so I had to kick the thing over with my boot. “Oh Christ, it’s Mrs. Feebing from 304.”

“Isn’t that the one with all the cats? The ones who thought my trainers were their bloody litterbox? Ol’ bitch had it coming,” Ned grumbled from the landing.

“We all have it coming,” I replied, taking in Mrs. Feebing’s ruined face. Eyes like two strawberries, mouth struck open and a family of maggots already having taken residence inside. Plugging my nose, I kicked the body over the banister, where it fell into an unceremonious pile with the rest of the recently and not-so-recently deceased. Truth be told, we hardly even noticed the smell anymore.

“You doing the beer run then, Alex?” Ned had heaved the generator back onto his forearms.

Heartland, Part 2: I don’t want nobody comin’ over to my table

Our waitress had a mouth so pinched you couldn’t have poked a dime through it. “What’ll ya have, hun?”

I proffered my ketchup-stained menu, which I hadn’t bothered to open. “Coffee, black. Toast, white, no butter. Tabasco, if ya got it.”

She sized me up for a moment, as if daring me to get weirder. But I won. I always win. “Fancy lady we got here with us today,” she muttered into her notepad.

“Rabbit fritters,” said Scats with a smile. “And a coffee. Also black.”

To my surprise she said, “Comin’ right up, buddy” without so much as a blink, and made a beeline to the counter.

I stared him down. “No way. How’d you know they’d have those?”

“Rabbit fritters? Like I said, they got ‘em everywhere.”

The time had come to sound out this guy’s game, but first I needed inspiration. When the coffee arrived, I used it to wash down a small handful of Ritalin tablets. It burned all the way down.

“Medical concerns?” Scats said.

“None of your damn business.”

“Can I bum one?” he asked.

I just glared, and he raised his palms in fake penitence. “OK. Sorry. Here. Gesture of good faith—have one of mine.” I heard the maraca-rattle of a pill bottle and he spilled a gleaming pile of mystery caplets into his palm, all the colors of the rainbow. I looked from the hoard to his face. He was grinning like Santa Claus.

Heartland, Part 1: He was walking along the road

I was on the third cigarette in a chain when I saw him. He had the look—or at least this was my initial impression, glimpsing him rising out of the darkness in the acid-white glare of my highbeams—of someone who’d as soon shoot you point blank in a back alley as buy you a drink in the front bar.

And I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me that it’s just a piss-stupid idea for a woman alone in this day and age to pick up a hitchhiker—particularly in the middle of the night, particularly when the hitcher is a man, and particularly in Texas.

He looked nearly as strung out as I did—which is to say, pretty goddamn strung out. He smiled as I leaned across the seat to open the passenger door, but the smile didn’t extend past his lips.

Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” started to play off my iPod when I first caught sight of him, and I remember thinking it seemed too ridiculous to be real: “I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road…”

“Back to the garden?” I offered as he ducked his head in.