Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial Read Online Free PDF Page B

he
turned back around, his knee bumped the cabinet. For a breathless
moment, the entire shimmering glass structure teetered and it
seemed like it would hold, then it came crashing down. Half the
glasses shattered and water and splintery shards sprayed over the
kitchen floor.
    We were in the
middle of yelling about it when Jennie clapped a hand to her mouth
and raced out of the room. Rivet and I both turned toward the sound
of her feet thumping up the stairs. When she came back down, her
face was sheepish and her sneakers were sloshing with every
step.
    "Left the tub on
too long," she'd mumbled as she went back to filling up coffee
mugs.
    By the time we
finished with the water, we had twelve coffee mugs, seven glasses,
two water bottles, a milk jug, and a bathtub full of water of
questionable quality. We made a unanimous decision to save the tub
for bathing, then set about finding weapons for our dangerous quest
to Old Lady Winters's.
    And now here we
were on the porch, waiting for Jennie.
    "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.
There weren't any posh community guidelines about stuff like how
short to trim your lawn or where your trash bins had to be placed
on the curb, and most of the residents didn't give much of a shit
about those things anyway.
    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