Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary by Eli Nixon Page A

something, anything. The room dissolved in lightning and I came to with rough carpet fibers poking my cheek. I'd gone over, just for a second. Shit.
     
     

Chapter 12
     
     
                  THE LIVING room had been cleaned out. Had they left? Been attacked? There weren't any zombies in the house, though, so... shit! I sprinted back to the kitchen and slammed the door I'd left open. Three zombies at the top of the porch stairs watched it close. I twisted the deadbolt, hoping it would hold, and ran toward the stairs...straight into a pair of sickeningly soft arms.
                  I shoved the thing away. The zombie's teeth chattered and it reeled onto its back. The front door. The fucking front door was open. Two more stags pushed through the opening. I saw a sea of pink behind them.
                  I wheeled back into the living room and snatched up a battery lantern and raced up both flights of stairs. Like the living room, my third-floor hideout was in shambles. Plastic jugs of homebrew lay scattered on their sides. The hardwood floor was soaked. I dropped to my knees and began sucking at the puddles, pressing my lips to the floor, spraying half-fermented sugar water with every pained breath. It wasn't enough. I grabbed a jug and upended it over my mouth. A brown, yeasty sludge rolled off the bottom of the jug and into my throat, gagging me. I forced it down and took another swallow, then vomited the whole mess onto the wall. Without pausing to wipe the dripping gruel off my chin, I gagged down another mouthful of sludge, tossed the bottle, and picked up a new one.
                  I heard thumps on the stairs. They were coming, using the only means of escape, trapping me. I chucked the empty jug at the stairway and went for another one. All this work, all this preparation, and in the end it amounted to nothing. We were ants cast away from the nest, unable to survive on our own. I'd spent a week building up a supply of booze to keep us rolling, and in one fell swoop, some unknown calamity had sucked it dry. What had happened here? Would I ever find out, ever see them again? Jesus, would I ever see Jennie again?
                  As disgusting as it was, there was alcohol in the watery sludge. The darkness receded, inch by excruciating inch, to be replaced by a reeling, stomach-flopping, crude alcohol buzz. I felt another wave rising up my throat and I fought to hold it in, trying to keep the alcohol in me as long as possible, but I projectile vomited a thick stream halfway across the room. It landed on the floorboards near the stairwell, and a moment later an unsteady bare foot pressed down into it, squishing vomit up between the toes. The foot belonged to a middle-aged woman in red pajamas, one saggy breast exposed under the lopsided button strip. He lips were pulled back, exposing teeth crusted with blood.
                  I picked up a chair and rushed the stairs, screaming at the zombies to die, die, just fucking die. The chair legs impacted the pajama zombie directly in the chest. She fell backward, striking the stag behind her, and then disappeared into the shadows of the stairway. They must have fallen like dominoes; I could hear the thumps echoing back up at me.
                  That bought me some time, but not much.
                  I parked the chair on the floor a few long paces from the doorway, figuring I could do the same thing the next time they came up, then triple-jumped to the nearest window. It was the one facing down River to the west, and fuck it, I shouldn't have looked. I could see a mass of dark shapes and pink lights for at least a mile down the road.
                  The north window, facing front, brought the same image. They crowded off of River and flowed toward the house. I lost track of them under the front porch's roof a story below me, but it didn't take a stretch of imagination to picture