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

them streaming through the front door, scuffing that beautiful hardwood foyer, no doubt.
                  Heathens.
                  The south window over the back yard showed an even more depressing sight—stags so thick I couldn't spot a single blade of grass. They were milling, doing the zombie shuffle, bumping into the Jeep, crawling up the porch stairs, when I first peered out the window, but almost instantly they all stopped and stared up at the third floor. I thought my terror level had peaked in the gully, but now it climbed to a whole new stratosphere. I couldn't escape this shit.
                  I could still kill myself. Better death at my own hands than via these pink-eyed fuckers, right? But the thought of being staked in a field for the crows to peck apart a bit at a time didn't particularly appeal. I'd die eventually, but nowhere these shitheads could get their spongey claws on my body.
                  Something tinkled far below me, and I pressed my cheek to the cool glass to get a better look at the side of the house. Had they broken the window in the kitchen door? No...no, that wasn't it. I suddenly realized why I could see the stags so clearly. The bottom level of the house was catching fire, starting in the kitchen. I could even see the edge of a flickering flame crawling over the back porch, escaped from the kitchen. The heat must have blasted out the window. In the open air, on the old, dry porch boards, the tendril of flame caught a breeze and leaped to the porch siding, picking up strength by the second.
                  I coughed, turned from the window. Fuck me. Thick, pungent smoke was billowing through the stairwell door. The whole house was catching. I saw a charred, African-American face in the smoke, just a mirage until it solidified and floated up over the landing at the top of the stairs. The stag didn't pause to look for me—it cut left straight from the top step and broke into a loping, limpy run in my direction, dragging its right leg behind it and moving fast despite the handicap.
                  Now, I like black people as much as the next guy, but the fact is, there were only two black families in Joshuah Hill, making them something of a rare breed. Blame class economics, but all the white zombies tended to blur into a whitewash fence coat and yet I recognized this stag immediately as Jack Freeman, the phys-ed teacher at Joshuah Hill Elementary. He was one of those people who never seemed to age. He was forty when I was in third grade, and he was forty now, still square-jawed and buzz-cut with a whole-cheek grizzle that never grew nor shrank. That facial hair would probably eat a razor if one ever made the mistake of venturing too close.
                  And black or not, I'd always liked ol' game-leg Jack Freeman. But that didn't stop me from skipping backward and using his momentum to propel him head-first into the window pane. Glass shattered like a church hymn and Jack Freemen went pinwheeling into empty air. Robotic, the stags made a hole and Jack made a squishy crunch on the lawn thirty feet below. He lay still except for a little recurring, impulsive twitch in his bum leg, and then he rolled to his knees before the stags moved back in and covered him up.
                  More zombies poured through the doorway, riding the wings of the smoke and backlit by the little camping lantern on the floor. There was a visible haze in the room now, hovering up near the ceiling. Most of the zombies were singed at least a little, some so heavily burned the flesh was missing in wide, red patches.
                  I skirted the influx of bodies, sticking close to the wall, stumbling over plastic jugs, dodging reaching fingers, the viper-strike of teeth. Sharp fingernails dug into my shoulder, but I tore free and reached the north window. As one, the stags below whipped their heads up to stare at