Read Online Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary by Eli Nixon - Free Book Online

emergence of this madness had returned en masse. Squirrels frolicked in the trees over my head, ducks prattled and dove at the far edge of the pond, prudently skirting the spreading slick of paint and suds. At the far edge of the park, up where it ran into Jeremiah Street, I saw three does grazing on the overgrown lawn. As long as I'd lived here, I'd never seen deer.
                  Rinsing my hands off one last time, convincing myself that the remaining flakes of wet paint dust wouldn't harm the beer much, I packed up and headed back to the Jeep. I tossed the buckets in the back and circled around to the driver's door when something caught my eye. It was across the street from the park, at the bottom of the low drainage gorge that fell away below River. Just a round bit of white, poking through the grass. Down there, away from the caring hand of a gardener, the undergrowth was thick and unkempt, constantly damp from the road runoff. It was just chance that I saw it, I think.
                  I made a cursory glance up and down the road, suddenly less sure of my solitude than I had been moments before, then slid carefully down the steep incline. Rough grass heads scratched at my exposed arms and face, and low brambles tore into my jeans. At the bottom of the slope, the ground was spongey with mud. It sucked at my sneakers as I pushed forward. I began to feel uneasy, a clenching feeling in my gut, telling me I was making a mistake. But there was nobody around, so I pressed on to where I'd seen the white glint.
                  Thick woods rose up on the other side of the gorge. Behind them, I knew, farmland sprawled away from Joshuah Hill in a radial pattern. I reached the lowest point of the gorge, where a ribbon of cracked mud pinpointed the path of water whenever there was a heavy rain. It was mucky, still pocked with puddles of stagnant water, and in the center of one of the drier portions was a human skull.
                  Pieces of green flesh clung to the sections of exposed bone like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, topped with sparse clumps of white hair. I could see shallow grooves in the scalp and cheekbones where animals had torn at it, ripping away the meager morsels. The lips had been torn clean, exposing both rows of grinning teeth in a death's head rictus. Whatever flesh remained was long past fresh and decaying rapidly. One eye socket was entirely empty. The other held a festering mass of soft gray lumps, and as I watched, a white grubworm crawled out of the socket and dropped onto the open lower jaw. And in the top of the skull was a thick crack that split the bone from front to back. I stumbled back. Tripped on a low vine. Squelched into the mud on my ass.
                  It was Mr. Collins. Jesus, it was Mr. Collins.
                  Worse, though, was the print outlined in the mud beside the leering skull. It was a perfect mold of a small, bare foot, like a signature in the spongey earth. The toes were pointed toward the woods in front of me, and—I could barely see it—there was another footprint farther up the bank. Someone had walked through here. No, not someone. People. Along the muck-filled bed in either direction, I could make out more footprints, all heading in the same direction. How had I missed them? An army had marched through here. And they'd dropped a skull.
                  Don't do it, Ray.
                  But someone had to. Fuck, someone had to. We'd stopped talking about it, sure. The zombies had disappeared, and for all our bickering and bitching, we were actually starting to enjoy ourselves in our little haven at River House. But we hadn't forgotten about it completely. Nothing disappears, not really. The zombies had moved on, but they were still out there. Maybe this would tell us something, give us a fucking clue as to what the hell they were actually doing. Give us an idea of what to expect in