Free Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary by Eli Nixon

Rivet, for Jennie. For me. Dammit, I needed answers. Rivet was always right, in the end. It just took everyone else awhile to come around.
                  I scrambled closer, keeping my head below the ceiling of clear air above the wheat. Stalks bent and snapped beneath my palms, my knees, the rubber toes of my shoes. Every few seconds, I popped my head into the clear to see how close I'd come. And every time, the statuesque bodies loomed nearer, watching, waiting for something. Dark sentinels in the growing twilight. I could see now that they were turned away from me, all of them, facing south over the darkening field.
                  With startling speed, the sun dropped behind the treeline off to the left, sending shadows racing past me to reunite with their dark brethren on the opposite border. Its light still reflected on the high clouds overhead, filling that wide, endless sky with fire even while the ground sank into darkness. The line of people was now a true silhouette, outlined against the arc of gold clinging tenaciously to the distant hilltop.
                  They were just ten feet away now, the people. They hadn't reacted to my approach, hadn't turned from their eternal vigil, and I was now close enough to see why.
                  They were staked to the ground.
                  Impaled through each person's chest was a long, stout pole that held them upright. One had no head, just a bumpy line along the top of its shoulders. Mr. Fucking Collins. Two, with longer hair, wore dark, striped pantsuits. This was them. The zombies we'd killed our first day. An eon ago, it seemed. I shrank lower into the wheat, pressing my chest to the ground, and through sheer force of will kept my hammering heart from bursting through my rib cage. Through a shifting veil of umber, I could see their shoulders and heads rising above me. We'd left them on the street, and someone had dragged them out here to erect this gruesome tableau.
                  What the fuck was this? What was the purpose? A burial rite? A sign? Here there be living, an all-you-can-eat people buffet. Come get some.
                  Shaking, I stood. There was no reason to hide. They were all dead. Dead...again, I guess. But the real kind of dead, where they didn't move or walk or try to eat your Christfucking throat. Slowly, I stepped around to the front of the grotesque scarecrows. Their eyes were all open, that same milky pink that the zombies got, but dull and lifeless. Staring without seeing. There were the secretaries, and Judge Mathers, and the thin guy with the beard who'd come from the hardware store. I looked for the little boy in the Orioles jersey and saw him staked beside Mr. Collins, both of them headless.
                  The world teetered around me a little. There were people staked in a field. No cops, no crime scene tape, no news coverage. Just people with wooden posts rammed into their chests and propped up in a field, and nobody around to give it a second thought. The past weeks had been insane, but I was still struck every so often by how complete of a reversal life had become. I'd split a man's head nearly in half with an axe. Just whacked it like a honeydew melon. I wasn't in jail. People weren't writing about me online, aghast at the monstrous evil that could lead a man to do such a thing. We'd littered a road with corpses, raided a pharmacy, raided a grocery store. Somewhere up north, a clan of meth heads was kidnapping kids and women.
                  Life was entirely fucked. And that was just in Joshuah Hill. Who knew what the rest of the world had become.
                  And the zombies weren't as mindless as we'd prefer to think. I took another look at Mr. Collins, at his wrinkled arms dangling limply at his side, at the tip of the pole sticking up through the fleshy stump that had once held his head. He hadn't been an