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

swallowed. It burned my throat. Poison.
                  Rivet wrenched my jaw open and Jennie poured more hooch into my gaping maw.
                  Bastards! Assholes! Fuckers trying to kill me. I'd show them. I'd fucking tear their throats out. I'd drink their hot blood and chew and chew and chew their flesh until their bones snapped.
                  They told me later that this moment was where my eyes turned pink and my curses became incoherent, gutteral snarls. At the pinnacle of my madness, Vitala siezed me in fullness. For just a moment, I was a zombie.
                  Then the alcohol began entering my bloodstream and I slowly, ever so slowly, reverted.
                  Fifteen minutes later, it was all done. I looked around the room, at Jennie's and Rivet's and Theo's faces, their concerned expressions, and for a heartbeat I hated them all.
                  Then that was gone, too, and I was myself again and drunk as a trailer park on Christmas. Abby was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear sobbing from the living room.
     
     

Chapter 9
     
                  THE EXPERIMENT had been a resounding success. I was given carte blanche to brew as much horse piss as I wanted.
                  I had already fermented the juices, so next I turned to the grains. Barley, millet, and quinoa. Barley is the most common ingredient in beer. Ninety-nine percent of the shit is made from barley, from the Stone Age to the modern day. I picked a handful of the grains from a bag and held them up to the light. They were pale, light-brown ovals with a thin line running through their center from top to bottom, each one about the size of a fingernail clipping if you haven't clipped for awhile.
                  Barley by itself won't turn into beer. It doesn't have enough sugar. Somewhere along the long timeline of human history, a thirsty yet observant man noticed that old barley grains left sitting in an earthenware jug full of rainwater turned the water into a sour beverage that made his head swoon. Thus, beer was born. Now, we call that process, where the barley sits in water for awhile, malting. How do I know? I read the manual on my Mr. Brew kit. It said: Naturally rich in starch, the barley seed contains an enzyme which converts that starch to sugar when the seed begins to sprout. Once you've got enough sugar, you dry out the barley seeds, kill the growth process, grind it all up, and ferment it. Voila, beer. Sort of.
                  Leave it to people to complicate the process as much as possible. Somehow, what started by pure accident turned into a highly articulate science. There are kilns for malting, temperature-controlled mash tuns for soaking, sanitizer solutions for killing bacteria, et cetera, et cetera. Since I didn't have any of that special equipment, I had to improvise. In the basement, I found two old, five-gallon paint buckets that still had a thick, white sludge inside them. Perfect. I didn't want to waste any of our drinking water, so I drove out to the duck pond on the edge of Joshuah Hill and spent an hour washing them out while the sun dipped along its westward arc.
                  A glistening, oily white rose spread over the pristine surface of the pond, radiating in a half-circle from where I stood knee-deep in the mud along the shoreline. I didn't even watch out for zombies anymore, didn't even carry a weapon. Whatever had caused them must have gotten rid of them just as quickly. The world around me was as empty and still as a graveyard, the empty buildings just vacuous reminders of our own frailty. It hadn't even yet been two weeks, and already the lack of maintenance in the park was showing. The grass was now higher than my shins, creeping over the severe borders of the twisting walkways. Leaves and dust covered the hardwood benches. All the animals that had been driven into hiding at the