Living Dead (15 page)

Chapter 27

In the chemical fog of blue paint fumes and low oxygen, the Rotter drumbeat retreats away from your skull and becomes a soft rain. All the sinister seeps out of it. It becomes background noise. You can time your breaths to it. See if you can add to the song. Make a game out of it. If they moan, you moan. Breathe when they beat. Set your timing. They are the drums, but you have to be the rhythm because dead people have no sense of time. A 7/4 beat is way too complicated. It would destroy the meat pudding they have slopping around in their skulls.

Denise is trying to explain all of this to Scott but he keeps nodding off, and he’s lying on his side on the couch, the fingers of his good arm drawing little circles on the carpet in front of him, like he’s on a raft in the middle of a lake somewhere, drifting and making little swirls with his fingertips, and fish are coming up to investigate, and they are sucking on his fingertips and it makes him smile.

On the couch, Scott smiles and spit tinged with blue paint leaks onto the carpet, something his mother would have had a stroke over once upon a time, if she hadn’t had her face and part of her left tit chewed off by dead people. He blinks slowly and breathes sometimes, but other times he forgets.

Denise is talking to him and he’s not really listening, so she slides in behind him on the couch so she can talk into his ear. And still he doesn’t listen, but it’s warm here and nice, and Scott smell of Scott’s body is dead in the chemical bath of Denise’s nostrils, and she tastes blue paint in the back of her throat and Scott smells like that, too.

She pushes her lips against Scott’s back and feels his fragility beneath her fingers as they dance across his ribs. There’s something about touching a man’s chest that makes Denise feel connected to him. It’s a place she’s never put her hands before; a part of him she’s never come into contact with. There are other parts of him she has never felt either. His throat and the way his Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. The little triangle of warm flesh in his collarbone. The inside of his arm and his ribs at the same time. She thinks about what it might be like to have Scott hold her right now, to be inside his limbs. Her hand runs down along his stomach, following a patch of matted hair. And then her fingers slip beneath the waistband of his pants, and then further, her fingers stroking him through his underwear.

She kisses the back of his neck and he sighs, but his body isn’t reacting the way it should so she goes a little further, using the line of the heart on the palm of her hand as a point of friction. He is slick with heat and sweat and she can feel him stir beneath his underwear, but when she finds the front flap of his underwear and teases it with her fingers, he sighs and pushes her hand away. He makes like he’s going to get up and then he doesn’t, and instead falls back into the couch and against Denise, snoring softly. She lies in the couch behind him, listening to the rain and rubbing the stickiness from her fingers onto his abdomen, counting the muscles while he sleeps and losing track again and again.

His abdomen clenches and unclenches, his breath hitching, and at first, Denise thinks it’s some delayed response to her touch, and she puts her hand against his stomach to feel the muscles like thick coils of snake beneath a sheet of flesh. With his clenching stomach comes a cool, slick sweat that Denise rubs her lips against, tasting the salt. And then he pitches forward so he can puke on the floor, away from the couch, and she’s so shocked by his act of expulsion she pushes his back, clucking like a hen. He rolls off the couch onto the floor, too stoned to catch himself.

He bashes his forehead against the floor in the spot where his hot vomit is cooling in a reeking puddle, and Denise is sitting up and rubbing the sick sweat from her lips. Once upon a time, the sight of someone puking would have made her gag, but she’s detached herself from this world in ways she could have only hoped for as a depressed teenager.

Now all it does is curl her lip in disgust. She plants a heel in Scott’s back and shoves, and he rolls over on his back and catches her gaze for a moment, his eyes bloodshot and lost, his hair slicked to his skull, his lips and nose soiled with vomit. He shudders his breath and a bubble of slime erupts on his lips. Denise suddenly has the urge to hit him with a brick until his skull becomes an ashtray. She can feel angry heat like rum in her belly, pushing itself into her extremis. Making her eyes water. Her heart is seeping poison into her bloodstream. Everything is Scott’s fault, it whispers, and she believes it.

She can walk by him to the door. Right now.

She can pull the nails on the crossbeams securing the door in place. She can fling the damned thing open and make for the stairs. She can do that. And Scott will just sit there, blubbering and fingering his vomit like a baby, even as dead people descend on him. Cooper’s friend or not, it’s true he’s holding everyone down. And she wouldn’t even be thinking that Cooper might not come back except Scott said it and put it in her head. Her heart beats and poison seeps and it’s right to blame Scott because it’s all his fault. Even Allen and Nancy were his fault, though that seems like a million years ago now.

It’s the nature of things. Being dead just isn’t the horror show it once was. Now, it’s not all that bad. At least 50 percent of the time, it’s preferable.

She stands up, but her forward momentum grinds to a halt when Scott stands up too. His movement doesn’t compute with the scene she’s already created in her head. He’s supposed to be sitting on the floor. She’s supposed to open the door. But he’s standing, and it’s wrecking everything. And he’s smiling, and that is somehow a lot worse, because he isn’t really looking at her anymore. His eyes have become unfocused. They stare at nothing. He looks toward the spot she’s standing, but he gives no sign of seeing her. And then he does, and it’s terrible.

Scott puts his hands on his cheeks and then his fingers curl into hooks and he snarls. His scrambling nails first scratch away the top layers of skin, and then with a second pass, they gouge flesh. They leave white and red snail trails down the sides of his face and he squeals at Denise. The squeals turn to boiled howls, and when he takes his first step toward her, she’s already backing into the hallway, back toward her room. For a moment, she thinks about going upstairs to the bathroom, but the thought of turning around to take the stairs with him behind her and out of sight turns her bowels to ice.

Instead, she moves down the hall further, away from the living room and this screeching creature that she was sure was unconscious just a moment before. Whether he’s a dead person or not doesn’t matter much. She can tell from the look on his face, peeking out from blood and sweat and vomit and paint — that rabid, manic look on his face — that he’s about to tear the roof off this motherfucker. And then he’s moving down the hall toward her, and
holy shit he’s fast
—

Denise trips over her heels in her bid to turn around in the hall. She stumbles hard against the wall, and her legs flop dangerously in front of her. The first few steps she takes are not so much running as they are her legs catching up to the momentum on her upper torso falling forward. And then she’s pounding hardwood, the balls of her feet slapping the ground as fast as her legs will pump. It’s hard to tell how fast you are moving when you are stoned, but in her head, she certainly feels fast. She feels like the wind, and her clenching thighs remind her of the pistons on the train at Heritage Park. The one that was mostly for show but every once in a while was revved up to show everyone it still had some power, and that it could still punch if need be.

Some ancient steam engine from a million years ago, when dead people trying to eat you were still a million years in the future. But that’s a big stupid joke, because there was nothing before dead people. And if she doesn’t move just a bit faster, there will be nothing after.

She reaches the door with her heart banging in her throat, high enough to be choking on the damned thing, and she swings her door open and uses the door knob as a pivot to spin around on her heel, and even then she steps on one of Cooper’s gross paint shirts and almost biffs. Scott is screeching down the hall with angry, crooked lines running from just under his eyes to his jaw, and his hands are out in front of him, reaching for her while he runs, his mouth hanging open like he’s trying to pop his own head off, hoping it will split in a Chelsea Grin and just fall off his neck. Denise hopes for that, too. And for once, they finally agree on something.

She slams the door shut when he’s less than ten feet from it, and she plants her shoulder against it just as he hits the other side at a full sprint. The impact is enough to crack the hinges and the latch set bulges. She screams for Scott to fuck off and leave her alone, and he responds with a snarl and a fist against the door. The sound is deep and rich with his new, warm flesh, but there’s no mistaking the sound. The second beat that follows a moment later causes Denise to burst into tears.

And then Scott is drumming his own song.

Chapter 28

The banging on the front of the store continues, and there’s not many of them, but Bretta knows there soon will be. Dead people have an urge to jam when they hear the drumbeats. Soon, as many of them as can fit along the sides of the building will all be doing it. When that happens, she and Cooper will have to sit and wait it out. Could be hours before something else gets their attention, but one time at the house it took five days. The night Allen and Nancy died, it had been going on forever.

If they’re stuck in this store for five days away from the house, there’s no telling what might happen with Scott and Denise. But it’s not going to come to that, with the way the door is covered with plywood and not much else. They don’t even have to move it to see outside. It’s a miracle no dead people have discovered the holes in the doorway yet.

The roll shutters will hold, but she and Cooper will have to sit against that plywood if they have any chance of keeping dead people out of the store. And they can keep that up for hours, if they need to. They can spell each other off. But can they do that for days? She doesn’t think so.

And if the dead people get a good sniff of warm meat, there’s no way they’ll ever leave. She and Cooper will have to sit at that door until Judgement Day. Or until somebody — Cooper, in all likelihood — fucks up or falls asleep and dead people come pouring in here.

When that happens, they’re all doomed.

She thinks about spaces, like the one between the storefront and the truck. There’s not really much room there, she decides. Maybe forty or fifty feet at most. Moving to the front of the store, she takes a peek out and thinks she can count maybe a dozen people shuffling around the truck. There are more of them in the parking lot, of course. A bunch of them are just wandering around, seemingly at random.

There are the ones banging on the store. There are a lot of them out there, but maybe there aren’t enough to stop Cooper and Bretta from getting to the truck. And if they can get in the truck fast enough, they can get out of the parking lot. Once they are out on the road, there won’t be any problems. They can go back the way they came and anything getting in the way can kiss the grill.

It’s a lunatic plan, of course. But they’ve got the suits.

And Cooper can’t see.

But they’ve got the suits, and even though he’s blind, he can still run, can’t he? Even though he’s blind, he can still hold her hand. He can still push dead people down. He doesn’t need to see them to do that. Sure he can.

She leaves the front of the store and comes back to where he’s lying on the floor, half-conscious, staring up at the ceiling. But of course he isn’t, not really, because he’s damaged his optic nerves with the shit he’s been ingesting the last few months. His eyes are moving, and his face is turned up, but he isn’t staring at anything at all.

She squats beside him and puts a hand on his knee.

“We have to go,” she says. “Can you get up?”

Cooper smiles and shakes his head. His lips are wet with spit. “I can’t see. I’m not going anywhere.”

While it’s true on many different levels at this exact moment, it’s not the answer Bretta wants to hear, and she tells him as much. He smiles at her insistence and shakes his head. He reminds her again he can’t see.

“I know. You don’t have to keep saying it. I’m not the one who stinks like mouthwash,
Al
.” It’s Al, as in
Al Coholic
, a joke name she once wrote on a name tag placed on her Grade 7 desk so a substitute could remember the names of the students he was babysitting that day. He was a Kenyan, and he kept calling her Al, but his voice turned up when he said it, like he was asking it as a question.
Al? Is Al? Your real name? Sit down please, Al?
On and on he went.

Later, remembering that story as Bretta had told it, Scott turned the name on Allen and it became his nickname.
Al? Pass me a fuckin’ beer, my man. Thanks Al?

Cooper sighs. He rolls over on his side, towards her. His blind eyes search an area just to her right, and Bretta stifles the urge to slap his out-turned face. But she doesn’t, because Cooper says something that makes her wish she’d never heard the name
Al Coholic
, and she sure as hell wishes she’d never let it slip out of her mouth right now.

“Hey,” he says drunkenly. “Did you see the way Nancy’s eye fluttered after Al killed her? Like a fuckin’ dying spider, right?”

“Jesus Christ. Why would you say something like that?”

Cooper’s eyes are rolling a bit, searching where he imagines her face might be. He settles on the wrong place again, and speaks to her shoulder. “I think about it a lot,” he says. “Like
a lot
, a lot. Like when you kill a spider, and it goes from moving ninety miles an hour to zero instantly, and all that’s left is this little fuckin’ bug twitch. I know they’re not bugs, but it’s the same thing, right? Crustaceans or whatever.”

“Arachnids,” she says, thinking of dead spiders.

“It was her eyelashes. They just fluttered and fluttered, like they couldn’t figure out she was dead yet.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“I can’t get it out of my head, really,” he says. “No matter how much paint or nail thinner or whatever. I just keep seeing that flutter.”

Bretta stands up and walks away without saying a word. She walks down the aisle where she ditched her suit, and slowly pieces it back together again. When she’s mostly done, she comes back down a different way. Cooper is falling asleep, but the click of her shoes on the floor startle him, and a soft kick to the knee gets his eyes open. She drops half of Cooper’s gear on the floor beside him. Pads and some of the carpet. She’d go back for the rest, but this is enough for now.

“What is it?”

“Come on, get up,” she says and grabs his arm. “We’re getting out of here.”

It’s a chore to pull him to his feet. He’s unstable on them, but he takes a few deep breaths and shakes his head. With her help, he’s able to wiggle back into his gear, and while he’s leaning against the wall, trying to get his marbles all spinning in the same direction again, and she digs up a thick bristle broom from a back closet. She twists the head off and then gives it to Cooper, who leans on it like a staff. His backpack is already full, and she asks him how that happened.

“I did it before,” he says, and burps. “Fuck. I don’t feel good.”

“You’re gonna feel worse if we don’t make it to the truck,” she says. “You got the keys?”

“They’re in there.”

“Okay.” She checks herself one more time to be sure everything is where it should be. “If we’re going, we gotta go.”

Cooper nods. He puts a hand out, and Bretta takes it. She gives it a squeeze for support and he smiles gratefully. He is uneven on his feet as they walk down the aisle toward the front of the store together, hand in hand.

“How many are out there?” he asks, and bumps his shoulder off an empty shelf.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“How many?”

“Not many. Like five. They’re all lined up along the wall beating on the side of the building.”

In the dark, he chuckles and squeezes her hand. “You’re a damned liar.”

“When we get out there,” she whispers.

“
Holy fuck.
This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Just push when I say push. And run when I say run. The truck is right in front of us. Fifty feet maybe. Just stay with me, and for the love of God, stay on your feet.”

“Okay,” he says. “I got this.”

Bretta takes a few hard, deep breaths. She peers out into the gloom one more time and can’t count the number of dead people between them and freedom. But she can see the outline of the truck, and that’s going to have to be enough. She pulls back the wood to open the door, and the noise causes the closest dead people to turn. She fumbles getting outside with Cooper clinging to her, holding the broom handle in his free hand to keep himself steady and sweeping it back and forth like a white cane.

But even as she takes her first steps toward the truck, she knows they are in serious trouble. There are black shamblers wandering around out here, their feet scraping on pavement, and now their heads are turning at the sound of breath and exertion, and the sound of Cooper stumbling through the door to get outside banging his stick on the ground in front of him.

He doesn’t have this
, she thinks immediately.

Followed closely by another thought.

We’re so fucked
.