Living Dead (17 page)

Chapter 31

They move through the dark as quickly as they can, considering the state Cooper is in, and they move as quietly as they can, considering the state he is in also. Several times, he trips over his feet or stumbles into a parked car, but as they travel, he seems to get his feet under him a little more with each step. Much of his success has to do with trusting Bretta not to steer him into a patch of dead people or face first into a car or other obstacle. The more he trusts her, the more willing he is to accept her instructions.

The air and the exercise seem to be doing him some good, too, speeding up his metabolism and flushing the alcohol from his system with each quickened breath.

He also becomes surer of where they are, until they round a corner that is familiar to Bretta. They are now only a hundred metres or so from home, and in spite of their current situation, Bretta affords a smile for Cooper.

“You did it,” she says quietly, patting him on the shoulder. “I’ll be goddamned.”

Cooper responds by burping minty sour gas. “Yay for me.”

Bretta makes her way down the street, Cooper in tow, moving from car to car and keeping low. There are dead people wandering the street, and when she gets closer to the house, she sees at least ten of them outside, banging on the walls, trying to smash through the door. It only takes a moment to realize they’re not getting in that way. Not with Cooper the way he is. If she had a weapon, maybe she’d be good for a few, one at a time, but a mass of them turning on them, and Cooper unable to see, he’d be buried in moments and she’d follow soon after. And there’s no telling if they could make enough noise for Scott and Denise to get to them in time.

“Smash our way in,” Cooper says, guessing the problem from the amount of noise. “Run through them and hit the door at full speed, it’ll pop open. We’ve got hockey gear on. That’s what we were made for.” He pounds a fist on his shoulder and the pads clack in the dark, proving his point.

“You’re drunk,” Bretta says. “We should find another way in. Go around and try a window maybe. If I boost you in, you can pull me up.”

“There’s no way of knowing how many dead people are wandering around the yard,” he says. “We’d make a bunch of noise getting in. Besides, the windows are secured, too.”

“We could call for Scott and Denise. Four of us…”

“It’s a good idea if they get out here fast enough.”

Bretta is staring at the front of the house, willing Scott to come to the door.

“And if they are listening,” she says.

Cooper nods. “That too. Why don’t you light another fire? That’ll work again.”

“I used all your alcohol.”

“You suck.”

She sighs. “That’s not going to work.”

The other fire is burning still. They can smell it here, blocks away. Vinyl and wood and meat. Lots of meat. It hangs in the air.

“I know,” Cooper says. “It’s making my mouth water. I can’t help it.”

“We go through the door,” Bretta says, ignoring him. “Straight shot.”

Was that line in a movie once? She can’t be sure. They were always pulling this kind of shit in movies. Big rush at the end. Usually right when shit really fell apart. Their darkest moment. Where they really had to pick themselves off the ground to keep going. Looking at the dead people in the yard and around the house, this is not a place to hit the canvas. A fall here is likely to be fatal. Sure, Cooper survived for a couple seconds under that pile bodies, but there’s no truck coming this time. Going down here means staying down.

Cooper is big enough to take down the door, but there are stairs. He’s never going to make the stairs. That means it has to be her. He has to follow behind.

And he has to stay up.

“Cooper,” she says. “I’m taking the run.”

He tries to grab ahold of her but he can’t see her, and he ends up stumbling against the car.

“Hey!” she whispers. “Keep it down!”

“I’m going, Brett. I’m bigger. I have the mass. I played hockey, and I can knock a fuckin’ door down.”

He says all of that, and she waits until he’s done to respond. “There’s stairs. And you’re blind.”

“Shit. Tell me something I don’t know.” He is defiant, alcohol turning him dumb and angry.

“It doesn’t matter what you know,” she replies. “I’m making the run because you’ll fall on the stairs. And then you’re chow.”

And then she stops talking and takes off toward the house in a dead sprint because he’s blind and he’s still standing there like an idiot arguing with nobody. She high steps and stabs the road with the balls of her feet, forcing her body onward, through an unnatural gait with all the armour on, and the shoulder pads knocking her arms off their usual running alignment, and her helmet turning her into a giant dirty bobble head doll. She puffs her lungs and moves straight like a big, clumsy arrow toward the door.

And she hears Cooper screaming her name, begging her to come back, she’s going to get herself killed, and the dead people are turning to see what all the commotion is. Her stomach drops and the adrenaline that comes with it is like nitrous oxide in her legs, flesh pistons pumping as fast as she can get them to go, up into the yard, and the dead people have turned, and they are coming forward to meet her, and they have their arms open to catch her.

But they are not fast enough. She’s lightning. She’s the wind. She’s a galloping fucking stallion, and they’re sacks of meat. And she’s at the house and
oh, fuck, the stairs—

She should have seen it coming, in retrospect. All she can see at the moment is the rush of the ground as it swings forward, her foot slipping off the middle stair and catching on the top one, and she pinwheels her arms as dead people close around her. The one in front of the door, her target, is a man who used to walk his dog in the area. She saw him a couple times in the summer and was always nice.

He always said hello. Now he has his arms out like he’s going to help her again, like she’s some silly little thing who wasn’t watching where she was going, and is on her way down for a date with skinned knees and hands or worse. The weight on her back, all the medicine, and the weight on her arms and legs from the carpet and the gear, they are helping her down.

And suddenly, Bretta sees a way to help herself.

She plants a foot at the top of the stairs, and it isn’t enough to catch her balance. But it is enough to change the angle of her fall for just a moment, from down to sideways. She tucks her arms in under her and gets one more foot inbounds. Just enough to elevate her. Falling sideways. She crashes into the nice man who used to walk his dog. She adds her force and mass to his. The two of them, a slower, heavier cannonball, crash into the door. There’s splinters and screeching as nails are ripped from their beds and the door swings open with a crash and two bodies hit the floor.

The nice man is holding her close, nuzzling her, trying to kiss her face. He bites the grill on Bretta’s helmet and his black teeth splinter and leave slime trails and blood. Her helmet is filled with the smell of old meat and burnt popcorn and she wretches at him like a cancerous dog’s bark.

The room is filled with the soft yellow light of candles. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Scott and she yells at him to help. Outside, Cooper is screaming. The dead are the only ones silent. The dead are the only ones calm.

Bretta pulls her face back from the nice man and sees Scott is naked and squatting, and he’s covered in blood. He is staring at Bretta and the nice man like they are intruders. He is staring with his mouth open as far as he can possibly stretch it, and there’s blood and spit running down his chin from his teeth. And his cheeks are scratched in near identical lines from his eyes to his jaw. Those cheeks are pushing up into his eyes because his mouth is open so wide, but she can still see them and they are blue and full of hate.

Out of the darkness down the hall, the slap of Denise’s feet on the hardwood, and Bretta sees her running with her hands over her head like some comic book monster, a sinister pose so overused and cliché it has become the comical domain of cartoon vampires and werewolves. Denise is bleeding too, and she’s screaming, and her clothes are in tatters. And she looks like the dead, and Scott looks like the dead also.

Except Denise is screaming words.

“Get the fuck out of the way!” she is screaming, and as Bretta pushes off the nice man and holds his flailing body to the ground with both hands on his chest, Denise snaps her body in half like a swimming dive, and her arcing hands, wrapped around the handle of a hammer, are streaks of pink and blue. She buries the square head of the hammer in the nice man’s forehead, and there’s a little fountain of old blood and grey pudding, and the nice man stops grabbing at Bretta and lies still.

Bretta and Denise stare at one another, eye to eye, breath heaving and coming into unison, and then Cooper screams again and the moment is gone. Denise stands up with her hammer and Bretta climbs to her feet. She pulls the straps on her helmet and laces her fingers into the grill so she can swing it like a weapon.

“Your husband is fucked,” Denise breathes, as Scott stands up hissing.

“Coop is blind,” says Bretta.

Some of the resolve on Denise’s face melts into panic, and a lady stumbles into the living room. Outside, through the door, four more are shuffling down the street, presumably toward Cooper, whose voice is starting to carry. Denise shoves the dead woman down and claws the side of the woman’s skull with the back of the hammer. And then Denise is over and outside before the woman can regain her footing.

Bretta hammers her helmet into the dead woman’s face like a head butt, mashing it. The blow isn’t enough to end the woman’s second life, however, and Bretta has to do it two more times before a large ugly pool of black rushes out of the woman’s head.

When Bretta turns, Scott is slinking toward her, his naked body a hairy, bloodied skeleton, his cock dangling between his legs like the ugly tip of a brown banana, and Bretta doesn’t give him a moment to explain himself, because he’s still hissing at her with his damn mouth open and doesn’t seem like he’s much in a talking mood. She whips the helmet in a big arc, a move which is quickly becoming her finisher and a crowd favourite.  He stiffens when his face comes in contact with plastic, and then he falls limp in front of her, his body coming to a rolling stop at her feet.

Outside, Cooper is screaming from the roof of a car two houses down, and Denise is kneeling on some kid with her hammer up, striking the boy repeatedly. There are still three more dead people around the car, and there are more shuffling out into the street.

“Shut up!” Bretta yells. “You’re making it worse!”

“Fuck you!” Cooper cries back. “You left me out here to die!”

The remark causes Denise to cast a dark look back toward the house. Then she reaches for Cooper and starts talking softly in an attempt to calm him down and bring him off the car.

“We have to get back inside,” Bretta says from the stairs. The road is filling with the dead, and they are moving to the sound of Cooper’s braying voice. Many of the dead people surrounding the house have already made their way down to the street.

“If the door isn’t totally smashed, you mean,” Denise says, casting another stink eye Bretta’s way. Bretta doesn’t say anything, and when she moves to help Denise with Cooper, she’s waved off by Denise’s bloody hammer. “Move. I got him.”

“Okay,” Bretta says, backing up, her hands out to make peace. When they’ve gone on to the house, under her breath she adds, “You can keep him.”

Chapter 32

They work the front door shut before any dead people can get in. Denise is right about it being broken, but she’s not so right that they can’t hammer more nails in to secure it. There are spots where the wood has splintered. The latch mechanism is completely broken.

“It’s okay,” Bretta says. “We won’t need to open it again anytime soon.”

“What a relief,” Denise bangs a nail home to emphasize her words.

“If we do need to leave, we might have a way to keep them distracted,” Bretta says.

“What’s that? Human sacrifice?”

Bretta points at Cooper, who is sitting on the couch with his arms wrapped around his knees. He won’t take off his suit just yet, even though Bretta has most of hers off and is a big sticky mess. “Ask your boyfriend.”

“They eat fire,” he says, and then bursts into tears.

Denise sits by him and rubs his back and casts sneering looks toward Bretta, who is going through her backpack.

Bretta pulls out handfuls of pills and piles them up on the table. She gathers two dozen little bottles containing clear and yellow liquids. She adds another handful of pills to the pile, sealed in bubbles. She adds two bottles of cough syrup and ten bottles of generic pain relievers.

“I just grabbed everything I could.” She fingers the pile. “Some of these look like birth control.”

“So what’s the plan then?” Denise asks. “Just give him something until he stops freaking out?”

Bretta doesn’t look up from the little treasure trove of drugs on the table. “Pretty much.”

Denise huffs all her breath out at once. She’s had enough bullshit for one day. “Oh my God! Why the fuck did you even go out there?”

Bretta looks up at Denise, her lip curling. “You know damned well why we went.”

“Yeah, well. It was a stupid idea. You could have backed that truck up to the door and we could all be gone now. Out of the city.”

Bretta stands and points at Scott, who is still lying unconscious or sleeping on the floor. “How far would we have gotten with him like this?”

“Well then we just fuckin’ leave him!” Denise yells.

“Like I left your boyfriend behind when he drank himself blind?”

“You’re the reason he was out there in the first place!” Denise yells. She has her hammer in her hand, and she’s waving it at Bretta back and forth slowly, like a snake. It’s a talisman of power, something for Denise to topple the alpha with if new leadership is in order. From the way she’s screaming, she thinks a change of leadership is very much in order at the moment.

Bretta senses the power in the tool as well. She puts her hands out to her sides. “Why don’t you put that down?”

Denise seems to consider the request for too long. The hammer glides back and forth, fangs out and covered in gore from its last victim. Finally, she tightens her grip on the weapon and drops it on the coffee table. The vibration causes Bretta’s little pill mountains to collapse and scatter. “Scott tried to kill me while you were gone.”

“Why are you both covered in paint?”

“I had to do something,” Denise replies. “That blood on him is his. He scraped himself up trying to kick my door in.”

She turns and lifts her shirt, revealing a red welt the size of two overlapping dinner plates. The welt is pockmarked with streaks of purple where bruising has set in and angry scratches and gashes where her flesh gave way to her bedroom door

“That looks painful.” Bretta looks over to where Scott is on the floor. His breathing is even and regular. It’s the first good sleep he’s had in weeks.

“All I need to do is knock him upside the head and he’s fine,” Bretta says, making Scott their common enemy as a peace offering.
He’s causing us both suffering
, she thinks. Something they can bond over.

Denise accepts the offering. “You can use my hammer if you want.”

“I just might.”

Denise turns to tend to Cooper. She pulls him up off the couch and takes him to his room, promising to get him undressed and in bed. Bretta looks at Scott on the floor and flops on the couch, leaving him there. She strips out of the rest of her armour, down to a sports bra. She throws the stinking pile of filth in the corner and then sits back. For the moment, the house is quiet, and she has time to breathe. Release. Big, deep, healing breaths. In comes quiet. Out goes chaos. In comes strength. Out goes fear.

The dead drum the walls. They drum the door. They shuffle step on the front steps. They fall on the stairs and knock one another down. And they drum.

Sighing, she gets up for water. When she returns, she watches Scott sleep while she drinks it, and then places the half-filled glass on the table. She begins separating the pills by size and colour. She separates the ones she knows from the ones she thinks she knows and the ones she’s never seen before. She makes new piles, ones with purpose. She separates tablets from capsules and capsules from gel-tabs. When she’s finished sorting and piling, the smallest pile is the ones she knows for sure. Cold meds. Codeine painkillers. Birth control. The biggest pile by far is the ones she’s never seen before. She pairs up like and like. She groups them in twos and threes.

Denise is right. It’s a terrible plan. But it’s the only one she has, so it’s the one she’s going to go with. They’ll eliminate the ones that make Scott worse. They’ll eliminate the ones that make him crave chocolate. They’ll find something that makes him better. And hopefully, they won’t kill him in the process.

Bretta looks over at him sleeping on the floor one last time and finishes her water. Then she gets up and grabs him by the arms. She drags him back to his room and onto the mattress on his bed. His skin catches and skids on the hardwood, but he doesn’t wake up.

Bretta breathes in while she works. The goal is to make him better.

She breathes out. The goal is not to kill him.

She breathes in.

She breathes out.

Her traitor brain adds a ghost of the word “hopefully” to her new mantra, but she pushes that awful word until it’s far, far from her mind.

At this point, she’s really settled on doing whatever it takes to make him better. After everything that has happened, is there honestly any length she won’t go to?

Cinching his hands and feet with rope and binding him to the bed, she thinks the answer to that question is no.