Living Dead (18 page)

Chapter 33

Cooper’s sight comes back slowly, a piece at a time, beginning with blues and purples. He announces his sight now includes the colour green, and with the addition of orange to his spectrum, he says he can make out light and darkness. Denise, a lithe moon in orbit around him, becomes darkness in his vision. The rest of the world is light. Light and darkness give way to fuzzy shadows, and the fourth morning after returning to the house, he tells Denise he can see again.

“It looks like shit,” he says, referring to his vision. “But it’s definitely there.”

Denise tends to Cooper’s wounds, feeds him in his room, and spends the rest of her time upstairs, away from Bretta, but also to watch the street. She’s also hiding from Cooper, who keeps asking for something to drink, or something to huff. And she wants to give it to him, but he’s in such piss-poor shape right now she’s worried it’ll do serious damage. Looking out the upstairs window in Scott’s parents’ room, overlooking the front step, Denise tries to count the dead and loses count.

“I got stuck on about eighty-nine,” Bretta says.

The sound of her voice makes Denise’s heart jump and she loses count. She snickers. “I was on ninety-five. I guess I have to start over. Someone made me lose count.”

“Why bother?” Bretta asks. “There’s a lot. That’s about all I need to know.”

Denise has restarted her count. “It’s not all about what Bretta wants. I’d like to know. For my own piece of mind.”

“The number keeps changing every couple minutes,” Bretta says. “It’s like counting goldfish.”

Denise sighs and rolls her eyes. “One,” she says loudly.

Bretta ignores the snark. “How’s Coop? I haven’t seen him in a while. You guys have been holed up in your room.”

“Yeah, well, being blind will do that to you.”

“Right,” Bretta says, annoyed. The conversation began childish and has done nothing but gone south. She decides a frontal approach might work better than all this pussy tip-toeing around. None of this bitchiness and passive aggressive avoidance crap has anything to do with counting corpses.  

“I didn’t blind him, you know,” she says. “Cooper did that to himself.”

Denise laughs. “I know. Of course he did. Addicts do that, you know? Give one an opportunity to hurt themselves, they’ll take it every time.”

“Well then why the hell are you so mad at me?” Bretta says, annoyed. “Is it Scott? Because he’s sick, too.”

“Yes, he is,” Denise says loudly. “And nobody but me seems to notice how often he puts everybody’s lives in danger.”

“I know.” Bretta puts her hands down. “I’m sorry, Denise. Really. He should have never gone after you, and we should have done a better job of securing him before we left.”

She doesn’t talk about how Cooper almost got her killed, and how blinding himself created a situation which could have killed them all. She can tell Denise isn’t ready to hear it. But it happened that way, and she knows it, and sooner or later Denise will realize it too. At least, Bretta hopes she will.

She walks over to the window where Denise is standing and leans against the ledge. It’s a sunny day, and if they were smart, they’d all be in the basement, away from the charcoal and burned plastic stink and rotten meat smells and away from the snare drum song on the walls. They just can’t seem to bring themselves to go down there for any extended period, though. The idea of a breach upstairs, trapping them in the basement, is like sitting in a boat in a deep cove and catching a flash of movement from a whale swimming underneath.

The slightest flick of the tail could send you diving head first into water cold enough to kill you in minutes. Being in the basement is the same way. You can sit back and pretend to relax, and maybe even close your eyes for a few minutes, but the whole time you’re going over the house with a fine-tooth comb in your mind, thinking about the nails holding the boards, and whether any of the dead people will realize under the vinyl and plywood there’s really just drywall and paint keeping them from a hot meal. The idea of being caught upstairs would be just as bad.

Bretta doesn’t like looking outside. With more arriving on the street by the hour, there’s no way to get out now. Even around the back of the house, the yards are filling up. The walkways and alleys in the neighbourhood are seeing more traffic than they have in months. There’s no question the sound of the truck has brought them in from the area, and what is worrisome is that there’s no telling how many might have heard the noise and are coming to check it out. There could be thousands of them on the way still.

Looking down at all those bodies, she wonders if Cooper and Denise weren’t right when they suggested they just take off. Just leave it all behind and head for somewhere else.

One thing is for certain, that opportunity isn’t going to happen again anytime soon. Opening the door now is likely a death sentence. The house can handle a few dozen dead people smashing away on it, but can it handle a hundred of them? A thousand?

Could there ever be more mass pushing against the house than mass in the house itself? Could they ever push against it hard enough to collapse a wall, for example, or knock it off the foundation?

She doubts that would ever be possible, but again, the outline of a whale under the water is a cause for concern. It’s something that gnaws at the edges of your thoughts.

“How’s he doing?” Denise says finally, meaning Scott.

“Horrible. I tied him up.” Bretta runs a hand through her hair. “He hisses when I come into the room. Just like a crocodile. And he refuses to eat because he insists he can’t digest it. He thinks his guts are rotting out now.”

“And your pills?”

Bretta sighs, and shakes her head. Not because the pills are a sore spot between the two women, but because Scott is also refusing those. She even wasted a few crushing them up in a can of soup, but Scott told her to stop wasting food.

“He’s so depressed. Sometimes he won’t even look at me. He just lies there pretending to be asleep and ignoring me. Those are actually the days I prefer.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand.

“Well, I know what that’s like,” Denise says. Then she puts a hand on Bretta’s shoulder. Bretta covers the hand with her own, and the women stand quietly in the light of the window, not speaking, counting the dead. Bretta gets to fifty-six and gives up. It doesn’t matter how many there are. Anything above thirty or forty would absolutely overpower all of them.

“Come on,” Denise says “Let’s go see what we can do about our men.” She leads Bretta away from the window and downstairs.

Coming down to the main floor, they see Scott’s door is closed, but when they reach the bottom stair and look back down the hall, Cooper’s is open. They find him sitting on the couch in the living room, and Bretta immediately looks to the little piles of pills and wonders why she isn’t smarter about keeping things out of Cooper’s hands. But of course, the answer is obvious. He was blind until… when exactly, she’s not sure. From Denise’s updates, his eyesight has been coming back, but last she heard, he was still only looking at shapes and shades of light and dark. She waves a hand in front of his face and he smiles.

“It’s still shitty, but it’s back,” he says.

“What are you doing out here?” Denise asks. “I thought you were sleeping.”

“Who can sleep with all that noise? How many are out there now?”

“We keep losing count,” Bretta says.

“Probably a hundred,” Denise says. “Maybe two hundred soon.”

“They followed us from the store,” he says, like this is a new piece of information a couple girls couldn’t have possibly come up with on their own.

“Yeah, to the spot where we left the truck,” Bretta says, annoyed. “Somebody screaming from the top of a parked car probably brought them the rest of the way.”

“Sorry. Had to be done. Someone left me blind and alone, surrounded by monsters.”

At this point, Bretta looks at Denise, who shakes her head.

“It doesn’t matter anymore why they’re here,” Denise says. “They just are.”

Cooper nods once and doesn’t bring it up again. Denise smiles at Bretta, and Bretta sees the truce between them has some weight behind it.

“How’s Scott?” Cooper asks, changing the subject.

“Getting worse,” Bretta says. She runs through the story again, about Scott’s depression and his refusal to waste resources which he thinks could be better spent on the living, and the ropes.

“At least he’s just depressed and not totally schizoid,” Cooper says. “Not like when we were gone, anyway.”

“He thinks he’s dead already,” Bretta says. “That’s pretty schizoid to me.”

She wants to say it’s more than schizoid. It’s A-1 bonkers. He’s completely lost his mind. These are thoughts she keeps to herself. It seems like a betrayal to accuse him in front of Cooper. It seems diminishing, somehow.

Cooper sits forward on the couch, his hands on his chin, looking over the pills on the table. “How did you split these up?”

“That little pile is stuff I know,” Bretta says. “That huge pile is stuff I’ve never seen before.”

Cooper picks up a gel cap to read the side and then puts it down again. “That’s a big pile.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a pharmacist.”

Cooper points to a small pile of pink and purple capsules that say AMOXIL 500 on them. “These are good ones. Too bad you don’t have lots more.”

“Painkillers?” Bretta asks.

Cooper shakes his head. “Better. Antibiotics. I used to take them for strep throat. They’re the big ones, too.”

Bretta nods and removes the pills from the pile of unknowns. There are sixteen of them. Then she stops, frowning.

“There were more,” she says. “There were blue pills in here, and I don’t see them now.”

Denise and Bretta look at one another, and then Denise looks at Cooper. Bretta does too, but is careful to look at him only after Denise does.

“Yeah,” Cooper says, looking down at his hands. “Those are mine now. Nobody needs them.”

“What are they?” Denise asks.

Bretta wants to know how that’s fair, and Cooper locks eyes with her, speaking carefully. “I risked my life out there too.”

Bretta can see desperation in his eyes, a chittering panic, like he’s about to lose it and freak out. And then she reminds herself that’s not Denise’s man who does that. It’s her own.

“What are they?” Denise says, and when Cooper doesn’t acknowledge her, she slaps his shoulder.

“What the fuck?” he asks, turning to her, and Denise asks for a third time. Cooper, rubbing his shoulder, finally tells them. “Adderall. I used to get ‘em from a kid in the neighbourhood. Three bucks a tab. They prescribe it for attention deficit disorder. That kid was selling his for weed money.”

“Speed,” Bretta says.

“It’s clinical,” Cooper says.

Denise looks at Bretta. “Anything else missing?”

“I don’t know,” Bretta says. “Ask him.”

“Nothing else is missing,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter, because nobody needs this shit anyway. You’re not going to cure Scott with these things. And last time I checked, nobody gives a shit anymore if you can pay attention in school. School doesn’t even exist. There’s no reason for these pills to exist. They’re obsolete, like the rest of the fucked-up shit humanity used to spend their money on.”

“Whatever,” Bretta says. “You’re right, you came with me, you can have them. Do you recognize any of these other pills?”

Cooper shakes his head. “I don’t. Does it really matter, if Scott isn’t going to take them?”

“He’s going to have to, sooner or later,” Bretta says.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Then he’s going to get too weak to put up a fight, and we’ll hold him down and force him to eat them,” Bretta says. “There’s no other way to get them into his system.”

“I don’t know about that either,” says Cooper.

Chapter 34

The things Cooper does know about are little barrels of clear plastic with orange plastic tops. They are half the size of a pen. Cooper holds ten of them in his hand, and when Bretta doesn’t make a grab for them right away, he sets them down on the table beside the pills. They fan out from his palm in a half circle.

“Insulin needles,” he says. When Denise asks why he grabbed those, he shrugs. “You never know what you’re going to need. I also grabbed another package of Peeps, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”

Bretta picks one up and pops the cap off. “How can we just start injecting random drugs into his body, hoping they will work?”

“You need a way to get drugs into him,” Cooper says. “That’s all this is. I have no idea what your plan is for picking which drugs, but is it really so different if he eats them hidden in his food or you shoot them into his arm?”

“You’re not going to start shooting things up, Cooper,” Denise says. The words sound like they form a question and a sentence at the same time.

Cooper’s gaze is levelled at Bretta. “Shut your goddamned mouth, Denise.”

“You’re fucked,” she says, slapping her hands on the table. She starts to stomp off to her room and then she turns, flicking an accusing finger in Cooper’s face.

“You didn’t learn a thing!”

“I’m a slow learner.”

“You’re such a nut case,” she says. “You’re worse than fuckin’ Scotty. At least he has an excuse.”

Cooper turns and regards her. To Bretta, he looks like a snake sizing up prey. “You finished?”

“You bet I am, asshole,” she says. She turns and stomps off to her room.

Cooper picks up one of the syringes and holds it eye level in front of Bretta. “If Scotty hadn’t destroyed the door, she’d have slammed it right there.”

Bretta shakes her head. She doesn’t want any part of the conversation because Denise is right. It’s dangerous. And it shows Cooper has learned absolutely nothing from the past week. She thinks about how one day it will be just Cooper anchoring everyone to a dangerous, miserable life, instead of Scott. She tells herself when that day comes, she will hit the gas and carry on down the road. Denise can stay behind if she likes.

She and Scott need to be away from these people. It’s hard to tell which is more hazardous for their health. The dead people outside, or this blue-eyed, blond hair dead person sitting in front of her, who is always smiling, and never gives a second thought to throwing all their lives under the bus.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Cooper says.

“They’re not worth a penny.”

“Fine,” he says. “So are you going to use the needles? I can show you how.”

“No. Not yet.”

And then: “Wait.”

She nods and Cooper piles up the needles and places them in her hand.

“He’s going to be alright,” he says. “You’re doing a good thing, Brett. Now. Why don’t you show me what you’re going to start with and I’ll show you how we turn pills into juice?”

Bretta pushes a single, tiny white pill from the pile of unknowns toward Cooper. “It’s one of the smallest,” she says. The pill says PROVENTIL in a half wheel around the top of the pill, with a 2 in the centre. “Does that mean two milligrams?”

Cooper shrugs. “I have no idea what that is.”

“It says Proventil,” Bretta replies. “I was thinking prevention of something. And it’s small. It might not do as much damage if it’s wrong.”

“Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is dangerous as all hell. But if he won’t eat, and he’s not getting better, I guess you can watch him waste away until he actually does become one of those things, or you can do something. Even if it’s the wrong thing, it’s better than nothing.”

Bretta decides she can’t argue with the logic of it. “Well. OK then.”

Cooper goes into the kitchen and reappears a moment later with a bottle of water, a small plate, and a spoon. He also has two cotton swabs in his hand, and he throws them down on the table. He hands Bretta the plate and a spoon. “Crush that pill into powder,” he says. “And no lumps. Lumps are wasteful.”

Bretta tries unsuccessfully to crush the pill with the spoon before retrieving a cleaver, which she uses to bisect the pieces of the pill into smaller and smaller parts. To crush the small pieces with the spoon, she places the pad of her thumb in the spoon and pushes against the plate. The pills break down with little clicks, and before long, Bretta has a pile of white powder the general consistency of icing sugar. “It looks like cocaine. I guess. I only ever saw it on T.V.”

“Sure it does,” Cooper says, nodding. He tears the cotton bandage into small squares.

Cooper scrapes the powder into the spoon, and then, using one of the syringes, he draws water from the newly-opened water bottle. He flushes some of the water out into the spoon, and the white powder disappears into milky liquid. “You only want to use new water bottles when you do this,” he says. “Even though these aren’t the most sanitary conditions. You can pick up all kinds of bugs flushing your rig with dirty water though.”

“’Course, not everybody’s careful,” he adds. “I heard about a guy once who spit blood into a spoon and used that to fix. Heroin addicts. Super fucked up.”

Bretta doesn’t respond to small talk. She’s watching Cooper carefully, committing every step of the process to memory. When Cooper is done mixing the powder, he flicks a lighter under the spoon.

“The trick here isn’t to boil it,” he says. “You just want to warm it up to help mix the water and the powder. It’ll also be less freaky for Scott. Trust me. Cold water in the veins feels really gross.”

The mixture bubbles for a moment and clarifies, and Cooper places a chunk of cotton swab in the centre of the spoon and the liquid disappears.

“Now for the magic,” Cooper says, with practiced ease. Placing the spoon on the table, he inserts the tip of the syringe into the cotton swab and draws the plunger. Cooper draws on the swab until bubbles begin to appear in the barrel of the syringe, and then he holds the needle upright and flicks out the bubbles. He places the cap back on the syringe and places it on the table in front of Bretta.

“Piece of cake,” he says.

“Holy shit,” Bretta says. She picks up the syringe, cupping it in both hands like it is some precious object.

“We’re going to have to watch him and see what kind of response he has,” Cooper says. “Maybe give him half. If everything’s OK, he can have the other half. Going straight into the blood is going to make it a lot stronger.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“If it doesn’t work,” Cooper says, “we try again tomorrow.”

They take the needle to Scott’s room. Denise is leaning in her doorway, arms crossed, scowling when they enter the hall. Cooper blows her a kiss, and she sneers and disappears into her room.

“Oh, she’s mad now,” Cooper says over his shoulder. “But in a few hours she’ll be begging for a taste.”

“You’re both going to die if you’re not careful.”

Cooper sighs. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

Scott’s room is a Grade-A disaster. There are soiled clothes piled around a mattress on the floor. The mattress is covered in piss stains. Scott’s on the bed, which is just a box spring now, and he’s tied to all four posts, spread eagle, his hands curled into fists and purple from straining against the nylon rope around his wrists. His ankles are bleeding from rope burn. His forearms are big purple bruises, the skin scraped raw. They look like little choked throats. Scott isn’t wearing pants, and he’s managed to kick off half the blanket so his dick is showing.

Cooper’s eyes are drawn to Scott’s penis, and then he looks away. “Hello!” he exclaims.

“Sorry.” Bretta is already moving to cover Scott with a sheet. “It’s just easier this way.”

“Forget it,” Cooper says. “Let’s just make sure the big guy stays covered.”

Bretta nods. “How are we going to do this?”

“Do what?” Scott asks.

“We got some medicine for you, Bro,” Cooper says. He uses his pointer finger to simulate a needle going into his own arm.

“Like fuck you do,” Scott says, wrestling with the ropes.

He screams when he sees the needle in Bretta’s hand. “NO! Fuck off!”

Cooper picks a blanket up off the floor. He makes a motion like he’s throwing it on the bed, to show Bretta what he has in mind. “Just like Nancy.”

Scott is wailing and thrashing like he’s being burned alive. His wrists bleed from nylon chafing. “Get out! Fuck off you guys, I swear to God!”

“Cooper! I’m gonna tear you open and drink your blood!”

“Calm down!” Bretta says.

“Fuck you, you fuckin’ whore!”

“Ignore him!” Cooper yells. “Remember what we’re here for! I’m gonna cover him up and we’ll isolate his arm.”

Bretta nods.

Cooper stands over Scott, blanket held at chest level. “See you on the other side, bro.”

Scott spits at him but it’s ineffective, and Cooper drops the blanket over Scott’s head and torso. Suddenly, it’s a lot harder to hear Scott swearing and threatening their lives.

In his weakened state, Scott’s defense is short lived. Cooper drops down on his chest, holding the blanket in place, and wraps his hands around Scott’s forearm. The veins on Scott’s arm begin to bulge, Cooper looks up at Bretta and tells her the needle only has to go in about half a centimetre.

“I can’t do it,” she says, backing up.

“You can hold him if you want,” Cooper says. “But if you don’t keep him still, we could tear his vein open and he’ll bleed to death.”

“Cooper!” Bretta yells, slapping at his face and missing by a mile. “Jesus Christ!”

“I’m just kidding,” Cooper says, laughing. “Come on, you’ll be fine.”

Bretta leans in and grabs Scott’s forearm. She looks at Cooper one last time and he tells her to go on, and then she pushes the needle into Scott’s skin. Beneath the towel, Scott howls like he’s being bitten, but Cooper holds his arm true.

“Now the plunger,” Cooper says. “Do it slowly.”             

“Do I have to pull it back first?”

“Naww,” Cooper says. “I flicked it good. They do it on TV because it looks cool. Just push it in.”

Bretta thumbs the plunger and pushes the milky liquid into Scott’s arm. When the round is spent, she pulls the needle out. Blood dribbles from his arm. Cooper releases Scott’s arm and scrambles off him. When he pulls the blanket back, Scott is red-faced and heaving.

“What the hell was that?”

Cooper shakes his head. “We have no idea. We just picked the littlest one.”

“
You what?
” Scott says. “
You’re all out of your goddamn minds!
”

“What are you worried about?” Cooper says. “You’re dead anyway, right?”

Scott responds by spitting at Cooper again, but he is suffering from cottonmouth and there’s little more than a noise for Cooper to dodge.

“Now what?” Bretta asks.

“Now we wait and see what happens,” Cooper replies, tossing the blanket aside and walking toward the door. “That’s your job. My job is to see if Denise is ready to speak to me yet.”

With Cooper gone, Scott and Bretta stare at each other.

Finally, Scott looks up at the ceiling. “Get out,” he says.

There’s a chair beside the dresser Bretta has been using while tending to her husband. She has a half-read copy of
Gone with the Wind
, a book Scott’s mom often talked about when she was alive. Finally reading it, however, Bretta has come to realize her mother-in-law was basing her discussions of the book on the film.

“She never even read this goddamn thing, did she?” she asks.

“How many times do I have to tell you I have no idea?” Scott says, staring up at the ceiling and clenching his fists.

Bretta smiles, and turns the page.

“No, she didn’t,” she says quietly, more to herself than to anyone else. Outside, the dead hit the walls, their fists like road hockey balls on the siding.