Living Dead (19 page)

Chapter 35

The first injection doesn’t cure Scott of anything. Instead, he breaks out in a rash that covers his chest and doesn’t go away for three days. Bretta wants to stop trying right there, but Cooper urges her on.

“We knew there were going to be misfires,” he says, and Bretta has to agree. A few days later, another pill, a purple one this time with no markings, gives him the sweats for hours. By the third one, Scott, who is still not eating, has more or less given up on trying to fight them when they come for the injections. Bretta also gets Cooper to help her force water down his throat, but he continually chokes on the stuff.

“Can we just inject water into his vein like the pills?” Bretta asks one morning, as they are sitting at the table in the kitchen.

“I don’t think you can,” Denise says. “I heard it turns your blood into Kool-Aid.”

Cooper laughs. “That’s probably the worst flavour I’ve ever heard of.”

Bretta smiles, but it’s all she can manage. “Well, if we don’t get some liquid into him soon, all of this will be for nothing. Besides, what’s intravenous?”

“Not thirty jabs with a little needle,” Denise says. “You’ll run out of places to stick him.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Cooper says. “I don’t think anybody is going to like it much, though.”

“Anything is better than nothing,” Bretta says.

“When my grandma was really old, she had dementia, and she wouldn’t eat. Kind of like this situation with Scott. Not that he’s got dementia. But whatever. You know what I’m saying. He won’t eat and won’t drink. They stuck a tube up her ass and gave her water that way.”

Denise curls her lip. “Are you kidding?”

When Cooper shakes his head, she makes a gagging noise.

“An enema,” Bretta says slowly. “But we don’t have anything we need.”

“Oh my God, Brett!” Denise says. “Don’t tell me you’re actually listening to what this crazy person has to say?”

“It’s not that crazy,” Cooper says. “It worked for my grandma.”

“I really wish you’d stop saying that!” Denise cries.

Cooper gets up from the table and pops open a drawer. He looks for a moment and then closes it and opens another. He closes that one and tries a cupboard, but gets nothing. He opens another cupboard by the stove and then chirps. He reaches in and pulls out what he was looking for, and then turns and holds it up for the girls to see.

“Oh,” Denise says. “Oh no. No, no.”

“Yes, yes,” Cooper says. In his hand, he is holding a turkey baster. He squeezes it, and it blows the hair across his face. “Hey, this thing has some force behind it.”

“In case he clenches,” he says, saying it like a pirate.

Denise collapses on the table, laughing. “Bretta, don’t. It’s too gross.”

“You’re sure it will work?” Bretta asks, and Cooper nods.

“We just need some lube,” he says.             

“Spit on it,” Denise says, and laughs again. “Oh, please don’t spit on it.”

“We can start with water,” Bretta says. “Maybe add a tablespoon of salt to it. If that works, we can think about soup or something later, watered down.”

“Ugh,” Cooper says, scrunching his nose. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You’re on your own if it does.”

“Seriously, guys?” Denise asks. “Just force him to drink it. There’s no need to jag him in the ass.”

“He won’t swallow,” Cooper says. “He’ll choke to death first.”

Denise points a finger at him. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

“Yeah?” Cooper asks. “Careful, chickie, or you’re going to be next.” He squeezes the rubber ball on the baster towards Denise, and she howls and hides her face.

By that afternoon, Scott still hasn’t had anything to eat or drink. As Bretta retreats from the shower of curses he hurls toward her, she makes up her mind. ‘Anything to save him’ is a mantra she finds herself reciting daily.

In the kitchen, she gathers the salt and three bottles of water. She pours the bottles into a bowl and adds the salt and sugar, and then mixes it until the crystals have mostly dissolved. She grabs a quarter-roll of paper towels.

“You should add something to flavour it,” Denise says.

“Shush,” Cooper says. “You’re going to help me hold the blanket.”

Denise points at Bretta. “This girl, when she makes up her mind, she’s on top of it.”

“If he didn’t like the needles,” Cooper says, “he’s really not going to like this.”

“Coop gets to administer the baster,” Denise says,

Cooper shakes his head and points at Bretta. “Sorry. A little too gay for me.”

There’s a bottle of canola oil in the cupboard, something they had yet to find a use for in the new world. Bretta pulls it off the shelf and shrugs at her friends. “Don’t they use this in porn?” she asks.

“They definitely did not,” Cooper says. “They had industrial grade stuff for that.”

Bretta puts the bottle down. She runs her fingers through her hair and swears loudly. Then she takes a deep breath and picks the bottle up again. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”

Scott is sleeping when they enter his room, but the sound and closeness of other bodies wakes him up. He watches, them, groggy-eyed, and when his eyes fall on the bowl Bretta is holding and the bottle of oil, his face wrinkles. “Oh God,” he says. “What now?”

“We want to give you a chance to eat or drink before we do something horrible to you,” says Cooper.

Scott looks at the bottle of oil. “What the hell?” He sounds angry, but his eyes are worried. Cooper picks up the turkey baster and makes a stabbing motion toward Scott with it.

“No!” Scott shouts. “
Leave me alone!
”

“You’re gonna die if you don’t get something in you,” says Bretta, trying to maintain her calm in spite of the tears which have suddenly taken root on her cheeks.

“You’re all gonna die if you touch me!” Scott yells. “I’ll fuckin’ kill you all!”

“It’s like this every time,” Bretta says quietly.

“Okay, buddy,” Cooper says. To Bretta, he says, “Does he need to be flipped on his back?”

“I don’t want him off the ropes,” she says. “We might not get them back on.”

Cooper, eyeing Scott’s sickened, yellowed state, shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem.”

“Wrap him up first,” she says.

Cooper puts a heavy blanket over Scott, who begins rolling back and forth and shouting for them to get off him. Once the blanket has been secured over Scott’s face and around his arms, Cooper tells Denise to unhook his hand. She does his foot next, and Cooper rolls Scott over like he’s flipping laundry.

“Jesus,” Cooper says. “How much weight has he lost?”

“I don’t know,” says Bretta, still crying. “A lot. Too much.” Her best guess is to say
at least forty pounds
, but she keeps that number to herself. It seems like another betrayal of Scott’s masculinity somehow, as ludicrous as that sounds in light of what they’re about to do to him. But in an emergency, sometimes it’s the little things you latch on to. Six months ago, she would have never imagined this would her life.
Am I really going to assault my husband with a turkey baster?
she thinks, but the answer to everything these days is
yes
. Yes I am. You can get used to anything if you are exposed to it long enough. Anything can become your normal. This is a new normal for all of them.

Scott manages to get an arm free and throws a wild, glancing punch at Cooper, but can’t sustain much of an offense and is quickly overwhelmed with exhaustion. He lies panting like a dog, on his stomach, buried under blankets and Cooper. Beside the bed, Bretta is holding the bowl and the turkey baster. She fills it with water and salt and then pours oil all over it. “How far do we push it in?”

Cooper laughs. “Why the hell are you askin’ me?”

“Stop messing around,” Denise says.

Bretta leans over the bed, the turkey baster dripping oil on the sheets and the blanket. She looks at Cooper one last time.

“Just don’t make eye contact with him when you do it,” he says, and Bretta swallows an urge to spray the water in his stupid grinning face.

Why are you enjoying this so much?
she wants to ask, but she doesn’t. Because she already knows the answer. Cooper’s normal is a lot farther out in left field than Denise or Bretta’s normal, that’s why. One day soon, he might become very dangerous. If he doesn’t kill himself first, that is.

It’s actually a surprisingly smooth ride, going in. Scott lets out an anguished cry from under the sheets. When Bretta works the bulb, he starts crying, sputtering the word
no
into his blankets.

“Holy shit,” Denise says. “Oh, this is too fucked up.” She backs away from the bed and flops down in Bretta’s chair. “I’m not part of this anymore.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Cooper says. To Bretta, he says, “What do you think? One more?”

“One more,” Bretta says.

When they are done, they wordlessly put Scott on his back and tie him back up to the posts. He doesn’t fight, and he doesn’t look at either Cooper or Bretta when they apologise for having to do it. Instead he bursts into tears, and mouths the words
get out
until Cooper and Bretta slink out of the room like scolded dogs.

Denise is the first one out of the room; the awkwardness of the scene is something she’ll bring up again and again later.

Back in the kitchen, the three of them sit wordlessly at the table and stare at their hands.

“Anybody know what time it is?” Denise asks suddenly.

“No,” Bretta says. “Why?

“No reason. It’s just that it seems to be getting darker earlier in the evening.”

“Getting to be that time of year,” Cooper says.

“What’s it going to be like here in the winter?” Denise asks.

Bretta and Cooper look at each other and shrug.

“What pill are you going to try tonight?” Cooper asks.

Bretta shakes her head. “He can have the night off.”

“Probably for the best,” Cooper says, getting up. He wanders off to his room, with Denise following.

Bretta sits there staring at her hands for a long time after. “Winter,” she says.

Chapter 36

Another day.

Denise walks into the room, and Cooper is squatting in the corner with a candle beside him, digging through a plastic soap dish he’s dug up from somewhere, filled with all the little tools and gadgets he needs to set a rig. He has a blackened spoon with the handle bent in a loop and back on itself, under the ladle so it acts as a stand. He has a handful of cotton swabs in there, but he cuts the heads off them before he uses them.

And he’s got those little green Adderalls he took from Bretta’s pile, and a number of other ones he hasn’t told her about. Five-milligram Valiums, the little yellow ones with hearts in them. Little purple Halcions in the .25 milligram dosage. And the jewels in the drug crown of his little collection of pills: six yellow MS Contin pills – 60-milligram morphine tablets. But the bigger jewel is a 200-milligram bomber of the stuff — it’s a green oblong while the others are little circles.

At the moment, he’s busy rubbing the pill in his thumb until the colour comes off. He places the tablet in the little spoon stand he’s created and uses a syringe to add a bit of water.

“Close the door if you’re staying,” Cooper says, not looking up.

He flicks a red-headed match to life. He heats the spoon until the pill begins to dissolve around the edges, at which point he produces another spoon and crushes the pill down to paste. He flicks another match and runs the flame under the spoon for a moment or two before pulling it away. The match dies in his fingers and he sets another one.

“What are you doing?” Denise asks when she sees he has begun the process of heating the spoon for a second or two at a time with the new match.

“Trying to get the wax out of it.” He heats the spoon again and this time leans in and blows a milky by-product off the top of the mixture. He heats the liquid again and then drops a cotton head into it. He uses a new syringe to draw the liquid and then holds it up for Denise to see.

“Whatta yah say, doll, wanna party?” he says, smiling. In the candle light, his eyes are black moons.

It’s been days since they started treating Scott for dehydration. A series of rapes, once a day, to make sure he’s alive and strong enough to handle the injections of random drugs in his body, searching for one that will make him calm his shit. Denise eyes the syringe thoughtfully. “Does it hurt?”

“It’s the best thing in the world.”

She thinks about Scott, lying on his face and helpless while they sodomize him with a turkey baster, and the sound of his frustrated cries as they careen off the walls in his room. She’s never been comfortable around men crying, but she’s never heard a man cry the way Scott does. So utterly broken. So utterly alone. That’s not something you can just wash out. Cooper could have fixed that, though. These tranquilizers would have made everything less stressful. For everyone. But doing things for other people just doesn’t seem to be Cooper’s style these days.

“No thanks,” she says.

Cooper arches his eyebrows. He asks again, this time with big pleading eyes. “It won’t be the same without you.”

“No,” she says. “It won’t.” Then she kisses him on the head and pats his bald head. She gets up and leaves the room. Then she goes down to the kitchen where Bretta is wiping her eyes and trying to hide the fact she’s been crying.

Denise sits down at the table and grabs Bretta’s hand. Bretta stares up at the ceiling, and tears run down her cheeks.

“I just want him to be okay,” she says, “and I feel like such a piece of shit for it.”

“You’re crying,” Denise says. “It means you’re not. It means you love him, and you hurt him. You had to, but you did. And the fact you’re crying about it shows how much you love him.”

Bretta squeezes Denise’s hand and smiles at her. She wipes her nose and the salt from her face. “I don’t know what will happen if he doesn’t get better.”

“He will.”

Bretta nods and wipes her face again. “What’s Cooper doing?”

“Ugh,” she says. “You don’t want to know.”

“The Adderall?” Bretta asks, and Denise lies with a nod, because even when she pulls herself out of his little webs, she’s still all tangled up in them.

“To tell the truth, your crying face makes me happy, a little,” Denise says, switching the conversation back.

Bretta looks confused.

“I don’t really feel anything anymore,” Denise says. She waves her hand at the wall. “I look at them, and it’s like, nothing. I don’t think I can be sad anymore. But I’m glad it’s not totally gone from the world.”

“What about when you look at us?” Bretta says, and Denise smiles.

“Of course,” she says. “Of course.”

Webs, everywhere, it seems.

Bretta cleans up and thanks Denise for her friendship.

Denise responds by offering to help with the pills. “I don’t know much about them. But I might recognize one or two, and you can cross them off your list.”

Bretta pulls out two sandwich bags, one containing a lot of pills and another, which looks like it holds one or two of each of the pills from the other bag. “I did it so I don’t get confused and accidentally shoot him twice with the same drug. Once they get used up, I’ve been taking them out of this bag.”

She holds up a third bag, and this one has around twenty pills in it, but only of four different kinds. She shakes the bag and the pills rattle like M&Ms. “Then they go into this one.”

“Okay,” Denise says. “So, unused, used, and yet-to-use. Got it.”

Bretta opens the yet-to-use bag and dumps them carefully onto the table. There are at least seven different colours of pills here, and in a variety of forms, from gel caps to little hard pills that look like they’ve been built from compressed talcum powder.

Denise pulls her chair out and then sits eye level with the table, leaning forward. She goes over each one individually, and when she reaches the last one, her eyes roll back to the other side, like a typewriter or an ear of corn in a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Finally, she looks at Bretta and shrugs. “Any ideas?”

“Not at all,” Bretta says. “I mean, do you go with big ones, or small ones? These little capsules or pills? And what are these red things?”

“I don’t know.”

Denise pushes several of them around with her fingers. “What have you guys been doing to pick them?”

“Up until now?” Bretta asks. “Picking the smallest ones. Just in case it means there’s less medicine in them. You know. So he doesn’t get hurt.”

“And that hasn’t worked.”

“No,” Bretta says. “That hasn’t worked.”

Denise puts her head down and uses her arm as a pillow. She looks over the pills again. “Maybe it’s time to mix things up a bit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Denise says, fingering a large green pill and isolating it from the herd. “Maybe you go with the big one, and see what happens.”

Bretta looks at the pill for a while.
It could be dangerous
, she’s thinking, but on the other hand, they don’t even really know for sure if the smaller pills have a smaller dose of medicine in them or not. She’s had cold pills that were massive, and then much smaller ones which knocked her on her ass.

Still, it’s a crapshoot either way. And Denise is right about the fact that it is time to mix things up. Nothing has worked so far, and one of the pills gave him an awful rash. How many trigger clicks will they get away with in their little game of Russian Roulette?

But it’s not just the pills they have to worry about, either. Scott might respond to the water from the turkey baster, but he still isn’t eating and they can’t keep jamming everything up his ass. Not just for Scott’s sake, who responded to the invasive procedure the way anybody would —
Christ!
— but for the rest of them, who can’t go on assaulting him until he finally dies.

So Denise wants the big one? Fine, let Denise have the big one. It’s actually kind of nice not having to make the decision for once. Cooper hasn’t picked any, even though he’s been happy to set the rigs for her and help dosing Scott. They all have a lot riding on him getting better, and Bretta forgets that sometimes. But she’s thinking about it now.

“The green one it is,” Bretta says, sweeping the rest of the pills back into the bag. Then she opens the bag containing all the extra pills and begins the long process of sorting all of the green ones out. In the end, there are twelve of them. If the pill works, they will have 12 doses to make Scott functional again.

“Should I go get Cooper?” Denise says.

“Tomorrow,” Bretta says. “I wanted to give Scott the night off after what just happened in there.”

“Good idea,” Denise says. Then: “Not too many nights off, though, right? He looks pretty sick.”

Bretta sighs into her hands. “No,” she says. “Not too many nights off.”