Living Dead (20 page)

Chapter 37

Cooper is asleep when Denise goes to bed, sitting on his knees and leaning over so his head is touching the wall, his back to her. He didn’t have time to take the syringe out of his arm before going under, and the cloth strip knotted around his bicep has made his arm cold. It has to come off, too. Denise pulls the needle from his arm and there’s a run of thin blood that follows the furrows of his skin and pools at his wrist. She tries to shake him awake but has no response. She slaps the back of his head and gets nothing. Fear stinging her guts, she checks the side of his pulse and feels his heart, slow but regular. She pushes him over on his side and throws a blanket over him.

“Goodnight,” she says finally, tucking herself in and looking at the lump of his form in the dark across the room. “You fucking idiot.”

He’s still asleep when she wakes up in the morning, but Bretta’s awake and she’s sitting at the table. She already has the green pill crushed and pasted and is drawing it into a syringe when Denise sits down beside her.

“How’s Coop?” Bretta asks.

“Getting caught up on his beauty sleep.”

“That’s good,” Bretta says. “He needs a lot of it.”

They both laugh. The smell of smoke is faint and distinct in the air, and Bretta says the fire must still be burning or the wind has changed.

“I thought maybe someone left the upstairs bedroom open again,” Denise says.

“This is new,” Bretta says.

“How is this going?” Denise asks, sweeping her hand in Bretta’s direction.

“Went off without a hitch.”

She had been up for hours and finally decided to do something constructive with her time other than sitting in the dark listening to dead people shuffling around outside.

It’s cold this morning, but it’ll heat up later.

Denise forages for breakfast and by the time she’s done eating, Bretta has cleaned up her little preparation station.

“Should we wake Coop?” Denise asks.

“I think we can manage,” Bretta says. Scott is getting weaker by the day, and there’s probably no need for three people to work on him.

“Besides,” Bretta says with a bitter voice. “It’s not like we’re sticking this up his ass.”

“Right,” Denise says. The awkwardness of the joke leaves an equally awkward silence in its wake.

In Scott’s room, they find him asleep as well, and Denise whispers that this might be more simple than they thought it was going to be. At the sound of her voice, his eyes flicker open, and he regards them silently while consciousness comes back to him. He looks down at the needle in Bretta’s hand and sighs.

“I’ll take it,” he says, his voice barely a whisper.

Bretta and Denise turn and look at each other, unsure of what to do next.

“That’s great,” Denise says finally. “It’s really much better this way.”

Bretta is still standing there with the syringe in her hand. “You have to swear to me you’re not going to do something stupid,” she says. “No spitting it out or anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear it.”

“Jesus, Bretta.” Scott shakes his head.

She’s only staring at him, though.

Finally, he sighs. “I swear.”

She stands still, regarding his words.

Denise puts a hand on her shoulder. “He’s not going to try anything.”

“Will you take it with some water?” Bretta asks.

“Yes,” Scott replies.

And then she relents, and Denise goes out to the kitchen and grabs a half-bottle of water.

When she’s gone, Scott says, “I’m sorry.”

Bretta starts to cry. “I don’t know what we’re giving you. I don’t know if it’s going to make you better or not.”

“
S’okay,
” he says. “We’ll try it and see what happens.”

When Denise comes back in the room, she’s suspicious of the quiet and Bretta’s tears but doesn’t say anything. She moves to the bed to give Scott some water and stops. “Can we let him loose?”

“Yeah,” Bretta says. “We can let him loose.”

The rope around Scott’s wrists is stained brown and is dusted with dried skin and scab flakes, and he winces as it falls away from his skin. His ankles are in better shape than his wrists, but they are still raw and still bruised. Denise puts the bottle to Scott’s mouth and he drinks a little and chokes on it, then drinks again. When she stands up, as much water is on Scott’s face and the blanket covering his body as there is in his mouth, but he thanks her and then holds his mouth open for Bretta to squeeze the plunger on the syringe, sending a narrow stream of green liquid into the back of his throat.

Scott winces and gags on the taste and Denise steps back in with more water. “Thanks,” he says.

He tries to sit up, but he’s dizzy, and Bretta pushes him back down onto the bed and sits down beside him. Scott does a slow inventory of his wounds, beginning with his wrists.

“We’ll clean them up when you’re feeling better,” she says.

“I’m getting dizzy.”

“It’s okay if you want to sleep some more.” She wets her hand with some water and wipes his forehead. Her hand comes away greasy, and she wipes it on the blanket.

“I’d like to get up.” His voice is thick and he speaks slowly.

Denise leaves the room while Bretta helps him get dressed, and when he’s done, Bretta calls her back in and the girls help him out into the living room where he grabs a corner of the couch.

“It’s good to sit up like a human being,” he says. His words are deliberate. His eyes are wide but unaware.

“You want anything?” Bretta asks.

“I just want to sit,” he says. “Like a human being.”

“Well,” Denise says, handing the water bottle to Bretta. “I’ll leave you both to it, then.”

She leaves them in the living room and retreats to her room. Inside, there are candles scattered about on the floor, out, thankfully, and Cooper is sleeping on the floor. The blankets from the bed are tangled in a ball around him, burying his arms and legs. Burying his head.

Annoyed, she kicks the bundle of blankets with her foot. “Come on, Coop. Get up. You’ve been asleep all day.” She kicks him harder. She puts a foot on his stomach and presses hard enough to be annoying. Cooper wiggles in his blanket and muffles something, but she can’t make it out so she kneels down, straddling his hips, and pulls the blanket off his head.

“Come on, sleepyhead,” she starts to say, but the words never finish coming out. Instead, they are caught in her throat. Cooper’s baby blue eyes, wide and unseeing, filled with lint from the blankets and dirt off the floor because he’s stopped blinking them and doesn’t care if something gets in them anymore. Cooper is staring back up at her with a face both pale and cold, his jaw chomping the air. Cooper, dead and gone. In his place, a mindless eating carcass, too dim to understand how to get out from under the blankets he’s tangled himself up in. Too dim to realize his eyes are full of dirt. Too dim to see the woman he loves as anything more than meat.

Denise screams and she keeps screaming. She throws herself backward, away from Cooper, away from horror, and in the process, her flailing limbs untangle Cooper’s blankets. Pressing on his stomach forces air out of his lungs, and he makes a half-breathing sound that sounds inhuman when it comes through his chomping teeth, like the sound of a cat growling and chewing meat.

He’s chewing his tongue
, Denise thinks.
How long has been laying there eating himself?

Cooper is fresh and limber. He moves as fast as his muscles will possibly allow him. He leaps to his feet and tendons in his legs bulge at the effort. He moves as fast as he’s ever moved in his life. He moves toward Denise, arms raised, mouth biting air, biting a shredded and bleeding thing that used to be his tongue.

She gets to her feet just as he reaches her, and she cowers from his embrace. He sprints and charges into her body, and the force drives them both through the doorway and out into the hall where they roll together in a tangle, like two snakes mating.

Cooper is grabbing at her face with hands like cold iron, and his face comes down to meet hers as if to give her a kiss but his jaw speeds up as it closes in on her lips, and every breath Denise takes comes in hot and fast and goes out with a hoarse wail. There’s a pounding on the floor and Denise looks away from Cooper just long enough to see Bretta coming down the hall, and the look of sick horror on her face as she realizes what’s happening. In the living room, behind her, Scott has turned and is looking over the back of the couch at her, but he doesn’t seem bothered at all. And then Cooper, Cooper’s face is her whole world, the way it was when they first started dating. He takes up every part of her vision, and she can hear his teeth banging together and his cold flesh brushes her lips and she screams one more time.

Chapter 38

Bretta is charging down the hall toward Cooper and Denise. She has no idea what she’s going to do when she gets there, only that she needs to move from one point in the house to another as fast as she can. Sprinting full out doesn’t seem to be fast enough and everything is happening in slow motion. At this pace, teleportation wouldn’t be fast enough.

Denise is screaming with Cooper in her face, and for one awful moment they lock eyes, and Bretta can only think of Nancy and her fluttering eye and Allen and his sweating, heaving form swinging a baseball bat. It’s happening again, only now there’s no Cooper and there’s no Scott to help. Now she’s dealing with it alone.

She throws herself on Cooper, wrapping her arms around his neck and her thighs around his back. Her ankles touch and lock at his groin, the balls of her feet are wet with Cooper’s piss and whatever else has collected down there. She arches her back, stretching Cooper out, careful to keep her arms beneath his chin.

The cold of his body drags the heat from her core and causes a chill that seems to get inside her, like laying on a waterbed with no heater. Cooper lunges at Denise and Bretta takes the chance to wrench him backwards. The pair of them stack like a rainbow of hot and cold flesh before rolling onto their side.

Denise can’t stop screaming, and it’s a small gift when her voice gives out and she starts barking at them both. She pulls herself free of Cooper’s limbs and scuttles backward like a crab away from the fight. Her eyes are wide and crazy and they roam the hall looking for escape. Bretta yells at her to grab something, but with Cooper thrashing above her, she’s unable to get little more than half words and stutters out.

The only noise Cooper makes is the sound of his jaws pumping and his teeth banging off each other, and at first, he seems unaware that Bretta is behind him. His only focus is on Denise, who has scuttled back past Scott’s room and is still going.

Cooper stops reaching for her, and he cranks his head to the side. Bretta can see one dead eye buried at the corner of his socket, trying desperately to see further behind, to get a look at Bretta. Cooper isn’t smart enough to go for the arms or the legs hooked around the front of his torso. This is where a living Cooper would have had her unravelled in a heartbeat. He’s a lot stronger than she is, but he’s a mindless thing now.

His only strategy is to try and turn around in Bretta’s arms so he can attack her from the front. Even as mindless as he is, he nearly slithers around on her immediately, forcing Bretta to lock down her ankles and loop her arm under Cooper’s armpit and clamp her hands together.

Cooper rolls them both onto Bretta’s back, and then over onto their sides again. He rolls until he’s on his stomach and then pops himself up with his arms. For a moment, it seems as though he’s going to be able to get to his feet with Bretta clinging to his back, but the weight of her body cinched against him is too off-balancing.

Instead, he does a half-somersault from his side. He’s close enough to the wall that he slams her into it with enough force to crack the drywall and drive the air from her lungs.

And while she’s gasping, her hands slip, and Cooper rolls again and nearly catches her with a swipe of his arm.

Jammed into the corner where the floor meets the wall, Bretta sees she isn’t going anywhere again. But Cooper might. He is using the fact she is now stuck in place as a lever to force his body to turn and to scrape her off. And it’s working. His shoulder is now pressed painfully into her breast, and with each bump and slither, that shoulder is getting closer to the middle of her chest.

She calls out again for help, more focused this time, forming proper words. Down the hall, Denise has all but disappeared. Bretta can see her feet shaking as she sobs in the living room but the rest of her is around the corner and out of view.

Scott’s head is no longer visible over the back of the couch, but the rest of his body is not visible either, and it occurs to Bretta he might be hiding from the noise. Or he could be so stoned he’s incapable of reacting to the situation. She calls Denise’s name and gets no answer but continued sobs.

But the house is far from filled with the mechanical eating noises Cooper makes or the desperate wailing of Denise in the living room. It is shuddering under the barrage of drumbeats from outside. Dozens of dead people thrust their fists at the walls as they try to get into the house. There’s a sharp crack in the air as a board on the window in Cooper’s room fails under the assault, and there’s another crack and the screeching sound of nails being forced out of wood in Scott’s room and Bretta thinks,
Oh God, they’re getting in
.

But it’s the least of her worries at the moment because Cooper is still determined to scrape her off his back.

She could try forcing Cooper to attack her from the other side, the side currently on the floor, but she would have to get out of the corner and roll him onto his other side. She’s not strong enough, and she’s beginning to tire. Cooper, on the other hand, isn’t going to slow down unless he ruptures a tendon or separates a muscle.

And he still kind of smells like the cologne he put on in the pharmacy, and it makes Bretta’s heart hurt to breathe it in.

Instead of trying to force Cooper to change directions, she changes her tactic. He tries to spin in her arms again, and this time, Bretta twists with him, sliding her back down the wall hard. The result is that she uses Cooper’s own momentum to lift him toward the wall, and she slides under him. When he tries to reach her again, she rolls with his movement one more time and suddenly it’s Cooper jammed up against the wall and Bretta on the outside.

Of course, Cooper doesn’t have anything to hold on to, and he immediately plants his hands and feet against the wall and flings them against the other side of the hall, once more trapping Bretta between his body and the wall.

The result is unintentional and unplanned, and, with his limited amount of thought, self-defeating. He’s not smart enough to realize he needs to change directions to get at Bretta, and scrambles against the floor to get under her.

Bretta’s waiting for him to do just that. She throws her shoulder up over Cooper’s side and he rolls again, on his face one more time, only now Bretta lets go of his arm and his throat and grabs two solid handfuls of his hair. Straddling him, she plants her knees and leans forward, jamming Cooper’s face into the floor at the same time.

Hard, as much forces as she can muster. And there’s a wet smack and Cooper’s whole body shudders as head and hardwood collide, and Cooper’s nose is broken and he’s missing teeth but he’s still thrashing, and he nearly bucks Bretta off again, but she’s ready for the move and she relaxes her thighs long enough to ride out Cooper’s thrashing.

And then she clunks his head into the floor again, and again, and she does it five or six times before the blood really flows. It runs from Cooper’s crushed orbital socket and what’s left of his nose is a wet lump of fat on his face, and his cheeks are sunk and it’s running dark and sticky from his ears, but at least now he’s just twitching instead of thrashing.

Bretta pulls herself off him. She’s slick with sweat and is sobbing herself, and when she stands up, Scott is there beside her, holding a lit candle in one hand and a can of spray paint in the other. The candle is one of those big, fat blue funeral candles that self-contain their wax by being too wide to melt through.

“They’re going to be in the house in a minute,” he says, his voice calm and even and his eyes huge and black from the drugs.

She stands beside him, her breath heaving her chest, wiping sweat from her face with the sleeve of her shirt, and looking at Cooper as he twitches on the floor. She just needs a moment of calm before the next tidal wave of horror comes crashing through the windows and the front door, but from the sound of the boards crashing around them and the thunder of fists on the walls, she’s not sure she can even have that.

“We should probably go downstairs,” Scott says, and begins spraying a thick black circle in the middle of Cooper’s back and filling the air with a chemical stink. Then he tips the candle so the wax runs out on Cooper’s back also. The loss of fuel lengthens the wick by an inch, which quickly blackens with flame. He places the candle on Cooper’s back and the paint becomes a sputtering blue and yellow distraction for the next several minutes.

“You’re going to burn the house down,” Bretta says.

“I don’t think so. If you’re right about little fires, I think they’re going to have the fire out before it spreads past Cooper.”

He’s talking about his best friend,
Bretta thinks.
They grew up together.
Whatever the medicine was in that green pill, it has cured Scott’s desire for suicide and the idea that he’s already dead. But it seems to have emotionally killed him off as well.

He ends up like a zombie no matter what we do
, she thinks, and her lips curl with the onset of more tears. “What about Denise?” she asks, and her voice warbles.

“She’s dead already,” Scott replies. He’s already moving toward the bottom of the staircase where the basement door sits closed.

Bretta hears what Scott says, but those words don’t make sense, because she can hear Denise crying under the drumming and she can see her feet still showing at the end of the hall. She’s obviously not dead. Scott must be too stoned to notice. Bretta comes to the end of the hall and looks down at Denise, who doesn’t look up because all of her energy and attention is focused on an ugly bite wound in her hand. A wound which is already necrotizing with infection. She can see angry red lines tracing the veins in her arm.

She reaches down and grabs Denise by the shoulder, and the girl looks up at her.

“We’re going,” Bretta says softly. “Downstairs.”

“I can’t,” Denise simpers. “Look what happened.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Bretta says, and pulls Denise to her feet.

“Is Cooper dead?”

“The basement,” Bretta says. She spots the bags of pills on the table in the kitchen and collects them, along with the syringes and the rig Cooper made for her. There’s still about a quarter of a bottle of isopropyl alcohol Bretta’s been using to sterilize everything and she takes that.

As she collects the items, it occurs to her that this tool that they’re going to use to save Scott is probably the last thing Cooper did in the world before he overdosed on whatever it was he took in his room. She’ll have to tell Scott that later, if there’s time.

The boards over the kitchen window are partially collapsed, but the window itself is too high for dead people to climb through, and they seem satisfied with reaching in and grabbing at the sink. The door in the living room is bulging under the weight of dead bodies pressed against it. Half the boards are gone, lying on the floor. She grabs those too.

The basement door is open, and Denise is at the top of the stairs. Bretta can hear movement at the back of the house and down the hall, past the broken door and Cooper’s flaming corpse, there is a rough square of sunlight with bodies tumbling through it.

Her view is blocked when a woman who is missing most of her face stands up and takes her first steps into the hall toward Cooper. There’s movement in Scott’s room, too, but she doesn’t stop to see what’s happening in there. She doesn’t have to.

It’s dim in the basement and becomes dimmer when Bretta shuts the door behind her. Scott has already piled up a handful of cinder blocks in the stairway, and they arrange the blocks so the door can’t be opened more than two inches.

“We can use the space to peek out of, if we need to,” he says.

Bretta wants to nail the boards up right away, but he tells her if they make too much noise they’ll attract some attention. “Let them fuss on Cooper for a while. We’ll just be quiet like mice and wait for them to get bored.”

Bretta looks at Denise whimpering in the corner holding her arm. “There’s no time for waiting,” she says.

“She needs to be dealt with,” Scott talks quietly, so as not to disturb Denise.

Bretta nods. “You’re right. She does.”