Living Dead (21 page)

Chapter 39

“Is it going to hurt much?” Denise asks, when she looks up and sees Bretta and Scott staring down at her.

“Yes,” Scott says.

“Scott, shut up,” Bretta says, scowling. Then she squats down in front of Denise and puts a hand over hers. “It might hurt, Denny. But it has to be done.”

Denise sniffs and looks down at her hand, with its ugly half-moon the shape of Cooper’s teeth. “If you don’t do something, I’m gonna come back and fuck you both up.”

“Yes,” Scott says again.

“How are you going to do it?”

Bretta holds up the last of the isopropyl and two syringes. “With these,” she says.

They sit Denise in an old kitchen chair Scott pulls from a back room. Bretta is talking quietly to the girl, calming her, trying to keep her heart rate down. Scott ties a length of rope around Denise’s arm, and then, as a precaution, they bind Denise to the chair.

“We’re just being careful,” Bretta says, by way of apology.

“I get it,” Denise says. “It’s a good idea.”

“This whole thing is a terrible idea,” Scott says.

With the ropes secured and the veins and arteries in Denise’s damaged arm bulging, Scott pulls Bretta aside. “Just how do you expect to pull this little miracle off?”

“I’m going to flush everything out with alcohol. Kill off whatever is turning her skin black.”

“Okay,” he says. “And what about the blood poisoning in her vein?”

“Same thing,” Bretta says.

“And if this doesn’t work?”

“If it doesn’t work,” Bretta says, “I’ll think of something else.”

They swab a point just below the tie off on Denise’s bicep, and Bretta inserts one of the syringes. She asks Scott to hold it steady and then she takes the second syringe and fills it with water and isopropyl. She swabs another spot in the palm of Denise’s hand, well below the bite wound. She inserts the needle into an artery and gives Denise one last smile before they begin. “It’s going to be alright,” she says, and Denise nods.

“When I plunge, you suck,” she says to Scott.

“I thought you guys were going to bash my head in when you told me I needed to be taken care of,” Denise says, and then she chuckles at the idea, like her paranoia and naivety are things to be joked about and laughed at.

“So did I,” says Scott, and that ends the laughing.

“You think this is going to work?” Denise says.

Bretta doesn’t answer. Instead, she locks her gaze on Scott and counts backward from five. Then she pushes the plunger down and ejects the alcohol and water into Denise’s arm.

A moment later, Scott begins pulling on his syringe, just as the muscles on Denise’s arms tighten and she sucks a breath between her teeth.

“Oh,” she says. “It hurts.
It hurrrrts
.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Scott says. “I can’t get it all.”

“Just keep doing it.” Bretta pulls more solution into her syringe and stabs it into Denise’s hand again. Denise pulls away, but slowly, her will is battling her unconscious reaction to the pain. Her fingers curl, the nails turning pink and then violet. The second syringe Scott pulls from her arm looks like cranberry juice, and Denise’s eyes flutter. Her breath comes in short gasps, and Scott says, “She’s about to pass out.”

“Good,” Bretta says. “One more.”

Denise tries to pull her hand away, but Bretta’s talons grip the flesh around her wrist. She fills the syringe with water this time and makes another injection point. Her hand is leaking water and blood from half a dozen spots now, and the third time Scott draws fluid from Denise’s hand, it’s mostly clear.

“That’s it.” He drops Denise’s arm and stands back. Bretta checks the wounds one more time, spurting small amounts of isopropyl and water into Cooper’s teeth marks. Then she pulls the rope free of Denise’s arm. She checks the girl’s eyes, but they are bloodshot and dark. Her breath comes slow and shallow and smells like rotten fruit and nail polish remover. Bretta looks up at Scott and he shrugs.

“It got through the rope,” he says. “You shot her full of that shit.”

Bretta moves to a sitting position on Denise’s thighs. Denise is unconscious. Her head lolls to one side, and Bretta splashes hot tears on the girl’s shirt.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she says, hugging Denise with both arms. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Nothing, really.” Scott is staring up at the ceiling. The sound of dragging footsteps has filled the house, but down here, the pounding on the outside walls of the house are subdued. “I thought you were going to smash her skull in.”

“Yeah well, sorry to disappoint you.” Bretta grabs an old coat and wraps Denise in it, and then sits beside her and cradles the girl’s head in her lap.

“If she turns, she might bite you before you even realize she’s dead,” Scott says.

“Fuck you,” Bretta says.

“Okay,” Scott says, and is quiet for a while.

Later, while sitting across from Bretta and Denise, he says, “You know, if she gets thirsty, we can always blast her in the ass with one of these water bottles.”

Bretta says nothing. She throws a baleful gaze across the room, willing him to stop talking.

Scott stares back with black pupils that threaten to spill out into the whites of his eyes. And then he smiles. It takes Bretta a long time to look away. Above, the shuffle step of dead people exploring the house continues, for what seems like forever.

Epilogue

It’s late November cold, and everything is covered in frost and ice. There are snow drifts a foot high in many of the yards, but below the snow is ice from the last Chinook. The wind, sledding down the Rocky Mountains to the west, is howling by the time it reaches the edge of the city. But this isn’t Chinook weather, not yet. This wind brings with it moisture and the nip of the northern winds following close behind. Snow.

The whole world is a gray sky that seems to touch the ground. There is no other noise to be heard. Everything dead is still, and everything still is silent. There are no drum beats.

And then, off the front door, the crunch of a foot stepping into snow. The first time that sound has been heard since the start of winter, but the snow remembers how to make it still, and the boot knows how to make it.

It’s Bretta, wrapped in as many layers as she can manage, and wearing a coat Scott’s mother once bought at the Salvation Army and didn’t try on because she was embarrassed about the prospect of it not fitting with other people watching. She has a child’s backpack loaded with food and water and other small supplies, candles and matches mostly, but a makeshift first-aid kit and other necessities are in there, too.

Scott comes next, bundled up like Bretta and carrying two ski poles to help navigate the snow. He has a backpack too, full-sized, filled with more of the same that Bretta is carrying.

Denise comes last, bundled, but only carrying a pillowcase of items. Denise sways on the uneven ground and starts to catch herself, but the hand Cooper tried to eat a long time ago doesn’t work so well anymore. She misses catching herself before hitting the front steps. She tumbles over, and Scott grabs her at the last minute, smiling.

“Here,” he says, handing over one of the ski poles.

The dead stand and sit and lay under the snow, but they are hard and cold and they don’t move when they hear feet crunching in the snow. There are close to a hundred pooled around the house, and the ones that froze inside were stacked in a pile by the side of the stairs. A blanket was thrown over the pile so the house didn’t look more like a Nazi death camp than it already was. Cooper is in that pile, at the bottom, but he’s not going to get up when the Chinook comes through and warms everything up.

Bretta walks up to a woman in a flannel shirt and bloody green panties and stares into her frozen face, searching for signs of movement and finding none.

“See?” Scott says. “We’re gonna be fine. With a bulldozer, we could probably clean this place right up before spring.”

Bretta laughs at the thought, but it isn’t true. Come the next warm Chinook wind, the dead will come out of their winter sleep like clockwork monsters, staggering around and finding new positions to stand in before the next freeze comes and everything comes to a halt once more. This is their new lifecycle, as long as winter lasts. This is their new normal.

The three of them are leaving the city. Bretta doesn’t want to be around for one more thaw cycle. Scott needs to get away from the dead people, even if that just means going somewhere that that will have fewer of them wandering around. He has mostly good days now, but bad days still come sometimes when he thinks too much about Allen or Cooper. He’s alive; he accepts this version of reality. For Bretta, it’s enough for now.

And Denise is alive too, through some miracle, though she’s a little worse for wear. She grieved for Cooper in the basement and in the dark, while Bretta and Scott explored the new version of their lives together. She never got back full use of her hand, and her balance is bad. She falls over things that she maybe shouldn’t. She’s slower than she used to be, and Bretta thinks the isopropyl sitting in her brain probably had a lot to do with that. Scott thinks it might have been a weakened effect of the virus acting like a kind of biological lobotomy. There’s no way to know for sure.

Maybe that will fix itself one day. Maybe not. For now, she’s actually happier than Bretta has ever seen her, and maybe that’s a good thing. Her new normal is brighter than it was, even with everything moving a little slower.

Bretta stares into the dead girl’s face, her features frozen and locked in ice. You can get used to anything if you are exposed to it long enough, she thinks. Anything can become your normal.

This is my normal
. And compared the past few months, it’s tame. The three of them have come through dark places and crawled out on the other side to find snow and bitter southern Alberta cold.

Even then, the weather will change. But the three of them will be long gone.

“You ready?” Denise asks.

“Yeah,” Bretta says. She steps past the frozen girl in the flannel shirt. And if she notices the girl’s eye move to follow her as she passes, Bretta doesn’t say anything.

Eventually, the sound of snow crunching under feet dies away until there’s just the soft hum of the wind and the cold. And the girl with the flannel shirt continues to stare out the side of her eye, off in the direction the three of them went, until the ice and the cold wind locks the eye in place.

The End

Read on for a free sample of White Flag Of The Dead

1

“Ugh.”

“How’s that?”

“Ugh.”

“Come on caveman, your son is calling you.”  My wife of six years poked me in the ribs and pushed my feet off the bed.  In the background, soft music played through the monitor, indicating that Jake, our son, was awake and had activated the toy.

“I’m too tired to play daddy today.  Get someone else.” I groaned, rolling over and burying my head in my pillows.

“Move it or we’ll never play at making another one,” she threatened.

“Empty threat. I’m too good for any woman to give up cold turkey.” 

Ellie grabbed my pillows. “Fine.  How about it’s your turn since I got up at 2?”

I rolled out of bed and lay on the floor.  “I’m nothing if not fair.”

The words “Have fun” floated over the bed and down to my ears as I started my morning routine of pushups and sit-ups.  I barely felt them anymore, since I had been doing them since I was a kid.  However, habits are habits, and it woke me up in the mornings.

I walked down the dark hall, feeling very much like a zombie.  I am sure I looked it, too.  But things needed to be done, and as the wife said, it was my turn. Five a.m. was waaaay to early for anything, let alone getting up from a very sound sleep.  Jake, my five-month old, was wiggly and wanting to move out of his crib.  He was just learning to sit on his own, although he couldn’t push himself to a sitting position yet.  He rolled all over creation, and dragged himself along in an attempt to crawl.  We thought he was the greatest thing, being new parents, but even we were surprised at how happy he was all the time, and what an easy baby he was, if judging by the grousing my brother did about his kids.

“Hey, buddy.” I said stepping over to his crib.  Jacob had activated his plastic fishbowl, which had alerted us to his state of wakefulness.  Jake looked at me and smiled through his binky, swinging his arms in excitement.  How these little guys remained so cheerful all the time was a mystery to me.  If I could bottle it, I would be rich.

I picked him up and headed downstairs to make a bottle for him, since Ellie was not breast-feeding.  She had tried, but it just seemed to not be in the cards, so here we were, spending lots of money on formula.  I didn’t blame Ellie, how could it be her fault? She felt bad enough as it was, since she believed she was not getting that special “bonding time” that so many people say is so important.  On the plus side, it allowed both of us to have some special time with the little guy, so we enjoyed it for what it was.

Downstairs I made him a bottle and a small bowl of oatmeal cereal.  The doctor had said he could start it, so we got some, and he really seemed to enjoy it.  I tasted it once and it reminded me strongly of glue, but I didn’t let Jake know that.  I turned on the television to see what news there could be.  I generally watched Fox for news, simply because it was slightly harder to spot the bias.  Ellie liked the local stuff and once in a blue moon, I turned on CNN.  Most of my news came from the Internet, but it was good background noise.

“…incoming reports remain sketchy, but there seems to be some sort of outbreak in New York City on the lower east side.  We go to Hannah Graves at the scene of Angel of Mercy Hospital.  Hannah, what can you tell us?” I glanced at the screen, but Jake decided to make a grab for the food bowl, so I lost the reporter’s comments.

“Okay, thanks, Hannah.  We’re going to our interview with Dr. Rafik Narwal, from the Center for Disease Control. Dr. Narwal, what can you tell us? Are we looking at a pandemic?”

That got my attention.  I picked Jake up to give him the rest of his bottle and stood in front of the television.  Dr. Narwal looked bad, as if he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep lately.

“Nothing of the sort.  We have taken precautions, like we normally do, when we have a situation where an infected person comes down with symptoms we haven’t seen before in this country.  In Africa, this sort of thing is routine and would not even be a story.”  Something in his manner was not sitting right with me.  I had spent the last four years of my life as an administrator in public schools, and I knew when someone was lying to me, or when they were trying to cover up something.  Right now, Dr. Narwal was lying, and worse, he seemed scared.  When the CDC spokesman looked scared, check your antibiotic supply because things were not good.  I started to think about what I had read recently, where estimates of the death toll from a pandemic avian flu outbreak, could reach 150 million.  I started to pay very close attention

“What kind of symptoms, so we will know what to look for?”  Darla the commentator asked.  I called her Darla because I didn’t know her name and she looked like one, anyway. 

Dr. Narwal looked nervous.  “The symptoms are relatively flu like, with profuse vomiting, diarrhea, sweating and salivating.  If anyone comes down with these symptoms after being infected, it is a very good idea to isolate them, as they are very contagious.”

“Is this a new disease?”

“All reports indicate we have not seen this strain of virus before, so yes.”

“Where did this begin?” Why people cared about this I wasn’t sure, but maybe it gave them some sort of relief blaming someone else.

Dr Narwal explained. “One of our colleagues was doing research in a remote village in the Congo Basin.  Nothing out of the ordinary there, many of our diseases and cures come from largely unexplored regions like the Congo and the Amazon.  Dr. Roberto Enillo, was researching a new virus outbreak and he discovered this new disease. We are currently running tests as to what kind of virus this is, what the incubation rate is, its survival rate in the open, what kills it, and what feeds it.

I noticed he used only the past tense when talking about Dr. Enillo.

“What can we tell people to do?” Darla asked, leaning forward, looking concerned for the camera.  I felt her concern, and appreciated the glimpse down her shirt. 

Dr. Narwal relaxed a bit, as this was familiar ground. “People should not panic.  If a relative comes down with the symptoms, isolate them and call the authorities.  If you feel you are sick, go to a hospital or clinic and they will take care of you.” Something was ticking in the back of my mind, but I didn’t pay close attention as I knelt down to change a dirty diaper.  . Jakey was finished with his bottle and gave me a satisfactory belch to complete his morning routine.  I laid him on the floor and smiled at him, which got a full smile and arm flapping in response.  What you don’t know about the world, buddy. I thought.

“In world news, England mobilizes its Territorial Army for a possible containment operation near Wales.  Details are sketchy at this point, but there appears to be rumors of some sort of patient uprising in a local hospital.  Further details as reports come in.”

“Okay, thanks, Hannah, in other news…”

I turned off the news as my wife came down, yawning and stretching.  “Anything on the news?”

“Something about a new virus going around that seems to be hitting hard in a lot of places.”,” I said, placing a few toys about for Jake to play with while I got my breakfast.

“Really? Anything I need to know about?”  Ellie stayed home with Jake three days a week, after taking a year off from full time work.  We did the math and realized that she would be working just for day care for Jake, so what was the point?  She worked as a cardiac nurse for a hospital in the city, so she generally worked the shifts no one else wanted, Saturdays being one of them.

“Just keep an eye out for flu-like symptoms, and call the authorities if anyone has been infected.  They didn’t say anything about transmission, but that it was very contagious.”,” I replied.

“Any reports of outbreaks around here?”  Ellie asked, her eyebrows rising.

“Nothing on the local news, but I am sure things will get out as needed, information wise.”,” I assured her.  The Internet eliminated information dissemination by the media, everyone had a camera, video recorder, or some combination, which allowed them to post immediately exactly what was happening.  You Tube was a great source of information, but it was better to watch with the sound off, as the posters tended to think they were trained cameramen.

“All right.  We’ll stay close to home, but I need to go to the grocery store. Jakey is running low on food.  We are starting him on level two foods this week.”  Ellie seemed pretty excited.  “He’s getting to be such a big boy.”

I grinned, “Takes after his daddy.”

“Right.  Nice fishing for compliments.”  Ellie walked over to rescue Jake, who had managed to drag himself over to the vent and got his sleeper button stuck.

I smiled and got myself breakfast, thinking about what I had heard on the radio.  That old feeling was ticking in the back of my head, and for once, I decided not to ignore it.

“Hey, babe?” I said.

Ellie looked up from Jake. “What?”

“When you go shopping, could you pick up some extra bottled water?  I kind of want to ease back on my pop intake.”

Ellie shrugged. “Sure whatever. Anything else?”

I thought for a minute.  “D and AA batteries.  I think Jake’s fishbowl is sounding weak, and his musical dragon is not so musical.”

“Okay.”

I went back to my breakfast, and thought about things before I went upstairs to get ready to go to work.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was going to be a lot more to this virus, and as I put on my shirt and tied my tie, I decided that prudence was the better side of caution.  I reached into my closet and opened the small safe I had hidden behind my Chicago Bears jersey.  I pulled out my Walther PPK, and checked to make sure it was fully loaded and a round was chambered.  . I took it to the side of the bed where I had a thick book hollowed out to accept the little pistol.  I placed the book on my nightstand, and hoped that everything would be all right.