Living Dead (8 page)

Chapter 13

Cooper and Denise are sitting on the couch in the living room when Bretta reappears from Scott’s room. She puts the first-aid kit on the kitchen table and sits on the arm of the couch beside Denise. Cooper smiles when he sees the way she’s sitting.

“Scott’s mom woulda freaked if she ever saw you perched up there like a shit hawk,” he says. “That’s what she used to say.”

“What’s a shit hawk?” Denise asks, leaning into Cooper so he can put his arm around her. She sits up a moment later, wrinkling her nose. “I forgot, you smell like pee.”

Cooper moves down to the far end of the couch, giving her some room. “Yeah. It’s elementary school all over again.”

“Were you a bed wetter as a kid?” Denise asks.

Cooper shakes his head. “Scott was. When I slept over, his mom made us sleep in the same bed. To shame him, I guess. Hoping he’d piss all over me, and I’d tell everyone at school about it.”

“That’s fucking horrible,” Bretta says.

“So did you tell?” Denise asks.

Cooper smiles. He’s always had the kind of sheepish grin girls find irresistible. It makes him look cute and snuggly at the same time. “Naww. I told her I did it. She fuckin’ hated me for that.”

“You’re a good friend,” Denise says. She leans over and kisses him on the cheek and Cooper grabs her.

“You just kissed my piss cheek,” he says, as Denise fights to escape his hold. She jumps up, rubbing her mouth and pretending to spit, and suddenly they’re both laughing.

“So gross,” Denise says.

“You love it,” Cooper says. “You’re into gross dudes.”

“So are you!” Denise says. She sits back down on the couch and slaps Cooper’s hand when he reaches for her. “Don’t touch me, gross boy-lover.”

Bretta, who has been quietly watching, says, “Scott’s laying on the floor because I couldn’t get him into bed.”

“You want me to help?” Cooper says.

Bretta shakes her head. “If he wants to be there, let him stay there. He’s probably safer on the floor than in the bed anyway.” She pulls her knee up so she can rest her head on it. “We’re pretty much out of medical supplies.”

“We can cut up a sheet or something,” Denise says. “Make bandages.”

“It’s not just that,” Bretta says. She walks over to a reclining chair and sits down. “We need something for Scott before he does this again.”

Cooper sits forward. “You know, he might do it again quietly next time, or in the middle of the night. When nobody can hear him until it’s too late.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Denise says.

Cooper shrugs. “It’s true.”

“He could also do it when you two are huffing paint in the basement,” Bretta says. “You’d be too stoned to fight off all those chompers if they got in the house.”

Denise looks down at the floor and sighs.

“So?” Cooper says.

“So what?” Bretta shoots back.

“So what do you want to do?”

“We need to leave the house.”

Cooper nods. “There’s a pharmacy not too far from here. A big box one. We can reload, then come back and figure out what we’re doing. Enough supplies to keep us going until it gets cold, right? Isn’t that still the plan?”

Denise shakes her head. “It’s suicide to go out there. They’ll turn you into hamburger.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Bretta says. “What about a suit of armour?”

Cooper and Denise look at each other and laugh. “Like in
Lord of the Rings
?” he asks. “Suit up and march out to
Mordor
for drugs and bandages?”

Bretta shakes her head. “We have a lot of duct tape. I dunno, we could make something that covers our arms and legs, and our heads.”

“I’m not sure about that one,” Denise says. “Sorry, Brett. It sounds dangerous.”

“Think about it,” Bretta says. “All we need is something to stop fingernails and teeth. Honestly, I think like, a roll of duct tape and a winter jacket might be able to do it. It’s not like they have knives or guns, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s not just one set of teeth,” Cooper says. “It could be a dozen at a time. And hands pulling that shit off your arms and legs so they can get you. What happens when you fall down and suddenly there’s 20 of those things on you?”

“We stay light, and we just make sure there’s nothing to grab,” Bretta says. “If you fall down, I’ll scrape them off you.”

“You’re just gonna walk all the way down to the pharmacy and back?” Denise asks. “How many dead people are out there? We don’t even know how many are in the neighbourhood. They could all come looking for you.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Bretta says. “If we could grab a vehicle, we could drive down there.”

“The roads are jammed,” Denise says. “And you might not find a car out there. Or you might, but it’ll be full of dead people. Or it’ll be out of gas. Or there’s a bunch of other things that could happen, and they’re all bad. Sorry, Brett. This is a horrible idea.”

Bretta stands up and crosses her arms. “It’s the only thing we can do,” she says. “Scott’s not going to live through another one of those bouts, and Cooper said it already. What happens if he tries that again when we’re asleep?”

“Or stoned,” Cooper says.

Denise is shaking her head. “He can be tied up. Once he’s all healed up, we can hold out until winter, just like we planned. We can’t go out there.”

“No,” Cooper says quietly. “Scott can’t.”

“Scott can’t,” Bretta says, echoing him.

“What, so the rest of us can?” Denise asks. “You guys are nuts.” She’s pulled both her legs up and now she looks like she’s hiding behind her knees. She’s practically curled up into a little ball. “You can’t go out there.”

“No,” Cooper says. He’s frowning and rubbing the back of his head. He’s looking down at the floor, lost in though. “We have to go,” he says, finally, and Bretta nods.

“No, we don’t!” Denise says. “We don’t have to do anything! I’m sorry, Bretta, but we can’t commit suicide because Scott has a deathwish. I’m sorry, we can’t.”

Bretta scowls.

Cooper snarls at Denise. “Shut your goddamned mouth for a minute, will you? You don’t know what’s going on.”

“Excuse me?” Denise flushes with anger, like a cuttlefish.

“Just shut up for a second,” Cooper says. “Scott’s not suicidal. He’s sick. And we need to help him, because he’s family.”

Denise is teary-eyed, and she presses the palms of her hands into her eyes. She stands up quickly and comes close to falling over the coffee table. Cooper reaches out to help her and she shoos his hands away like hungry chickens. “Fine,” she says. “You want to run off and get killed, go ahead!”

“Don’t be like that,” Cooper says. He reaches for her, but Denise is done with the conversation. She slaps his hand again, and this time she means it. She turns and pushes past Bretta, and then runs down the hallway toward the room she and Cooper share. Her sobs follow behind her, until they’re cut short by the slamming of her bedroom door.

After she’s gone, Bretta and Cooper look at each other from opposite sides of the living room. Both standing, arms crossed. Finally, Cooper shrugs. “So?”

“Armour,” Bretta says. “And a car.”

“Lucky for you, I might know where to get one,” Cooper says.

“That’s good because I was just going to wander up and down the street until we found one with the keys in it.”

“No need,” Cooper says. “Walter Something has a cherry-red Ford pick-up sitting in his garage he’s not using. We just have to go down and get it.”

“Keys?” Bretta says.

“He’s out there in his pajamas,” says Cooper. “That means they’re probably in the house still.”

“He is, isn’t he?” She sits on the couch, and for the first time in forever, she smiles.

Cooper sits beside her. “Now. Tell me about this armour.”

Chapter 14

There’s a knothole in one of the boards covering the window in the room Cooper and Denise share that provides a view of the back yard, and for the past few days, flies have been coming into the room through it. What they could possibly want inside, Denise has no idea; it seems this new world of dead things and rotting meat should be tailor-made for flies. She thinks maybe, like people, flies are greedy things at heart; that they look at their bounty and still want whatever is on the other side of the knothole. Because they don’t have it is exactly why they want it. In the old world, Denise knew the feeling.

Sometimes Denise looks out the knothole. On days when there are dead people wandering around on the grass, she watches them. Other days, when the yard is empty, she stares at the fence separating the property from the rest of the world.

When she’s done crying about Cooper and Bretta and their stupid, suicidal mission to go find meds for Scott, she wipes her tears from her cheeks and puts her eye to the hole.

Beyond the fence is a back alley, and beyond that, a large dry pond the city disguised as a green space. The area is like an expansive, grass-filled pit, six feet deep. As large as a couple city blocks. There’s playground equipment near the middle of the park, an Imaginarium comprised almost entirely of climbing toys. Pirate ships, monkey bars, and a rockets, all attached by wooden bridges and climbing wires. Cooper said it was really there so that if you got swept away in the water, you’d have something to climb up on until help arrived.

“That’s why there’s no swings,” he said.

None of that is visible from the knothole in the middle of the window. She sees the fence, and she sees grass. Somewhere out of her line of sight are Allen and Nancy, mostly eaten and birthing new generations of flies every hour. Some of these flies look at the bounty flesh and aren’t satisfied. Those are the ones who seek out the knothole and end up inside the house.

And inside, they like nothing more than to buzz around your head and land on your bare skin. Cooper said flies do it because they’re born annoying. When they rub their hands together, they’re plotting something sinister, like how they can best time it to fly into your mouth a second before you sneeze. Flies, he has told her, want nothing more than to get inside you and control you from within. They’re nature’s mind control experts.

It’s classic pothead philosophy, really, and while she knows Cooper doesn’t really believe it, he likes to talk about it. He likes to sort out all the little details. And now that there’s nothing to do but look for ways to get high and lay around in the dark fucking or sleeping, he has the entire thing mapped out. He’s even begun twisting the idea that flies are responsible for the plague of dead people.

Denise knows the real reason flies behave the way they do. She finished her biology classes all the way up to academics in high school. She knows flies have taste receptors on their feet, for example, and the reason they are constantly cleaning themselves is so those receptors can stay clear of dust. The behavior is called preening, like what a duck does to spread oil on its feathers.

When they land on people, they’re looking for food. And they’re looking for a place to shit, lay eggs and spit on something putrid or sweet so they can suck it up with their long, padded tongue. Look close enough at that tongue, and it kind of looks like a swollen vagina with black barbs of hair coming out of it. She told Cooper that, one time, and he asked if it could still be considered a blowjob if your vagina was on your face. At the time, Denise said no, but looking at the flies in the room, rubbing their robber-hands together and stamping their tongue on everything they can reach, she’s not so sure.

The irony of the fly is that it spends its days denying who it really is. It spends its days trying to look like someone who wasn’t born in shit. Flies put on airs, like they’re better than other insects. And they land on people because they love the taste of the oils and salt a human body produces in miniscule quantities.

The spray cans have been moved up into the bedroom, because Denise doesn’t like spiders and the basement is full of them. She takes a can of black paint and sprays it on a fly as it is coming out of the knothole. Tiny, aerosol droplets of night wash over the insect. Unable to draw breath through the chemical shield, it drops out of the hole, already dead.

There’s no holding your breath if you’re a fly. You’re either taking in air or you’re dead. The paint is sticky, so the head of the fly becomes glued to the wood just below the knothole. It gets stuck headfirst. It falls upside down and its legs are curled and twitching, facing up toward the ceiling like how bugs die in cartoons.

In the old world, Denise knew a lot of people who put on airs. Some of them were like flies. They had parents who drank or were poor or were dead. They had an image of the people they wanted to be, and they became them. And like the paint fly with its head glued to a board, she imagined they were all dead now, too. It all seemed pointless now, but at the time, they probably thought it meant something to be seen as big and important. The paint fly probably thought it was good to be clean, right up until it got a blast of black paint in the eyes and thick poison coated its fly lungs.

As she’s looking at the dead paint fly, another fly lands on it, vagina-tongue padding the paint fly’s torso. Seeming to like what it tastes, the second fly ruts the corpse.

Denise watches them for a moment longer than she thinks is appropriate, and then she blasts the second fly with paint as well. It manages to get airborne but lands on the floor a few feet away from the window. Its wings are stuck to the floor, and it buzzes in unfiltered insect rage.

Then she grabs one of Cooper’s socks off the floor and tosses it into the bottom of a paint bag. She sprays a thick coat of black paint into the bottom of the bag, coating the sock until it’s dripping in paint. She puts the bag to her mouth and breathes deep, counting to 10 before she exhales.

The second huff brings on a wave of drunken dizziness. She puts her eye up to the knothole and looks out at the yard, huffing paint, and staring at the multicolour wonderland beyond the barrier of the window. The yard disappears for an instant when a dead person shuffles past the window.

She listens to it fall on its knees. She hears the soft, wet smack of meat being chewed by a hungry mouth. Listening to her friends being eaten, Denise thinks about how dead people are sometimes better. They are simple and honest when it comes to what they’re all about. They don’t put on airs, like flies. Like the people in her old life. They see what they need and they go after it.

Looking at it this way, through the haze of chemical drunkenness, she can see the attraction. She can understand why Scott would want to be one of them. At least the waiting and the worrying would be gone. Trying to survive would be as simple as wandering around until someone got too noisy for their own good. At that point, they’d have to be eaten. And dead people get to go outside, something Denise hasn’t done in months.

She makes up her mind, then. If Bretta and Cooper don’t come back, Denise isn’t going to put on airs. She’s going to give up the pretentiousness of being alive. She’s going to stop worrying about what the dead people think of her. She’s going to open the door and let them in. She’s going to go outside. And Scott?

Well, if they don’t come back, Scott will finally get his wish.