Chapter 17
Bretta cuts strips from the carpet long enough to make circles she can fit her arms through. She cuts them wide enough for one to cover her arm from her armpit to just above her elbow. Two of them cover her forearm from elbow to wrist. She cuts strips for her stomach and for her back, where her flesh will be exposed below her shoulder pads. Her legs are going to be covered by hockey shorts and shin guards. She has a pair of running shoes, and since they have no protection on them, she’ll just have to be careful to keep her feet away from the mouths of any dead people they come across.
She takes the Bees jersey, flips it inside out, and uses duct tape to secure the carpet strips in place. The result is a stiff-but-manageable shirt that leaves her about eighty-five per cent covered. It’s not one hundred, but it will have to be close enough to work.
She looks over at Cooper’s jersey, the colour negative of the one she’s wearing, and thinks Cooper should be out here fixing it himself. Cooper also promised he wouldn’t get high, but he seems long on promises and short on accountability these days.
She wants to leave his jersey empty to teach him a lesson, to do his own damned work, but she knows she’s going to be cutting more strips and taping them into the shirt. In the end, it really isn’t about Cooper being a shit head. It’s about helping Scott get better, so when the weather turns cold, he’ll be able to survive their trip out of the city. And for that, Bretta will continue to overlook how useless his friends have become, and how their drug spirals are making everyone’s lives more difficult.
So if she’s all alone dealing with a house full of zombies while dead people are pounding on the walls outside, so be it. As long as someone has a level head to deal with the bullshit, they just might be all right. And if the time comes when she and Scott are ready to leave, and Cooper and Denise can’t handle it, well, they can stay here and huff paint until they die.
So she cuts more strips in the carpet, and while she’s doing that, she’s listening to the shambling corpses outside and thinking about getting around them when it’s time to leave. They’ll have to be dealt with before anybody opens the door, otherwise the living room will be just like Scott’s window. They’ll pile in the second there’s a gap big enough to slide through, and they’ll all have to either be put down, or she will have to come up with another way to incapacitate them.
Behind her, from the hall, she hears feet sliding on the floor, but she doesn’t look up until she hears Scott’s voice ask what she’s doing. When she looks up at him, she’s shocked by how much weight he’s lost the past few days. She’s always been a bad judge of weight on men, because of how different they carry it than women do, but she can guess it’s been more than 30 pounds. He’s got black circles under his eyes. There’s blood on his face, and blood on his shirt and arms. He has splatters of blood like brown paint on his jeans, and some of them have been washed down by urine.
“What are you doing?” she says, trying to sound neutral. She’s angry, though, and she breathes fire through her mouth in an attempt to keep herself from snapping at him.
“Thought I’d get up,” he says. “Laying down is as good as standing. You?”
Bretta grabs the jersey she has lined with tape for herself, the one suited to fit her body. She stands up and slides it over her head. “Should be good enough to keep their teeth out of me,” she says.
“You’re going outside.” He ignores the chance to say something nice in favour of saying something important.
Bretta pulls the jersey off, careful not to pull off any of the carpet strips. She folds it in half and hangs it over the arm of the couch.
“We need supplies.”
“The basement is full of supplies.”
“Other supplies.”
“What other supplies?”
Bretta gashes into a chunk of carpet. “Did you know there was hardwood under this carpet?”
“No,” he says. “Why are you changing the subject?”
“We’re short on first-aid stuff. We need alcohol, because Cooper drank it. And we need bandages and antiseptics because you keep pulling yours off.”
“Not that I’m blaming you or anything,” she quickly adds. “It’s just we need to replace what we have.”
“Bullshit.” He picks up the jersey she’s already completed for herself, the suit of armour she’s made to protect herself from probing fingers and chomping teeth. He tests the circles in the arms by giving each a soft squeeze. Then he looks at her, and his voice turns oddly dramatic. “You’re going after it, aren’t you?”
“Pretty much.”
“You think there’s salvation to be had here.” He runs a hand down his chest and across his stomach, and then pulls his hand away with a flourish. “Like there’s something left to save.”
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Bretta says.
Scott shakes his head. He shuffles over to the couch and sits down, pushing aside the jersey. “You don’t get it.”
“I do,” Bretta says. “It’s all in your head.”
“I want you to push that idea right out of your head,” he says. “It’s not going to work. I know you think it will, but it won’t.”
“Cooper said this happened to you before. He said you took drugs and you were fine right up until you had to kill Allen.”
Scott looks down at his hands. He clenches them into fists.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says.
“Don’t turn this into a scene from
Good Will Hunting
,” he says. “I’m not pretty enough to be Matt Damon, and you sure as shit aren’t funny enough to be Robin Williams.”
“He’s not that funny.”
“You don’t know anything about comedy.”
Bretta puts the box cutter in her hand on the floor by her knee. She wants to punch his face in. She won’t though, because he’s sick. No matter how much of an asshole he is, no matter how much he hurts her, she needs to keep reminding herself that he’s sick. He sits there and smiles, and she thinks about how she sounds like every abused girl ever talked about in a movie. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“That’s all right,” he says. “I didn’t come out here to fight.”
“What did you come out here for?”
Scott ignores the question. Instead, he gets up and walks over to the front door. He puts a hand on it, like he’s feeling for a fire on the other side.
“You should all build fancy suits. All of you should go,” he says. “What I said in the bedroom, about being dead. I meant it. Just go and don’t bother coming back. Risking your life for pills is stupid.”
“It’s not just you,” she says. “We really do need supplies if we’re going to hold out until winter. That’s still the plan, isn’t it?”
“For you guys, maybe.” He still has his hand on the door. He puts his forehead against the wood. He spreads his hands out from his body, like he’s lying on the door. “I’m not going anywhere but outside.”
She doesn’t want to argue, so she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she goes back to cutting strips of carpet. She doesn’t want to be goaded into another fight with him. It seems like that’s all he wants.
Instead, she switches directions. “Why don’t you change your clothes? I’ll give you a sponge bath.”
The thought of touching him in his current condition is almost out of the question, but she is sure she can manage if it means getting him out of the pissy clothes he’s wearing.
“I can’t smell anything anymore,” he says. “The bodies out there, the blood, my own waste. None of it.” He turns and looks at her and says, “It’s glorious.”
“At least you’re happy about something.”
Scott frowns, and Bretta goes back to cutting the carpet. Her knuckles are raw from being dragged across the material when the blade cuts in, but she keeps at it. Every once in a while, she does a quick measurement in Cooper’s jersey to see what shape of carpet she needs next. What she doesn’t do is look up at Scott while he sulks. What she doesn’t do is acknowledge him in any way. What she’s just landed is good enough, she thinks, and hopefully he’ll let it drop at that.
He has one more comeback in mind, though. He turns and screams something Bretta doesn’t understand; a selection of syllables connected by stitches pulled tight together. He bangs on the door rapid-fire, until the dead people outside take notice. Once they’ve begun to really hammer the outside of the door, Scott turns around and looks at Bretta again.
“Enjoy your day.” He turns and shuffles back to his room. The door closes with a snap and Bretta thinks,
Dear God, if he goes at the window in there, I’m not going to do a damned thing to stop him.
Outside, the rain of fists on wood continues, unabated, for hours. Bretta doesn’t stop working through any of it.
Chapter 18
Daylight.
It drapes itself over the house like some cruel blanket, taunting Bretta to come outside, begging her to feel warmth on her skin. The blades of grass, the dandelions, the Canadian thistle that has taken over the lawn near the fence. It all seems oblivious that the end of the world has come and gone. For the lawn, people coming back from the dead has been a godsend.
It’s been a boon unheralded in their age. The dead don’t mow the lawn. They don’t lay down swimming pools. They don’t keep dogs that kill with their piss. When they rot, they drop food on the ground and the plants soak it up. The grass has never been this tall before. A summer of undisturbed growth has left it a feral thing, straining to grow every day. Reaching to touch the sun.
Looking at the way the plants outside have responded to the apocalypse, Bretta decides she’s not going to refer to it as the end of the world anymore. The world seems to be doing just fine with dead people in it. If anything, it’s doing better than ever.
Sitting at the upstairs window, looking out at the yard, Bretta tells Cooper about her decision. He’s been pulling cinder blocks out of the basement for the last half hour. She’s sitting back from the glass, because she doesn’t want to see Nancy and Allen down there, carved down to bone, boiling with flies and wasps. There’s a dead guy standing out by the fence she can see. He’s wearing a red hoodie and jeans. He has a black goatee that’s full of what looks like mud, but Cooper thinks might be shit. Cooper’s wrists are bleeding where they’ve been rubbing against the concrete.
“There’s no good way to carry a cinder block,” Cooper says. “They always scrape you.”
He has cinder blocks lined up along the wall, three high now, in five stacks. A wall of 15 blocks. He is moving them by himself as a penance for bailing out on Bretta the night before. For getting high after he said he wouldn’t. His eyes look like toilet water with blood in them, and he’s sweating a lot more than he should be. He’s already taken four aspirin for his headache. He drank them down with purple sports drink. It’s Scott’s cure for hangovers. Apparently, it’s Cooper’s, too, if you can call what happens after getting high on paint a hangover.
“Is that going to be enough?” Bretta asks, looking at the wall of blocks.
Cooper shrugs. “Probably.”
He sits on top of the wall he’s built, pulling sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt.
Bretta can smell his body, onions and tampons, and she’s revolted by it. “You should put some deodorant on.”
“We’re all out,” he says.
She makes a mental note to look for some once they are out of the house. Scott’s parents counted on food, and water, and some basic first aid. They counted on camping equipment, little tin pots and pans, a box of flares, fishing tackle, should they ever feel the need to leave the house. They counted on needing toilet paper, but they never thought of soap, or toothpaste, or deodorant.
“They never thought of turning on each other, or trying to burn the house down, either,” Cooper says, looking at the master bedroom, and the door that always stays shut.
There is a message on Scott’s cell phone from his mother, saying his dad is really not doing well and that there was an accident in their bedroom and a fire started.
“I called 911 and got a busy signal,” she said. She ended the message by telling Scott she loved him and to please come home soon. Then Scott’s dad could be heard in the background screaming, and the message ended.
Something awful happened between when she left that message and when they showed up at the house. But it doesn’t matter now, because the phone is dead. Bretta’s phone is dead, too. It’s sitting in a backpack in her room as part of her bug-out gear.
Bretta steps away from the window. “I’ll trade you places,” she says.
Cooper nods. He grabs a cinder block and sets it beside the window. Then he leans out, his hands braced on the sill. Looking down, he sees his friends, mostly eaten, their flesh black and vibrating with insects. The dead people have mostly taken what they want, but there is still a lot left for the flies. The stringy bits, mostly.
Cooper takes a deep breath.
“Hey, fuckers!” he yells, banging on the side of the house. “Come get some, fuckers!”
Responding to the noise, the dead guy with the shit-mouth turns and stumbles through the long grass until he’s at the back of the house. Oblivious to Allen and Nancy, the shit-mouth guy pounds on the wall. Cooper grabs the cinder block off the floor. He holds it outside the window with both hands. When shit-mouth starts to look up, using the outside wall for support, Cooper plays bombardier and drops the block.
There is a perfect second as the block drops, gaining speed, and shit-mouth doesn’t react to the incoming missile. He stares up at it, hands on the wall, and then there’s a bit of a thud and shit-mouth is on the ground. The force of the block carves a ‘V’ in his forehead, driving his eyes out and smashing his teeth when they snap together. When he drops to the ground, he goes ass-first, sitting down hard and then flopping over on one side. The dome of his skull crushed, his pierced ears are sitting at a weird angle that makes Cooper laugh.
He turns to Bretta. “Bullseye.”
There are more dead people shambling into the back yard, and Cooper readies another block. He whoops at them, daring them to step into range of his concrete bombs. A teenage girl sporting 1980s neon and skinny jeans steps into range next, and when the block hits her, it snaps her neck and her collar bone, but doesn’t smash her head in. Instead, she falls over, her shoulder looking like a torn checkmark. With her spine damaged, she’s unable to do anything but snap at the air and blink and look around.
Walter Something is next, his belly distended from all the meat he pulled off Allen and Nancy’s bellies. There’s a lock of Nancy’s hair hanging from his mouth, and he hasn’t bothered to pull it out. It just hangs there, like half a yellow beard, sticking to his neck with blood for glue. When Cooper hits him with a brick, his skull caves just like the guy with the hoodie. The corner of the block scrapes black flesh and fat from his face, revealing his gums and black teeth. Cooper sees Nancy’s hair bunched up in Walter’s mouth, caught at the back of his throat. Even if he’d stuck around a bit longer, his eating days were over from the look of the traffic jam in there. Of course, a hairball and meat-clog wouldn’t stop him from chewing. Not the way a cinder block stops it, anyway.
Cooper continues to yell and whistle and hurl obscenities at the dead people. He continues to hurl bricks, too. The noise eventually brings Denise from downstairs. Scott comes up too, walking slow, holding himself up against the railing on the stairs and then leaning on the door for support. By the time Cooper is halfway through his stack of cinder blocks, everyone else is standing around quietly watching.
Bretta puts a hand on Scott. “How are you feeling?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the black paint on Denise’s face.
“You guys are huffers now?” Scott asks. Denise responds with a smirk. She moves over to the exterior wall so she can stand beside Cooper.
“We ran out of booze,” Cooper says, looking back at Scott from the window. “Brett didn’t want me drinking all the rubbing alcohol.” When he smiles, his teeth are black and blue. His gums are black.
“You look like crackheads,” Scott says.
Cooper shrugs. “Yeah well, you stink like piss, and you’re crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” Scott says.
Cooper laughs. “Whatever. I’m not going to argue. But for the record, this is just like when you were a kid and spent the summer at loony-camp.”
Scott snarls. He bunches his hands into fists and comes at Cooper. He manages to take a swing before Cooper shoves him down, but his fist glances off Cooper’s shoulder.
“The fuck away from me!” Cooper yells, and then the girls are yelling, trying to get between the two of them before something worse starts. Bretta stands over Scott, but he pushes her out of the way.
She reaches an arm out to help him up and he ignores it. “Leave me alone,” he says with a sour note. “Coop, you can go fuck yourself.”
“Suck it, you pissy bitch,” Cooper says.
Scott turns and stomps down the stairs and into his room. He slams his bedroom door, and when it doesn’t latch shut, he slams it again, harder. Alone in his room, he kicks the door and curses.
“He needs to stay away from me,” Cooper says, pointing at Bretta.
She shakes her head. “Calm down. Everything is fine now.”
Denise is in the corner with her hands on her hip, scowling at Bretta. The two women look at each other for a long moment, but Denise puts her head down when Bretta purses her lips. She rubs Cooper’s back. “You alright?”
“I’m fine,” Cooper says. He grabs a cinder block. There’s only six left now. “Let’s just get this done.”
“Fine by me. You know, the only reason you’re leaving is to help him,” she says. “You’d think he’d be a little more grateful.”
“Oh, piss off, Denny,” Bretta snaps. She turns and heads downstairs. “Coop, can you come down when you’re done?”
“Whatever,” Cooper says.
“Holy bitchy,” Denise says, quietly, though, so only Cooper can hear her.
“Shut up,” Cooper says. He drops a cinder block on a 10-year-old boy wearing a Transformers T-shirt. The brick catches the boy in the back of the head and pins him face first to the ground with a broken neck.
Denise pulls back like she’s been slapped, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she sits on the floor beside Cooper and listens to the sound of cinderblocks hitting dead bodies.
Eventually, Cooper drops the last block. He turns and goes downstairs without saying anything and resists looking at Denise as he leaves. When he’s out of sight, she gives him the finger. And then she picks herself up off the floor and follows him downstairs.