Chapter 29
Cooper trips stepping out of the door and falls to his knees instantly.
Bretta turns. She grabs him by the shoulder to help him up, and he yelps and tries to club her with his broom handle, bouncing it loudly off her helmet.
“Stop it!” she barks. They haven’t gone two feet and everything is already going to hell. Cooper’s always been kind of a useful idiot. This time, his idiocy is going to get them both killed. But even as anger stabs behind her eyes, she sees it’s really anger at herself, for coming up with such a stupid, half-baked plan and risking their lives.
Cooper climbs the wooden rod so that he’s standing again, apologising and reaching for Bretta at the same time.
“Bretta?” he’s reaching timidly about for her, like something you’d do as a kid in one of those stupid church-sponsored haunted houses where they made you feel grapes and cold spaghetti while blindfolded. “I need help. Please?”
Dead people are moving toward them, and Bretta shoves one down only to have two more take its place.
She grabs Cooper by the arm. “Follow me.” She tries to say it calmly, but it comes out as a grunting yell anyway, and across the parking lot dead people turn at the sound.
“We’re running,” she says. “
Now
.”
Bretta wheels and fires herself toward the truck. There are more of them out here than she could see, and now they have a target and they are converging on the source of the noise. Two stumbling fools covered in carpet and half-sized hockey gear.
Cooper isn’t moving fast enough for Bretta to run, and she constantly bites the urge to spring toward the truck and leave him to fend for himself. When she pulls on him, he comes off-balanced. He trips over his own feet and collides with a half-sprawled woman in a black business suit doing a bear-walk toward them. Her ribcage shattered to the point where she can no longer stand properly, she meanders on all fours with her head cocked to the side, allowing her to navigate with a single eye.
Cooper howls when he goes down, and the bear-walking woman is on him, scrabbling up his torso to get at his face. Cooper, screaming, is bringing more of the dead people toward them every moment.
He has three of them on him now. Two men have joined the woman, both with reeking wet flesh and carrying with them a horde of flies and beetles in orbit.
Bretta shoves an old man to the ground and stomps on his face, hard enough for it to crack and tear. Another woman tries to grab her and is turned and pushed into more dead people, where they fall on themselves in a tangle.
Cooper is still screaming and Bretta can hear him, but the sound of his voice is making her think only of how she could turn and run to the truck right now and Cooper would continue getting their attention until she could peel out of the parking lot.
“Bretta!” he screams, his hand reaching up from a dog pile of dead people. There are five on him now. More than she can handle.
“Help me!” he cries unevenly, because they are stepping on his guts trying to get at him.
Bretta screams and throws her pry bar at them without thinking about it. It careens off the back of a pouty-looking kid missing his scalp from about the middle of his forehead. The dead continue to pile on. From what Bretta can see, they haven’t yet found a way into his armour, but they are making headway. His arms and legs are peppered with bloody crescent moons, and long, crooked scratch marks. In her heart, seeing all those dead people, Bretta sees the truth of it. She can’t save him like this. As if sensing that his fate is being decided, Cooper screams the word
NO!
over and over like a petulant child.
She turns away from Cooper’s screams. Toward the truck. There are more dead people in front of her still, but their numbers are thinner here. Cooper is the target. Cooper, the big noisemaker, with his bad eyes and very good lungs, in spite of the paint and poison he’s been leeching into them. He is attracting them by twos and threes. Bretta sidesteps the ones in the way and grabs for the door handle on the passenger side. Moments later, she’s climbing in behind the wheel of the truck. The keys are still in the ignition. It fires on the first try, and the when she flicks the lights on she sees dozens more dead people all the way out to the street, turning to see what this new, interesting noise is, and where these Night Hawk high beams are coming from. The lights give Bretta enough room to see the pile of dead people where Cooper is.
Looking out towards him makes her skin feel sick to be in, and she instead turns her attention forward. Eyes front, just like in grade school.
Dead people are pounding on the hood of the truck. They are moving along the sides of it, trying to find a way into it through simple elimination. That’s all dead people really do, in a way. They just find different ways to eliminate. They eliminate the need for walls by smashing them with their fists until they hit a door or a window. They eliminate the need for burials by getting up and walking away. And they eliminate lives by taking the best parts of the people they get their hands on.
But they aren’t the only ones who exist by process of elimination.
Bretta is getting pretty good at eliminating things herself.
She drops the truck into reverse and throttles the gas. The machine shoots backward thirty feet in a heartbeat, driving dead people into the concrete before it. Ripping them open like water balloons filled with stew. Headlights trained on the road, Bretta hits the gear into drive, and this time, the truck rockets forward. But instead of heading out on to the road, she cranks the wheel of the truck and lights up the pharmacy. The pile of dead people trying to get into Cooper’s armour has grown to maybe fifteen. Bretta lays on the horn as she comes at the pile.
There’s little enough chance Cooper has come out of this without a fatal bite. And if he did, there’s an equally good chance she’s about to plow him under the grill of the truck.
But maybe Coop is together enough to realize what’s about to come at him. Maybe he’s together enough to flatten himself out so the truck can go right over top of him and scrape the dead people off like peanut butter. If he doesn’t, well, there isn’t much that can be done about it now. Because it’s happening.
Bretta lays on the horn as the truck hurtles toward the dog pile. It occurs to her at the last moment she doesn’t need to gun the engine before hitting the mass of writhing flesh to get results. But by then, it’s far too late.
Human bodies are fairly soft. There’s not much weight to them. Not when compared to the business end of a truck. And Bretta really isn’t going that fast. But these bodies have been degrading for a while. Months, in some cases. They’re much softer than a living body.
Two heads come up onto the hood immediately after impact. They hit with enough force to crack the windshield on driver’s side. They leave big wet, red impacts on the glass. At least three bodies cartwheel into the side of the building. One actually disappears into the black hole of a front door. The two on either side of the door hit and crumple immediately. One leaves a not unsubstantial amount of skull and scalp tissue in the steel of the roll shutters protecting the windows.
Bretta backs the truck up ten feet to better survey the damage. The passenger-side light has been smashed. There is a lot of blood and meat on the ground, and two wet tire marks with bodies and pieces of bodies scattered about. Some of them are moving still. Most are not. In the middle of those tire marks is Cooper, writhing on the ground and clutching his arm. He’s covered in blood, but it’s impossible to tell whose blood it is. There’s too much of it.
Bretta parks the truck and rushes to his side. He screams when she grabs his leg and tries to kick her, and she yells at him to calm down. It takes him a moment to regain part of his drunken senses. He lies on his side, his breath huffing, coming with enough force to trip his vocal cords into creating a high, sickly whine.
“What happened?” he breathes. He keeps asking even as Bretta is telling him. Until she comes to the part with the truck and the cartwheels.
“You… you ran me over?” he asks.
“Not all the way over,” Bretta says. She scans the lot and bares her teeth at the dead people converging on the area. The truck is still running. There is a lot of bone sticking out of the shattered grill.
“My arm hurts,” Cooper says. He tries to hold it up, and his forearm has a perfect tread mark running across it. His hand has already turned purple.
Bretta grabs him by the shoulder. “We’ll fix it up. But if you don’t get up right now, I might have to run you over again.”
He laughs at the suggestion. The mop handle is on the ground near him, warped by the tires of the truck, but still in one piece. Bretta scoops it up and helps Cooper to his feet. Quickly now, as company is coming. She helps him to the truck, urging him on. There are scrape marks and bites all over his jersey.
There’s an ugly scuff mark on his helmet; a near miss from one of the truck tires. He climbs in like a turtle, slow and sore, until Bretta plants a hand on his ass and gives him a good shove. She folds his legs up behind him and slams the passenger side door.
Then she crosses over behind the truck and has to jump into the back to avoid dead people coming around the side. She drops down to the ground beside her door and throws it open, slamming it shut with dead people grabbing at the handle and punching the window.
Bretta turns the truck toward the road and pins it, knocking them aside. The truck lunges over the curb onto the road, and Bretta points it back the way they came. Back toward home. Back toward Scott and Denise.
Cooper is clutching his arm. “Can you take a look at this?”
She flicks on an interior light, but the arm is still wrapped in carpet and duct tape. A good sign. “I can’t see anything.”
When Cooper starts to remove the armour, she puts a hand on his. “Just leave it. We’ll take a look at it when we get home and have more space.”
What she doesn’t say is that she’s not sure if that armour is the only thing holding the arm together or not. And she doesn’t say she’s not eager to find out.
Chapter 30
The road back to the house seems twice as far in the dark, in part because Bretta can’t always remember the good spots to maneuver the truck, and several times she has to backtrack after coming to a dead end. Yards are usually the best place to drive, but they’re also dangerous because she can’t see what’s hiding in the long grass.
Worse, the injection of bones into the grill of the truck has resulted in multiple punctures of the radiator, and after the first whoosh of steam under the hood when she jumps a curb to get around a car sitting sideways on the road, the temperature gauge begins a slow but steady climb toward red.
The vents in the dash fill the cab with the hot, sweet smell of burning antifreeze, and Cooper takes a deep breath and coughs. “That’s not good.”
Steam from antifreeze tends to stick to your skin, and the moisture hangs in your sinuses. When the temperature gauge finally pushes into red, a bell begins to chime, and Cooper sneers.
“How far from home are we?” he asks, looking out the window but not actually seeing anything.
Bretta doesn’t respond. Truth is, she’s not sure. They’re on a different road than they came down on, something she missed when she peeled out of the parking lot. She had her mind on other things. Like the state of Cooper’s arm, for one. The fact there was a few dozen people milling around hoping to eat them, for another. And that really was a big one.
Ultimately, it’s the only one that matters, because everything else is just kind of bullshit, comparatively speaking. When you live in a place where hundreds of thousands of dead people would love nothing more than to serve you up for a snack, you quickly learn not to sweat the small stuff. Like when your husband’s idiot friends blind themselves drinking shit they shouldn’t be drinking, for example.
“Where are we?” Cooper asks again, rocking back and forth holding his arm.
“I’m not really sure.”
The warning bells informing the driver their vehicle is badly overheating are paired with a small buzzer as the needle on the temperature gauge hits about 90 percent, and when the engine knocks, it makes a sound like some monstrous fish slapping its tail.
“We have to be close, right?”
“Do me a favour and shut up, okay?” Bretta stops herself when she realizes she just answered a question answered with another question. A classic Scott thing to do. Also, treating Cooper like a simpering child is totally a Scott thing to do.
What
isn’t
a Scott thing to do is living among the dead so long you begin to get confused about who the dead and the living are. No matter what Cooper says about Scott and his wonky childhood, that little gem is a brand new one. It might have been in the fine print of their marriage agreement when she signed it, but she was too happy the day she signed it to notice.
Might have been a subsection of a subsection: the man of your dreams has a time bomb in his skull, and the timer has a loose wire. Jiggle it just right, and boom. It’s Oklahoma City, baby.
Forced to go around another mess of smashed cars on the road, Bretta takes the truck up into tall grass on another yard. This time, when she hits the gas pedal, there’s a flash of light beneath the vehicle and smoke pours out from under the sides.
Coming out of the yard the rearview mirror shows a half-dozen little candlelight fires lit by the heat under the truck. Inside the cab, sweat is rolling down the back of her helmet and along her spine. With the window open, she can catch the occasional cold breath of air, but she feels like she’s sitting in a bucket surrounded by hot sand. Heat is emanating from every piece of metal in the vehicle, it seems, and despite the vents being off, she can feel it leaking from there the most.
Peeling off the grass, the engine bangs twice more and the engine dies. Moments later, the truck rolls to a stop.
“We there?” The tone in Cooper’s voice says he knows the answer to his own question.
“I have no idea,” she says. And she means it. In this new, black world where electric streetlights are a thing of the past, the darkness is complete. There are clouds covering the starlight and there’s no moon shining through. The light on the truck shows the street as a long grey line filled with debris and moving shadows.
Cooper leans forward in his seat. His eyes scan the dark, but it’s futility manifesting as hope, and it’s pointless. “Are they out there?”
“Oh, they’re out there.” Bretta’s got her hand on the keys. She knows she needs to shut the lights off, because the light will bring dead people running. But killing the lights will also leave them sitting in the dark, alone and lost. She wishes they had visited Scott’s parents more often when they were alive. She never spent much time in the neighbourhood. If she’d even just gone for a walk or a drive one of those days, she might have a better sense of where they needed to go. Those visits were mechanical, though. Perfunctory.
Scott put his time in, but he had spent just about as much time as he could handle with his folks before he turned eighteen. Bretta had taken her lead from her husband and molded her own relationship with them around his. They went to the family dinners, made small talk, and watched the ticking clock for a reasonable amount of time to pass so they could politely beg off a second dessert and inform everyone they had a busy night ahead. They really had to get going. Some nights, Bretta had some pressing thing to attend to. Other nights, it was something Scott was doing.
And then they’d get back into Scott’s car and quietly drive away. Those times, the car acted like a bariatric chamber, and Bretta spent more time thinking about her decompress than she paid attention to the streets in the neighbourhood.
An older man stumbles out of the shadows cast by the truck’s lone headlight, attracted by the noise and by the light thrown out from the vehicle. The man moves toward the truck with a clumsy shuffle step. The source of the shuffle is one of his legs bending halfway down the shin like a misplaced knee pointed toward his other leg; a break which has been held together by the makeshift tourniquet applied by his tight jeans. He bumps against the grill of the truck and responds by slamming his fists onto the hood. The effect is a loud, hollow beat that rings out into the black air of night.
“Holy shit!” Cooper jumps when Bretta grabs his arm.
“There’s just one,” Bretta says in a low voice.
“One’s not bad,” Cooper says. “You can take one.”
Bretta nods, thinking she can take one, sure. But there’s more out there. She can see the blacker-than black outlines they cast in the dark, and their shadows move in the truck lights. But the sound of the truck dying and the wet fists of the man standing in front of them will bring them in, looking for a meal. There’s no telling how many of them are coming from behind, following the route they took to get here, following the stink of the engine as it gasped and sputtered and burned.
The man slides around the side of the truck, his fists making snail trails on the hood that steam from the heat of the engine. The man is beyond feeling his hands burn. But then he turns and slides off the hood of the truck and stumbles past Cooper’s door, snapping his jaw and reaching spasming fingers for something away from them. Something behind the truck.
Cooper, oblivious, sees nothing. But he continues to stare out the front window as though he can. “What’s happening?”
“Shut up for a second,” Bretta says. She watches the man shuffle down the length of the truck, and he tips badly to one side when he steps away from the vehicle. From behind, his head is a shimmering wound. The man reaches the sidewalk and trips over the curb, going down hard and making no attempt to catch himself. His skull bounces off pavement loud enough for Bretta to hear it, a sort of hollow
clunk
that would have made her cringe once upon a time.
The man uses his hands to pull himself up into a crawling position, but when he tries to use his broken leg to stand, it finally gives out on him and folds rudely back on itself. The break causes him to fall again, and this time he doesn’t bother trying to stand. Beyond him, the grassfire caused by the heat of the truck’s engine is fluttering and growing by the second; it has already created an ugly blackened patch more than 10 feet across. The man reaches the edge of the grass on his hands and knees and plunges forward toward the fire.
“What’s happening?” Cooper asks. “Brett?”
“You really need to see this,” Bretta replies.
Cooper snorts. “Fuck. Real funny.”
In the grass, the man is grabbing clumps of burning grass without hesitation, lunging at the yellow streaks, he buries his face in flames. His arms smoulder and catch fire, and he bites at himself trying to put the fire out. Only he isn’t actually trying to put the fire out. He’s doing something else. And suddenly what they saw on Deerfoot Trail makes sense. And all those burned corpses, is this how it happened? The Asian man outside Walter’s house? The dozens of blackened faces they’ve seen over the past few months?
“Holy shit,” Bretta says. “He’s eating it.”
“Eating what?” Cooper asks, cranking his head from side to side. “What is he eating?”
“Fire,” she replies.
The man is having poor luck eating the flames, but the fire is not having any issue eating him. His shirt and the meat beneath are becoming oily smoke as the flames chug his rancid, fatty flesh.
“Yeah, they do that,” Cooper says with a sigh.
“Wait. You knew they did this? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Cooper shakes his head. “I didn’t really think it mattered.” He holds his hand out and waves dismissively. “That’s how you get them to eat bodies.”
“Jesus Christ. Definitely news you can use.” Bretta grabs Cooper’s bag. Sure enough, there are six bottles of isopropyl alcohol among a small mountain of loose pills, mouthwash, deodorant, tampons, and syringes.
“Tampons, Cooper?” she asks, grabbing two of the alcohol bottles.
“Piss off,” he says. “Denise.”
“You’re a real sweetie.” Bretta pops open the driver’s side door and sliding off the seat. “Hold on, I’ll be right back. Then you’re gonna tell me where we are.”
“Hey come back!” Cooper yells at the sound of the door opening. “What are you doing?”
Bretta is already around the back of the truck, and his words are dead air.
There’s a thick stink of smoke and burnt flesh, and after popping the lid of the first bottle, Bretta pours alcohol into the grass. She flicks the last half of the second bottle toward the fire, causing spurts of light to erupt in the air. Fire knows food by taste, and soon enough, the flames have spread and stabilized around the fuel. Heading back to the cab on Cooper’s side and pulls open the door.
“Get out.”
Cooper half-slides, half-falls out of the vehicle, and Bretta grabs him to keep from falling down. He teeters, reeking of spearmint, and she keeps her hand on him until he’s steady.
“Okay,” he says. “What’s around us?”
Nothing
, is what Bretta wants to say, but instead she peers about and begins describing what she sees. A green house. Two blue cars. A ‘T’ intersection with a big brown house off to one side with an attached double garage. It’s hard to make out details in the dark. The light from the fire wavers and makes monsters out of shadows.
Cooper knows none of these things. He stares off into space, squinting in the dark, like if he tries hard enough his eyes will begin working again and everything will be fine. But they don’t, and it isn’t. Finally, frustrated, Bretta gives him a shove against the side of the truck, hard enough he nearly goes down.
“Anything, Cooper? Jesus Christ!” she turns and looks at the fire behind them. There are about a half-dozen dead people in the flames now, quietly immolating themselves. Trying to capture the flames and eat them. A woman with fire for hair has a handful of burning grass and is jamming it into her mouth. Another woman with no shirt and a red bra, her arms scraped and bleeding, is busy lapping at the flames like a dog. The fire has grown enough to make up details of the house, boarded and silent. Bretta can read the numbers on it and the one beside it, closer to where they are standing.
“This house is 4872,” she says. “That one is 4874. Anything?”
Cooper shakes his head drunkenly, and Bretta growls at him. But then Cooper stops shaking his head. “Wait,” he says. “4872. We’re a couple blocks away. We need to go east. No. West. Towards the school.”
“You sure about this?”
Scott pauses before answering. “Yah. I’m sure.”
“You need to be sure like nothing else.” Bretta pushes him against the truck again, grabbing him by the collar so she can speak slowly and deliberately into his face. “If we get wandering around out here, we’re dead. And then Scott and Denise are dead, too, because they’re not going to survive long on their own. This is all for nothing if you meant
east
and said
west
.”
“No, for sure. I’m good. It’s
wesht
.”
“Well all right then,” Bretta says.