Chapter 4
The house is still quiet the next morning, as it is most mornings. Bretta is already up. She’s burning the legs off a chair in the fireplace and boiling water for coffee. Scott’s mom dragged the chair home from a garage sale.
The coffee is dehydrated crystals that you add to hot water and stir. The first couple times any of them used it, they put too much coffee in the water and the pots were undrinkable. Bretta’s got a system now, and usually hits the right amount without too much measuring. Good coffee is more about colour and smell than math. They don’t have any powdered creamer left, so it’s been going down black for weeks.
She pours a cup and checks on Scott, even though she’s already done that. He’s still out of it, breathing deep and even, on his back with his head turned. Bretta’s been thinking about putting him on his side in case he vomits, but it’s a lot of work and she doesn’t want to disturb him. It would be nice if he’d open his eyes and look at her. Just to make sure he’s still there.
Denise is up before Cooper. She is careful again when she steps around Nancy’s body. She heads for the Tylenol first, and the coffee second.
“Rough night?” Bretta asks when she sees Denise.
Denise is standing in the kitchen, downing pills with her coffee and holding her head with a free hand. Her eyes are watery and her face looks wane and chapped. Her nostrils are red, like she’s got a cold coming on. She smells like she’s been drinking nail polish remover.
“Horrible night.” Denise shakes her head and winces. “My head is killing me.”
“You look sick,” Bretta says.
“I might be coming down with a cold or something.”
A few minutes later, Cooper comes out of his room, and he looks worse than Denise does.
“It must be contagious,” Bretta says.
Denise stares into the fire instead of answering.
Cooper sits down on the couch beside Bretta and puts a steaming cup to his lips. “It smells like a good batch.”
When Bretta doesn’t respond, he puts the cup down on the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I was a dick last night. I was freaked out and stressed out, and I shouldn’t have said any of that.”
He waves his hand when he speaks, to show Bretta he doesn’t just mean the fight in the kitchen, but everything. “Of course we’ll wait and see what happens. There’s nothing else to do. Scott’s my boy, Brett. That makes you family.”
Bretta nods. “Thanks.”
Cooper opens his arms. “We still friends?”
Bretta gives him a half-hearted hug, and Cooper immediately wraps his arms around her.
Denise smiles from her spot on the loveseat. “Good. Everyone loves each other again.”
Cooper kisses the top of Bretta’s head. “Of course we do. One big, happy family.”
“Why do you guys smell like nail polish remover?” Bretta asks.
Scott grabs his coffee and pulls away from her. “Must be the rubbing alcohol from last night. It got spilled all over the place.”
He gets up and moves over beside Denise, who is looking like she’s about to throw up. Between sips, he says, “We gotta clean up the house today, I guess.”
“I guess,” Bretta says.
After breakfast, Cooper heads upstairs to where Allen is laying in a pool of his own blood and some of Nancy’s. The blood is turning brown and creating a film across the floor. Being around the body makes his stomach tense, and he has to sit down for a minute to collect his thoughts.
One of the most drastic changes he’s noticed since dead people started coming back is how easy it is to be around corpses. Something that would have caused him to flip out a year ago isn’t really an issue anymore.
Hell, Allen’s still fresh. He’s not seething with maggots. He’s not surrounded by wasps and flies. He isn’t falling apart, either. It won’t be as bad getting him out of here.
The callousness of the situation would have also disturbed him once, a million years ago, but when he looks down at Allen and his broken skull, he can remind himself he isn’t looking at a person anymore. This is just meat.
And Allen didn’t come back, so he’s actually one of the lucky ones. It isn’t much of a eulogy, but it’ll have to do. There’s still Nancy to deal with.
Cooper puts a blanket on the floor and spreads it out and then he takes a sheet and spreads that out beside Allen’s body. He walks carefully, avoiding the pools of sticky blood. The red pools remind him of the way barbecue sauce glazes on meat over a hot grill; shiny, like lacquer almost. The body gives off a ripe-meat smell that isn’t completely unpleasant, and Cooper breathes through his nose.
He rolls Allen over onto the sheet and then uses the corners of the sheet to pull the body onto the blanket. The blanket doesn’t cooperate; it bunches up around Allen’s crooked shoulders to show off the goofy, two-directional look on his dead face.
Finally, Cooper gives up. He uses the blanket to cover Allen’s body and then rolls the corpse until it’s covered, and the two ends of the blanket are facing up. He drags Allen out into the hall. There is still a blood trail, but it’s faint, and the blood only pools when Cooper stops to adjust his grip.
None of the windows on the second floor are barricaded for obvious reasons. The dead aren’t tall enough to reach them. A lot of the time, you can stick your head out overtop of them and they don’t even notice. They’d only been in the house a few days when Scott realized the dead people weren’t looking up at the windows. The ones that did usually fell over on their backs like rotting turtles.
“They’re just like dogs,” Denise said at the time. “Dogs don’t look up either.”
Bretta and Scott laughed.
Cooper called bullshit. “Dogs can look up at your face just fine. They stare at your face.”
“Yeah but they can’t look up with their eyes,” Denise replied. “They have to tilt their heads. These people are like that. They can’t look up without moving their heads.”
“Maybe it has something to do with their fucked up heads,” said Allen.” Their ligaments or something.”
“Maybe they’re too dumb to look up,” Cooper said.
“You’re dumb,” Denise said. “And you can look up just fine.” Everybody laughed then.
Cooper is thinking about it when the corner of the blanket slips from his hand. Now he’s looking down at Allen’s broken face, with one eye staring straight down so only half of the colour is showing, and the other staring back up at Cooper. The sheet inside the blanket is covered in blood, and globs are sticking to it, like somebody spit wads of blood and snot into the back of Allen’s head.
“Jesus Christ,” Cooper says, and he can’t look anymore. He covers Allen’s face and pushes him against the wall, just beneath the window. Getting him outside is going to be a two-man job.
Downstairs, Bretta and Denise have been avoiding Nancy’s body and focusing on tidying instead. Bretta is working the kitchen, and Denise is busy in the living room. It’s a familiar routine they fall into without too much thought. An easy habit. A lot of times when they clean, they like to talk about all the things they miss in the world now that every street is bloated with dead people. They miss movies. They miss walking around outside. They miss electricity and everything that comes with it; from light bulbs to cold refrigerators to hot showers. Bretta misses Stampeders games in the summer and spicy hot dogs you could only seem to get at the stadium. Denise misses hot showers and deodorant.
They talk about what life might be like outside Calgary, in the Great Plains or in the foothills where there aren’t many people and lots of space. Bretta talks about her life before she came to the city, and how her family farmed out past Vulcan. She talks about the boredom of the country.
“Our neighbour was this weird guy who raised pigs,” she says. “He didn’t get along with my dad, so we didn’t see too much of them. That was it for miles, though. So boring you want to die.”
Denise looks down the hall at Nancy’s body. And suddenly she isn’t in the mood for reminiscing. “We should have gotten out when we had the chance.”
Bretta has the first-aid kit in her hands. “Hey, what did you guys do with the rubbing alcohol last night?”
Denise doesn’t respond.
“Is that why Cooper smells weird?”
Denise looks off Nancy’s body but not at Bretta. At the floor instead. “He had a rough night.”
“You guys know that shit will kill you, right?” Bretta’s got the hand with the first-aid kit on her hip, and she’s holding a rolled-up bandage in her other hand. It looks like a big sterile snowball. “It’ll make you go blind I think.”
“We didn’t drink it,” Denise lies.
“So what did you do?”
“We didn’t drink it.”
Bretta is shaking her head and muttering about being crazy, and Denise needs to be away from her for a bit, so she heads downstairs to the basement. The door is white with a brass knob and there’s a skeleton face on it, a remnant of Scott’s Halloween days that earned the right to be a year-round decoration.
Scott’s parents were late taking their Halloween ornaments down one year, and the skull just sort of hung around. Like a family photo of the inside of a relative’s head, bones and veins and blue eyes without lids leering out at the world. The skeleton head is not scary, because it’s for kids. But in a way, it’s still scary. Like how everything made for children is vaguely sinister.
Denise is careful in the basement, because there isn’t much light and there’s a lot to trip over. The air is dusty and stale. It’s one big room down here, with a fuse box in one corner and a tankless water system under the stairs. The furnace is new too. Scott’s parents didn’t want to be dicking around with old appliances when they retired, so they spent a bunch of money upgrading their house two years before the first outbreaks caused everybody to turtle in their homes or head for the hills. Those few left who weren’t aimlessly wandering around looking for a warm meal.
Cooper has said a few times there’s water in the lines if they ever get hard up; they can cut the PEX and copper tubes feeding everything and get at it.
The middle of the room is their prize, and one of the reasons they’ve never left Scott’s parents’ house. Crates of dried and canned goods are stacked six feet high. Along the far wall are bottles of water, the big 18.9 litre ones designed to go in water machines like the one they have upstairs. The bottles are two deep. There’s over 50 of them still. Above them, on four shelves, are more canned goods, and potted and preserved food Scott’s mom made. Jams and pickles mostly, but some of the jars are filled with brined hams or whole chickens in jars with dill sprigs and chunks of lemon. The hams have cloves and garlic in them, and they taste a little like cinnamon. The sight of meat as pickles doesn’t sit well with her, but the food is good enough. It’s better than the canned stuff.
Scott’s mom was a hoarder. That’s why they all came here, and why they’ve stayed as long as they have. Scott’s mom saw the end coming and filled her basement with supplies. Of course, by the time the six of them made it to the house, his parents were already shambling around in the yard. It was hard to tell who went first. Cooper says it looked like Scott’s mom bit three of his dad’s fingers off and he bled out. It’s something they’ve talked about a few times in bed, but never around Bretta and Scott.
Something had also happened to the second upstairs bedroom, the one Nancy and Allen weren’t using, because one wall is burned black.
When they first got to the house, there was still soda powder from the fire extinguisher all over the floor. There was a large blood stain on the floor, too, which soaked up the powder to make a sort of bloody pancake.
Denise doesn’t come down to the basement often because she hates bugs, and there are spiders down here. She’s tried to get the food moved upstairs, but nobody wants to do that.
They may need to barricade themselves in the basement if dead people ever get in the house in enough numbers that they can’t be dealt with.
Denise thinks that’s the case, that they should move everything up to the second floor and booby trap the stairs. She saw
Night of the Living Dead
and everybody died. That girl ate her parents in the basement. She doesn’t want that to be any of them. More than anything, she wishes the dead people outside were those sterile zombies in the original movie. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it’s also much more horrible.
And of course, nobody wanted to do that, because that would mean sharing rooms, and there wasn’t enough space. There is now, with Allen and Nancy gone, but the choice is either sleeping where your friends were killed or sleeping in a room that reeks like a stinky old firepit and burned plastic.
Denise goes around the mountain of food to the shelves on the back wall, picking out some cans of beans and single-serving cups of instant rice. In the back corner, near the water, there’s a milk crate with a brown work jacket over it. She checks the coat for spiders and then pushes it to the side. Not because she’s looking for anything, but because it’s there and she’s curious. And also because there are no bodies down here in the cool and the dark, and it’s the only place in the house that doesn’t smell like blood or charred wood right now.
The milk crate is filled with different colours of spray paint, the thick stuff designed to be primer and paint in the same can. Weather resistant, all-purpose stuff. Blue and red and black and white.