Chapter 11
It’s daytime, and they’re checking the windows and doors on the house for weak spots. The windows are sealed with pressure-treated boards two inches deep and eight inches across and 12 feet long. The yellow kind people once to use as deck flooring. Scott’s dad had stacks of it in the basement he’d bought from Home Depot when his folks were going to finish the basement.
As it turns out, the boards are excellent for keeping out unwanted house guests if they are cut to fit the moldings on the window frames. Scott and Cooper used a couple nails in each side. They started at the bottom and rested the new one on top of the old ones to minimize board spacing. They did a lot of the first windows with a screw gun Scott’s dad kept charged with his tools, and when the battery died and the spares are all used up, they switched to a drywall hammer and the heaviest nails they could find.
They were sitting in an old tobacco can with the lid bolted to the underside of the shelf Scott’s dad kept his tools in. Before they became Scott’s tools. Back when everything said “Randy” on it and meant it.
Boards come loose here and there, and hammering nails into the walls brings the attention of the dead people, who hammer the outside walls in return. Cooper double taps the nails, trying to get the dead people to bang out a code or some kind of reply. He hits the window frames rapidly in succession and waits for a responding flurry, but none come and eventually he gets bored and moves on, checking other windows and making up other games to amuse himself.
Cooper and Denise are both covered in paint still. Bretta can’t look at their blue faces without her stomach wrenching, but she doesn’t say anything. Cooper and Denise don’t talk about it. The three of them barely speak, unless it’s to ask if someone has checked this door or that window. They check the living room with its big windows first, and then they move on to the kitchen. Cooper checks the bedrooms, starting with Scott’s.
The room stinks like old piss. Scott has never looked more sick in his life. He’s pale and wilting. He reminds Cooper of old celery in the fridge. He doesn’t move from the bed, but he looks up when he hears Cooper in the room. “Don’t get too close,” he says. “I’m starting to stink like old meat.”
“That’s not you,” Cooper says. “That’s those fuckers outside. You just stink like piss.”
Scott doesn’t respond to the taunt. He changes the subject. “Why is your face so blue?”
“It’s paint. I spilled it.”
“Why did you spill it on your face?”
Cooper laughs. “I dunno. I wanted to.”
Scott repositions himself so he’s lying on his side. He grimaces when he moves, and does it slowly, like an old woman. Cooper is checking the nails on the window, and he adds another one to the board knocked loose by the dead woman. Neither of them really talks much, but Cooper is half-assed talking to himself about the window, and Scott is rubbing his hand and watching Cooper the way a cat watches a mouse. Finally, he speaks again.
“I don’t know why you bother,” he says. “We’re all dead anyway.”
“Don’t be so fucking dramatic,” Cooper whistles. “Jesus man, you really stink. Why don’t you ask Brett to give you a bath or something?”
“I can’t smell it.” He starts to get up, sucks air through his teeth, and then lays back down again. He moves like the slightest bump or jostle will cause him serious agony.
Cooper shakes his head. “You gotta get your shit together. You’re making Bretta nuts. You’re making us all nuts.”
“Fuck you.” Scott’s gone back to staring at the ceiling. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Mind your own goddamned business.”
Cooper grabs up his tools and turns to go without saying anything. At the door he stops. “You’re gonna get an infection lying in your own filth like that. Sores, from being wet all the time. My grandmother did the same thing at the end. Pissing and shitting into her bedsores. Eventually they took her leg. And then she died.”
Scott laughs. Cooper doesn’t remember the last time he heard that.
“It’s too late,” Scott says. “Take whatever you want. Cut off my head. Doesn’t matter.”
“Nice chatting with you.” Cooper leaves the room flushed and sneering, and when Denise gives him a ‘what’s wrong?’ look in the living room, he just shakes his head. “Scott’s really messed up.”
“Yeah?” Bretta says, comes out of the kitchen with her arms crossed.
“Did you know he’s covered in piss and talking like he’s already dead?” Cooper asks.
Bretta sighs and runs a hand over her ponytail.
“So,” Denise says. “What are we going to do about it?”
Neither one seems to have an answer. There’s a thump at the front door as dead people try to get in. Bretta walks over and puts her hand on the slats of wood blocking the door. They are horizontal across the door frame and crossed in the corners.
When Scott and Cooper were sealing the house, Scott wanted to be sure the doors were extra secure. He was worried about living people trying to break in and take what they had. He had a vision out of some kind of “Mad Max” movie, where roving bands of punks would loot and kill as they saw fit, while the dead people came in behind and cleaned up on easy meals.
But there haven’t been any living people for a while. Occasionally, a vehicle will motor through the neighbourhood, or they’ll hear gunshots and screams, but that’s mostly stopped now. The people here have either left or they’ve adopted the same siege mentality the four of them have adopted. They’re not going anywhere until the weather turns cold.
In winter, the dead would freeze, and Scott said they’d be able to walk by the corpses and leave the city once and for all.
But winter is still months away. Scott doesn’t have months.
“So what do we do?” Denise says.
“Drugs,” Cooper says, and Bretta sucks her teeth.
“I’m not kidding. He needs drugs. He needs anti-depressants, or anti-psychotics or something.” Cooper is nodding his head, and he has Denise nodding hers. “If we can medicate him, we might be able to at least get him out of bed.”
“Yeah, but where the hell do we get any of that stuff?” Bretta asks.
Cooper looks at the door. He’s looking at the way it shakes, just a little, every time the dead people outside bang on it. The shaking causes dust to drop from the ceiling, and the dust in the air is caught by errant beams of sunlight filtering into the room through the gaps in the boards covering the windows. He walks to the window and puts a hand in the beam, letting the tiny dust particles to catch in the fine hair on his wrist.
“We have to go out there,” he says. It’s something they’ve all been thinking but nobody wants to put words to.
“No way,” Denise says.
“No,” Bretta says. “He’s right.”
“We’re safe in here, guys,” Denise says. “Whatever Scott has or he’s going through, he might snap out of it. We don’t know what might happen with him in the next few days. But we all know what’s waiting for us on the other side of that door.”
In response, there’s a quick double thump of meat on wood.
“He’s not getting better,” Bretta says. “He’s getting a lot worse.”
Denise looks down at her nails and then makes a fist. “So what makes us any different from everyone else we’ve seen out there?”
Of course they know what she means. The roving gangs shooting at each other, with crowds of dead people following behind. Following the sound of their panicked voices, the sound of their fear.
“We don’t even have a car,” Denise says. “What makes you think we’d last ten seconds out there before they tear us to bits?”
“Doing nothing isn’t an option,” Bretta says. “He’s going to die.”
“We don’t even know what
it
is!” Denise’s voice is getting louder. Sweat is gleaming along her forehead and around the paint on her jaw.
“No,” Bretta says, her voice soft. “We don’t.” She can’t argue with the logic. While it looks mental, there’s no telling for sure what it is causing Scott to act the way he is. “But doing something is better than nothing. And we can’t just sit around waiting for him to die.”
“You think I want him dead?” Denise asks. “What the fuck?”
Cooper puts her hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her, trying to end a fight before it starts, when there’s a crash in Scott’s room and the sound of Scott screaming.
Just like that the fight is over.
Cooper and Bretta turn and sprint through the living room and down the hall. Cooper is bigger and stronger; Cooper gets there first. He throws open the door, ready to charge in to save his friend from whatever new horror had leached into the house, but the sight of blood stops him.
Bretta is a moment behind him. It takes her a second longer to reach the doorway. The blood has stopped them cold. It’s everywhere. Outside, the dead hammer in a frenzy, a double bass soundtrack for what they see.
Scott’s no longer in bed, at least.
When Denise gets to the doorway, she isn’t frozen by the scene like the other two are. She knows exactly what she should be doing, and she does it.
She starts to scream.
Chapter 12
Scott’s at the window, peeling the boards back one at a time. Three of them are on the floor beside him; the gaps left in their wake are filled with the flat stares of dead people outside, Walter Something, and the guy with the meat missing on his arm from the back yard. Their throats are swollen from feeding, and they look like rotting toads. They’re reaching through the gaps in the window, trying to get at Scott, who has just pulled another board free. Nails screech and bend, and he tosses it aside. Scott’s covered in blood. The bandage on his wrist is a bloody tampon. Blood runs freely from the wound, ripped open either by the dead people or by Scott himself.
Cooper grabs Scott around the back and pulls him, thrashing, back from the window. Scott grabs at Cooper’s arms and yells at Cooper to let him go. Cooper puts his head between Scott’s shoulder blades. He lifts Scott off the ground and then twists, planting him face-first on the ground like a wrestler. Scott’s unable to get his hands up fast enough to protect himself; he slams his forehead on the floor.
Bretta’s got a board from the floor, careful of the twisted nails, and is using it to push on the heads of the dead people to keep them out of the window gap. They manage to beat a fifth board loose with their hands, and the gap widens enough for them to get their heads in.
The thrashing and screams are attracting the attention of more dead people from the yard and out on the street. Pushing on their heads is like poking dead fish in a fish tank with a spoon. They bobble when their heads are pushed back. They trip over each other and fall on their backs, but their ranks are quickly filled.
Denise is crying, but she grabs a pissy sheet off Scott’s bed and then holds it out for Cooper. Still struggling with Scott, who is trying to roll over and get on his back, Cooper nods and grabs the sheet out of her hands. He uses one hand and his body leverage to keep Scott from moving too much, and with his other hand, he begins pulling the sheet out and covering Scott with it. Another time, this wouldn’t be so easy for Cooper. The two men are just about even as far as strength and they have similar lean builds. Scott’s wounds and the fact he’s been starving and bed-ridden for days has left him in a weakened state.
Once the sheet is down over Scott’s arms, Cooper switches his positioning and quickly wraps Scott’s upper torso. He puts his shoulder in the middle of Scott’s back, his cheek pressed against the pissy sheet, and he wrinkles his nose. He yells at Denise to go grab a hammer and help Bretta. She disappears from the room.
Bretta is stabbing at the dead people crowding the gap in the window. The room has long since lost the smell of Scott and is filled with the stink of old meat. The smell assaults the senses. It stops the body’s automatic will to draw breath and forces a person to make the conscious decision whether to breathe or not. In this new world, drawing breath is sometimes a voluntary act.
Denise reappears in the doorway. She’s got a hammer in each hand. Cooper starts getting up off Scott. Scott reacts to the loss of Cooper’s body weight on his back and tries rolling over again.
With a frustrated curse, Cooper collapses down on his friend. Denise gives a hammer to Bretta instead, who immediately swings the small tool and mashes Walter Something’s hand against the window trim. Walter leans forward in response, trying to crawl through the hole. Bretta swings again, and this time, she connects with the yellow flesh at his hairline. The hammer head compresses putrefying tissue against his skull. It tears the skin and Walter falls back, tripping over another dead person behind him. The hammer leaves a rectangle wound on his forehead that pushes his eyebrow down, like Walter is quizzically pondering the state of his life with a cocked eyebrow.
Bretta swings again and again, careful to keep her mouth shut when connecting with the yellow meat. Denise waits until Bretta has cleared some space and then she holds up one end of a board. Together, they push it against the window.
“We’ve got no fucking nails!” Bretta yells.
But Denise fishes some out of her pocket and holds her hand out. A thump from outside slides the board out of alignment; Bretta only manages to grab three of the nails while the rest scatter on the floor.
Bretta swings her hammer and flattens an Arab woman’s nose. The two girls push the board back into place. Denise is hammering at a nearly useless angle; she’s trying to stay as low as she can and keep her hands away from the groping appendages of the dead. Bretta lines up a nail and hits it at an angle. It slams flat against the board and drops between her feet.
“Hurry the fuck up!” Cooper yells.
Bretta tries again. The nail strike hits true, and she buries it in the board with a handful of solid strikes. With an anchor nail, she’s able to add another in the board and stabilize her side. Denise hands her some more nails, and then grabs another board. By the time they’re on the third board, the girls have more or less synchronized their effort. When they secure the next one, the gap in the window has been reduced to about six inches, and the dead people are unable to coordinate their limbs to get into the hole. They fall back to their old standby of pounding on the wood and the siding directly around the window.
Scott has stopped struggling. The girls finish securing the final board.
“I’m getting up now,” Cooper says to the back of Scott’s head. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He grabs the sheet and pulls it off Scott, and then tosses it aside. “Fucking great,” he says, holding up the front of his shirt. “I stink like piss.”
Denise looks at him but says nothing. Bretta puts her hammer down and kneels beside Scott. She grabs his wounded arm to inspect the damage.
“This is totally open again.” She rolls Scott on his back, weak and defeated. Bretta holds up and inspects his other arm, and then she runs her hands along the sides of his head and through his hair.
“What the hell are you doing?” Scott asks.
“I’m checking for bites.”
Scott lays back and lets her finish. He looks over at Cooper and Denise, standing together near the end of the bed. Close by, in case they’re needed. Cooper takes his shirt off and throws it on the floor. “You can keep that one.”
Finally, Bretta leans back. “We need to dress that wound again,” she says.
Denise steps out of the room. Cooper is looking hard at Bretta.
“Well,” he says. “What do you want to do now, Brett?”
“May as well go ahead and fuck Bretta if you want,” Scott says.
“Fuck off,” Cooper says.
Scott grins. “Whatever, man. You guys probably are already.”
Bretta reaches down and slaps Scott, hard, on the face. He stops smiling. His face is red where her fingers connected with his cheek. “Don’t even start,” Bretta says.
Scott shrugs and looks away.
“Quit being an asshole,” Bretta says.
Denise steps into the awkward silence in the room and hands Bretta the first-aid kit. Scott grabs her hand, looking up at her. “You’re my friend still, aren’t you?”
Cooper crosses his arms. “We’re all your friends, man. We’re all family here.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Scott says. “One big happy family.”
Bretta sets to work wrapping his arm. She doesn’t say anything. She just works until it’s done. The dead continue to hammer the walls. They were so close this time. They have no other thought but to keep trying.