Chapter 15
Another day. Bretta lights a candle with a cheap pink lighter. Sitting with Cooper in this flickering light, making plans Denise wants no part of, makes Bretta feel like they’re conspirators in some secret drama. She looks at the paint on Cooper’s face and sighs inwardly. If this is a conspiracy, she could have really picked a better partner. In truth, if she wasn’t positive she would need another set of hands out there, she might just consider going by herself. Sober, Cooper is a good man to have around. Stoned on paint fumes, he is a child in a man’s body.
Right now, his eyes are more or less clear. But he and Denise had been hitting the paint a lot lately. So much that Bretta has taken to sleeping upstairs with the window open to escape the fumes. Sooner or later, they are going to kill themselves with that stuff. She is sure of it.
“So?” Cooper says. “You said you have a plan?”
Bretta nods. She begins by telling him things they already know; things he may need a reminder of because of his new pastime. She tells him how the dead scratch and bite, and that’s how they spread it. And sure, if you die with a healthy brain, you’ll come back like Nancy did, but that’s not what they’re worried about out there. They’re worried about the infection in the mouths and on the fingernails of the dead people. “So we stop fingers and teeth from touching us,” she says. “We’re golden, Ponyboy.”
“Okay, horsie-girl,” Cooper says, misunderstanding the reference. “So we just need to find something to cover up with and we’re good to go.”
“Right.” The candle flickers on the table from her breath. “We have some duct tape left. You can’t bite through that.”
“
Au contraire
,” Cooper says. “People bite through it all the time. That’s how they tear it usually. Bite the corner and pull down.”
“So we wrap it tight on a shirt so they can’t bite the corner. We use long-sleeve sweaters and tape the hell out of them.”
Cooper’s staring into the candle, chewing his lip. And then he snaps his fingers. He looks up at Bretta, smiling. “By Jove, I think I’ve got it,” he says in a fake British accent. He gets off the couch and heads for the basement.
“What do you have?” she asks.
Cooper’s voice wisps up from the basement stairs. “I’ll be right back!”
Bretta can hear him thumping around down there, and then he’s on the stairs again, his feet heavy as he clomps back to the main floor, one stair at a time. When he appears again, he’s got two large black duffel bags in his hands. He pushes the door shut with his ass because his hands are full, and winces when the dead people outside bang on the living room wall in response. He throws the bags at Bretta’s feet.
“Problem solved,” he says.
Bretta grabs the zipper on the bag closest to her. “What is it?”
She laughs when she sees what’s inside. “Hockey equipment?”
“Yeah!” Cooper says. “I don’t know how much will fit me, but you’ll be fine.”
Bretta pulls out a black and white glove and slides her hand into it. “It fits,” she says, before a grimace drags down the sides of her face. “And it stinks. Oh, God.” She flips the glove back into the bag.
“They’re a few years old,” Cooper says. “And hockey gear always smells bad. But it turns you into a tank once you have it on.”
Bretta picks up the glove again and smells it. Her face wrinkles. “Ugh, fuck,” she says. “Boys stink.”
“Yeah, they do,” Cooper says, picking up a knee guard. He fits it on his leg over his pants, and then raps the plastic shin with his knuckles. He smiles at Bretta and shrugs. “They’ll break their damn teeth before they ever get into this,” he says.
Bretta is pulling out other pieces of equipment. First elbow pads, then shin guards. There are pairs of hockey socks balled in pairs. They look like monstrous tube socks with blue and red stripes at the top. There’s a sandwich bag with red and blue mouth guards in it formed for Scott’s teeth. There’s a scuffed helmet with a full cage, which Bretta slides over her head. She pulls out a neck guard and padded hockey pants. There are shoulder guards and two jerseys with opposite green and white colour schemes.
Both of them have the same cartoonish bumblebee logo on the front. The bee’s head looks a little like Mickey Mouse with pink spots for cheeks but no ears. He has a round bee-body striped yellow and black. There’s a large stinger protruding out of the bee’s ass shaped like hockey stick and he’s taking a slap shot with it. The puck has streamers coming off to show how fast it’s going.
Bretta holds up the green and white jersey. “That’s a cute bee,” she says. She thinks of Scott as a 13-year-old boy and the idea of it makes her smile. “Seventy-one,” she says reading the number on the back of the jersey. “Is that a lucky number, you think?”
“Sort of.” He holds up his index and middle fingers together and grins. “It’s a sixty-nine with two fingers.”
“Gross,” Bretta says, and Cooper laughs. She drops the jersey with the other gear. She picks up Scott’s jock strap. “Think we’ll be needing these?”
“It’s a face guard,” Scott says. “Put it on and see if it fits.”
Bretta laughs. “Fuck off!”
She takes stock of everything she’s pulled out of the bag and what’s left inside still. “You know, with a couple layers of clothing, we should be fairly well protected,” she says. She takes the helmet off and lays it upside-down on the pile outside the bag. “That thing even fits,” she says, brushing sweaty hair from her face.
“Yeah,” says Cooper. “We’re really going to do this, eh?”
Bretta nods. “We have no choice.”
If Scott is going to get better, they need to get him some help. And that means drugs. Anything they can find so he can start coping without going crazy. She starts to say this to Cooper, but she fumbles on the words and looks at him helplessly. “Anything to keep him from going…”
“Fuckin’ nuts?” Cooper says. After a moment, Bretta nods. Cooper sighs. He stands up and claps his hands and holds one out for her. “Come on. Let’s see how this stuff looks on you.”
His hand is warm and soft. Softer than Scott’s. It’s bigger than Scott’s hand, too, and her hand almost disappears in his grasp. She allows herself to be pulled up and wonders why she’s thinking about Cooper’s hand. She also wonders why she feels guilty thinking about it.
She grabs the helmet and puts it on, and then takes it off when Cooper holds up a pair of gray shoulder pads. The equipment was built for a shorter but wider Scott; it fits, but it’s loose, and Bretta imagines herself sliding around inside it.
“No worries,” Cooper says. “We can tighten this all up.” To prove his point, he pushes on the sides of the pads. They bunch around Bretta’s chest and her ribs, and Cooper’s hands are suddenly resting on her sides, his fingers on the bottom of her rib cage. Her breath catches in her throat.
Cooper pulls his hands away. He balls them into fists and steps back from Bretta. “It’s pretty easy to figure out,” he says, his tone awkward. His face has gone pink with embarrassment.
“Right,” Bretta says. She puts the hockey shorts on and fumbles with the strap. She kicks the old jock strap to the side with her toe. “I’m not going to need this.” She works her way through the gear methodically. Every new, stinking item placed on her body is a torture to her nose.
“My mom got rid of all my old hockey stuff after I stopped playing,” Cooper says. “Scott played one more year than I did.” He’s trying to find a comfortable way to fit into the shoulder pads, which were obviously built for a smaller frame.
“So he was better than you?” Bretta slips the gloves on and dons her helmet. She swings her arms to test her ability to move.
“I got cut because I was smoking up all the time. Cardio was for shit, and I had a smoker’s cough at 14.” Cooper manages to get his elbow pads on and kneels down to work on his shin guards. When he’s done, he helps Bretta with some of the straps. The equipment she’s wearing fits a lot better than Cooper’s does, and with a sigh, he heaves the shoulder pads off and shrugs. “I won’t be able to move in those things.”
“We’ll just have to find something else,” Bretta says. “Did you guys play football?” Cooper shakes his head. “By then, we were off into better things, like weed and girls. Neither one of us joined anything once we started smoking.”
“There’s got to be something around here.”
“We could use cardboard, maybe,” Cooper says. He looks around the house.
Bretta takes the helmet and gloves off and tosses them onto the couch.
“We could empty some of the boxes of food downstairs,” Bretta says. “I don’t know how it’ll hold up, though.”
“We could tape it under our clothes,” Cooper says.
Looking down at her bare feet on the living room carpet, Bretta sees they’ve been standing on the answer all along. “The carpet,” she says.
“Do what with it, exactly?”
“Put it in our sleeves,” she says. Looking at it now, she feels stupid for never thinking of it before. There’s lots of carpet in the house, despite Scott’s mom’s love for all things hardwood. The carpet in the living room could be chopped up to make enough armour for all of them. With or without the hockey equipment.
“We can tape it up,” Cooper says. “Holy shit.”
Bretta thinks they could easily fill in the gaps in her hockey equipment. They should be able to build Cooper’s shoulders and torso up so he’s protected as well. A sharp knife would do it. Duct tape would do it. She starts telling Cooper what she has in mind when they both stop. The smell of paint is coming through the house.
Suddenly Bretta isn’t much in the mood for fun and games. “We’ll figure this out later,” she says, looking pointedly down the hall toward the room Denise and Cooper share.
Cooper sighs. He starts stripping off the hockey gear he’s wearing and flipping them into the bag on the floor between his feet. “I should probably go see how she’s doing,” he says. He rubs his sweaty face with his hands and wrinkles his nose. “This stuff does stink.”
“It’s probably not the gear,” Bretta shoots back. She’s peeling out of her hockey equipment also.
“Yeah, well,” Cooper says. “I guess I better go see to her.” He starts to leave the room, but Bretta calls his name and stops him.
“Just so you know,” she says slowly. “I need you with a clear head for this. I can’t take you out there if you’re a zombie.”
Cooper puts his hands up, a symbol of mock-surrender. “I know, I know. I’m fine. We’re fine, everybody’s fine.”
“We’re fine,” Bretta nods.
Cooper turns and leaves. He goes down the hall to his bedroom. He can hear dead people thumping on the wall in his room. When he opens the door, Denise is sitting with a candle by the bed. Denise has a bag in one hand and the black spray paint in the other. She looks up but doesn’t say anything, and Cooper doesn’t either. Denise goes back to staring at the candle. Carefully, she pushes the nozzle of the paint can, shooting a mist of black toward the lit flame. When it erupts in a yellow fireball, it’s a sound Cooper can actual feel on the air. The burst of light flashes on Denise’s bloodshot eyes. She smiles, and then grunts like a chimp.
“You look wrecked,” Cooper says.
Denise turns back to him. He can see the wheels turning behind her eyes as her stoned brain tries to formulate a response. Finally, she says, “You guys having fun out there?”
“Not really.”
Denise shrugs. She holds up the bag to Cooper, and he takes it but doesn’t do anything else.
“Come sit down,” Denise says, slurring her words. “This is really fun.”
“I bet it is,” Cooper says, sitting down beside her. She leans over in slow motion and kisses him on the lips. She tastes like paint. The bottom of her face is black.
“You’re my world,” she says, too dizzy to look him in the eye.
“Me too,” Cooper says. He puts an arm around her and looks down at the bag again.
He thinks,
fuck it.
The world is already over. Might as well sit back and watch the fucker burn.
He puts the bag to his face with his free hand, holding Denise with his other arm. She leans into him. Her breath is loud and nasal, like she has a cold. Her sinuses are packed with paint. He breathes and breathes. Hydrocarbons flood his brain, slowing everything down. Paint coats his face and makes him sweat.
“Watch this,” he says, taking a deep breath from the paint bag. When he blows out, he purses his lip and blows a stream of air at the candle. The paint fumes on his breath cause little puffs of flame to erupt from the candle wick, and Denise chuckles. Cooper can see the side of the candle is covered in black paint, like skin on the wax. The heat of his little fireballs melt the wax beneath the paint, and it causes the skin to crack.
“Cool beans,” Denise says, putting her head against Cooper’s shoulder.
She leans over to kiss him again, and this time, Cooper meets her halfway. The pounding dead work a lazy waltz and Cooper taps his foot.
Denise doesn’t taste like paint anymore. But even if she did, Cooper wouldn’t care.
Chapter 16
When Bretta goes into Scott’s room, he’s on the floor still, lying on his side and sleeping. The air in the room is heavy with the stink of old piss; Bretta holds her breath to avoid choking on it. She thinks about the molecules of Scott’s urine floating around in the room, coating her nose and her throat with every breath, and she wants to puke. With every breath, it’s like he’s pissing on her face. Every drop of sweat that beads on her forehead is like a tiny piss filter, dragging urine out of the air and letting it soak into her pores. She wipes her hand on her forehead and then on her pants.
She leans down and checks on Scott. He’s sleeping softly, his mouth open. His arm is sticking straight out from his side with the wounded wrist facing up. The bandages seem to be holding, but there aren’t any more to change his arm with. They’re going to have to leave the house sooner rather than later. She puts a hand on his forehead. He’s cooler than he should be, but Bretta isn’t sure if that’s because he’s sleeping on the floor, or because his body has slowed down from the blood loss.
She calls to him, softly, and he doesn’t respond. She says his name again and he stirs. She puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes him, just a little. His breathing hitches and he opens his eyes. For just a few seconds, he’s looking up at her and he’s lucid, the man she’s loved for years and the one she said yes to when he asked her to marry him. She often thought about who would win the genetic tug-of-war when they had children: his brown eyes or her blue ones.
Looking at him now, it seems like all those thoughts happened in a half-buried dream. And of course they did. They belong to that other life, the one that happened before the world stopped breathing. Before it started to rot. She would never consider children now, in this world, would she? And certainly not with Scott in his current form, weak, and stinking and far away.
Of course not. Any life made now is just a future death sentence waiting to happen. And that’s OK. You can get used to anything if you are exposed to it long enough. Anything can become your normal.
“What do you want?” Scott asks. He’s looking up at her through cracks in his eyelids.
“I need to ask you something,” she says. “It’s important. I need to know what kind of medicine you need.”
Scott furrows his brow. He stares into a corner where the ceiling meets the walls. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bretta squeezes his shoulder. “I know about it already. Coop told me everything. He was worried. He wanted to help.”
“Yeah, well, Cooper’s a lying sack of shit.”
Bretta takes her arm off his shoulder. In response, Scott rolls over so he can’t see her face. He puts the pissy sheet over his head so he can hide from the conversation. And suddenly, Bretta is fighting an urge to punch him in the back of the head as hard as she can.
This isn’t how a discussion with an adult goes. This is what it’s like talking to a five year old. This is the kind of dynamic you get when someone is trying to leverage for a later bedtime, or for more cookies with their dinner instead of vegetables. It occurs to her that this is what Scott looks like regressing, and she wonders if she’ll come into the room someday soon, and he’ll be curled up in a fetal position. She wonders if he’ll be a 160-pound fetus, with soft bones and translucent skin. He might be trying to suck a partially formed thumb. He might be gasping for breath with malformed fetal lungs.
She pulls at the sheet and he slaps at her hands. He’s the world’s biggest kindergartener. He’s a fucking child who is too scared to get up and use the bathroom, so he lays in bed pissing all over himself. She slaps his hands back, and he tries to bury himself in the sheet. She stands up and grabs it in both hands. He senses what’s coming and tries to tighten his grasp, but he’s weak and slow and his slashed up arm isn’t working very well. When she yanks the sheet free, it catches his head. The force of the motion causes him to bounce the back of his skull off the floor.
“Fuck!” he yells. “Fuck off!”
“What’s it called?” she yells back. He buries his head in his arms and she grabs a handful of his hair. The strands are greasy and wet between her fingers.
“What is it, Scott?” she yells. “What the fuck is it?” Her knuckles are tight against his scalp, and she gives his head a shake to emphasize her question.
“Crazy bitch,” Scott says. He tries to smack her but she’s strong and fast, and she’s still controlling him with a hand in his hair. He lets out as surprised gasp when she plants a knee on his chest. This is every playground fight she’s ever been in. Every one she’s ever seen. A bigger, stronger kid on top of a weaker one. One of them swearing from impotence, and the other swearing because they’re supposed to. She pins his free arm under her knee and straddles his chest. She’s got one hand in his hair and one on his injured wrist. She would have never been able to do this to him when he was healthy. They wrestled a lot; she liked playfighting with him. She liked the heat their bodies caused pushing against one another, being violent, being close. Until one of them would finally give in and they’d have fast sex.
This isn’t that.
This is her dominating him utterly. This is her pinning him to the ground until he loses what little energy stores he has left. This is her pinning him flat and asking him over and over again what kind of drugs he needs. She’s surprised to feel the end of his erection touch the side of her foot, but there’s no way she’d ever let him near her with it right now. He’s too messed up. He’s too dirty. Sex with him would probably make her sick.
The truth of it, though, is that he is just too damned weak to be attractive. He has all the attraction of an invalid. She wonders if this will be the end of their relationship. Even if Scott lives through this, will she ever be able to get this image out of her head?
You can get used to anything if you are exposed to it long enough, sure. Will she get used to thinking of him as some weak creature she has to baby until he finally dies?
She grabs hold of Scott’s face. “Tell me what it’s called!”
Scott fights back one last time, but every movement cinches her grip on him tighter and finally, with a resigned sigh, he says something that sounds like
resper-doll
. She repeats it, committing it to memory.
“Get off me,” he says, and she obliges him. He lies on his back, heaving breath out of his lungs like mud on the end of a shovel. He casts a sour look at her. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
“I just needed to know,” she says. “I’m sorry I got rough.”
“Get out.”
“Scott.”
“Get out!” he screams. “Get the fuck away from me!”
That’s enough for her. She’s never seen so much hate on his face, and, in spite of the fight they just had, it hurts that it is directed her way. She shakes her head and turns to leave the room, but then she stops. “We’re going to get you better.”
He laughs. Hard, and loud, making fists with his hands and barking out laughter. “Listen to me, you stunned cunt,” he says. “Listen good, because you don’t understand a fucking thing. I’m dead, don’t you get it? No heartbeat, no fucking blood. You get it? My organs are black slime, you get it? My brain is dead fucking pudding, Brett. You get it?”
“I don’t—” she starts, and he cuts her off.
“I’M FUCKING DEAD! I’M ALREADY DEAD, BRETTA! YOU GET THAT SHIT? I’M FUCKING DEAD!”
His words stretch out, so it sounds like
deeeeaaaaad.
He cuts himself off with more laughing. Outside, the drums of the dead start up as their rotting neighbours try to climb into the window once more. Scott turns to the window and screams
deaaaaad
again, before collapsing in a fit of coughing laughter.
Bretta leaves him like that. She slams the door behind her, and stands in the hall, listening to him coughing and laughing. She looks down and thinks,
this is almost the exact spot where Nancy was wrapped in that blanket. After Cooper stomped her head in. After she got put down a second time.
Her eyes start to water, and she bites her cheek until they’re gone. She takes deep breaths to force the sadness away. She turns and walks down to Cooper and Denise’s room, and the smell of piss is replaced with paint. She knocks, but doesn’t hear anything. She knocks again and there’s giggling, so she calls their names.
“What do you want?” Denise says.
“I need to talk to you guys,” Bretta says. “Are you decent? Can I open the door?”
“Yeah,” Cooper says.
Hand on the doorknob, she opens the door and peers into the gloom. There’s a single candle on a night table under the window. The rest of the room is dark enough to show beams of light coming through the cracks between the boards over the window. And Denise and Cooper are sitting on the bed in a heap of legs and arms. Cooper’s got his head on Denise’s chest, and Denise is resting her chin on Cooper’s bald head.
Denise has a razor in her hand. It looks like she’s been giving Cooper a haircut, because there are nicks in half a dozen places on his scalp.
The bottom of both their faces are black with paint. Denise, her eyes like bloody ivory, crinkles her nose at Bretta and sticks her tongue out.
“What is it, honey?” Cooper says. His voice is slow. He’s got paint on his teeth so it looks like they are broken.
Looking at them, she can’t see how this plan can be anything other than one massive fuck-up. She doesn’t say that though. “I know what we need to find. Something called Resper-Doll.”
“Yeah,” Denise says. “We could totally hear him telling you.”
“You alright?” Cooper says. He grabs the paint bag off the bed where it’s sitting beside his leg. He holds it up to her. “You look like you could use some,” he says.
“We have black and blue,” Denise says, and then she giggles. “Your two favourite flavours.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Cooper says. “Those are colours, not flavours.”
“They both taste painty,” Denise says.
Cooper shakes the bag at her. He nods for her to go ahead and take it.
Bretta walks across the room, moving slowly, sliding her feet through piles of clothes as she moves toward the bed. She reaches out and takes the bag from Cooper, who is nodding and smiling. Denise is watching her closely, her silvered eyes unblinking in the dark.
She looks down into the bag. It’s wet with paint. Black gets on her fingers. There’s red here, too. The edge of the bag has blood on it. She looks up at Cooper and Denise, who are sitting and watching. Cooper snorts, and something dark and fresh drips down over his lips. It collects on his chin. He coughs and wipes it away with a slow-motion hand. Denise has blood smeared around her face. Whether it’s Cooper’s blood or not, she can’t be sure. “Bit of a nosebleed,” she says.
Cooper says, “Huh?” and then, “Oh yeah.” He wipes his bloody hand on the wall beside him, where it leaves a shit-coloured streak in the yellow light of the bedroom.
Bretta hands the bag to Denise.
“You sure?” Denise asks.
“Pretty sure,” Bretta says. She looks at Cooper. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“No problem, Bretty,” he says, smiling like a jack-o-lantern.
With a sigh, Bretta turns and leaves. Halfway down the hall, she wipes a tear from her cheek and wipes her hand on her pants. There’s no time for emotions or bullshit. There’s no time to be reminded again and again that she’s the only one in the house who seems to be alive anymore. For now, she’ll cut carpet and work on the suits. Tomorrow, she and Cooper can head out to find Resper Dolls, whatever that it. With any luck, they just might find it.
She reminds herself that baby steps are what are required for any long trip. She has a feeling the next few weeks will be the longest of her life. Impossible to believe almost, from what they’ve gone through the last few months. Her new normal seems to be one where she’s the only sane person left in a house full of lunatics. A house surrounded by meat grinders who are smashing their limbs into paste trying to get into the house.
She wipes another tear from her cheek. In the kitchen, she grabs a pair of those scissors that can cut tomatoes and copper pennies and she grabs a box cutter. In the corner of the living room, farthest from the furniture and near the fireplace, she starts cutting into the carpet, making long, wide strips.
There’s hardwood underneath, and she feels oddly relieved by that.