A Little More Dead (15 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Four

In the kitchen, Wendy screamed when
Paul’s handgun went off one time.

Chapter
Twenty-Five

Paul’s foot knocked the flat-screen TV from
its narrow stand. He screamed and threw a glass lamp against the wall, sending shards
flying.

Dan and Wendy watched, trembling along with
the candle.

Paul fired three rounds into the TV, debris
jumping with each bull’s-eye.

Wendy stood with her hands over her
mouth while Dan pulled the blanket over the scowl etched into Sophia’s face,
covering the bullet hole in her forehead and the brain splatter on the couch.

Paul side kicked a tripod lamp and
thundered out onto the front porch. “Come on out, you cocksuckers!” he screamed
into the night. “I’m right here!” Tears fogged his vision. Pain clouded his
mind. He swore like never before and unloaded a string of shots at the moon
until his clip ran dry. Storming back inside, he ejected the empty clip and
threw it against a wall before grabbing another from the table beside the
armchair. Paul slapped the clip in hard and pushed past Dan.

Dan grabbed his arm. “Paul!”

Paul shook him off and darted back outside.
“Knock, knock motherfuckers!” he yelled, firing three rounds at a decorative
wishing well in the front yard.

Dan followed and pushed his arm down.
“Stop!” he cried, wrestling him for the gun. “They’ll hear the shots!”

Paul put his shoulder into Dan, knocking
him backwards, and shot a huge oak tree like it was its fault. Dan tackled him,
sending the gun sliding across the porch. Paul rolled over on top of him and punched
him in the face with a hard right.

“Paul!” Wendy screamed from the doorway.

Dan twisted beneath Paul’s weight, blood
running from his nose. “They’ll kill us!” he choked, bucking his hips.

Sophia’s last words slipped through
Paul’s mind. He stopped struggling, surprise widening his eyes when he found
his hands throttling Dan’s neck. He got to his feet and ignored Dan’s hand for
help getting up.

Wendy stared at the blood running into
Dan’s mouth. “Are you okay?”

“You’re wasting what little ammo we
have,” Dan panted, wiping his nose and surveying his bloody fingers. “This
isn’t a game, you asshole! I’m sorry about Sophia; I loved her too but you’re
going to get us all fucking killed!” Dan got up and straightened his
paddle-holster, surveying the moonlit front yard. “Jesus Christ!”

Paul glared at him through bloodshot
eyes and cried out one last time before storming back inside and curling up
with Sophia’s body on the couch, determined to fall asleep and never wake up
again.

Chapter
Twenty-Six

DAY TWELVE

When Paul woke up the next morning,
Sophia was stiff in his arms. Nonetheless, he hugged her even tighter. “I’m so
sorry, baby,” he whispered, grimacing with the smell. “This isn’t where it
ends.” He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw white spots and tried to remember
what she looked like when she was beautiful and full of life but all he could
see was the teeth that tried taking a bite out of his cheek last night. He
buried his face in her neck, agonizing over the fact that he didn’t have a
single picture of her. His phone was long dead and no one carried pictures in
their wallet anymore. At some point, he would have to go back to Des Moines and
grab the photo albums tucked in a spare bedroom closet. He knew right where
they were because they just moved into their house and he remembered seeing
them when he was looking for the spare Jeep keys he never found.

Sophia felt like a store mannequin in
his arms. Forcing her sharp teeth from his memory, he recalled Colorado instead.
The chateau they stayed at last month looked like a painting under the fresh
snowfall and Sophia was just as stunning in her red coat and black ski pants.
Her dark hair stood out against her faux-fur lined hood, turning heads wherever
she went. He yawned and snuggled up closer to her corpse.
Unfortunately,
that wasn’t the Sophia he saw in his dreams last night.
The Sophia he
saw snarled and lunged, digging her claws into his back and pulling him to her
needy mouth.

Paul shook it off and went outside and
peed on the back deck, smoke rising from his stream. Back inside, he found Dan
staring at Sophia’s body on the couch, his hair all kinds of crazy. He met
Paul’s eyes and acted like he wanted to say
something
– probably something
about how sorry he was about Sophia or something about how things will get
better or some bullshit like that. If he did, he decided against it and
followed Paul into the attached three-car garage where they found a silver Porsche
Cayman with no keys, some work gloves and two shovels. Up on the hill in the
backyard, they dug a grave under a tall willow overlooking a valley of naked
trees below. It must’ve been breathtaking in the fall. Today, however, it just
looked dead.

Wendy got stuck watching them dig on a
fallen log, afraid to be alone. “It’s a beautiful spot.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper,
yet echoed inside Paul’s mind like thunder. Sweat coursed down his face as the
sun slowly rose above them. There was nothing
beautiful
about any of this. The fact that he was digging his
wife’s grave stole the breath his heaving lungs so desperately required. Dan
stopped to wipe his brow and finish off a bottle of water while Paul dug
harder, faster, wanting to put this behind him.
All of it.
What was the point? He should be with her, not with Dan and some two-bit
stripper from
whothefuckcares
!

“Do you guys want some more water?”
Wendy asked.

Paul stabbed his shovel into the ground
like a lawn dart. “I swear to God, if you don’t shut the fuck up! Why are you
even here?” He glared at her through bloodshot eyes ringed with dark circles. Wet
trails ran down his dirty face and shirt as the willow’s bare branches provided
little cover from the sun.

Wendy looked down at her sneakers and
got quiet, picking at the decaying bark on the fallen tree.

Paul sighed and ran a hand down his
face, leaving a brown smear mark behind.

“I’ll take some more water.” Dan offered
her a tight smile and wiggled the empty bottle.

She looked to Paul for approval and when
he turned away she got up and brushed off the rear end of her new jeans.
“Okay.”

Dan watched her head back down to the
house before turning to Paul, who grabbed his shovel and went back to work. Dan
inhaled a deep breath of country air and wiped his forehead with the back of
his glove before jabbing the shovel back into the earth and tossing fresh soil
over his shoulder. “She’s just trying to help.”

Paul kept digging while two squirrels
chased each other around in the sunlight, oblivious to the apocalyptic changes
around them and it irked him to no end. If they knew what was good for them,
they’d be hiding, not playing like a bunch of jackasses. After gently laying
Sophia’s body – wrapped in three blankets and a blue tarp – into the shallow
hole, they returned the last shovelfuls of dirt to the ground. Dan dropped his
shovel and stared at the fresh plot in front of him, chasing his breath.

With a loud grunt, Paul threw his shovel
into the valley of trees below. He wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt
sleeve before planting a cross – crudely made from some leftover white trim found
in the garage – into the dark soil. Dan watched him bend down and let the dirt
slip through his fingers, just like he had done with his wife. Dan set a tentative
hand on Paul’s shoulder, on the verge of saying something, and then walked
away.
 

A cardinal sang out a musical trill off
in the distance. The wind ran over Paul’s wet hair. Tears and dirt blurred his
vision. “I love you so much,” he whispered, soil filtering through his fingers.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.” He raised his head to see the same two
squirrels wind their way up a nearby tree as if there was a magical spiral
staircase around it. He stood up and looked from the grave to the breathtaking
view stretching below. “I’m so sorry,
babycakes
.”

He hung his head. It hadn’t even been
two weeks since they abandoned their house and his beautiful wife was already
in the ground. Maybe he was already dead and this was his Hell. Maybe he should
eat a bullet and find out, just to be sure. When he turned back for the house,
he saw Dan watching from the deck with a shotgun at his side.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

Dan and Wendy sat in the kitchen,
munching on pretzels and chocolate chip cookies they found in the pantry. The
house had some food but not much and, unfortunately, this was as close to
comfort food as they were going to get. One floor above, Paul sat on the toilet
in a Jack and Jill bathroom with his Beretta shoved in his mouth. Tears gave
his soiled face a sadistic clown look that was anything but funny. With Sophia’s
body buried in a stranger’s backyard and dead people trying to kill them,
things had become too much for one person to process. And without Sophia, that’s
exactly what he was.

One person.

Half of something
else.

He felt like even less.

The gun barrel left a metallic taste in
his mouth. His mother raised him to believe that suicide would get you a
one-way ticket to Hell, but he was already there. The gun clattered against his
teeth. He stared at a brightly colored pirate towel hanging against the opposite
wall and shoved the gun harder into the roof of his mouth. His eyes dropped to
a mermaid-shaped bottle of shampoo on the tub’s edge. The pirate decals
plastered across the aqua-colored walls looked new and Paul could taste his own
blood.

The vibrant bathroom gripped the slick
wheel in his mind with white knuckles and steered in new directions at will. He
and Sophia would never have that baby together. Not now. Not ever. They would never
steal another glance while reading Kindles and sipping hot chocolate on a cold
winter’s night. Never share another story about their crazy day or laugh at
another inside joke.

Rebecca flickered through his mind and
he curled a finger around the trigger because he deserved this. Whatever
this
was he fucking deserved it. Because
of him there would never be a beautiful brown-eyed little girl chasing Sophia
around the house with matching smiles and hair. Sorrow suffocated his will to
live. He would never touch her again.
Talk to her.
See
her. Breathe her in. He didn’t even have a picture. Not one single picture.

This thought drove him more insane than
the rest. Because as the cold steel
scratched
his
teeth and tore open the roof of his mouth, he couldn’t assemble his wife’s features
in his mind. He closed his eyes and tried to pull the picture together. It came
and went with hollow eyes and cracked skin. His heart pounded. He couldn’t see
her face. It was a funhouse of mirrors inside his head, stretching and
compressing his memories. He couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to breathe. He
wanted to join her. Not fifty years from now. Not tomorrow.
Today.
Right now.
There was nothing left of
this world and it was time to go.
 

Paul pulled the gun from his mouth, a
silver rope of saliva stretching between the two, and sat up straighter on the
toilet.

“Stop being such a pussy,” he whispered,
pushing the barrel against his right temple and gritting his teeth.

There was only one way he could see her
face again, only one way this very minute. His index finger felt the engraved
lines on the trigger. Clear liquids gushed from his eyes and nose, chest
clutching with erratic breaths. His fuzzy gaze fell to the bath mat where a
shark jumped from the rugged blue waters below it. How could they go swimming
at the beach if she wasn’t there to go? She loved the beach. How could he take
care of her if she wasn’t there to take care of?

Just do it!

A melancholy breath filled his lungs

He held it, tensing for impact.

Paul was coming home.

Fuck this shit.

His finger squeezed the trigger and just
before the hammer fell, he saw her face as clear as day. Sophia smiled at him
from across a table at some dimly lit restaurant, a lone candle flickering
against her soft features. Her face sparkled in the cozy light and she was so
damn beautiful. Her warm hand took his and squeezed. She mouthed the words,
I
love you, Paul,
and the way she said his name breathed life back into his
soul.

“I love you,” he whispered back. “I’m so
sorry.”

Her smile fell. Sophia shook her head,
face dramatically sobering in the jittery light.
You’re not done here.

Paul furrowed his brow and couldn’t find
his voice.

Her hand slipped from his.

He tried to grab it but she was already
floating backwards into a vapor before vanishing altogether. The fog cleared
and he found himself staring at the fucking pirate towel again. He jerked his
gaze around the bathroom, desperate to reconnect for just another minute more.
His shoulders sank.

She was gone.

But he could still see her face,
unlocking a river of air that flooded his lungs. He could see her. Feel her. Hear
her.

You’re
not done here.

He lowered the gun and dropped his head
between his shoulders, unable to fathom what she meant because he most
certainly
was
done here. Blood oozed
from his lips to the floor between his shoes. They would be together again but
not like this. She was right. Paul took a deep breath and blew it out. Getting to
his feet, he wobbled and holstered the gun before blowing his nose into the pirate
towel.