Living Dead (13 page)

Chapter 23

Cooper’s got his door open and he flops out onto the ground. He lands on his back, which leaves him gasping for breath. There’s another shot, and a patch of ground by his head erupts in a puff of white dust. On the other side of the parking lot, there’s a dull thud like a car door being slammed, but it’s the more focused sound of the bullet hitting the body of one of the cars. Cooper rolls onto his side, his jaw working like a landed fish, and he pulls himself up into a sitting position just as Bretta tumbles from the cab. He pulls her down face first but she catches herself and lands awkwardly on one shoulder pad before falling onto her side. Cooper yells at her to get behind the tire, and as he does, the air is hit with another pop, and there’s a puff of white dust from the pavement between them.

A brown man is yelling something they can’t understand, and he switches to accented English and tells them to come out with their hands fucking up. Bretta is looking at Cooper like he should know what to do but Cooper just sits there, his hands tucked around his knees, making himself as small as possible behind the tire.

The man fires again and then there’s a sound of him reloading. “Get up, goddamn you!”

Bretta nods at Cooper and Cooper shakes his head, and when the man fires again, the tire Bretta is sitting in front of goes flat and she screams.

“Alright! I’m coming out!” She has her hands up, and she ducks enough behind the front of the truck that there’s no clear target for the man to shoot at.

“Stand up!” the man yells. “I’ll take your head off, goddamn it!”

Cooper gets his hands up too, and Bretta is standing now and the guy is pointing the gun at her face. She looks at that little black barrel. Death is in there waiting for her, and it feels like that little black hole is the edge of a cliff. She thinks about how this is the first time anyone has ever pointed a gun at her, and wonders how many people said that right before they were killed by those things.

Cooper walks around the side of the truck and the man swings the gun back and forth, making sure Cooper and Bretta both know who’s in charge.

Cooper moves slow, his hands up, but not all the way up, not like he would if he really wanted the man to stay calm. It’s the opposite, in fact. He moves with purpose, one foot in front of the other, watching the man the way he’d approach a snake; hands out, being careful not to make any sudden movements, and biding his time.

And then Bretta fully sees what Cooper is intending to do, that he’s going to try and make a move.

The man’s face is curled into a sneer, but not because he thinks he’s in any real danger. He has the gun after all. But he doesn’t know what Cooper knows. There is a glint of chrome sticking out the back of Cooper’s pants. It’s the stupid chrome toy Bretta was plinking dead people with. The man doesn’t know the gun Cooper has shoots stupid yellow balls of plastic and not real bullets.

And he doesn’t know what Bretta knows; he doesn’t know Cooper’s about to do something really stupid and somebody is going to die. And it’s just so typical of Cooper to make his move when the man swings his gun back toward Bretta, because the last thing Cooper would ever do is put himself directly in harm’s way. Cooper reaches down into the back of his pants and pulls out that stupid toy gun.

The silver barrel flashes in the sun. The man sees it and drags his own weapon back toward Cooper, already firing, and Bretta throws herself down beside the truck. But the gun is nowhere near her; it’s firing around Cooper and not hitting him because the man isn’t aiming, he’s just pointing and shooting. That’s a very good thing, because everyone knows you can’t dodge a bullet. But that has never stopped everyone who’s ever been shot at from trying.

And Cooper points and shoots too, and his toy is so quiet next to the pistol Bretta can’t even hear it, but there’s a little puff of compressed air from the barrel and the man roars and grabs his face with his free hand, but he’s still shooting with the other and he misses Cooper again and again, and Cooper shoots back and this time there’s a single bloody tear on the man’s face. His eye snaps shut and he screams and is weeping blood. He fires another round blind that careens off pavement somewhere; it makes that stupid western movie sound bullets make when they zing past the hero.

Cooper is sprinting toward him in all his carpet armour, making him slow, but it doesn’t matter because the man is screaming for his eye and he’s out of bullets.

And then Cooper has the man on the ground and he’s beating him with the handle part of his pistol, because it’s made from metal and only decorated with plastic. The plastic pieces are smashing off and bouncing on the pavement around the spot where the two men are fighting, and Bretta can see pieces of plastic sticking out of the man’s cheeks, and there’s a lot of blood from his eye and half his teeth are smashed. Cooper keeps hitting and hitting, long after the man stops moving, and when Bretta finally puts a hand on him to get him to stop swinging, Cooper throws her off.

“FUCK OFF!” he screams, and he hits the man and hits him again, until he’s tired and sweating, and the carpet on his forearms is covered in blood and it looks like he just jammed his hands into a bucket of paint. Cooper stands up and peels the carpet off and throws them on the ground in disgust. Then he sees blood on his clothes and he peels down to his stinking undershirt, and he puts his head down on the hood of the truck and screams into his hands. He throws the toy pistol across the parking lot and it bounces off a car before smashing to pieces.

He stands there, heaving, and sweating, and Bretta puts a hand on his shoulder, and he falls into her arms, her neck getting wet with his snot and his blubbery tears. Bretta puts her head against his and rubs the hot skin on his back. She holds him close with a hand on his neck.

“It’s okay,” she says, and wonders if her life in this new world will always involve comforting men when they’ve stepped over the edge. “You saved us, and that’s all that matters. You’re a big stupid hero.” Cooper gasps for air, and then he pulls his head away, but not so far away she can’t taste every breath from his mouth, and the taste of him on the air makes her tingle.

Finally, he laughs a single, goofy bark and pulls away. Bretta feels him like a ghost on her body, her skin damp with his sweat.

“Oh my God.” He is wiping his nose with his hands and laughing. “I can’t believe that worked.” His lip trembles and he gasps for air, and he stares into the sky taking deep breaths until the trembling stops.

Bretta takes Cooper’s shirt and throws it over the dead man’s face. “Think he’ll come back?”

“His skull’s broke,” Cooper says. “There’s more than blood in that puddle around his head. That’s what broke the handle of the gun, maybe.”

“Guess we’ll know in a few minutes,” Bretta says, though she doesn’t have any intention of sticking around long enough to see. She pulls the piece of paper out of her pocket. She starts toward the blackened door of the pharmacy, and then stops when Cooper calls her.

He’s got the man’s pistol. He holds an empty magazine and the gun up and tells her that’s all there is.

“It’ll have to do,” Bretta replies. She lets Cooper go first, and she takes one last look around the parking lot. For a moment, she thinks she sees movement on the road, but then she’s stepping into the cool and the dark of the pharmacy. Cooper has the gun out, and neither of them moves. Neither breathes.

Cooper calls out for anyone inside to come out with their hands up, but after a few more minutes of near-total silence, Cooper moves further into the store. With the windows boarded, it’s darker than home. Dark as Walter’s house. But there’s nobody here, or if they are, they’re not coming out.

“Stay put,” he says, but she doesn’t. They move up and down the aisles looking for signs of life. Eventually, they meet back at the front of the store.

“Looks good,” he says.

Bretta grabs a green hand basket, and hands one to Cooper. “Let’s get going then,” she says. “I don’t want to be here when dead people show up looking for all that noise.” She ducks past him and starts moving down the main aisle, reading the shelves along the way. Cooper takes one more peek out the front door to make sure the dead man is still dead, and then he turns and heads down a second aisle.

Chapter 24

The pharmacy is as empty as they thought it would be. There is a nest in the back of the store where the drugs are. There are jackets piled in a heap. There is garbage lining the shelves; someone has thrown more than one can of cold pasta against the walls. Streaks of tomato sauce and beans mark the floor between the aisles.

There’s shit and piss in a bucket in a small bathroom in the very back of the store, and the smell of it makes Cooper gag when he opens the door.

Cooper collects bandages off the aisles and looks through cold meds; he grabs green carry baskets from the front of the store with a business logo on the side of them, tossing the broken and dirty ones aside and keeping the best ones to gather supplies. He stalks the aisles and grabs anything with a children’s warning on the label. He grabs bottles of alcohol and mouthwash and hand sanitizer.

He grabs packages of glow-in-the-dark stars, cheap plastic and cardboard packages from China with little pink and green constellations. Yellow stars and green comets. Saturns of all different colours and sizes. New moons. They are the Lucky Charms cereal of children’s bedroom design.

He grabs scented candles and bottles of spray can deodorizer. He piles the items up in his little plastic baskets, and then when Bretta puts a hand on his arm, he sets them on the ground. Carefully, because he doesn’t want to make too much noise. Outside, the parking lot is beginning to fill up with dead people.

“The noise,” Bretta says.

Cooper shakes his head, but not because he disagrees with her. It’s because he doesn’t want to see what he’s seeing. He doesn’t want to see dead people streaming into the parking lot. He doesn’t want to see all that grey flesh stumbling around, arms wide open, searching for the source of the gunshots, and for the revving engine of the truck as it smashed down the peace and quiet of the neighbourhood. There are more than a dozen of them out there. Had they been following the truck all along?

He hasn’t thought about it until just now. How far will they go looking for a meal? It is something they have never been able to explore in the house; the question had simply never come up. They never make enough noise to warrant this kind of attention. The truck is something they may have heard from blocks away, but the gunshots? How far away could they hear those?

“What do we do?” Bretta still has a hand on Cooper’s arm, and she lets it drop self-consciously.

Cooper walks to the door, careful not to step on any trash, careful to step only toe-heel, because then his shoes won’t slap on the linoleum and cause any undue attention. He’s balancing quick with cautious. He reaches the doorway and then turns and gives Bretta a half-shrug. “Now we wait, I guess.”

“Great.” Bretta is holding her basket, and she sets it down between her feet.

“If we just stay quiet,” Cooper says, “I think they’ll move on.”

“Do you?” Bretta is stripping out of her armour, and her greasy hair is sticking to her face. She pulls the pads over her head. The act pulls her undershirt up, revealing the milk white of her stomach.

Cooper’s eyes are immediately drawn down to her belly button, and he looks away.

“You know this how, exactly?” she huffs. “Because that’s what they do at home?”

Cooper says nothing. She’s right of course; he was just saying it to make her feel at ease. Trying to be nice to her. But this world has no room for being nice anymore. Bretta’s looking out there and seeing only truth. And the truth of the situation is that dead people don’t wander off. They mill around until someone coughs, or sneezes, or sobs, and then they hammer on the walls until they find a way in. Or until someone drops a cinder block on their head. That’s all they do. And that’s what they’re going to do here.

“We’re trapped,” Bretta says.

“Okay, so. We’re stuck,” Cooper nods. “Let’s just hang out for a while and figure this out.”

Bretta picks up her basket. “We still have a job to do.”

She walks away, leaving Cooper alone at the front of the store. Cooper takes another look at the dead people in the parking lot. More are stumbling around out there. There’s close to thirty now. Beyond the lot, shuffling on the road, stumbling in yards and across sidewalks, more are coming. Not a lot more, but enough. There are already too many to deal with. If they would have jumped back into the truck right after dealing with the psycho, they would have been clear of this.

That moment is long gone, though. So maybe they’ll hang out and wait a bit. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll figure something out. They always do.
In the meantime...

In the meantime, he’s looking down at the ground near his feet and he sees baby wipes, the lavender-scented kind you wipe baby asses with when they shit themselves. He looks at that smiling, happy baby on the cover, half-sitting, half-crawling, too young for anything but slapping the ground, making noise, and shitting himself. Cooper doesn’t even know if it’s a girl or a boy, because at that age, they all have that same sexless look about them. The baby makes him think of Adele’s room, and he nearly kicks the box across the room before he realizes one very simple fact:

I really stink
.

Looking at the baby, with its puff pastry smile and strawberry complexion, reminds Cooper of what his own ass might smell like after a run on those lavender wipes. He looks up and sees a whole aisle of health and beauty products, barely touched. Because who the fuck cares about pimples or aftershave when every waking moment is a living nightmare of death and horror? Nobody.

Cooper walks over to the aisle and sure enough, aside from the toothbrush and deodorant sections, it’s more or less unblemished. The people here before didn’t really care about looking or smelling good either, apparently.

Strategically placed in the makeup aisle are little plastic mirrors. He grabs a handful of lavender baby wipes and smears the oil and sweat off his forehead. The smell is old lady clean; it’s a smell he associates with his grandmother after a hot shower. He wipes grime from his cheeks, and then he’s scrubbing furiously at his nose and around his eyes. The wipes turn black and he throws them on the floor, forgotten. He strips out of his shirt to better get at his skin. He grabs handfuls of wipes and attacks his neck. He wipes down his ears, behind them, then his shoulder blades. He attacks his chest. His armpits. He’s bathed in lavender, and it’s the greatest thing he’s ever smelled because finally, it’s not sweat and body odour. It’s not sour balls or ass. It’s human, the way human beings in this century are supposed to smell. And perhaps best of all, it’s another step away from the dead people and their earthy, breath-stopping stench.

“What are you doing?” Bretta asks.

Cooper sees her then, at the end of the aisle, smiling and confused. Of course she knows what he’s doing. Cooper’s actually surprised she didn’t think of it first. He tosses her the opened box of baby wipes. She catches the box and wrinkles her nose when she reads it.

“No thanks,” she says. “They smell awful.”

“Suit yourself, Stinker.”

Bretta is already looking for something with a less flowery scent. She disappears from view and then her head reappears a moment later on the other side of the aisle. Her smirk has broken open into an actual smile. She’s holding up an economy-sized bottle of unscented hand sanitizer and a package of alcohol swabs.

“Enjoy your lilacs, Gramma,” she says, and shakes the sanitizer at him.

“Nice,” he says, emptying the last of the wipes and tossing the box to the ground. “You can drink that shit when you’re done cleaning up.”

“Gross. Of course you would know that.”

“Of course,” he replies. “I know everything.”

Bretta is wiping her face with the alcohol pads. “Yeah, yeah, big smart guy. This shit is going to dry out my face.”

“At least it will be clean,” Cooper says. He starts undoing his belt. “Turn around for a minute, I’m almost done.”

“Uhh, gross?” Bretta says, but she does it anyway. “Couldn’t find somewhere else to do that?”

“I was here first. And I’m almost done.”

Bretta laughs. “Not much to wash down there,” she says.

Cooper gives himself three good strokes and comes up with filthy baby wipes. He quickly folds them and stuffs them back into the empty box.

“What I wouldn’t give for a shower,” he says.

“I hear yah,” Bretta says. “Clean clothes, too.”

“Yah, that,” Cooper says. He’s walking down the aisle now, away from Bretta, back toward the front of the store. He grabs an ocean mist deodorant stick - his brand, once upon a time before the world ended. He takes some cheap body spray off the shelf and then tosses it aside when he finds the midrange men’s cologne a little further down the aisle.

There’s a seventy dollar bottle of something French or Italian, Cooper’s not sure about it. It has a horse on the front, though, galloping toward you when you hold the bottle up. Like what comes out of the bottle is majestic and powerful, and it’s ready to be yours at the push of a button.

He sprays it on his wrist like his mother used to. He sprays it on his T-shirt. Then he goes to the front of the store and checks on the parking lot. It’s become a mass of writhing, grey flesh.

He turns and looks back at Bretta, who is busy combing her hair and checking herself out in the mirror. She glances at him for a moment, and his belly flutters when she smirks before going back to her hair.

There may not be anything alive outside, but there’s lots of life in here
, he thinks.