Living Dead (14 page)

Chapter 25

Denise is on one side of the couch and Scott is on the other. Scott is trying to wiggle himself out of his shirt and Denise is watching him, wishing she could wipe the paint away from her mouth because it’s itching and giving her acne. Of course, with more paint, she could make herself forget just about everything stressful in her life, and that’s something that might happen later if Scott calms down enough that he can be left on his own for a while.

Scott is out of his shirt, and he’s fingering one of the nail holes in his chest, his face puckered and sour. The bleeding has stopped; the wounds are more ugly than dangerous, though if he gets a septic infection, there aren’t any doctors around to take care of it.

“They look sore,” Denise says, nodding.

“Shut up,” Scott matches a bitchy voice to his bitchy face. He flexes his arm and eyeballs the nail marks in his bicep and near his elbow.

“They hurt,” he says finally, putting his arm down. “A lot.”

“You can clean everything up when they get back with your meds.”

“You’re kidding, right? They’re not coming back.”

“Shut up,” she said, and he laughs.

“Come on,
Denny
,” he says. “You don’t really think they’re coming back? Christ, why would they? So they can strap themselves onto a loser gimp and a dirty paint junkie? Why would anyone do that?”

“Don’t be a prick.”

“Oh, right,” Scott says. He snaps his finger and his face lights up with. “Why on earth would they get out on the road and realize they don’t have to come back to this crap-tastic stinkhole? Why not just load up on supplies and pull a Tom Petty? You know, hit the Great Wide Open? You think there’s rotters flooding the streets of small towns 50 miles from Calgary? Hell no. More half-tons and guns out there than people. Especially in the south.”

“They’re coming back.”

“They’re not coming back,” Scott says. “We’re damaged goods, doll. You should let me wander out into traffic, and you should start thinking of ways you’re going to get your ass out of here before the food and water dries up or you get sick and crazy from being alone.”

Denise starts to answer, to tell him to pull his head out of his ass and straighten the goddamn thing, when there’s a noise at the door. Someone trips on the front stairs and falls against the side of the house, stealing the spotlight in the room. Scott turns to her, the smile melting off his face.

“Oops,” he says. “Too late.”

Denise sighs, and doesn’t stop until every last bit of breath is pushed out of her lungs. She holds it for a moment, and when the drumbeat starts on the door, she drags new air back into her lungs. Then she gets up and goes to her bedroom. When she comes back, she’s holding a spray can of paint and one of Cooper’s T-shirts because Scott is probably right and fuck it all anyway.

She tosses the can on the couch and rips the shirt down from the collar with both hands. Then she rips it again on the other side and lobs the piece with the arms still attached to Scott. He catches it in his good hand but stares up at her, saying nothing.

From the kitchen, she grabs two bottles of water and a grocery bag from the cupboard where Scott’s mom used to keep them. She pitches one of the bottles at Scott when she comes back to the couch, and he makes a grab for it with his injured hand and winces when it bounces off his fingers, landing in his lap.

“Hey, can you stop throwing shit at me?”

Denise takes a drink from her water bottle. She drops the shirt in the bag and then flips the cap on the spray paint so it pops onto the floor. She gives the can a few good shakes and the air is filled with the sound of the marble agitator clanging off its cylinder prison like some industrial wind chime.

She hits the shirt at the bottom of the can with a heavy coat of blue and keeps it there until a tiny river is running off the cloth and into the bag.

“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” Scott says.

Denise shrugs. “You were just telling me we’re all gonna die,” she says. “What the hell do you care?”

“Touché.”

He continues to watch, and Denise makes an “O” with her hand around the open part of the bag, pushing it down far enough that her lips aren’t touching blue when she puts it to her mouth. She takes seven or eight deep breaths and the bag collapses and inflates like a blue lung. The last breath she holds for a ten count, and then exhales, gasping and coughing. When she looks at Scott again, her eyes are blood-streaked marbles, yellow and dull and watering.

“What’s it feel like?” Scott says.

Denise smiles. “It’s like that French thing,” she says, and when Scott shrugs, she laughs. “That French thing, you know, like you saw it before. Like-a reminder, kinda, but weirder.”

“Déjà vu?”

“Yah, that’s the one,” Denise says. She takes a handful of deep breaths from the bag and laughs again. “Déjà-view. It’s like being high and reliving everything, like not really, you know. It just feels that way kinda.”

“You’re already fucked up,” Scott says. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I knew you were gonna say that,” Denise says, pointing at him and cackling. “See? It’s like that.”

“Right,” Scott says. “And this is how you and Cooper have been spending your time?”

“Says the guy who shits himself,” Denise replies, holding herself up with her knees on her shoulders and leaning her face over the plastic bag.

Scott doesn’t respond, and Denise goes back to breathing in her bag. She sweats down her nose and along her jaw, where it mixes with fresh paint and watercolours her chin.

The air is filled with chemical smells; it’s filled with body odour and sweat; it’s filled with the stench of rotting bodies trickling in the air flowing around the door. It’s filled with the slip-thump drumbeat of rotting hands smacking against the outside door. It’s filled with the heavy, rasping breath of Denise slowly replacing oxygen with inhalant fumes.

Scott rubs his oily face.

“Can I try?” he asks, and Denise, her head tipped down into the bag, seems only able to move her eyes up to see him at first. Then she lifts her head, smiling. Her teeth are bright and blue and when she smiles, a lob of blue drool spills from the corner of her mouth. She stands up on wobbling legs and shuffles over to him, her feet sliding and stepping, and flops down on the couch beside him. She whispers for him to have at her, and lets out a hollow little laugh when he takes the bag from her hands. He hands her Cooper’s T-shirt and she wipes her mouth, and Scott puts the bag toward his mouth. “Like this?” he asks. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I knew you were gonna say that,” Denise whispers, and she slides a blue hand over his.

Chapter 26

There are scented candles on one of the shelves next to bottles of fabric fresheners and deodorizers, and Bretta grabs two apple cinnamon candles and a special edition pumpkin spice candle, holding them together so she can smell them all at once and enjoying the effect it produces. Almost everything worth eating has been scavenged out of the store, something they could have easily rectified if they had thought far enough ahead to grab some food from the house before leaving.

It simply never occurred to them they might get stuck out here; Bretta planned a quick jaunt down to the store and then back within an hour, maybe a few at most — the return of the conquering heroes, their medicine stores full and maybe some fresh underwear to boot.

Now they are sitting quietly inside a half-burned pharmacy, dead black inside from the roll shutters covering the glass windows around the front of the building. Windows long since smashed, probably by the first looters looking for supplies to get out of the city with. And outside, the dead people have swollen to even bigger numbers, to fifty or sixty of them maybe, and Bretta hates herself for not doing as the looters had done. Namely, finding what they’d come here for and gotten the hell out of Dodge in the quick.

“Dead black inside,” she says, lighting the candles. “Just dead outside.”

Cooper laughs. “Speak for yourself. We’re cleaner now than we have been in months. I smell like baby wipes every time I move.”

I doesn’t feel any more alive
, she thinks.

In the back of the store, safely nestled behind the pharmacy counter, Bretta pushes her candles together. In her head, she imagines the three flames blending into one large one, but the wicks are too low, and the candles seem completely oblivious to one another after sputtering to life.

Cooper is sitting beside her. He’s had more luck finding something to eat than Bretta has. He hands her two packs of stale marshmallow peeps. 

“You got a stick?” he says, and then laughs, imagining peeps roasting over an open flame like a grocery store chicken.

“You know how good a real chicken would taste right now?” he pulls back the wrapper. He tries to cook one over the candle flame with just his fingers, but the fire is low, and all it does is burn his fingers. He gets soot all over the peep, and it smells like lavender and burnt sugar.

“You’re an idiot,” Bretta says, trying not to validate his stupidity with a smile.

He pops the half-cooked confection into his mouth and then makes a face. “Oh God, it’s awful.”

“We could really use a stick,” he says again, holding another peep over the apple pie candle.

“What we could use,” Bretta says, “is a way back to the truck.”

“Forget it. We’ll think of something tomorrow, when we can see.”

“I’m worried about Scott.” She holds a peep in her fingertips and nibbles the beak.

“Neither one of them are in any shape to do something stupid,” Cooper replies.

“Scott’s been doing plenty of stupid the last little while,” Bretta says. She feels guilty for letting the words flop out between them and the wrapper on the marshmallows crinkles and she stops playing with them. She’d rather go hungry than make any more noise than is necessary.

“Plenty of stupid to go around,” Cooper says.

“Yah there is.”

Outside, dead people stumble around in the parking lot, and it’s impossible to know if there are more of them or less of them than before. Not without looking.

Bretta wants to take this little bit of quiet they have to ask Cooper about the drinking and about the paint. Cooper must sense it, because before she says anything, he shrugs his shoulders.

“The world has gone to shit. In case you didn’t notice.”

“You’re making it worse,” she says, and Cooper laughs because he thinks she’s talking about the world when she’s really talking about the four of them. When she shakes her head, he tosses his opened bag of peeps in her lap.

“I have no intention of rotting out around you guys,” he says. “If I get bit or sick, or whatever. That’s it. I’m out.”

“Euthanasia?”

“Something,” he says.

“I get it.” Her eyes follow the lines of the fire. They soak in the yellow and the long, flickering shadows cast by it. “But it’s not time to think like that.”

“Oh yeah? What time is it?”

Bretta doesn’t answer, and Cooper stops talking, too. After a while, he gets up and vanishes down one of the aisles. When he comes back, he’s holding two bottles of mouthwash. A wintergreen and something blue. He flops down beside Bretta, and she sighs loud enough to voice a protest for what he’s about to do. He hands them out to her.

“I got you one, if you want. Blue or green, you can pick.”

“You’re a real piece of work, right?” she asks.

“Right,” he says.

She reaches out for the blue bottle and he pulls it back, teasing her, holding out the green one.

“Fuck off, Coop.” She takes the blue bottle in her hands and holds it while he cracks the seal on his green bottle. He catches her watching him. He puts the bottle to his lips and winks at her.

“It’s okay, Brett. This is something people do in the real world. Like homeless people. They do it to keep warm during the winter.”

“It’s not winter yet,” she says, and thinks,
not yet. But it will be soon
.

“Sociables,” he says. He lifts his head back and takes deep swallows of the stuff, and the smell of apples and lavender is replaced by chemical spearmint.

Watching him, Bretta thinks the last six months have been so very cold.

She pulls the lid off the blue bottle and smells it, but she can’t bring herself to drink. Cooper has no problems, however. His grin is becoming easy and his eyes glassy. His lips and teeth are the same vibrant green as the bottle he’s holding.

“Anchors away,” he says, and she stands up because she doesn’t want to be part of this anymore. Instead, she walks the back counter of the pharmacy, where boxes have been torn and bottles tossed from shelves. There are pills scattered on the floor, little crunchy land mines that skitter across the linoleum when they are scuffed by her feet. There’s a smell of grape cough syrup and Bretta wonders if Cooper would have dipped into it if he could have found enough of it lying around. And there are more bottles of pills, things she doesn’t recognize, and there are more ripped boxes with pharmaceutical names on the labels she does but words spelling out the drugs inside which she can’t pronounce. And there are pills.

You can’t have a real appreciation for the amount of influence the big pharmaceuticals have had in your life until you get a chance to walk through the debris field of a pharmacy laid waste. There are hundreds of different types of pills here, along with dark brown plastic bottles filled with viscous liquids of a dozen colours. And little glass bottles filled with clear liquids and yellow ones. There are bars, shakes, special meal replacements, bandages and disinfectants, and little bubble-packed strips with single serving shots of whatever it is they deemed you needed. And then there are pills, they’re all there waiting for people to come along and take them.

At the height of modern society, Canadians spent more than $20 billion on legal drugs for a chance at a continued and meaningful life, but also for the opportunity to be killed by them accidentally to the tune of more than 10,000 per year. Pharmaceutical companies spent billions in advertising drumming up ways to scare people into their family doctor’s office, and then paid tens of millions to sway those same doctors into using those products.

Looking around her now, between the pills and the syringes, and the wipes and the creams and the vapours, and between the syrups, serums, and pills, it’s easy for Bretta to see that domination laid bare. And it’s pretty easy to see the utter and final pointlessness of their empire-building.

This isn’t a new thought for her. She’s often given thought to the empty fast food joints, the media conglomerates, the Wal-Marts that once dotted the landscape of every major city and small town. All those American companies creeping into Canadian lives while nobody was watching. While everyone was busy keeping warm and working their asses off to keep up with their neighbours.

The Canadian Dream. Really just a lighter, more multicultural version of the American Dream. Both of which have no longer not become nightmares, but have dried up and cease to exist in any meaningful format all. All it took was the complete destruction of society to end the practice of corporate-sponsored greed.

Bretta fishes in her pocket for the little scrap of paper with the magic word written on it; Risperdal, the name of the pill which is supposed to make Scott better. But most of the pill containers don’t have names on them. They have barcodes and 15-digit numbers. Many of the labeled containers have names that look the same. And when she finally finds the one with the name matching the name on the paper, she opens the lid on the box and stares into an empty space.

She stares at it for a long time, chewing her lip, unable to properly process this new information; unable to think of what to do next. It has to be here because it must be here, and any other reality is just a stupid, cruel, and terrible practical joke perpetuated by the universe. It’s not enough they have to live like animals, and her friends have to slowly tear their wrists by drinking chemicals and huffing paint, but Scott also must live through something not remotely related to the mountain of suffering the world has endured as it turns black and boils in the sun. She didn’t see this coming because the outrage of it is just one more thing in a long list of terrible things. It’s a perfect camouflage, really. It’s just so goddamned typical of everything.

She shuffles out of the back storage area, kicking pills and plastic wrappers away as she makes her way back to where Cooper is half-sitting, half-laying on the floor, where he’s vomited green slime into a blanket, and the air is now filled with the smell of both. She takes her seat beside him, not talking, and picks up the blue bottle of mouthwash. At that moment, as rough as Scott is, she gives the bottle a long hard look. She could use a break right now. Like a fish could use water.

She tears the plastic seal off the bottle with her fingernails and has to pinch the cap before it will spin off — an ingenious child-proof design feature left over from the days when children gave two shits about anything blue or minty — and brings the bottle to her nose. The smell of cool mint floods her nostrils. It’s not an unpleasant feeling to get away from Cooper’s vomit for a little while. She puts the tip of her tongue into the mouthwash, and it’s instantly numbed by the action. She could use a little of this stinging numbness in her brain right now.

Cooper is kind of staring off into space, oblivious to his surroundings. He slowly brings a hand up in front of his face like he’s counting his fingers.

“How you doing there, champ?” Bretta says.

“Bretts?” he replies. His voice has a note of concern, but it’s a soft note, played on a piano far away in another room somewhere. “Oh fuck, Bretts. Oh Christ. I’m blind. I can’t see my fingers. I’m blind.”

Bretta doesn’t respond immediately. She watches him fluttering his hands in front of his face, his eyes wide and peering, desperate for a glimpse of light, a flash of colour, anything. She watches him, and then she sighs, puts the lid back on the bottle, and places it on the floor.

Not satisfied with that, she immediately picks it up again and hurls it into the store, where it flies head over heels before skimming a pile of shampoo bottles off the top of one of the aisles and crashing onto the floor. There’s exactly eight seconds of quiet then, before a scuffle outside the front door turns into the slow, plodding beat as a single drummer begins his song.

And then he’s followed by another.