“What was it?” Bretta asks, stepping against the wall. There’s a thump at the door louder than before, and she slides down the hall away from the noise, bumping into Cooper and pushing him back so she can get further away from it.
Cooper shoves her from behind, and they move down the hall toward the back of the house, where the door to the garage is shut but not boarded up. He reaches down and pops the garage door open, and when the door swings open, it’s black inside, but Bretta isn’t even aware of what’s happening in front of her.
“Coop!” She grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him, hard. “Was it her?”
Cooper turns and looks down the hall, back to Adele’s room, where the thumping is insistent and enough to send vibrations through the walls.
“Was it a kid?”
“It was a man,” Cooper says. “And part of a kid.”
Chapter 21
Denise isn’t doing what she was told. She’s not securing the door, like Cooper told her to. Instead, she’s standing in the doorway with the door open a crack; just wide enough to watch Cooper and Bretta reach the sidewalk. She opens it a bit more to watch them walk down toward Walter’s house. There are dead people on the sidewalk. Coming at them from the opposite side. She watches just long enough to see Cooper turn on the first one, and then she’s hit from behind. The door slams shut, and her chest compresses against it from the force of the blow. It drives her into the wood and gives her splinters on her arms and on her face.
It’s Scott, slamming into her from behind, driving her against the door while she can’t see him, throwing his full weight against her back. Scott, who waited until Cooper and Bretta had gone before making his move. Striking Denise from her blind side, so there will be no fight.
Denise’s head bounces off the door and she teeters on collapse. She doesn’t hit the floor. The weight of Scott pushing against her keeps her on her feet, until he lets go and she crumples at his feet.
He watches her go down, his chest heaving from more exertion than he’s managed in weeks. It’s good to be on the winning end of a fight for a change. There’s no time for gloating, however. And there’s nobody left to brag to. He needs out of the house because that’s where he belongs. And now that Cooper and Brett are gone, that’s exactly what he plans on doing.
He kicks Denise to the side of the door and pulls it open, enough to slide through. He’s halfway through the door when his plan goes all to hell. His arm is actually touching sunshine when everything falls apart. It happens too fast to react. It’s over before he realizes what’s happened.
Denise, from the floor, brings up both feet and hammers the door shut. The force of her feet slamming into the door is enough to drive Scott into the wall, and he would fall over except his arm is pinned in the door. This isn’t one of those cardboard and glue jobs from the inside of the house. This is a solid block of pine, re-enforced with heavy screws. The force of the impact numbs his arm above the elbow. The impact dives board nails into this flesh, where the skin tears and goes purple and erupts with blood.
In his state, there’s only a little pain. It’s more like being dredged up out of a pond filled with murky water. It’s like being dragged like a fish up into an air of screams and pain. He senses it above him, but can only look at the feeling. At that moment, all he knows is that he wants the nails out of his bicep, and he wants his arm out of the door. But it’s not like holding burning coal. It’s like that moment of weightlessness before falling down the stairs when you would do anything to grab on to something and stop it from happening.
Denise is screaming at him and calling him names, but what he hears is the creak of the boards that twist the nails. The nails send lightning bolts up his arm with every shift of Denise’s weight. He tries kicking her but is too weak to do any damage. He tries to punch her and he can’t reach. He tries to scream at her and he can’t breathe.
When she releases him, she gets to her knees and then to her feet, still woozy from losing her wind, and she falls against the door as Scott is sliding away from it, along the wall, into the couch, where he holds his damaged arm tight to his body. The door slams shut under her weight.
“You broke it,” Scott says.
Denise is breathing hard and coughing, and she has blood on her lips. The door shut now, she gasps for air until she’s calm enough to talk again. “You can’t go out there. You crazy fuck.” She puts her hand on the door and then arches her back, stretching herself out. She groans and her back pops.
“You almost broke my ribs,” she huffs.
“Wish I woulda broke your neck,” Scott says.
Denise laughs. There’s a hammer on the couch, and she stays far away from Scott when she reaches for it. Her chest feels out of place. It hurts to breathe and walk at the same time. She hits nails into wood and the door is secured again. “You’re a real piece of work.”
“You have no idea what it’s like.” Scott is watching the blood drop from his arm, not her. “You guys all think you do, but you don’t.”
“What don’t we know?” Denise asks. She swings her hand like she’s going to toss the hammer aside and then thinks better of it. “Aren’t we all in this together?”
Scott slides his ass up onto the couch, wincing as he settles back into the cushions. “You’re all in this together. I’m all alone.”
“You’re not like us, you’re right,” Denise says, choking on her words. “We’re not selfish pricks. We’re not laying around pissing ourselves while other people take care of us.”
“Leave me alone.”
Denise laughs again, but nothing about the conversation seems funny to either of them. “We’re not going to get everyone killed.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Scott asks.
She’s got his attention now, and his eyes are blazing. Denise isn’t afraid of the sudden burst of emotion from him. Just the opposite. It’s a relief to see a bit of colour out of him that isn’t despair. Finally, he looks human again. He seems alive, in an Auschwitz walk-in-the-sun kind of way.
“Nobody understands because everyone is still holding out,” he says. “This stupid quest to find drugs is proof there’s hope, and that’s what’s different. You’re all hoping I’ll get better so I can keep everyone alive. The truth is, I’m dead already.”
“I used to have a therapist,” Denise says. “I used to get depressed all the time. Lots of drugs. Anxiety meds. He told me a lot of people say they have things wrong with them as a way to avoid dealing with the world. Like, if you say you’re depressed, it gives you an excuse to lie in bed and not shower.
“Or if you’re super-organized, so you must have obsessive compulsive disorder because no normal person could be on time or like to colour-coordinate your socks. It’s something that makes you different, so you say it’s not your fault. You’re crazy. There’s something wrong upstairs. It’s the only explanation for why you’re not exactly like everyone else out there. But guess what? It’s bullshit.”
“I’m rotting,” Scott says. “That wrong enough for yah?”
Denise lets loose with a wordless howl. She flings the hammer down the hall, where it bangs off the wall and slides along the floor toward her room. Her chest heaving, she moves toward Scott. She leans in close, sweat making strands of hair cling to the sides of her face. “If you want to be dead so bad, you should at least act the part. Dead people don’t talk. Do me a favour and shut the hell up.”
Scott shakes his head and grins yellow corn in her face. “You’re all gonna die sooner or later.”
“I hope it’s sooner!” She stomps off toward her room and then stops in the hall with the hammer at her feet. Picking it up, she walks back to the living room. Scott is trying to get off the couch with one arm, and she flops down on the reclining chair to watch. He stands up, but then he sits back down when Denise waves the hammer at him.
“Can I have an aspirin?” he asks. He’s making a big deal out of rubbing his arm, putting a show on so Denise knows exactly how bad he’s hurt. His shirt has four overlapping blood roses from where the nails bit him. There’s two more on his arm and they’re dark and sticky.
She gets up and goes to the kitchen. She comes back with three red pills and a bottle of water. As he’s drinking, she hands him a pillow for his arm.
“May as well get comfortable.” Her voice is quiet. “No telling how long we’re gonna be here.”
Chapter 22
Cooper just keeps saying Jesus Christ, like it’s some kind of mantra. Like saying the name will work the way they told him it would in Sunday school when he was little. Say the Lord’s name and be saved from darkness. From the look on Cooper’s face, however, the Lord doesn’t seem to be listening.
From what he saw in Adele’s bedroom, the Lord seems to be dead himself. Why else would he let something so awful exist in the world? It wasn’t the first time he’d seen children since all of this started. There were schools in the area after all, and tons of kids who didn’t make it. Sometimes, they could be seen shuffling around, half-sized versions of the really dangerous dead people but just as dangerous themselves.
More so, Bretta said, because you weren’t used to fighting someone that small. Worse, Scott said, because they were just the right height to bite your balls off. It was kind of funny then. They’d all shared a grim laugh.
But Cooper isn’t laughing now, and he can’t imagine ever laughing about it again.
He wants to shut the hallway door to the garage, but it’s dark inside the garage. Instead, he pulls Bretta further into the room, away from the hallway. It’s cold, and they can smell the concrete floor. They can smell the oil stains and the dust. They can smell old cardboard boxes used for storage.
The one thing they can’t smell is rotting meat, and for that, Cooper is grateful.
Walter’s truck is parked in the middle of the garage, just like they knew it would be. Walter also stockpiled a bunch of food and water, and it sits out now, forever unused.
“Why didn’t we hear them?” Bretta says, thinking about to all the times they might have been able to do something, to get everyone together under one roof.
“The windows on this house are all barricaded. There’s no second floor where they could have gone to get away from the noise for a little while. Our windows are all done up, too.”
“Maybe the Somethings were too scared to reach out for help,” Bretta says.
“Maybe we were.” Cooper is standing by the truck, but he isn’t looking at it anymore. Instead, he’s looking at something on the wall, and he runs around the side of the truck to get a better view of it. Bretta steps away from the door and lets it shut behind her. In the dark, on the wall, are nine black guns ranging from handguns to small automatic weapons. There are also two green camo-coloured rifles with scopes. All of the handguns are automatics, and two of them are chrome-plated. The guns are mounted on a particle board display with hangers holding them in place.
“Are you kidding me?” Cooper yells, and Bretta can’t tell if he’s angry or happy. He reaches up and grabs what looks like a scoped AR-15 off the wall. It has a long black barrel that ends in an orange cap. Cooper brings the weapon up to his shoulder, aiming at the wall. He pulls the action on the weapon and then stops.
“We can use these,” Bretta says. She thinks about shooting their way out of the city. She thinks about fucking up any dead person who gets in the way or tries to bite them, about blowing their heads off the way they do in the movies. “Holy shit, Coop. You know what this is?”
Cooper sighs. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.” He spins on his heel and points the gun at her.
“Whoa,” Bretta puts her hands up. “What are you doing?”
“Something I should have done a long time ago.” He sounds like every bad guy from every bad movie ever made. He pulls the trigger, and Bretta screams. There’s a click from the gun, and a rush of air as a little yellow projectile shoots out of the barrel of the gun. It plinks off Bretta’s chest, and she flinches. Cooper finds it hysterically funny.
“What the hell?” she asks, wiping her chest. “What was that thing?”
Cooper holds the gun out. “Fake,” he says. When she doesn’t take it right away, he shakes it, and they can hear the little yellow beads rattling inside the gun. Finally, he shrugs and tosses it on the ground. “Well, that’s depressing.”
Bretta pulls a silver handgun off the wall. It
feels
real enough; it’s cold and metal and heavy. She shakes it and it doesn’t make any noise, but when she drops the magazine out she sees the beads are held in place with a little spring mechanism. She sighs. “These guns are all bullshit.”
Cooper is climbing into the driver’s seat. “Probably for the best,” he says. “They make too much noise.” The keys are sitting on the passenger seat and he starts the truck with them. As Bretta is getting into the passenger side, he jumps out and pulls the release on the garage door. There’s a lock on the wheel track and he kicks it open. The door shudders in the track, and Cooper pulls until it’s high enough to set on his shoulder.
Bretta leans her head out the window and takes aim at Cooper’s leg with the gun she pulled off the wall, plinking a yellow round off his hip.
“The aim on that thing is pretty good,” Cooper says.
“I was aiming for your balls.”
“Of course you were.”
Bretta’s already got her helmet off, and her sweaty hair is clinging to her face. The truck is rumbling and sputtering blue smoke into the garage and quickly filling it with exhaust fumes. “Don’t forget to lift with your balls and your back.” Scott’s words, from her mouth.
Cooper takes deep breaths of the exhaust and wishes there was more time and this was a different situation. He shoves the door up as high as it will go and then walks down to the sidewalk to take a quick look around. There’s movement in the street on both sides, but it’s a few blocks away. They have plenty of time.
He looks back at the house and sees the front door is still open a crack. He imagines Denise watching them. “You know, it’s not too late. We could load this truck up with supplies and fuck off. All of us. Tight squeeze, but it could work. And we have a half a tank of gas so we’d be good for a while.”
“Four of us, in this cab?” Bretta says. “Maybe. But not with Scott trying to jump out every two seconds or grabbing for the steering wheel. And if we get stuck out here, half a tank of gas isn’t going to do us any good at all.”
Cooper jumps into the truck. He revs the engine and pops it into gear. “If we get stuck out here, nothing will.”
After that, they don’t talk much. They watch the road, and Bretta tries the radio, but there’s nothing but old emergency broadcast recordings telling them there’s an update coming. They keep driving, but that update never comes. The road is full of cars, so they have to drive slow and dead people come out of yards and parking lots to try and grab them as they go by. The dead people hang on to the truck, but Cooper hits the gas and they fall under the wheels. Sometimes, they drive on the sidewalk and the dead people are there, too. There are sections of the neighbourhood that have been looted and fires have burned unchecked.
Everywhere they look there are more dead people shuffling around like they’re waiting for something to happen. Or they’re broken and dragging themselves along the ground with broken spines. Sometimes their hips are gone, and they are dragging long strings of meat behind them. There are dead people trapped in the cars. There are dead babies trapped in car seats. Some of those car seats only have the bottom half of the babies. Some of them only have brown stains.
They drive into a strip mall with a lot of dead people wandering around burnt and empty cars. There’s a supermarket and all the windows are smashed. They drive slowly and see dead people wandering the aisles. Behind them, a wall of dead people is following the noise of the truck, and Cooper speeds up to make some space. There’s a pharmacy here but the windows are smashed and the door is just a black hole, and they don’t stop because there are too many dead people around. Bretta takes aim at a First Nations woman in a tattered Calgary Flames jersey and plinks a yellow bead off her forehead. This makes Cooper laugh.
“I told you they have good aim,” he says.
The main roads are impossible to navigate. The cars on Blackfoot Trail are mashed together, end to end, stretching up and away past a burnt train yard. The shoulders are full of smashed cars and swarming with little black figures that look like ants. Cooper parks the truck on a hill overlooking the Bow River, and they count more than a dozen fires burning. They’re marked with long cones of gray drifting south.
In the downtown core, high rises have signs hanging from the windows that say
HELP!
or
S.O.S
or
SAVE US
. Windows have been smashed, and several buildings stand like black skeletons where nothing moves. The famous Calgary skyline might be a black hole at night, but during the day, it’s a smoldering corpse of the life it once held.
Bretta points to a burning wreck on Deerfoot Trail where several dozen dead people have converged on a blue Monte Carlo. “What are they doing?”
Cooper watches for a moment, eyes straining to cover the distance, but then he shakes his head. “I’m not sure. Could be people down there.”
“I don’t think so. They’re ignoring the cab.”
“So?”
The dead people are hammering the crushed hood of the car, causing flames to shoot out from under the sides. Dead people shove their hands in those fires, and then bring their hands to their faces, as though they are trying to drink the flames. Some of them have dropped to their hands and knees to push their faces into the burning tires.
“They’re not going after people,” she says. “It looks like they’re trying to eat the flames.”
Cooper laughs. “Nobody ever accused these rotters of being too smart for their own good.”
“This explains why so many of them are burned, though,” Bretta says.
There is no more time to observe. Cooper has to move the truck because dead people are starting to converge on the sound of the engine, so he goes a block at a time and stops so they can look at the city some more.
“I’ve seen enough,” Bretta says, leaning back in her seat. The city is a wasteland, and it looks the same all over.
Cooper hasn’t seen enough yet, but he drives on the sidewalk to get around a car accident and then heads for the neighbourhood side roads which are less congested.
“There’s so much we don’t know about them,” Bretta says as they pass from one congested neighbourhood to another.
“I know enough,” Cooper says.
They drive through an area with a lot of trees, and old houses with little fences and feral shrubs along the sidewalk. Some of these houses have been boarded up and there are dead people banging on the doors, but there’s no sign of anybody around.
“We should stop,” Bretta says. “They don’t bang on the walls for nothing.”
Cooper drives past. “We don’t know what kind of people are in there.”
After that, Bretta doesn’t talk much.
Near an intersection closed off by dead people and smashed cars, they pull into the parking lot for a strip mall. Trees line the road, and there’s a chain-link fence strung haphazardly, threading them. There are dead bodies in piles, and Bretta watches them as the truck moves past. There aren’t any cars in the lot. Just dead bodies and broken storefronts. One of the stores is a place called Luke’s Pharmacy.
“Looks good,” Cooper says. He stops the truck well back from the store. He starts to turn the truck off.
“Think that’s a good idea?” Bretta is watching his hand on the keys.
“The noise will just bring them running. We have a limited window of opportunity for this.”
“What do you mean?” Bretta asks.
“All those dead people we passed. They didn’t forget about us.”
He pulls the key out and the engine dies. But then there’s a bang outside and the sound of breaking glass, and suddenly Cooper wishes very much that he would have kept the truck running. And now, with blood and glass in the air, and Bretta screaming, he wishes very much he would have just kept driving. But more than anything, he wishes whoever is shooting at them from the darkened pharmacy door is a bad aim, or he and Bretta are both about to join the piles of dead people in the parking lot.