Chapter 7
LIFE.
It washed through my bloodstream on a silken tide, cleansing my sins with fingers soft and sure. Nobody'd brought a needle, so we settled for toot. A fingernail each. Just enough to keep the demons howling at the ramparts. They'd been creeping in again. Quieter this time. Harder to sense. It was a dangerous cliff. Once you lost the edge, nobody was sure how far you could fall before it became impossible to climb back to the top. Nobody was keen to find out.
We were good now, but nothing lasts forever. Especially brown sugar. That gram bag was little more than wrinkled cellophane by now, a shell of itself. We'd sucked all the meat out.
Jennie and Rivet and I were in Janet's living room, catching our breaths on her cat fur-carpeted sofa. We'd flicked on a small table lamp, but Jennie wouldn't let us turn any more on. The blinds were still tightly drawn, the front door now shut, locked, the garden shovel wedged between the doorknob and the flat front of the second stair to keep it from swinging inward. Janet's mangled corpse sprawled like a morbid Halloween decoration on the bloodstained hardwood beneath the shovel's shaft. Her head rested beside it, the neck part facing the wrong way. We were high.
Life was good. So good.
"Anyone got a cigarette?" I asked.
Jennie shook her head. She hadn't taken her eyes off me the whole time we topped up, and I understood why. I even empathized. At the first signs of a zombie apocalypse, her boyfriend had tried to eat her and her best friend had been bitten—twice. It was the kind of horror story the heroes usually watch in passing on their way to the safe zone, the scene that shows the audience how dangerous the infection is. Damn, poor guys. I sure hope we don't end up like them.
Honestly, I wasn't sure what would happen to me, either. We're always the heroes of our own stories, no matter how short and fucked they wind up being. And here's the shit: Looks like I wasn't making it past the prologue. Everybody dies in Joshuah Hill.
"Where's the cat?" asked Rivet.
"Upstairs, maybe?" I suggested, not really caring. "Outside. Ran away. Maybe Janet ate it."
"Sick, Ray." Jennie.
"Do you feel like eating any animals?" Rivet asked, eyeing me around Jennie, who was between us on the sofa.
"Yeah," I said. "A cow. Ground up, on a bun. Or fresh human. Are those animals?" It was a joke, but Jennie leaned away all the same. "If nobody has a cigarette, I'm taking a look around."
"Good thinking," Rivet said, standing. "I'll come with you, check out the upstairs. Jen, wanna take the kitchen and any bathrooms down here?" He already knew what I was going for—the best of friends always knew—but for some reason he wanted to keep an eye on me.
"What if the police come?" Jennie ventured. "I know, okay? I know. But we could still be overreacting about this whole thing. What do we really know? Even if there's some fucked up virus going around, it could just be on this street. Or this neighborhood. Or stuck in Joshuah Hill, or...we killed someone, guys. Jesus, we killed a woman in her own home. Even if something bad is happening now, what happens when it blows over? People don't forget a murder."
Rivet sat lightly on the couch and put his arm around her. He brushed a few damp, dangling brown strands from her face. They hitched up against the bandage swathed across her forehead. "You could be right. Even if we say it was self defense, who's going to believe a couple low-life junkies, right? No matter how beautiful one of them is." Jennie sucked in a quavering breath, smiling in spite of herself. "So we do what we always do. We stay alive. That's all we've been doing for years in this shithole town, isn't it? We're survivors, Jen. All of us. Even chewed up Rayman over there." I flipped him off. "There hasn't been a storm rough enough to take us down yet, and you know more than anyone it's not for lack of trying. Waves are getting bigger, that's all. We've weathered 'em before, we'll do it again. Do you believe that?" He tilted Jennie's face toward his own.
A tear worked its way down the hill of Jennie's cheek and clung to the bottom of her jaw. She was smiling through quivering lips. "You're such an asshole, Rivet," she said. "Those were my lines." Rivet kissed her lightly, and Jennie leaned into it. I studied the bannisters. I wasn't jealous. Jennie had been untouchably Rivet's for years now, even during the breaks. Their's was a relationship rockier than a truckload of gravel, yet they always found a way to work it out. Yeah, I'd had my chance with her, and yeah, I'd blown it. We'd moved on and, thank God, stayed friends. I was happy that she'd found someone like Rivet, someone she could really trust. Even so, I was ready for the moment to end. This house and its dead shadows were getting to me. I cleared my throat.
"Yep," Rivet said, pulling away. He held Jennie's eyes, winked. Her laughter was the warm tinkle of champagne flutes.
"Sorry, Ray."
"Onward and upward," I said kindly, hiding my anxiety.
"I'll search the downstairs. What do we need? Vics and oxys?"
"Anything," I said. "Grab everything and bring it to the dining room. I'll look it over."
"Ray's what you'd call a pharmacopeia," Rivet explained. "If anyone's getting through this, it's him."
"We all are," I said. I fingered the plastic ballpoint pen in my pocket. "And this time, let's get some real weapons."
We reunited ten minutes later. Jennie acquiesced to turning on another light in the dining room, but made a show of turning off the living room light first. "Let's not draw any attention to the house," she said. "From...whoever."
" 'Whomever,' doll," Rivet corrected primly, then drawled: "Ain't no call for guttermouthin' 'round this here doomsday."
I spread the prescription bottles out on the cherrywood dining room table. Rivet and I had gleaned a half dozen from the master bedroom and its adjoining bathroom, while Jennie had only found three of the translucent orange tubes, but made up for it with a bundle of steak knives and a meat cleaver. Nobody had found a cat. The cutlery was arranged at the far end of the table while I used the closer half for a pharmacology inspection.
"Anything good, doc?" Rivet asked. I pushed away four bottles. Nausea meds. After a brief hesitation, I added a fifth to the cast-off pile. Rivet picked it up and read the label. "Promethazine?"
"It's a weak sedative and an even weaker antipsychotic," I explained, "but it's mainly used for motion sickness and insomnia. It might work—hell, I don't know how any of this works—but it's probably not worth the risk. If anything, it'll just knock you cold for ten hours. It'd make us too vulnerable. I'm going to make a ruling and say anything heavily sedative is out."
"So we don't fall asleep fighting zombies," Rivet said. "I second that."
"Which leaves us with a half full bottle of oxycodone and a mostly full bottle of Vicodin, and like..." I shook the last two tubes, "...maybe twelve of these Percs from her oral surgery two years ago."
Since heroin worked to keep us from getting crazy, my thinking was that other things like it would probably do the same thing. Everything I'd picked out was an opiod analgesic, synthetic versions of heroin or morphine or opium, take your pick, all taken from or inspired by the humble poppy and modernized for our cleaner world. Some of the most illegal substances on the planet, unless you had a little sheet of paper from the doctor giving you the right to use them. All this time, Janet had been right down the street getting just as high as the three of us. The only difference was, she had society's permission. I wondered if she'd have come over for a beer if I'd ever asked.
I suddenly realized that Rivet had taken off without a word, leaving me and Jennie with the drugs. He did that a lot. I looked at the four bottles. Thirty-ish generic oxycodone, fifty-ish Vicodin, twelve Percocet. The oxycodone, 80-milligram pills, was by far the strongest of the three, so we could halve those. Vicodin—5 milligrams of hydrocodone bitartrate—being the weakest, would probably take two pills per pop. If we rationed, this little supply would keep us going for...I counted silently, using my fingers. A hundred doses, probably, and we'd each need at least three a day. With three of us, we had—
"Ten days," Jennie sa
id. I glanced up and saw that she was studying the bottles, too. "Maybe eleven."
"About what I was thinking," I agreed. Not bad. For a junkie, ten days was a lifetime supply.
"We have to be good with them," Jennie added. "Good" meaning we don't binge through them in two days. A tall order. "I love Rivet, but I don't want him carrying them."
"Agreed again," I said. "You hold onto them." A screen door banged at the rear of the house, near the kitchen. "Preseeents!" Rivet called in an effeminate tone. He slumped into the dining room under the weight of a gardener's wet dream: another shovel, a hoe, a pickaxe, and a regular axe. Cradled in the crook of his left arm was a small lump of mewing fur. "There's a shed out back. Found Whiskers, too."
I helped Rivet offload the tools while Jennie liberated the small cat. It was all black with bright yellow eyes, barely older than a kitten. It looked up at Jennie and favored her with a soft, prattling coo, like a pigeon.
"Aren't you adorable," Jennie said, stroking the cat just behind the ears. It began to purr.
I hefted the hoe. A thick smear of rust had claimed the metal, and the wooden handle was split by a hairline crack from top to bottom. "You check for the secret compartment under the floor where she hides all her ex-Special Ops weapons?" I asked.
"Stomped all over the place. Not a bunker, not a hole. Not even a chainsaw, but if you ever lose your hand, I swear to God I won't rest until I find one."
"My sweetheart," I said dryly. "I guess this is what we have to work with. Dibs on the axe."
"Drugs?" Rivet asked. I told him how we'd figured it. He nodded. "Jennie should hold them for us," he said. I tried to hide my surprise but I guess it showed, because he said. "I don't trust myself with them, and I sure as hell don't trust you, Ray, so she's the one. I'll see if I can scrounge up some backpacks or something." Jennie followed him out, still holding the black kitten, and a moment later I heard cabinets banging in the kitchen.
Left alone in the dim dining room, I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw that it still had no bars. Somehow, that single fact, more than being attacked by a psychotic Janet Wazowski, drove home the reality of what was happening to us. How alone we were now. The table was lit by a small lamp on a counter that was fixed onto the wall and ran parallel to the table, and it cast a quiet yellow wedge of light across the center of the table. Shadows held their ground at the rigid edges of the light, claiming this territory for their own. I supposed it belonged to them now. How long would the power last? It was so quiet. I hadn't really been listening, but I couldn't remember hearing a single car driving by outside.
It was one in the afternoon according to my phone—Jesus, had all this happened in only an hour?—but even on this quiet street, we usually had some sort of mid-day traffic. Blue-collars coming home for a quick lunch, parents driving kids who'd had doctor's appointments, the usual smattering of people just, you know, having lives. Being normal. Was that already gone? Was normal just a memory? I hated this quiet. Shoving the phone back in my pocket, I went to the living room and found the remote. Switched on the TV.
Snow. Snow. Blank. Snow. There—channel 16 still showed the morning newsroom, but nobody was giving the news. The big, curved desk behind which the anchors usually sat stood like a monolith of an ancient culture that had been wiped out centuries previously. The station's logo was frozen on the massive green screen behind it, flanked by polished wood panels and soft pockets of fluorescent insets behind smoked glass. The tops of three red, wheeled chairs peeked over the desk. Simply existing, part of the props. It looked darker than it should, and I realized that the bright camera lights, off-screen, must be switched off.
It must have been a monumentally coincidental series of mistakes that left this image here. Somebody forgot to turn off the camera. Someone forgot to stop broadcasting. Somewhere else, the relay was still firing to send the signal out to the faithful viewers of this once-beloved news station. Everything was as it should be, but for one tiny detail: There were no people. They'd just left, abandoned ship, the way invading soldiers in World War II often entered vacated homes to find the table still set, the stove still burning, the food still warm.
How long would this last?
"Kind of creepy, isn't it?"
I jumped at Rivet's voice. He had an armload of bags, packs, and satchels of varying colors and designs, which he dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I should be moving, doing something. Staying busy like Rivet. He already understood how important that was. Sitting still and thinking was poison.
"Take your pick," Rivet said. We're loading up and heading out."
"Why can't we stay here?" I said.
"For one, Janet's got a grocery list on her fridge longer than the Bible, so there's not much food around here. For two, hell no. There's a corpse in the foyer and I'm not spending the apocalypse down the street from where I spent my life getting high. Call me crazy, but I don't want to kill any zombies I went to school with."
The son of a bitch was actually enjoying this. I'd recognize that gleam of excitement in his eyes blindfolded. Worse, I couldn't find a reason to blame him. Hadn't I felt a similar thrill while going through the medication in the dining room? I'd been washing dust off windshields and selling bathroom tile sets so long I'd forgotten the simple, innocent pleasure of purpose. Of tromping through those woods, gripping that Nerf gun tightly, checking again that it was cocked when I knew it was, analyzing every minute sound and leafy sway, senses heightened, escaping. Parents didn't argue out in the woods. Fathers didn't have a reason not to come home. Mothers didn't have a chance to lock themselves away from a little boy for hours at a time. Not in the woods. The air was too crisp, the sun too warm, to allow such nonsense. Despite the terrible wars Rivet and I imagined into existence, nobody died in the woods.
"Where are we going?" I asked, surrendering the decision to Rivet.
"Dinkins," he said. Joshuah Hill's only pharmacy. I didn't mention my house, the water we'd managed to stockpile, any of that. What we really needed, we couldn't find there. Dinkins Drug was the logical place.
A plastic bottle struck the floor in the dining room. I raced around the stairway and saw Jennie scrambling to put the prescription bottles back where they'd been on the table.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Titan knocked them down," she explained, swallowing.
"Titan?"
"The cat." She nodded. It was on the far edge of the table, eating dry kibble from a little bowl surrounded by knives. "The name was on his collar."
"We're heading out," Rivet said behind me. "Grab some food and pick a good weapon." He thrust a small blue backpack at Jennie. "That's for the meds. Let's go."