Free Living Dead by J.W. Schnarr Page A

stomach now, and his face is half-crying, half-surprised. Like he can’t believe how sad he is, or he’s sad that he sees so much blood.
    “It’s not blood,” Bretta says again, and this time she does touch it. Just two fingers. She holds them up so he can see the dampness.
    “Don’t touch it!” Scott yells, and he throws his pillow at her. “I’m an infection now, and I’m gonna make you all sick. You’re all gonna die in here.”
    Bretta wipes her hand and holds it up for him to see. “It’s OK. I’m fine, you can calm down.”
    The woman’s arm in the window is still scrambling around like a blind snake, scratching the wall and leaving streaks of dirty pus behind. Bretta walks over to the window, her hands out so Scott can see them.
    “It’s okay,” she says again, and throws her shoulder into the wooden plank that’s been knocked loose by the dead woman. There’s a crunch of bone in the arm, and a groan as the nails on the other side of the window shift in the board and loosen. Her arm comes away sore, the tricep throbbing. She clenches her fist and hits the board again, and this time, the arm breaks clean and flops down. The tendons pull tight and the woman makes a dirty fist.
    Bretta pulls away from the window, and now the board is open just enough for the woman to pull her arm back outside the house. It disappears into the gap backwards, with her fingers clawed like a chicken’s foot. Bretta pushes the wood back into place. The nails are loose and the board wobbles. “We’ll have to get that fixed,” she says.
    Scott looks down at the piss stain on the bed. “So much blood.”
    Bretta reaches out to him, but he pulls away, curling himself into the corner.
    “You need to leave,” he says. “You’re attracting the dead with your warmth.”
    “Don’t talk like that.”
    “I can smell it on you,” he says, lifting his head like a wolf sniffing for prey.
    Seeing him crouched there, covered in piss, holding his hand to his stomach, his thumb making little circles in his palm, she just wants to reach out. She wants to connect to him, to help him out of this dark time. The look on his face says he doesn’t need any help.
    “Get out!” he says again, louder.
    Bretta puts her hands up. A surrender. “OK. I’m leaving.”
    She walks slowly and backwards. She doesn’t turn away until she’s got the door open, and she closes it just as Scott is flopping back down into his piss stain, foregoing the sheet now. Staring at something on the ceiling that’s so damned important all of the sudden.
    Bretta stands outside the door, her hand on the knob, sucking in the stink of blue paint and doing her best to keep down the hard emotions stabbing her in the lungs at that moment.
    She turns and walks up the stairs, away from Scott. Away from Denise and Cooper and their weird paint orgy in the basement. She heads upstairs to the rooms where they can open windows. She can stick her head out them and pretend to be away from the madhouse for a little while. Be outside, where she hasn’t been or months. At the end of the hallway, the window is sitting half open, and she walks by Allen’s room to get to it. On the other side of the hallway is the room Scott’s parents died in. At least, that’s where his mom died.
    She sticks her head way out of the window at the end of the hall, taking gasping, shuddered breaths, trying to keep a lid on how hurt and alone she feels, and doing a pretty good job. Until she looks down and sees Nancy splayed open like a dead starfish, staring up at the window with her broken face. Allen is further out in the yard, lying on his stomach. He’s been pulled open as well, the two of them a pair of raw sausages someone stepped on to drive them out of their casings.
    “We’re never going to get out of here alive,” she says to Nancy, and then bursts into tears. They fall from her face into the bloody soil under the window, and the noise attracts the dead people in the yard.