He says it outside a coffeehouse, straddling an intricate iron chair, the soft clang-clang-clang that signals customers coming and going providing background noise. He has a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and he alternates between taking swigs of the first and drags on the second. Anything that burns going down.
When he says it it's an accusation, not a confession. Kenny stares at him through condensed breath and smoke, and he glares back.
He's like Kenny now.
o
Kenny sleeps in his parka because he has no comforter, just a lumpy mattress with a brown blood stain on it. It's been a month since Christophe told him he's caught whatever Kenny had; for the first week Kenny tore the obituaries from the paper and scanned them for word, but after days with nothing outside of the usual elderly fare, Kenny lost interest.
He drifts in unconsciousness, replaying the cafe scene: the harsh way Christophe spoke of the anti-miracle that had been bestowed on him and the blame he placed on Kenny; Kenny feels responsible, but also defensive. The best of intentions had sent him through the revolving door of hell.
Kenny wakes up when he smells mulch; "They buried me," Christophe hisses, straddling him like so much convoluted metal. He's broken the screen and climbed into his bedroom without so much as a word, and it's so dark that Kenny is going by feeling more than sight: Christophe may as well have been amputated, callused hands holding his limbs down. The whole thing strikes Kenny as a tragicomedic parody of sneaking into a lover's room at night to hold them in your arms.
Christophe claws into Kenny's shoulders and slams him into the mattress scapula-first. He's got dirt under his nails, he goes on to say, tobacco-yellow teeth clenched, because he had to dig himself out of his grave. "What do you want me to do," Kenny says, and Christophe replies, "take it back!" but Kenny doesn't know how.
He sits up, takes a pocket knife out, pops it open, holds it against Kenny's thin-frabic-covered throat (which, Kenny feels, only adds to the homoerotic tint of the scene) and says, "You know how to break a zombie curse?
"Kill the one that infected you."
Kenny protests and struggles, but he knows it is a lost cause; Christophe cuts his jugular, messily because of the ensuing scuffle.
o
Kenny comes back face-down in a puddle of his own blood. It's soaked into the carpet and his hand squishes when he lays it flat under his chest and pushes himself up.
He staggers from his bedroom to the hall, sees a blinding strip of light from under the bathroom door, and edges the door open with his foot. Christophe is sitting in the bathtub, staring vacantly at the tap, elbows and knees jutting out above the water level. Kenny approaches and looks from Christophe, who hasn't broken his gaze from the water faucet, to the open window; "You'll catch your death," Kenny mumbles, and Christophe laughs—hollow—"I already have."
His hand stirs and lifts from the water, stretches out the digits and lets it dangle over the edge of the tub. "Dirt," he says by explanation of the necessity of the bath water, "and the literal and metaphorical blood on the hands." His hand squeezes compulsively and he confesses that in all his work as a mercenary, he's never killed before; Kenny kneels down and says "Well, killing me doesn't really count," in an attempt to keep it light; "Because neither of us are really alive," Christophe's body sinks with his voice, dipping another inch below the long-chilled water.
Kenny reaches out to stroke his cheek and Christophe's flesh is cold. Kenny feels no elation in finding someone like him, like he once imagined he would. It is more a mutual sort of mourning; a very warped kind of understanding; a relationship that is required of them.