The Scattered and the Dead | Book 3 | The Scattered and the Dead

by McBain, Tim

  They’d cleared most of the houses in this stretch now, remote clusters of smaller homes, trailers, and pre-fabs. Patches of overgrown farmland interrupted the neighborhood, and here and there an old sprawling farmhouse stood alone.

  On the whole, it had been a good day. Not their best ever, but not bad at all.

  The main scores were food. Even after all these years, there was food to be had if you looked long and hard enough.

  Lots of un-scavenged food had spoiled over the past nine years, of course. Left to rot. Wasting away in pantries, cupboards, fridges, and freezers.

  But certain items could stand that test of time, survive damn near a decade while retaining their full nutritional value, and they’d found plenty of those today — an unusually strong haul.

  Bags of uncooked rice could last thirty years. Dried beans lasted indefinitely. Honey, too. Canned food was somewhat of a wild card. Stored at moderate temps, they might last indefinitely. In practice, some did and some didn’t.

  Every time Erin opened one, she felt like she was scratching off a lotto ticket, hoping for a winner. Sometimes it had gone moldy, somehow, someway. Other times, opening a can of the bad stuff kind of popped and sprayed. Botulism. It had no odor and was potentially lethal, but you could kill it by boiling the food for ten minutes.

  Of course, even the good stuff they found in the cans had lost much of its color over the years. All of it kind of turned to a lifeless gray in time. A maggoty color. One of the kids had asked Erin where the color had gone, and she didn’t have a good answer for that.

  Today, they’d found two pounds of rice, one brown and one white. Thirteen mystery cans, most of them creamed corn, though she was particularly excited by the can of pumpkin pie filling — she hoped that one panned out sans mold. Two five pound bags of light red beans looked to be in excellent shape, still a really nice shine to their shells. The gleaming oblong orbs almost looked like the weird curved eggs of some rare spider, she thought.

  She’d also found six pouches of powdered refried beans that seemed to still be good — just heat and add water. With beans, you knew without doubt if they’d gone bad. The smell was like an intense fart reduction. Cooked down. Intensified ass. You didn’t smell it so much as it clobbered in you in the face, brought stinging tears to your eyes.

  Most of their food needs were met by their garden and from fishing the river these days. The dry stuff they’d found would be nice insurance and add some variety to the mix, but they’d really ventured out looking for ammunition. And that they’d failed to find.

  Just thinking about it made Erin grind her teeth together. They’d scored plenty of weapons in their scavenging outings, enough that each adult in their small compound was armed at least twice over. But with a very limited supply of ammo, they had to ration every bullet. Every round. Every shell. It was not an ideal scenario when security was such a day-to-day concern. Marcus had been training dogs for that purpose, but Erin wanted more stopping power than that, if they needed it.

  If they needed it? That was a joke. When they needed it. There was no doubt they would, sooner or later.

  “One more baby?”

  Izzy’s voice startled Erin from her daze, and her first thought was that Izzy somehow knew. Had been reading Erin’s mind or something. Or maybe she’d seen that absent-minded belly stroke a few minutes ago and put two and two together.

  It was only after the first panic-stricken moment passed that Erin noticed Izzy gesturing at the house up ahead.

  Not “one more baby,” Erin finally realized. Izzy had said, “one more, maybe.” As in, should they maybe go through one more house before heading home?

  Relief flooded Erin’s entire body. She turned to study the place.

  Vinyl siding lined the top half, neat rows of pale blue that reminded her of a shard of robin’s egg she’d found as a kid. Dark brick occupied the bottom half. One of the window sills looked bloated and soggy, brown lines trailing down beneath the glass, but otherwise it seemed a nice enough place. Still standing, anyway.

  “Sure,” she said. “One last house. Why not?”

  Izzy took the lead, walking her bike up the driveway. Erin followed behind, still shaking off the momentary alarm from before. She wiped a hand across her brow.

  The strain of keeping this thing a secret was starting to wear on her. She’d tell everyone sooner or later, of course. She sort of had to, right?

  For now, though, she would keep the fact that she was pregnant to herself.

  Lorraine

  Paintsville, Kentucky

  1 year, 52 days after

  Louis knelt next to the rear fender of a Subaru Legacy, a warped double of himself glaring back from the glossy black paint. One end of the clear plastic tube adhered to his lips, and the other disappeared into the steel sphincter leading into the sedan’s gas tank.

  He blinked a few times. Took a deep breath. Sucked.

  Lorraine stifled a laugh, watching from her vantage point leaned up against the hood of an adjacent car, her pregnant belly quivering with the chuckle seeping out of her. She couldn’t help but laugh at the commencement of the siphoning ritual. She remembered Louis once explaining that he always tried to avoid making eye contact with his mirror image while sucking on the tube, finding something uncomfortable about it. Tried. But he couldn’t do it. He always found himself locking eyes with his reflection, both of them sucking away.

  Now amber liquid zoomed through the clear plastic, always a little faster than its master’s reaction time. Louis ripped the tube out of his mouth a beat too late, hacking and retching and spitting as he directed the flow of gasoline into the first red plastic gas can in a row of them.

  The fuel gurgled into the can, echoing funny out of the tiny plastic enclosure.

  “If all of these have a quarter of a tank or more, we’ll be full up again,” Louis said, waving a hand at the smattering of cars in the Food City parking lot. His face still puckered funny from the gasoline taste in his mouth.

  Lorraine nodded. Full up had become their go-to term for all thirteen of their gas cans being full, large and small. It was something like 80 gallons of gasoline total, not counting the stuff in the car’s tank. They figured that could get them around 2,000 miles, even factoring in the hassle of finding detours around roadblocks and such.

  They fell quiet as the siphoning continued. Wet gurgling sounds occupying some of the emptiness all around them.

  They were in Kentucky now. The Bluegrass State. The foothills of the Appalachians made everything seem different here from what Lorraine was used to. The chain stores and restaurants were more or less the same as everywhere else, but the terrain elevated things and sat everything on odd inclines.

  The supermarket parking lot they now occupied, for example, sat on higher land than everything else around, forever looking down on the Fazoli’s and Peebles across the street. A grassy knoll separated the asphalt of the lot from that of the street, a wall of sheared rock cutting off the hill to etch a space for the snaking road.

  Their most recent stop — a bungalow outside of Dayton, Ohio that had once been Lorraine’s sister’s place — had proved to be another dead end. Vacant and lifeless. The exterior of the house seemed to have gone soggy somehow, already entering the first stages of falling down, the exposed wood on the porch all bloated and soft, the asphalt shingles peeling away from the peak of the roof like a bald spot at the crown of the head.

  Where would they go next? Lorraine didn’t know. She didn’t think Louis did either.

  An engine roared somewhere not so far off, and Lorraine instinctively slid her butt off the hood of the Ford she’d been sitting on. She and Louis huddled between the two cars. Heads down. Waiting.

  The engine’s growl swelled. The sound grew fuller. It was getting closer.

  Lorraine snuck a glance at Louis, but he only stared at the ground, his face blank.

  Even if this little freeze frame act had become routine for them in their travels, it still ma
de her heart beat faster in her chest. That rhythmic thud of blood pulsed in her ears now.

  The vehicle ripped right down the street before them, though the bulging green of the hill shielded them from seeing it. The sound of the engine built to a crescendo, an aggressive churning that almost screamed at its peak.

  And then the sound retreated. Fading. Soon to be gone and forgotten for good like all the other tense moments that had come before it.

  The rest of the siphoning seemed to go faster after that, somehow. Time no longer interested in lingering here.

  With everything full up, they piled the gear into the car. Louis did most of the lifting, but even in her very pregnant state, Lorraine could handle the smallest tanks. Most of the gas could be stowed in the trunk, but a couple of bigger cans occupied the backseat.

  And soon they were in the car and moving again. It felt natural now, Lorraine thought, to press forward, even if they had no place left to go.

  They moved out away from Food City and Fazoli’s and passed some residential stuff as the city thinned out. Houses and trailer parks in various stages of decay.

  Storms had ravaged this part of the country, and signs of flooding still occupied much of the region — washed out sections of blacktop, the brown waterline creeping as high as five or seven feet on the vinyl siding of houses in the low areas, and even still, the water rode high in the drainage trench along the road’s shoulder, babbling alongside them as they drove.

  Lorraine thought of her sister’s place again. She hadn’t held out high hopes for Debbie’s survival in the first place, so her house standing empty offered no huge surprise in and of itself. She’d never said as much out loud to Louis for fear of jinxing it, but more than once the words last ditch effort had occurred to her as they made the trek to Ohio.

  And that ominous series of questions percolated back to the surface of her thoughts again: now what? Where do we go? And why?

  Neither she nor Louis held any answers to these questions, she thought, though they dare not speak of it. So they drove, pressed forward, found some comfort in the velocity.

  In the weeks since they’d fled the camp, they’d now ventured as far south as Florida and as far north as New Jersey, crisscrossing up and down the east coast, seeking family or friends along these routes. Any familiar face.

  Instead they’d found only death, emptiness, roving packs of the dead reanimated. Nightmare upon nightmare somehow made real.

  Another dead end.

  And another.

  And another.

  The world was full of them now. Life itself, too. Maybe it had always been so, and they’d peeled off the mask to reveal this truth at last.

  Louis turned his head to her then. Smiled. She could still detect that touch of gasoline disgust in the little puckers near the corners of his lips.

  “South then, I guess,” he said, as much observing the direction they were headed as declaring it a conscious selection. “That’ll take us into Tennessee.”

  She nodded.

  “Sounds as good as anywhere else to me.”

  This exchanged couplet, just a few words spoken by each of them, struck her as typical of their conversations. Sure, sometimes one or the other launched into a real discussion, but after all this time sitting side by side in the front seat, they’d grown comfortable with the silence. They often didn’t need words for long stretches.

  Even so, after weeks in the car with this man, her perception of him had changed. Back in camp, he seemed one of the more well-adjusted if distant figures. A nice person. A leader. A hard worker. But not someone she felt like she knew very well.

  Now, though, she had come to learn he had another side. His quietness seemed more boyish than before, almost angelic. Shy and a little soft. Where before she saw masculinity in his silence, she now found gentleness. Like some weird moth person who flitted around the edges of life and didn’t really know how to engage with it beyond that. He never really asserted himself, she’d realized. He was just kind of there.

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds. Took a couple of deep breaths — in slow and out slower. Let these thoughts flee her head.

  When she opened them again, she felt better. A bit empty, maybe, but sometimes that was OK, she thought.

  She watched the green and brown of the hills rise and fall along the sides of the road. Dense woods cluttered these slopes, trees jutting out of the ground at every possible angle it seemed, webs of foliage strung tightly around everything. The oaks and pines tried their best to reach their limbs out into the open area of sunlight above the road.

  They were headed south, somewhere north of Knoxville, when the rain started. It didn't stop for four days.

  Erin

  Rich Creek, Virginia

  9 years, 36 days after

  They ambled up a mostly shattered concrete walk, clumps of dried grass reaching out for their ankles. The craters in the sidewalk made Erin’s ankles tilt into odd angles with each step, made her realize the ache that had settled into the joints. Not great. They still had a long bike ride home, too. Better to make this one quick, she thought.

  The front door was locked, but a doorway leading into the back of the garage was open. That made things easy enough. No broken windows this time, nor the awkward boosting and climbing that often followed the shattering of glass.

  Erin turned the knob. Flung the slab of wood out of the way, the hinges squawking like angry birds. She tried to see into the shaded garage, but apart from a slab of smooth concrete floor just inside the door and the vague silhouette of a sedan beyond, she couldn’t make out much.

  “Stay close,” she said.

  Her voice came out tight. Sharp. Just slipping between her teeth.

  She drew her weapon. Kept it leveled at the ground. Both hands wound around the grip.

  A single breath filled her lungs. She held it. Let it out in slow motion.

  Then she started in, passing through the breach. Izzy followed just behind her.

  The garage smelled of dust. Thick and dry and earthy. As her eyes adjusted, the details of the place winnowed into focus, shapes forming in the gloom.

  The car was a beat up Pontiac Grand Am from about 1998, she thought. Black with faded out spots where the sun had parched the shine out of the enamel. A rumpled fender. Splotches of rust freckling the bottom half of the thing.

  Overturned five-gallon buckets huddled in one corner. There were a couple of Craftsman tool centers, toppled, their empty drawers all hanging open.

  “Looks like someone got here before us,” Izzy said.

  “Kind of weird,” Erin said.

  Izzy squinted.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “None of the other houses on this street looked to be picked over.” Erin tapped her bulging pack. “Too much food around. So why come all the way out here and toss this house and not the others?”

  A few seconds of silence passed as Erin’s eyes continued sweeping the space.

  “Should we keep looking?” Izzy asked.

  Erin nodded, and they took two concrete steps up from the garage to the door leading into the house. The kitchen beyond showed even more obvious evidence of having been searched.

  Paper and cardboard trash cluttered the floor. Ankle deep. Signs of many skipped recycling days.

  Every cabinet door hung wide, some of them crooked on the hinges. A couple had been ripped off entirely.

  The shelves inside were mostly bare. Wood exposed. Skeletal.

  Nothing promising. Yet Erin found herself relieved.

  “Let’s do a quick sweep. Make sure we’re alone,” Erin said. “Then we’ll take a closer look.”

  Izzy nodded, drawing her own pistol.

  A rapid room to room check confirmed that they indeed had the place to themselves. Two bedrooms. Living room. Bathroom. What looked like a former office based on the busted roll-y chair. Basement. All empty.

  They put away their weapons, and Erin felt some of the tension in her neck an
d shoulders release. It always did once they ruled out contact with hostiles.

  The scan also strengthened the case that this place had been thoroughly searched. Trash lined the floor of each room. Every shelf emptied. Every cupboard ripped open. Some air of urgency remained in the evidence left the behind, some hint of violence in the way everything had been pulled apart. Erin couldn’t help but be intrigued.

  Someone had been looking for something.

  “I’ll take the basement,” Izzy said.

  That struck Erin as odd. The downstairs had been fairly cavernous. Cool. Dank. Poured concrete walls and floors, one room of dark wood paneling. Had there been books she’d overlooked? Something like that might have caught the kid’s eye. It had also been fairly clean relative to the upstairs. Maybe Izzy just wanted the easy job, Erin thought. No wading through a sea of trash down there.

  Before she could ask, Izzy pounded down the steps and disappeared around the corner.

  That left the upstairs to Erin. She moved beyond the kitchen.

  In the hall, a closet door laid half-open. Beach towels and sheets strewn over the floor where they’d been ripped from the shelves within.

  To the left she found the living room. Here, even the couch cushions had been slit with a blade of some type. White stuffing hung out of the slashes, cloud-like guts left on display as though whoever sliced the thing was making an example out of the sofa, sending a message to the other furniture. Fall in line… or else.

  An array of magazines and pamphlets stretched over the floor between the coffee table and the couch. The glossy covers glared, white patches reflected where the sunlight reached through the window to touch them. Erin knelt to take a closer look.

  Soldier of Fortune. American Riflemen. Guns & Ammo.

  Gun magazines, all of them. Various firearms gleamed on the covers, oiled up and practically glistening.

  So maybe that’s why the place had been looted so thoroughly. Someone came looking for the guns and ammo.