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

by McBain, Tim

  Erin’s jaw flexed. A frustrated puff exited her nostrils. So close and yet so far.

  She picked past the magazines to pull out the pamphlets that lay partially buried beneath them. Leafed through a couple of them. She shook her head as she looked through them. Four sales brochures about bomb shelters.

  Happy families smiled in all of the photos, the details eerily similar between the pamphlets. Father. Mother. Son. Daughter. Sitting together at a dinner table. Steaks or possibly pork chops rested on each of their plates. Mashed potatoes. Unidentifiable green vegetable clusters. Something quite dated in their clothes and haircuts. Erin wanted to pin the styling down to 1993 or so.

  The perfect nuclear family unit safely stowed in underground chambers and loving every minute of it.

  Izzy’s voice flaring up from the basement startled Erin out of her ironic analysis of the bomb shelter models.

  “Erin!”

  Even through the floor, the voice was sharp. Something urgent in her delivery. Either scared or excited, Erin couldn’t tell.

  “What?”

  “Come look at this!”

  Excited. That was good.

  Erin let the pamphlets fall back into a glossy pile and lifted herself off the floor. Her joints protested some, but the little rush of adrenaline from Izzy’s yell mostly dulled the aches.

  She headed for the basement. Clambered down the steps. At the bottom, she glanced around, not exactly sure where Izzy was.

  Smooth concrete gaped back at her. The floor had been painted gray, a soft matte coating with red splotches shining through where the top coat had worn away. The walls were white with black smudges marring them high and low.

  She heard a scuffle in the room to the back left of the basement.

  It almost felt weird to walk over a clear floor after wading through the ankle deep heap upstairs. Her feet seemed tentative, as though all of this must be too good to be true.

  “What the hell is this about?” Izzy said when Erin finally located her.

  She seemed to be gesturing at something, but it was darker back here. Shadows within shadows. A mist of light glinted through a narrow glass block window, but even squinting Erin couldn’t quite make it out.

  She took another couple of steps forward, and then it came clear.

  Izzy had peeled a curtain back from the wall and held it off to the side. Nothing elaborate — a draping of dark fabric that Erin hadn’t even realized was cloth when they did their first scan. Since the color roughly matched the other walls in the room, it blended in quite well.

  Behind the curtain, a brick section interrupted the poured concrete. That seemed odd.

  Erin stepped closer. Touched the red brick. Fingered the grout lines. Gave it a couple of slaps. It was mortared in place alright. Solid.

  “It’s just about the size of a doorway,” Izzy said. “But what the hell would it be?”

  Erin gasped. Her mind leapt to the magazines upstairs. All those glossy gun centerfolds, oiled up AK-47s and shotguns.

  Then those faded, and she saw the warped family photos in the pamphlets. Smiling models eating pork chops in a strange underground compartment.

  Her eyes snapped back to the bricked up doorway.

  “It’s a bomb shelter.”

  Louis

  Rogersville, Tennessee

  1 year, 52 days after

  Louis stroked his fingertips at the back of his neck. Pinched the sinewy muscles. He didn’t fully understand why sitting in the car seemed to make every fiber in his body vaguely sore, but the fact remained undeniable at the moment. Its truth etched itself into his flesh.

  They’d passed the state line not so long ago. Goodbye Kentucky. Hello Tennessee.

  It was getting dark, though, so he couldn’t see much of what the Volunteer State had to offer. Just that narrow tunnel of things his headlights touched — namely the yellow line that seemed to blink off and on in the middle of the highway.

  In any case, this state probably held more of the same, he figured. Emptiness. Death. Evidence of a great civilization, or at least a civilization, with no real signs of life left. Ruins of a type.

  Raindrops tapped at the windshield. Keeping time. A downpour had slowed their progress some, but it seemed to be letting up some for the time being.

  Still, a sheet of water remained atop the asphalt, and the car’s tires flung the wet into the wheel wells with an almost musical thrum. He kept the speed down a little for fear of hydroplaning.

  Lorraine slept in the passenger seat. Curled up. Even breaths entering and exiting her body, seeming to inflate her ribcage. She looked small. From this angle, the shadows made it hard for him to believe she was still quite pregnant.

  Looking over at her sleeping figure seemed to trigger a drowsiness of his own. He yawned. Let his eyes shift back to the road. They’d need to get off the main roads, find a place to sleep. No real point in pushing too deeply into the night if they had no place to go.

  A broken down station wagon clogged the left lane, and he slowed to veer around it.

  For the most part, the roads in this area were clear. That, at least, was something to be thankful for. Most of the empties had been shuttled off to the side, out of the way.

  The shoulder looked like the parking lot of a used car dealership. Abandoned cars huddled along the rumble strip here and there. Clusters of them. Some stripped of their tires and any usable parts.

  Deeper in the south, the main roads bordered on impassable. Permanent traffic jams. Fifty car pile ups. Hard evidence of the attempted exodus.

  Florida had been the worst of it. In a way, Louis regretted ever going there. Part of him needed to do it, needed to see the worst of the worst with his own eyes. Ground zero. And so he did.

  Lorraine had stayed back from that last of it. Scared of the radiation. She’d holed up in an old hotel in the panhandle.

  And Louis had rocketed the rest of the way south on his own. Come face to face with the blackened piles of rubble that had once been Orlando and Miami. The nukes should have been air burst like the others, destructive without leaving radiation behind. Should have. But it hadn’t played out that way.

  Now this was a dead place, Louis thought, as he’d driven through the endless wastes.

  He’d made the solo trip in a day and hadn’t left the car, hadn’t stopped at all, hadn’t eaten or slept. He just looked on the ruins from what felt like the safety of the road, unable to resist that urge to drive past, crane his neck, take all of the details in.

  Those images flashed in his head now. Bits and pieces coming back to him.

  Concrete shards poked up from the ground, pointed their angled bits toward the sky. The glass pieces in the rubble looked strangest — the skyscrapers toppled, some of their fancy mirrored sides miraculously left intact.

  It was hard to fathom the loss of life that would have accompanied the destruction.

  At the center of the blast, the great ball of fire would have reached several million degrees Fahrenheit within one millionth of a second after detonation. A fireball with a two mile radius. It would have melted anyone it touched. Reduced the bodies to bloody jellies. Hundreds of thousands of blackened puddles.

  No. Not would have. Did. It did burn them, incinerate them. All of them.

  And at the point of impact, a crater remained. Almost 700 feet deep. Just over half a mile around. A chasm where the land itself had been wounded.

  Lorraine moaned in her sleep, and the sound shook him from this nightmare reverie. A little whimper escaping her lips, the sound dull as though it emitted from deep in her throat. She sounded like a scared dog, Louis thought.

  He reached a hand out instinctively to wake her, but then he stopped himself, his fingertips hovering just shy of her shoulder. Maybe he shouldn’t.

  Lorraine had grown more quiet after the trip to her sister’s. Turned more somber, he thought. Another empty house. Just what they needed, right? And this one seemed to have taken quite a beating already. Its damag
ed state a symbol somehow of what they were up against on this voyage. It’d only been about a year since everything went to shit, and the decay was already setting in. Every storm would leave permanent marks now.

  When she moaned again, his hand moved to her shoulder. Clutched it. Gave her the lightest shake that jostled her head on her neck.

  Her eyelids fluttered and opened wide, and she sucked in one sharp breath.

  “You OK?” he said.

  She blinked.

  “Yeah. Just dreamin’.”

  “Nightmare?”

  She tilted her head. Blinked a few more times. That wide look in her eyes receded.

  “Yes and no, I guess.”

  She smeared the heel of her hand against her chin.

  He knew that she’d dreamed about the camp again. About all the people. About Ray. She’d told him before that she dreamed that most nights. Variations of them being back there, of things being back the way they had been. Did that make sleeping or waking the nightmare?

  He didn’t know if he should ask after any of it. Would she want to talk about it or not? He didn’t know the etiquette for these things, if there was one.

  “Guess I’m lucky,” he said after a beat. “No nightmares for me. Not in a long while, anyway.”

  “You don’t dream about the camp?”

  He shook his head.

  They fell quiet after that. Louis could feel her eyes linger on him for a prolonged beat, and then she turned to gaze out the window. She stayed faced away as she spoke.

  “It’s been weeks, I guess, but it’s like my brain can’t wrap itself around the idea. We’re not going back. Ray is not coming back. Never. I can’t process it. Can’t make it feel real, so I dream about it. My brain makes up movies where I find myself back there, back where things made sense. Plays them over and over again.”

  Louis shifted in his seat.

  “Now we just drive around,” she said. “Hurtle forward to nowhere. Feels like we’re in between places, you know? Between worlds. The past is gone, completely untouchable. And the future holds no shape. Morphs and distorts and conceals itself from us. We’re driving, but we don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Think I’m going to pull over, actually,” he said. “Get off the highway and park somewhere. Try to sleep.”

  She nodded.

  And the quiet that ensued took on a fresh throb of awkwardness.

  Louis chewed his lip. He thought maybe he’d said the wrong thing. Answered her thought about where they were going too literally. She hadn’t meant it that way, he knew.

  The car coiled onto an exit ramp, and they found themselves on a two-lane service road now. It seemed darker off the freeway. Less open. Walls of trees and brush closing in on the strip of asphalt. A touch claustrophobic.

  The headlights glinted on the big golden arches of a vacant McDonald’s, but wilderness dominated the rest of the empty space around them.

  “You must miss it, though, right?” she said. “Being part of the camp and everything. Being part of… I don’t know… civilization.”

  “I mean, yeah, in a way,” he said. “But maybe not as much as you do. I mean, it’s lonelier some out here on the road, but I don’t know. Maybe I never felt like a part of it the way you did.”

  Now she rotated her shoulders to face him fully. He could see her eyebrows furrow out of the corner of his eye.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I liked it there, but I felt like I was still on the outside of things, you know? Not like you and Ray. I contributed and everything. Did my job. Tried to help where I could. And I had friends to a certain degree, but… I guess I still felt apart.”

  “Was it always like that for you, do you think? Before the plague and all?”

  “Mostly, yeah. Maybe if you went back far enough, it wasn’t, but just about as long as I can remember I guess.”

  “Did something… did something happen?” she said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  He watched the rain spatter the windshield, hesitated to answer. Explaining it never helped, he knew. Never satisfied anyone.

  But she was pressing him, even if the tone of her voice tried to conceal it. Their conversations had danced around this topic a few times. She wanted answers, and he wanted to give them, even if he didn’t know why. Or how.

  “My dad was a mean drunk. Beat on me and my brother pretty good. Maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know,” he said. “Mostly it was small stuff. Slapping us around. But one night, he put nine cigarettes out on my back because I left my bike in the yard.”

  He swallowed before he went on.

  “I can still hear it. The hiss each cherry made as he crushed it into me. And I can still feel where each of the wounds marked me. The screaming flash of pain as my flesh softened and twisted around every ember it extinguished. Little blackened craters in my skin. Puckered places. Opened. Smelled like burned hamburger, and it hurt for a month.”

  She gasped.

  “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged.

  “Doesn’t hurt anymore. Even the scars have faded. Just some faint discolored spots are all that’s left.” His eyes stared ahead, out the windshield. “Anyway, I think because of that night, I kind of learned to split my feelings in a way, if that makes sense. I had to separate myself from them. Separate my body from my mind. Separate myself from pain. That’s what kept me safe, kept me alive.”

  His fingers squeezed the steering wheel, tightening for a moment and then releasing.

  “But it also kept me apart from the crowd, I think, even when I had friends. Kept me a little distant. A little uncomfortable. I was separate from my feelings, but I was separate from other people, too.”

  After a stretch of quiet, he went on.

  “When I got older, I think it really held me back in life. That splitting of my feelings. I was in love once, you know. But I lost her. Couldn’t close that gap between us, the gap that existed between me and everybody, even if it was what we both wanted.” He shook his head. “I’d just go blank inside at all the wrong times, I guess. Empty. Cold, maybe. I couldn’t express my feelings right anymore. Couldn’t tell her in a way that would make her feel what I felt inside, make her know it and trust it.”

  Louis took a hand from the steering wheel and wiped it on the thigh of his pants before he went on. It wasn’t sweaty. He wasn’t nervous. But some impulse triggered the behavior out of habit, nevertheless.

  “It’s like I had all of this love in my body, an overwhelming abundance of it, and only the tiniest pinhole available to try to squeeze it out of in order to share it — the smallest, most worthless little rift through which I had to somehow express the entirety of my being, of my soul.”

  Even now he could hear that flat affect in his own voice. A touch of that distance that had always plagued him, isolated him.

  “The one thing that kept me safe also kept me alone. Maybe forever.”

  He could see Lorraine’s lips part out of the corner of his eye, knew she didn’t quite know what to say in response to all of this, so he jumped in with the smooth segue to save her.

  “I’m thinking we can pull over on the shoulder here and get some sleep. We could drive around looking for a driveway or parking lot for a little extra privacy, but out here on these country roads, half tucked in the woods? Probably makes no difference either way. That OK with you?”

  She swallowed before she answered, throat clicking. Jarred by the change of subject, he thought.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds fine.”

  He let his foot off the accelerator, and the car slowed as he scanned for a nice flat spot on the shoulder. Droplets of rain hit the strip of dirt there and exploded, all of the world slicked and shining with wet.

  The sedan eased off the asphalt — half onto the dirt and half into some tall grass at the edge of the woods. Everything juddered a little as the tires ground over the stony earth and came to a
stop.

  The brake lights glowed red behind them for a beat, and then the engine and lights cut out all at once.

  Inky dark closed around them like a fist, just the moon hung up above to break its grip, shining out from the one strip of sky unblocked by clouds. The sudden lack of engine noise made Louis’s skin crawl where his neck and spine connected. Unsettling.

  The rain sounded louder in the quiet. Wet fingers tapping on the hood, on the roof.

  Louis leaned into the back seat and felt for the water bottles, handing one to Lorraine. They always kept a few gallons on hand. Old milk jugs for storage, and smaller handier bottles to drink out of.

  “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to sleeping in the car,” she said, her voice quieter than before. “It’s like being inside and outside at the same time somehow. Between in a weird way. Between places, you know?”

  He nodded, then remembered that she couldn’t see him.

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “Well,” she said taking another drink. “Goodnight.”

  “Night.”

  He put the water bottle down between his feet, and felt along the side of his seat for the handle that allowed the back to recline. He laid it almost flat, the moon’s glow tilting away from him as he descended.

  His skull nestled on the headrest, and he stared into the matte blackness above. The crushed velvet interior coating the ceiling and blocking out the clouds which blocked out the stars.

  Crushed interior. Sounded about right.

  He shouldn’t have told her, he knew. About the cigarettes. Shouldn’t have told her any of it. It would have been easier for her that way. Easier for everyone.

  In time his eyelids grew heavy, and he drifted off. But sleep only took him in fits and starts.

  Sounds snapped him awake now and then. Sent shards of icy fear through his being. He could never decide if the noises were real or dreamed, but he had to check them out. Needed to be sure.

  He stared out the windows for a long stretch each time, swiveled his head to take in the expanse of black murk all around. Maybe it was just the rain.