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

by McBain, Tim

  He turned toward the backseat. Eyed the two milk jugs of water they hadn’t emptied quite yet. The urge to guzzle down a bunch prickled over him, the strongest desire to drink long and deep and let the wet weep down his chin. But he fought it. They needed to conserve. For now, they still had a little more than a gallon, but…

  He looked back at the wall of corpses outside. Mindless wanderers. Staggering their little choppy steps. Mewling their mouths. Endless twitches and quirks animated these dead beings. Dragged them along toward nowhere. Moved them for no good reason, he thought.

  Trapped. Trapped in a Subaru. Penned in. Made small.

  Despair. Louis now knew despair like he’d never known it. It was like a hole from which happiness leaked, hope drained, any ability to cope gushed. It emptied him. Reduced him.

  He felt like a bug that the universe had plucked from the air, and now it wanted to play with him. Torture him. Hold him down. Strip off his wings and rip off his limbs one by one.

  But no. He couldn’t think that way. The universe was merely indifferent to his suffering. Something impossibly vast. Perhaps infinite. And he was a tiny speck among all of that space. A single grain of sand on the beach. Ultimately without consequence.

  Reality didn’t belong to him, wasn’t happening to him. It just was.

  And the only thing that was real was this moment. Now. Right now. Not the past. Not the future. Those were ideas. Mental constructs.

  Now.

  Wasn’t he fine for now? Yes. Did worrying about what may or may not happen next help at all? No.

  So let it go. Let it go.

  He took a few deep breaths. In through the nostrils. Out through the mouth. When he focused on his breathing, there was no anxiety. No nattering worry about the future. There was only the right now.

  Something about that felt good, so he took a few more breaths.

  Maybe that was how it’d be. Death. You focused on those last few breaths. Cleared your mind. And then you let go.

  But he wouldn’t think about that anymore. He would only breathe.

  A bodily smell resided with them in the car now. Not the shit bucket smell, which seemed to come and go in wafts. This was more permanent. Something sweaty. Something dank and meaty. A dark smell, he thought. The tang of exhausted sweat comprised part of it, but there was something more there. A touch of ammonia now and then. A touch of blood, maybe.

  The dead wandered and wandered. Roamed in circles. Pieces of shit.

  He thought maybe the herd was thinning, but he’d thought that before, and he had been wrong. Wishful thinking.

  He didn’t want to think about it now. Like maybe he would jinx it.

  No. No more words. He would breathe. He would focus.

  Breathe. And let go.

  Baghead

  Rural Maryland

  9 years, 40 days after

  Baghead blinked. Reality winking to black and then bobbing back into his vision.

  The silhouette standing in the doorway held very still for a moment. Tension visible in its shoulders. A hood thrown up over the head. Her arms twitched a little, fingers wriggling to adjust their grip on the rifle.

  She couldn’t see him, he knew. For now, she maybe wasn’t even certain someone was in the woods. Probably debating whether or she was imagining things, her mind playing tricks. How often might that happen when one sat out here night after night in the dark, staring out at nothing?

  It was her, though. He was sure of it.

  Deirdre.

  He didn’t know why or how he knew, but she was the one standing in the doorway with an assault rifle in her hands. He had no doubt. Even with the hood draped over her head, even with the lantern back lighting her, shrouding her face in shadow so thick as to obscure all detail, he knew.

  It must be her body language, he thought after a second, that identified her. The way she carried her shoulders. The way her hips and wrists moved. And he wondered if we might all be unique on that level — the way our bodies were put together, the way we moved. Each human body something of a singularity.

  “It’s me,” he said, lifting his voice. Even in his own ears he sounded a little hoarse. He cleared his throat, was going to repeat himself.

  Deirdre shuffled back a step and a half, crouching, aiming her weapon into the dark beyond the doorway. He detected panic in her movements, choppy and hurried. She must be trying to stay out of the opening where she would be exposed.

  “Hands up and come out into the opening, into the light.”

  Baghead put his hand and stump up. Feeling weird. He walked toward a gap in the trees, the place where the woods gave way to the opening.

  His legs tingled, a little wobbly beneath him, half numb. His feet crunched over and through the foliage, twigs snapping below, loud and sharp like a mess of broken ribs. It felt strange to not worry about the sound of his movements after so long inching his way in the quiet.

  He passed under an arch of branches, and the land seemed to open up around him. He stopped there, two steps beyond the tree line, somehow reluctant to move fully into the open.

  “It’s me,” he repeated, his voice clear this time.

  “Into the light now,” she said, gesturing with the gun.

  He took a breath. Walked toward that sprawling box of light streaming out onto the dirt in front of the shed, the place where the glow sliced a piece out of the dark.

  At last his feet crossed the threshold, stepped into the gleam. The light walked up his body until it lit the bag topping his head. He angled himself a little away to keep its harshness out of his eyes the best he could.

  Deirdre sited her gun on him, the metal clicking against her hands. She squinted hard, and then she let the rifle down slowly, bringing it to her side.

  “So you’re back. Finally,” she said. “Hand of Death bring you?”

  Baghead nodded.

  “Let’s just call it unfinished business,” he said. “I’m here to finish it, as a matter of fact, if you’ll help me do it.”

  Louis

  Rural Tennessee

  1 year, 57 days after

  It was gray out when it happened.

  Louis woke. Found himself just barely able to see through the gauzy plume outside the car. Fog as thick as a blanket. Clouds pulled down from the heavens to swathe them.

  He blinked a few times. It took a second for his brain to wake up, to make sense of the situation around him, his mind utterly blank for those first waking moments.

  He’d slept deeply. Dreamed nonsense that was already fleeing his memory.

  It was morning now. He was pretty sure of that. Probably just after dawn based on the little glimmer of light filtering through the fog.

  And then his body reacted to what he was seeing. He lurched forward in his seat a second before the significance really occurred to his conscious mind.

  His hands strangled the steering wheel. Head all hunched toward the windshield. Eyes squinted as though it might help him see through the mist.

  Even with everything shrouded in smoky tendrils, he could tell it was different, though. The world outside the car had changed as they slept. Changed dramatically.

  The black shapes moving around the car. There were fewer of them. Half as many. Less than half.

  The herd had thinned. Dispersed. Moved on. For real this time.

  A fraction of the walking dead remained, perhaps less than a third of what had been there, and even those seemed to be moving away now. Shuffling west, Louis thought. The whole horde leaving this place.

  Maybe something drew them that way. A sound. A smell. Who knew what stimulus got through to the idiot things?

  The why mattered less than the reality, anyway. They were fleeing en masse, like a flock of birds migrating for the winter.

  His hand fumbled for the spindle just below the door handle, his eyes not daring to break contact with the freshly sparse horde out there. He rolled the window down a little more.

  The cool air spilled in. His breath h
itched a little in his throat as the fresh wind touched his cheeks. It felt incredible.

  After reassuring himself that none of the dead were within 10 or so feet of the car anymore, he rolled the window down another three cranks and stuck the top of his head into the gray morning. Felt the cool envelop his skull, enter his mouth and nostrils, suck down into his chest. Unbelievable.

  That dank morning air was so heavy with wet that it reminded him of being in a basement. Inhaling a lungful of the stuff brought memories flooding back. Waiting for the school bus as a kid, the sun just barely over the horizon, the dew from the grass lacquering the toes of his shoes with a glossy coat of moisture. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and breathed and remembered, felt all the strange and beautiful nuances of being that child in the world before. The dreams and insecurities of a time and world he was starting to forget. He found the experience both life-affirming and vexing, beautiful and somehow tragic.

  He reeled his head back into the vehicle and turned to Lorraine after that. Discovered her still deep asleep, arms clutched to her chest in a way that made her seem small. A little frail.

  He lifted his hand toward her, but he stopped himself short of shaking her arm to wake her. His fingers twitched a little as they hovered just shy of her person. Torn. He wanted to share this excitement, but… she was eight months pregnant for God’s sake. He should let her rest.

  As the daylight swelled over the next few minutes, the shade of gray around them brightened. The mist thinned, grew faintly more translucent.

  He could see more of them now. Following the others. Moving out. Moving away from the car.

  Checking the mirrors, he found the area behind them was nearly clear of the dead. A few haggard looking ones staggered there, bloated from the flood and slower than the rest.

  And a sharp tingle, almost painful, shot through his arms into his hands and roiled there. Felt like an electric current.

  This was a miracle, he thought. For this herd to move out so rapidly? A miracle.

  An answered prayer.

  He couldn’t wait anymore.

  He leaned over to Lorraine. Gripped her arm. Gave it a little shake.

  She didn’t wake.

  He shook it again. More firmly this time.

  Her limp form flopped at his touch. Shoulders shimmying all loose. After a second her head tilted down onto her chest.

  He let go. Waited for that head to bob up. Those eyelids to flutter and open.

  But no. Still deep asleep. No signs of waking.

  What the fuck?

  Panic welled in his chest. Mind racing. Did the heat get to her in the night? What was it called? Heat stroke or whatever. He knew that could be fatal, could put her in a coma, could…

  He stopped. Held his breathe. Listened.

  The wind still rolled in and out of her, chest rising and falling slow motion.

  Louis closed his eyes. Relief washing over him. At least…

  He shook her with both hands now. Panic crept into his arms and he really throttled her, limp neck flopping the head back and forth.

  She popped up, all of her body seeming to tense. She sucked in a big breath. Eyelids fluttering and opening.

  She looked at him for a second, a blank look in her eyes.

  And then both of her hands clutched at her belly, that blank expression going pained or confused or both.

  “I think…” she said, licking her lips. “I think…”

  “What is it?” Louis said, his voice just above a whisper.

  “My water broke.”

  Baghead

  Rural Maryland

  9 years, 40 days after

  Deirdre led the way through another stretch of woods, Bags sort of following the silhouette of her as much as anything. It felt better, he thought, to be back in the dark, to move under the cover of the night once more. To press closer and closer to that final conflict that would define his story, one way or another, without anyone knowing him and Deirdre.

  He could still picture the way she’d appeared there in the doorway. Her form shifting into the light, taking two steps until her frame filled much of the small doorway, the shadow shape he somehow knew was her.

  She’d wanted to wait until morning to make their move, to wait for the guards to change shifts. But he explained how it wouldn’t do. Whether the bag was on or off, he couldn’t move in the open. Not during the daylight.

  So she’d abandoned her post to lead him onward, to make sure he got where he was going. Going AWOL from a guard station was an offense that could be punishable by death, but maybe it wouldn’t matter after tonight.

  One way or another, it would all end tonight.

  They worked their way down a beaten path, a muddy rut gashing through the woods. The trees had been trimmed back here so they formed a weird cut out in the branches and foliage, almost like some topiary design, an arched opening in the forest.

  After a long stretch of quiet, Deirdre spoke up.

  “How’d you know I’d be there tonight?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, last I’d heard you worked the late shift, that you preferred that to the other. And I kind of figured I’d get word if you had left the camp.”

  He didn’t need to make any effort to stress “left the camp” as a euphemism for her death. She understood what he meant.

  “So you figured I’d help you? Even if we’d only met years and years ago?”

  “Guess I got the impression that we were on the same side. That maybe we wanted the same thing. You made that clear enough, didn’t you?”

  Years back, Deirdre had wandered the world outside the camp as a scavenger. She had sought Baghead out in those days, had found the little place he was staying in at the time — a cabin in rural Virginia — just after he’d started publishing and distributing his anthologies. And she’d brought him a pile of papers — journals and letters, mostly. In a lot of ways, she was the one responsible for the story of Father, Ray, and Lorraine getting out the way it did. Pieces of it, anyhow. She’d probably been one of few in the camp who’d pieced together that the figure in Baghead’s book named Decker was now the leader known far and wide as Father, and she’d helped fill in more of the tale accordingly.

  “I guess so,” she said after a long pause. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”

  Lights shone in the distance. A bunch of little pinpricks gleaming in the darkness. It must be the camp. Baghead wondered if he’d even recognize it now. Did it resemble the place that Ray and Lorraine had built at all anymore? Maybe. Maybe not. He didn’t think he’d get much of a look.

  “Do you think killing him will make a difference?” Deirdre said, her voice tighter than before. Smaller.

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “Maybe. I guess it’ll change things. I don’t know if it’ll be for the better, but… There’s a kind of justice in it, either way. It would feel right, whatever the consequences, if that makes sense. If you even pull it off, that is.”

  Baghead chuckled a little at that. He wanted to reply, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  The trail curved away from the lights, pushing the glitter in the distance off to their right. Baghead could vaguely discern iron fencing now between them and the town, a bunch of little rectangular shapes filed along the ground in rows, their outlines standing out in the moonlight. It took more than a minute of looking at them to realize they must be grave stones, surrounded by that wrought iron fence — a cemetery.

  “What are the latest rumors about him?” Baghead said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “He had a stroke,” Deirdre said. “Or at least that’s what everyone says. He’s tried to play it off as a broken ankle, but… I guess it’s been six or eight months now that he’s been getting around in a wheelchair. Weak on the one side, you know. At first, his back was all leaned that way most of the time, his one eye pretty much slack and dead-looking. It got better, though, a little.”

&nb
sp; Baghead nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see him in the dark.

  “I’d heard a little about that. Didn’t know what to make of it.”

  “Even before that, I’d say age had calmed him. He’s more of a figurehead than before but not unreasonable. He tries to inspire the people, or did. I think it started as a manipulation — more bullshit to dupe the sheep, you know — but maybe it turned real over time. A little sincerity. Could be goodwill toward man is easier to come by when you live a cushy life like he does, up in his house, pursuing his recreational drug habit and whatever the hell he was doing.”

  “So the drug stuff… that was all true? I thought maybe there’d been some exaggeration involved. Sort of a building of that rock star legend kind of thing. The larger than life figure. Indestructible.”

  She shrugged.

  “Maybe it’s not like how it was back in the day, but he still goes on binges. This is all second hand information, I should tell you. I guess most of it always was, but… Ever since the stroke, he doesn’t have visitors up to the house. Just the caretakers, I guess. He keeps to himself apart from that and the odd meeting with the council and some of the ceremonial crap. He’s sort of a withered thing now, I guess you could say. It’s hard to imagine he’ll be around much longer, but…”

  After a lull, the conversation reduced to the beat of their footsteps, Baghead changed the subject.

  “So how’s life in camp these days?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Same as it ever was, for the most part. You’d think it’d either get better or worse, and the people seem to have an inexplicable ebb and flow in whether they feel good or bad about it. Street speakers come along and get everyone whipped into a frenzy about what an unlivable shithole the camp is, and then a month or two later, the council puts together a little campaign of their own, gets everyone feeling patriotic about what a great life we have here. Despite all the talk, for the most part nothing really changes from what I can tell. Kind of like way back, in the old world, everyone got up in arms about elections and so forth, but my life never changed so much that I can remember. Not until it all collapsed, I guess.”