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

by McBain, Tim

  Blood leaked out everywhere. All those perforations in the chest, in the neck, in the face. Dripping red streaks down the front of him. Spilling. Draining.

  And then Baghead stopped squeezing the trigger, let the gun fall to his side, and it was quiet at last.

  He watched the slumped figure for a long moment.

  Motionless. The body gone still. The blood flow seemed to slow even as he looked on. Trickling. Ceasing.

  The head looked wrong. Something utterly lifeless about the way the chin slumped against the sternum. The angle, maybe.

  Blinking and letting his vision steady, he saw that the back of the skull was mostly gone. The exit wound blasting it to bits, spraying it against the pillows and one section of the wall. Looked like some kind of excavation, the rounded bits of skull exposed along the edges of the pitted place. An archaeological dig looking for artifacts in the back of this head.

  The gaping wound removed all doubt.

  Father was dead. For better or worse, he was dead.

  Decker. Jones. Father.

  Gone for good.

  And three breaths later, Baghead brought the gun to the spot in the canvas bag that lined up with his own temple. He could feel the metal pinning the fabric to his warped flesh. Hard. A little warm from all the recent activity.

  No satisfaction existed in any of this, but maybe there was a finality to what happened here. A sense of closure. A big loop cinching tight. A finale.

  It could all be over now. One final twitch of the muscles in his hand and he was all done.

  He closed his eyes. Listened to his pulse pounding in his ears. That beat that’s always there, from birth to death, one’s lifelong companion. That clock in the chest that ticks down, down, down, until at long last it stops.

  Good to go. So go.

  Cease to exist.

  His hand clenched. He squeezed the trigger.

  The gun clicked.

  Empty.

  Erin

  Ripplemead, Virginia

  9 years, 40 days after

  When Erin came downstairs the next morning, she found Marissa cleaning the infirmary. The bed was empty.

  “What happened?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? But he was doing better, how—”

  “Not dead. Gone. As in snuck out in the middle of the night. Delfino, too.”

  “Oh,” Erin said.

  She knew she should feel relieved. The sooner the man with a bounty on his head was away from them, the better. And yet she couldn’t help but wonder if he would have been safer here, under their protection and care.

  “Do you think he’ll be OK? In terms of the infection and all.”

  “He wasn’t through with his course of antibiotics, so that’s not great. But I don’t suppose it matters all that much. If he really means to have a face-to-face with that cultist kook, I don’t think he’s long for this world.”

  Erin nodded.

  “I guess you’re probably right.”

  Erin gathered up the dirty linens Marissa had piled at the end of the bed. When she turned to the door, she startled at Ruth’s sudden appearance on the threshold. She hadn’t heard so much as a single floorboard creak, which was a feat given how loud the old floors were.

  “You’re a sneaky one, aren’t you?” Erin said.

  Ruth hunched her shoulders.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Erin said. “It’s a good thing. Being sneaky can come in handy.”

  The girl’s shoulders relaxed, and Erin realized she was going to have to break it to the girl that Delfino and Baghead were gone. She didn’t know the girl well enough yet to guess how she’d react.

  “Ruth,” Erin said, lowering herself to one knee. “I’m sure you know that Delfino and Baghead had very important business. And unfortunately, it couldn’t wait any longer, and they had to leave last night.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “They told me to give you this,” the girl said and opened her hand.

  A wad of bills were clutched in her fingers. A tidy sum of old money, which still had good value in many places.

  “They did?”

  “And earlier Baghead told me to tell you that your hospitality will be remembered.”

  “Probably not for long,” Marissa muttered from the other side of the room.

  Erin shot her a warning look.

  She swiveled back to face the girl.

  “You got to say goodbye, then?” she asked.

  “Yes. And Delfino said he would come back to visit me someday, and I said that I didn’t know if you would like that so much, and he said, ‘Let her try and stop me.’”

  Erin chuckled.

  “Yeah, that sounds like Delfino, alright.”

  Erin tucked the wad of cash in her pocket and readjusted her grip on the laundry.

  “Well, Ruth. Seeing as you’re one of us now, I suppose you should get your very first chore assignment. How does that sound?”

  Ruth wrinkled her nose at the bundled linens in Erin’s arms.

  “Can it be something that isn’t laundry?”

  Erin grinned.

  “Sure. In fact, I have something way more fun than laundry you can help with.”

  Delfino’s unannounced arrival with a man on the brink of death had thrown off everything around the farm, and Izzy and Erin had yet to unload the trailer they’d brought back from the bunker house.

  Erin led Ruth to the garage where Izzy was already stacking the weapons and ammunition they’d scavenged into some old wooden milk crates.

  “Where did it all come from?” the girl asked.

  “Izzy and I found it.”

  “In a secret bunker,” Izzy said, holding up a finger. “Don’t leave that part out.”

  “How did you find it if it was a secret?” Ruth asked.

  Izzy grinned.

  “Because we’re professional treasure hunters.”

  “Treasure hunters?”

  “Oh yeah. We know how to find all the best stuff.” Izzy patted one of the crates. “Take this haul, for example. Your average, run-of-the-mill scavenger never would have found this loot, because it was sealed inside a hidden vault. We had to use all our skills, and even then, it took us hours to get into the place. We had to dig and dig all night, and just when we were about to give up — clang! — the shovel hit something.”

  “What was it?”

  “A hatch! A special little door leading into the bunker.” Izzy lowered her head, her face grave. “And do you know what was guarding the treasure inside?”

  “What?”

  “A zombie!”

  Izzy lunged forward, hands outstretched.

  Ruth shrieked, but instead of giggling like most of the kids would have done, the fear on her face only deepened.

  “Don’t worry, though. I decapitated him with a shovel.”

  “What’s de-cap-it-ate mean?” Ruth asked, separating the word into four distinct syllables.

  Izzy opened her mouth, but Erin scowled at her and mouthed, No.

  “Oh, it’s just an overly technical way of saying I sent him straight to zombie heaven.”

  The space between Ruth’s eyebrow’s crinkled.

  “There’s a zombie heaven?”

  Erin sighed and blew out a breath.

  “It’s just a… figure of speech,” Izzy said. “Hey, Ruth. You wanna see something really cool?”

  “OK.”

  Izzy jumped down from the trailer, dusting her hands on the front of her shirt. She hoisted the old rifle with the bayonet on the end and held it up in the air.

  Ruth’s eyes went wide.

  “What is it?”

  “This dagger thing on the end is called a bayonet,” Izzy said, unhooking the bayonet and handing it to the kid.

  Ruth’s fingers moved toward the pointed end.

  “Careful, it’s sharp,” Erin said.

  Ruth’s eyes glittere
d as she turned the gleaming blade over in her hands.

  “Can I play with it?”

  “Uh… no.” Erin shot Izzy a look, wondering why she’d handed the bayonet to the kid in the first place. “It’s not a toy.”

  Izzy shrugged, and Ruth looked disappointed.

  “But I can show you how to use it sometime,” Erin said.

  “I know how to use it,” Ruth said, then made a quick stabbing motion in the air.

  Izzy cackled.

  “See, Erin? She’s a natural.”

  And the girl looked so serious that Erin laughed a little, too.

  “Well, I can see you’ve got the bayonet part down,” she said. “But I meant I’d show you how to shoot the gun. We’ve got some targets set up across the river.”

  Ruth’s eyes bulged.

  “For real?”

  “Sure,” Erin said. “Not today, but we’ve got enough ammo now to train up anyone who wants to learn, so sometime soon.”

  Satisfied, Ruth handed the bayonet back to Izzy. Erin gestured at the smallest and lightest of the crates.

  “You think you can carry that?”

  Ruth lifted the wooden carton.

  “It’s not too heavy?” Erin asked.

  “Nope,” the girl insisted.

  The three of them filed inside to the walk-in closet that Erin had converted into an armory. She pulled a key from her pocket, unlocked the padlock she kept on the door, and turned on the light.

  Inside, Erin showed Ruth how to sort the ammo into the various cans by size.

  “When you fill one of these, throw in one or two of these little packets,” Erin said, tossing two desiccant gel packs into one of the ammo cans.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, humidity is bad for ammunition. So these little bags soak up the moisture from the air and keep it from ruining the shells.” Erin got to her feet. “You think you can finish sorting those while Izzy and I go refill our crates?”

  Ruth nodded, plunking a handful of 9mm rounds into one of the ammo cans.

  Back in the garage, Izzy and Erin unpacked more gear from the trailer.

  “Do me a favor, Iz,” Erin said.

  “Aww, you’re not gonna chew me out for letting her hold the bayonet are you?”

  “No. But that was sort of dumb.”

  Izzy rolled her eyes.

  “What did you think she was gonna do? Impale herself on it?”

  “No, but it’s important to make sure the kids understand that they’re weapons and not toys.” Erin shook her head. “Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to ask about anyway. I was going to see if you’d go help Marcus with lunch. I want to talk with Ruth alone for a few minutes.”

  “To see if she knows what happened to her family?”

  Erin nodded.

  “Didn’t Delfino say they found her covered head-to-toe in blood? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know her family’s dead.”

  “I know. But sometimes it helps them to talk about it. Remember how Cameron was when we first found him? He’d barely talk.” Erin nestled two containers of gunpowder in her crate and lifted it. “Pretending the bad shit didn’t happen isn’t good for anyone.”

  Ruth sat cross-legged in the center of the gun closet when she returned, still dividing ammo between the various cans.

  “Thanks for helping out, Ruth,” Erin said. “You’re doing a really good job.”

  “It’s kind of like sorting beans and seeds,” Ruth said, not looking up from her task.

  Erin stared down at the top of the kid’s head.

  “Did you help your mom and dad do that?”

  There was a beat and then the small head bobbed once.

  “Can you tell me what happened to them?”

  Ruth bit her lip.

  “Did someone hurt them?” Erin asked.

  Several seconds of silence passed, and Erin didn’t think Ruth was going to answer.

  “Raiders,” she said, finally, her voice small. “They usually came at night, and we would hide in the woods until they left. But this time they came in the middle of the day. We heard the trucks. And mama put me in the old cupboard in the attic and told me not to make a noise, and she made me promise not to come out until it was night.”

  Erin nodded. That explained how she’d survived, then.

  “There were noises. The trucks outside and men yelling. And then someone banging on the front door and kicking it open and I heard gunshots. Mama was screaming, and baby Thomas was crying, and I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rocked back and forth.”

  Ruth began to rock now.

  “And I wanted to hum to keep out the bad sounds, but I’d told mama I wouldn’t make any noise, so I couldn’t.”

  Still rocking, Ruth started to cry.

  Erin reached out to put a hand on her head, and the girl jumped.

  “Hey, it’s OK,” Erin said, softly. “You’re safe now.”

  Tears streamed down the small round cheeks.

  “Sometimes I have bad dreams about the sounds,” Ruth said, hiccupping.

  Erin stroked the girl’s hair.

  “Yeah. I have dreams like that, too.” Erin blinked. “Tell you what, the next time you have a dream like that, I want you to come wake me up, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Erin got out a handkerchief and dried the girl’s face.

  “Has Rayne showed you the basement, yet?”

  Ruth shook her head.

  “Come on, then.”

  Erin took the girl downstairs to the giant open space they’d converted into a play room. There were boxes filled with Lego and Barbies. A massive dollhouse that came up to Erin’s shoulders. A jungle gym with a small slide and tumbling mats spread out on the floor. But the main feature was the half of the basement set up like a small village with a tiny grocery store and gas station and three playhouses that Marcus and Ned had built one winter.

  Ruth ran over to one of the foot-powered Little Tikes cars and stuck her head inside.

  “Can I play with it?”

  “Of course.”

  Ruth clambered inside and propelled herself across one of the roads painted on the floor.

  “You did a really great job with your chores today, Ruth,” Erin said. “Do you want to play down here for a while?”

  Ruth nodded, kicking herself halfway across the room and pressing the little toy horn.

  And Erin thought that even after everything she’d been through, all the terrible things she’d seen and heard, the kid would be OK.

  Louis

  Rural Virginia

  1 year, 88 days after

  The car hurtled down another stretch of rural road, headlights piercing the dark of night. Naked branches reflected back the glow, dead trees with the bark falling away to expose patches of the white beneath like bones.

  They’d moved out of Ohio at last, carrying the spoils of their looting along with them, moving south, hoping to keep warm as the seasons changed. Fall had crept in, the nights going cooler, the leaves shriveling to dried brown husks that tumbled down to the ground every time the wind blew.

  Winter would swoop down sooner or later, and he wanted to be someplace warm, hopefully settled as a matter of fact, by the time that happened. Better to start drifting that way now, he thought, figure out the rest as it got close.

  Driving at night was so different now. No streetlights. Likewise no barns or driveways lit through the night with spotlights.

  Just the endless dark — black seas of nothing to swallow everything after dusk, make it disappear until morning. A sort of awe-inspiring blackness transpired whenever he turned the headlights off for the night. Sometimes it was so intensely dark that it sickened him a little.

  As for inside the car, Louis mostly kept the dash lights turned up when he was awake, that pale green glow shining back a little too bright. He needed it, though, to be able to keep an eye on the girl. Elsewise the dark would fold around her as well, tuck her out of sight in the backseat.
Leave her in the unknown. And even if he’d calmed considerably since those first weeks taking care of her, he couldn’t have that, couldn’t have her shrouded in shadows so thick he couldn’t see her at all.

  The only drawback of keeping those dash lights cranked was the rearview mirror. He had to avoid its gaze at all costs, that magical piece of glass that painted pictures, the abyss that wanted only to stare into him. Even now he got the itch to flick his eyes that way, stare into his reflection. Behold the horror there.

  Rayne cooed then, like she knew the trouble he was feeling, or perhaps that he’d been thinking of her just a second ago. He looked back on her now. What a strange, angelic thing she was. Awake in the dark now, glowing with that green tint from the dashboard lights.

  Her eyes had grown brighter already. How long had it been? Almost two months since she was born? He swore he could see the first gleam of intelligence there, staring out along with her eyes, like she was starting to discern the shapes around her, the world around her, making those first bits of sense out of it all. Stitching some version of reality together in her head.

  What strange things babies were. Round little people. Innocent. Innately kind and gentle. Wholly without any ability for speech or any other real communication skills beyond crying. Even so, he felt like he knew her quite a bit already. Had a distinct feeling in her presence, a knowledge of her personality even as it took its first rudimentary shape, a sense of deep connectedness as specific and real as any other connection he’d had with a person in his life.

  Already she was a real person, an individual who would slowly become herself the rest of the way over the next decade and a half or so. It blew his mind on a daily basis.

  She spit up them. A rocket of white goo spilling down her front and splattering in all directions as it collided with the cross bar of her car seat. It was, on some level, an impressive spatter. More than you’d think a baby could produce, and the velocity led to a wide spray pattern.

  He sighed. Pulled the car over onto the shoulder, tires juddering as they slid onto the gravel and dust there.

  He’d almost made the mistake of looking in the mirror as he put the car in park, but he caught himself at the last second. Quickly looked down at his left wrist, which for some reason had become his go to outlet to avoid the rearview.