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

by McBain, Tim

  He climbed into the backseat where he wet a rag with one of the gallon jugs of water, and then he went about getting her cleaned up. He scrubbed her face first, wiping the stuff from around her mouth, a preliminary job that’d likely need repeated before this was done. Then he unlatched the seat and pulled her free to get at the rest of her.

  Better to toss the Metallica t-shirt she wore for a diaper today, now that it was creamed pretty good with half-digested formula. He threw it out the window, heard it slap the ground, a sound both heavy and wet. Then he wiped her down and wrapped her in another t-shirt — this one featuring some cartoon character he didn’t recognize.

  He gave the car seat itself a cleaning before he put her back in, and then he double backed to her face, which had somehow seemed to accumulate more vomit during this process, as predicted.

  All in all, it was a quick job. Not as bad as some, especially considering how much had shot out this particular time.

  Once she was re-secured in her seat, he made his way back to the driver’s seat, eyes flicking to the rearview out of some habit.

  He froze. Stared at himself.

  Sores pocked his right cheek, a port wine colored patch of them about the size of an oblong silver dollar. Growths, really. Protrusions like tiny heads of asparagus rendered in a ruddy yet fleshy tone. Tiny knobs that he thought looked fungal somehow. A living thing on his skin.

  That wasn’t it. Or at least he was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  He got this, whatever it was, in the wastes of Florida. The dead cities where the bombs went off, flattened and blackened the earth. He’d driven down there on his own, braved his way all the way down to Miami, Lorraine staying north for those two days, staying in a little cabin north of the danger zone in the panhandle.

  He had to see it with his own two eyes. Had to. Whatever the consequences, he’d live with them, he’d make peace with them.

  He’d walked the streets there, the place where the land was wounded. Touched the shards of concrete, the rebar bent and twisted in all directions like broken fingers. He’d walked among the rubble. Looking for something. He didn’t know what. Something he would know when he saw it, if he ever did.

  In his memories, all of these walks happened in the dark, lightning flashing to split the sky with jagged bright. He knew that must not have been true, that some of his time there would have happened in broad daylight, but his memory believed otherwise. Played movies that showed dark and dark and dark.

  He’d also walked through some of the remaining buildings or what was left of them. Leaning things. Stucco all bubbled from water damage, strange blisters bulging from its rough surface. Some of the apartments remained mostly intact. He remembered one in vivid detail — fully furnished with a black leather sofa and matching love seat, art deco coffee table and TV stand set. Tasteful. A suburban time capsule if ever there were a historian to record these artifacts, preserve them in a museum somewhere — a picture of how things used to be.

  The sores had started as a singular welt about the size of a pimple, all the way back when Lorraine was still with him. They’d steadily grown or spread, depending on how one looked at the matter. He’d let his stubble grow out to kind of cover it, hoping it’d go way. Even now part of him thought that if he just didn’t look at it… maybe.

  And now he saw his teeth bared in the rearview as he lurched for it.

  He clubbed at the mirror with his fist, hand ricocheting off to graze the sun visor. The second blow knocked the mirror off its perch, tumbled it to the floor where he heard it shatter.

  It glinted green light there, a pale glow shimmering up from the dark, and he could see the cracks in it, the places where no light shined back. Thin black lines like veins etched into the glass.

  Erin

  Ripplemead, Virginia

  9 years, 40 days after

  After lunch, Erin stood at the kitchen sink, cleaning the last of the dishes. She could see some of the kids through the window playing a game of tag between the lines of clothes hanging up to dry.

  Marcus came in and picked up a dish towel to help her finish.

  “Did you talk to Ruth about Delfino and Baghead leaving?”

  “Yeah,” Erin said. “Why?”

  “She seems kinda down. Says she doesn’t want to go to the quarry. Rayne even gave her the hard sell. Told her about swimming and catching frogs, but Ruth isn’t into it.”

  “I asked her about her family earlier,” Erin explained, passing Marcus a pot. “She’s probably still upset about that.”

  “Ah. Yeah, that would explain it.”

  Marcus dried the pot and replaced it on the stove.

  “Anyway, it’s fine if she wants to stay,” Erin said. “Marissa and I will keep an eye on her.”

  “You sure you don’t want to come to the quarry with us? It’s a great day for a swim,” he said, flicking the towel at her.

  “It’s not a matter of wanting or not wanting.” Erin swatted the towel away. “I promised Marissa I’d help her make one last batch of soap, and if we don’t do it now, it won’t be cured in time for the next trip into Roanoke.”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow.

  “You know she’s only going to use the money she makes selling the soap to buy more booze.”

  “Yeah,” Erin said. “I know.”

  “And you don’t think you should talk to her about the drinking?”

  “No, I do not.”

  Marcus cocked his head to one side.

  “Chicken.”

  “I’m not a chicken,” Erin said. “I simply value my life. Besides that, you think she’d listen? Has Marissa ever taken anyone else’s advice? Ever?”

  There was a sudden clatter behind them as Marissa barged in with her soap-making supplies: a giant stainless steel kettle, a butcher’s scale, jars of scrap grease, and a container of lye marked with a skull and crossbones and several warnings about it being “caustic” and “dangerous.”

  “Advice about what?”

  “Marcus thinks you should dye your hair bright red,” Erin said, spewing out the first thing that came to mind. Anything to avoid having a heart-to-heart with Marissa about her drinking.

  “Me? With bright red hair?” Marissa chuckled. “I’d look like a clown.”

  Marcus mouthed the word “chicken” at Erin and then turned his attention to the window overlooking the back yard.

  “Looks like everyone’s ready to go.” Marcus hung the towel from the hook on one of the cabinets and kissed the side of Erin’s head. “If you guys finish with the soap early, you should come down and join us.”

  Erin watched Marcus and the other adults form the kids into a line and start the march to the quarry.

  “You tell him yet?” Marissa asked, setting the big pot on the stove.

  “No.”

  “If you wait any longer, he’s liable to figure it out on his own.”

  At the look on Erin’s face, Marissa smirked.

  “You know I grew up with two sisters?”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “I was in the middle. Two years between me and Cecilia, the youngest, and Rosa, the oldest,” Marissa said, measuring out water into a plastic pitcher. “We were close. Too close, maybe. Used to fight like cats. Scratching and pulling hair. Cece could be real nasty. She’d fight dirty, let me tell you.”

  Marissa set the pitcher of water in the sink and began weighing the grease.

  “Anyway, we were always in each others’ business whether we liked it or not. Listening in on phone calls and going through each others’ things. One time, Rosa had a boyfriend over. We had an old TV out on the lanai, which is what we called a porch back then, and they were out there watching TV. Holding hands and kissing and all the stuff that kids do at that age. And me and Cecelia snuck out into the bushes to spy on them. Well, Cece got mad because she thought I was hogging the binoculars, so she gave me a real hard pinch in the inside of my arm. Left a bruise that didn’t go away for two weeks. And I let out thi
s yelp and kind of sprang up out of the palmetto we were hiding behind. Blew our cover. And when Rosa spotted us, she was just furious. Her face got all red, and she wanted to yell at us, but her boyfriend was there, so she was stuck trying to not totally lose her cool. So she kind of sputtered out a few unintelligible words, and then she yelled, ‘Beeswax!’”

  “Beeswax?” Erin repeated.

  Marissa laughed and nodded, dumping the grease into the large pot and giving it a stir.

  “The gist being that me and Cece should mind our own.” Marissa tapped her spoon on the edge of the pot. “Anyway, it became sort of a shorthand between the three of us. Anytime one of us stuck our nose where it didn’t belong after that, the other could just say, ‘Beeswax.’ And we’d know we were being told to mind our own damn business.”

  “So is that what kind of soap we’re making today?” Erin asked. “Beeswax?”

  Marissa pursed her lips.

  “No, stupid. I’m telling you that if you want me to back off, you can tell me so.”

  “Oh,” Erin said, sifting through Marissa’s collection of essential oils that she used to scent the soaps. “So you’re saying that all I have to do is say, ‘beeswax,’ and you’ll shut up?”

  “Yeah.”

  Erin swiveled her head to meet Marissa’s eye.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this like eight years ago?”

  A laugh burst out of Marissa’s lips.

  “You remind me of her, sometimes. Little Cece.” Marissa shook the wooden spoon at her. “The mouth on that one.”

  She clucked her tongue and gestured toward the dining room.

  “Looks like one of the kids left their stuff behind.”

  Erin spun around and spotted the bright pink backpack on the dining table.

  “Jade.” Erin shook her head. “No surprise there.”

  “No, ma’am. That one would lose her ass if it wasn’t stuck on the back of her,” Marissa said. “Mix up that lye for me, will you? And don’t forget to glove up first.”

  “Oh, I won’t make that mistake again,” Erin said. “I can still feel the burn from that time I got just a little speck of it on the back of my hand.”

  “Kinda stings and itches and burns all at once, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Erin unscrewed the lid of the lye powder and measured out the proper amount on the kitchen scale.

  She’d just scooped the lye into the pitcher of water when the dogs started barking.

  “What are those mutts yapping about?” Marissa asked, turning her head toward the racket.

  There was a knock at the back door, and Marissa clapped her hands together.

  “Ahh, I bet they sent someone back for Jade’s stuff.”

  Erin nodded and then froze. There was something wrong. Something off. But what?

  Finally, she understood what it was. No one in their group would knock on that door. They were in the kitchen. A communal space. Everyone came or went here as they pleased.

  None of the adults would knock, and definitely none of the kids.

  The realization only took seconds. Two or three at most. But it was too late.

  “Wait!” Erin said.

  But Marissa had already reached the door. Twisted the knob. Pulled it open.

  At the sound of Erin’s voice, Marissa swiveled back around to face her. She didn’t even see what came next.

  Didn’t see the shotgun extending into the ever-widening space between the door and the frame.

  Didn’t see the barrel pointed right at her own head.

  Louis

  Rural Virginia

  1 year, 189 days after

  Louis stood at a workbench, brow furrowed in concentration. He traced paper patterns over white canvas, number 2 pencil working around the big block of coarse fabric, that gray line trailing along behind it.

  The baby cooed in a stroller behind him. Reaching plump little hands in the air to grasp at nothing. He checked his watch. After he got this cut out, he’d feed her.

  He’d never worn a watch in his life, but the baby’s feeding schedule made paying attention to the time matter more than it had before. He didn’t mind it. Started to find the idea of passing time interesting. Measuring the pieces of the day struck him as strange, not all the way real. All the time was alive even after you separated it from the rest in your head, like you could slice your life up into the tiniest bits and watch the things wriggle.

  They’d set up shop in an upstairs apartment overtop an old auto garage. He liked being up high whenever they got off the road to rest for a few days, better to have that vantage point, he thought. Looking down on the street, it just felt like he’d see anyone before they saw him.

  For now they were down in the garage, the smell of dirty motor oil strong here. A stench that matched the dark splotches on the concrete floor here and there. He didn’t mind the odor, though. It reminded him of the way things used to be.

  With the patterns traced, he removed the paper from the fabric and went about it cutting out the shapes with a pair of big silver shears that reminded him of his grandma. She sewed a lot. Had fabric shears in the little sewing area in her basement that he got in trouble for playing with when he was a kid.

  With the first piece of canvas cut out, he held it up. Tried to get a sense of its size. Maybe it’d work. Hard to say.

  This was his second attempt at this little project, the first coming out too small. Thankfully he had a whole bolt of the fabric to work with. He’d found it in the stock room at a Joann Fabric in Paducah, Kentucky. Took it even before he knew exactly what he meant to do with it, though he supposed some part of his mind must have known immediately. The subconscious, the muck brain, sometimes knew things a long time before the idea burbled up to the conscious mind. He remembered reading about it, a bunch of neuroscience studies.

  In any case, his pattern drafting and application had turned to a trial and error process. He knew nothing about piecing together a garment, even a simple one. Before he got going, he’d wondered if it might take five or six tries to get it even close to right. Now that he was working at it, he thought he’d have something usable on this second try, and then he could decide whether or not to take one more pass just to perfect it, maybe have a backup.

  The second piece of canvas came free from the roll, and he held this one up near his face. Tried to get a sense of how it related to the size of his head. He’d always known he’d had a pretty massive cranium. Struggled to find hats that fit right. Most of them looked too tight, looked in grave danger squeezed around his fat melon, like they might start quivering and snap from the strain at any second.

  He tossed the fabric back on the workbench and headed upstairs to fix a bottle for the girl.

  He boiled the water on a propane grill on the balcony. Let it cool. Then he mixed three scoops of powder with six ounces of water, checked the temp on his wrist and fed her.

  She lay on his forearm, eyes closed as she fed from the bottle, still so small that she didn’t even run the length from his elbow to wrist, coming up about 3 inches shy. It was, in most ways, hard for him to believe that she was a living human being. She seemed some smaller species to him, helpless and strange, never to actually grow up from here.

  She slept after the formula was gone, and he carefully wedged her down in the stroller again, wrapping her in blankets in such a way that it reminded him of a tortilla folding around a bean burrito.

  Now he started the long, tedious process of stitching his fabric pieces together by hand. The black thread stood out from the white canvas, though the effect looked more intentional than he imagined. Where he’d foreseen a clashing of colors, he instead found a complimentary relationship.

  He pricked his fingers a few times with the needle, little beads of blood rising up from the skin like some baked good plumping in the oven. But mostly the process was without problems apart from the slow pace.

  Time passed with his focus on nothing more than the tiny loops of black thread w
inding around and through canvas. It somehow felt odd to lose himself in this task, and he periodically found himself vaguely aware of the quiet surrounding them in this apartment, the utter stillness of the room.

  When the hood was done, he lined up the eye holes. Cut them out. He wanted to add a couple of other features, but for now he’d take a look. The real thing.

  He moved into the shadows of the bathroom. Fumbled for his box of matches there on the vanity. Scraped one against the textured side of the box, and the flame flared and hissed. He lit the candle, some vague cinnamon-y scent quickly filling the little space.

  At last, he faced the mirror. Cringed a little at the face looking back. The growths had spread. Crawled along just more than half of his jaw. Reached up over the bridge of his nose. It invaded his face little by little. Soon the mottled skin would cover it.

  Some of the color had drained from the affected area — the wine shade going paler and pinker. He couldn’t decide if it was more or less gross this way. Not a huge difference, maybe.

  And he watched in the mirror as the canvas slid over his head to make the diseased looking visage disappear. He stared through the eyeholes at his new face, smooth fabric without blemish. Blinked a few times.

  And tears flooded his eyes. The relief somehow coaxing them out. He didn’t know why. This layer of canvas changed nothing. It just pulled a shoddy mask over reality.

  But the crying only grew stronger. Quivered in his chest. Wrenched a sob out of him that sounded so strange.

  It was almost an out of body experience. Something happening to him. He didn’t feel the full force of the emotions that must be happening in there to cause all of this, didn’t feel much that he could tell.

  Somehow, whether he understood it or not, he found incredible relief in being able to block his face out, from himself and everyone else.

  Erin

  Ripplemead, Virginia

  9 years, 40 days after

  The man holding the gun pulled the trigger. The shell exploded into the back of Marissa’s head at point-blank range.