by McBain, Tim
Wind ripped through the pines, shook the boughs like they were all waving at him. That brought him out of the coffee dream and back to the car.
He peered through the binoculars again. For a split second, he thought the bundle was gone, but it was there. Unmoved.
He huffed out a big breath, that weird blend of relief and tension confusing his insides again. The pressure could only increase as he sat here, as he waited.
Just stay calm. It’s early yet. Someone will be up soon. They’ll see her.
The day seemed to be growing brighter by the second outside. He couldn’t see the dawn coming up over the horizon from where he sat, but he knew it must be moving pretty good now. No dallying this morning. Up and at ‘em.
He scanned over the windows of the house, swinging the binoculars to check the upstairs first and then swishing down. Nothing. No signs of movement. He was just about to set the ‘nocs aside again when he saw it.
The male appeared there. Scrawny and black. Shoulders stooped. He trailed across the yard, a bucket in hand, moving toward the house. That gentle look in his eyes as always.
Had he gotten outside while Baghead slept? He must have. But how had he not noticed the bundle on the porch?
Of course the house probably had a back door. That could explain it.
Baghead held his breath. Waiting for the moment when the approaching figure saw her there on the porch. His heart beat so fast it seemed to hover in his chest, climbing up into his neck to patter like hummingbird wings.
He jogged up the steps.
And whatever would happen, it would happen now. The reality of this situation would snap into place, go from abstract to concrete, from endless possibilities to one actuality, no longer a malleable thing. It would belong to the ages.
When he saw the bundle at his feet, he froze. Dropped whatever he’d been holding, little bits of something tumbling out of the container to spill over the porch.
After what felt like a long time, he stooped and one of his hands reached toward the baby’s face. A tentative gesture. One who knew that something delicate lay before him, something precious. It looked like he brushed her cheek with his knuckles, probably just barely touching her, almost as if to make sure she was real.
And Baghead knew it would be OK now. It would be OK.
This was the one he had wanted to find her — the gentle one who sometimes walked around with a squirrel perched on his shoulder.
He knew today would be the day, because the other was gone. The dark-haired girl who led them. Baghead thought she would take the baby in, too. But the boy with the squirrel was the safest bet. The best bet. Now that he’d touched the baby’s face, it was done. It was settled. It was over.
And Baghead felt the tears coursing down his cheeks. Even beneath the canvas he felt them. He fished his hand underneath the hood to dab at them.
The boy scooped up the baby, wadded blankets and all, and he turned to disappear into the house.
Baghead had planned to wait here a while, maybe even until dark. Better to drive off then, as those within the house slept. But he thought the distraction, the excitement, would cover the sound of the car’s engine just now.
His fingers found the keys in the ignition. He felt empty. He felt blank. And it occurred to him that he never thought life would be anything like this when he was young. He thought it would be something else altogether. Something that made sense.
The starter whined before the engine turned over, and he gunned it out of there, tires slipping some in the mud before they found traction on the asphalt and the car really took off.
The future was this emptiness stretched out in front of him. This infinite blank space. And now his life would go on, hurtling into that void. It’d just go on a while. No destination.
He plunged down the road. Going wherever. Going nowhere.
Life would keep unspooling, keep happening to him. The clock in his chest would keep ticking down the hours, unwinding. It would all just keep happening until it didn’t. That was how this ride worked.
It followed whims, turned on happenstance, walked the razor thin line between everything and nothing every day, between life and death.
It was all just time in a way. Time you filled however you wanted, or time that got filled for you, maybe. Minutes and hours and years and decades of time. Days that coiled around and took circuitous paths and crossed with some people and not others, connected you intimately with some, crashed you up against others in conflict.
Eventually it peeled you apart from all of them.
When your clock stopped ticking, it took you under all alone.
No one was cataloging these events, these stories, trying to craft a narrative out of the mess, find a melody in all the noise. It was all just happening. The ride went on and on and on without purpose, without meaning.
With or without you, it went on.
Baghead
Rural Oklahoma
9 years, 84 days after
By the time Baghead had made his way home, the season had changed. October descended over the land. Chilled the air. Crisped the leaves. Sucked the life and green out of them. Plucked them from their branches and sprinkled them over the ground.
The world had changed, too. Some seismic shift had erupted when he’d fired that gun. Shockwaves spilling outward from that point in time and space.
The war had started almost immediately. Loosed like a forest fire. Rampaging over the foothills of the Appalachians. Raging over the towns and cities between Father’s camp and the Sovereign Cities.
Forty days of war and counting. Spreading. Maiming. Killing.
War was a living thing reaching its tentacles out, suckers attaching to whatever living souls they could find. Leaving a trail of twisted and eviscerated bodies wherever it touched.
Baghead had seen some its effects up close. Crucified bodies on the outskirts of the towns. Blood and shit weeping down from the empty human shells, their arms wide open.
In the rural places, he found bodies nailed to barns and farmhouses. Guts ripped out and strewn through the branches of bushes nearby like Christmas lights. Bloody messages scrawled over the heads.
More vengeance and fury and meaningless cruelty for a mindless, violent, raping world.
He’d fled the nightmare he helped create. Left the coast. Headed west. Hitched rides when and where he could. Walked the rest. Slept in any dry place he could find. Starved and shivered and withered into something frailer than he’d been before. It’d taken more than a month to make it home.
And despite all the change the world had seen in these past forty-odd days, the busted down Ford Focus along the river where he laid his head remained the same. Unmoved. Still sitting on four flat tires. Still rusted to shit. Still perpetually surrounded by that wet babble of the river, a comforting sound to him.
He approached the vehicle slowly. Feet careful and quiet on the sand and gravel. Not wanting to spook the one who may lay within even now — the one he hoped was there.
He tried to peer through the glass on the driver’s side door. Cupped his good hand against the window. Saw only murk there, the glare from the sunlight shining too bright to make out any detail.
His hand found the knob. Pulled. The door eased open at his touch.
Empty.
He stood in the doorway of the car for some time. The gray cat wasn’t there. Gone now. Maybe it’d be back, but the evidence suggested otherwise.
The cat had left an offering on the center console. Two dead mice presented on the altar there. Crusted now. Dried out. They didn’t even smell. It’d probably been weeks.
He was an older cat. Perhaps ten or eleven. Out here in the wastes, that had to be considered a good long life.
He uncrinkled a plastic shopping bag from the floor of the backseat and used it as a glove. Scraped the mice up with some difficulty and dumped them outside the car.
Then he climbed in and sat down. Closed the door behind him. Stared out at the river.
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The water streamed along as ever. Unperturbed. Maybe that meant something.
And he replayed that scene in Father’s basement. All that talk. All that blood. The skull emptied. A concave piece of broken crockery.
There was no lesson in it. Only meaninglessness. Only nothing.
Maybe all messages failed as you toed up to the edge of that abyss. Stopped pretending everything would be OK and stared down at the certainty of death with wide open eyes.
He didn’t know. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing. Perpetuated violence, vengeance, mindless aggression without purpose. He didn’t know that, either.
You tried to do what you thought was right in the moment. But only looking back could you see how the dots connected. Or didn’t connect. Did they ever fucking connect?
Maybe there was no right answer. Just time stretching out to swallow everything. A life that went on for a while.
These thoughts spiraled in his brain. Negativity coiling around and around itself there.
Pain. Cold feelings. Empty feelings.
They’d assailed him ever since the encounter with Father. Snaking tendrils out to afflict the rest of his body.
Queasy stomach. Loss of appetite. Muscles bunched tight in his lower back and neck. Tense. Sore.
Pain without relief.
He closed his eyes. He’d been so close to it there in that room with Father. Oblivion. He’d taken a good long look into that gaping emptiness. Had found it cold, yes, but not quite scary anymore. Maybe…
Something rattled behind him. A little scraping sound followed this first noise.
He opened his eyes. Turned.
The gray cat slithered through the hole in the rear windshield that served as his cat door. He didn’t hesitate as he made eye contact with Baghead, still worming through the gap.
He trilled — a sound somewhere between bemused and faintly bewildered in Baghead’s interpretation. Then he padded across the backseat, crossed the bridge of the center console.
Baghead stroked the furry head as the cat came within arm’s reach. And the swirling black noise in his head receded.
“Hey little guy.”
The cat took plodding steps onto Baghead’s legs. Stuck its snoot into the canvas under his chin, and then settled into a loaf on his lap.
And Baghead felt himself pulled fully into this moment. Here. Now.
Being.
With the feel of the cat’s fur, and the babble of the river, and the familiar stale smoke and french fry smell of the car’s interior.
The sense of suffering faded some. Not joy but a kind of peace replacing the pain.
The meaning he tried to stack on life’s events seemed to matter less and less. Revealed, however briefly, for the abstractions they were.
Here and now. Those were the real thing. The only thing.
He’d spent his life, he realized, learning this and forgetting it over and over. Trying to hold onto it only to lose it again.
Maybe it would stick now. Maybe he’d suffered enough that it could finally stick.
The cat drifted off toward sleep in his lap, and Baghead closed his eyes as well. His thoughts simplified. Slowing to a trickle. Until there was more empty space in his head than words.
Life isn’t a puzzle to be solved. No answer lies inside this mystery box.
It just is.
It is here.
It is now.
Life goes on. For a while.
The Scattered and the Dead
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- The complete Scattered and the Dead series -
Book 0.5
Book 1
Book 1.5
Book 2
Book 2.5
Book 2.6
Book 3
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The Violet Darger series
The Victor Loshak series
The Charlotte Winters series
Casting Shadows Everywhere
The Clowns
The Awake in the Dark series
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- About the Authors -
Tim McBain writes because life is short, and he wants to make something awesome before he dies. Additionally, he likes to move it, move it.
You can connect with Tim on Twitter at @realtimmcbain or via email at [email protected].
L.T. Vargus grew up in Hell, Michigan, which is a lot smaller, quieter, and less fiery than one might imagine. When not click-clacking away at the keyboard, she can be found sewing, fantasizing about food, and rotting her brain in front of the TV.
If you want to wax poetic about pizza or cats, you can contact L.T. (the L is for Lex) at [email protected] or on Twitter @ltvargus.
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