The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  The day after the tobacco shop, he made it to the liquor store. He wasn’t alone this time. Some local drunks had pried open the back door and were working on clearing the place out. Even so, he hauled a lot of product home, making several trips with a Radio Flyer wagon from the neighbor’s abandoned garage — case after case of Jim Beam black label, Smirnoff, Jose Cuervo, Dekuyper Triple Sec — cheap, but he liked it.

  He got some beer, too, but it was a bit useless to him warm. Liquor he could tolerate at room temp, especially in a cocktail. Warm beer made his throat close up. He couldn’t get it down. Yet another reason to look forward to the days getting shorter and colder.

  There was an irony in hoping for winter, though. When he thought of the booze and pills and to some degree the weed, he thought of them as ways to feel warm inside. So he wanted it to get cold outside to better help him feel warm inside.

  He liked that.

  He thought about it when he ate. He wished he could never stop eating, never end the comfort he got from putting delicious food into his face. He wanted that feeling forever.

  He thought that’s all anybody really wanted in life, to feel warm inside. They deluded themselves into looking at the thing sideways, always glancing at it out of the corner of their eye so they didn’t have to see it straight on. They’d accept it so long as it was somehow indirect. Call it abusing Xanax, they don’t want it. Call it anti-anxiety medication, and it’s OK to take Xanax every day.

  No matter what anyone else thought, though, he knew that was all he wanted. The words came to him often these days:

  Just help me feel warm inside.

  He drank and smoked and ate things to get that feeling inside and keep it for a while, and it worked. It worked just fine.

  But the body wasn’t designed to be loaded up with these substances all of the time. He knew that. That’s why he had the rotation. He wasn’t a doctor, but he could apply a little common sense. Liquor does one type of damage, weed does another, and pills do another. So you rotate them and spread each type of damage out. One day a week, he abstained altogether. Sunday. Sunday was the worst.

  But yeah. Moderation. Everything in moderation.

  The cigarette was burned down to the butt. Damn. He stubbed it out in the ash tray. They always went faster when he was drunk like this. He wanted to light another one, felt the itch of the pack in his pocket, but he had to wait.

  It’d been his plan all along to get into the pharmacy, of course, but as others had obviously learned that was not as easy as it might seem. The room was well secured.

  Ah, but Travis had an advantage over the biker types passing through to loot the place. He knew the pharmacist, knew where he lived. Don Grigsby lived on Ash Avenue in a large brick house with a white picket fence running around an in-ground pool in the back. Much nicer than Travis’s house.

  When he’d checked the place, it had been empty, though. No Grigsby. No keys to the pharmacy that he could find. The only cool thing he found was a hunting rifle and ammo to add to his growing armory. He noted that the pharmacist’s mini Cooper was not in the garage.

  For 17 days after that, he spent a few hours per evening patrolling the town on his bike in search of the car. He finally found it a couple of miles outside of town. Apparently Grigbsy was trying to get out. He had another gun, a 9mm, on his decaying person, and $66,000 cash in a brown paper bag on the floor on the passenger side. Travis figured that to be useless, but he took it anyway. Grigsby also had the key. That was all Travis really cared about.

  He leaned over to blow out the candle and then resettled in the recliner in the dark. The acrid smell of the extinguished candle filled his nostrils, and he pictured the smoke pirouetting off of the end of the blackened wick.

  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He knew all of this was pathetic in a way. He knew it was no life. Staying drunk or high all day? No life at all.

  But he also knew that if people knew the things he’d seen, nobody would judge him. If they knew, nobody would blame him for his hasty retreat from reality.

  Nine days after the EMPs hit, he’d ridden out by the highway and sat in the grass. He drank whiskey sours out of a pair of huge mason jars he’d prepared for the journey while he watched military people haul off dead bodies in dump trucks. A second group of soldiers came six days later and burned a bunch more corpses in a big ditch just past the grocery store. It smelled like Korean barbecue, like some kind of sweet and sour beef dish with a good char on it. He almost vomited at first, but he got used to it.

  He thought they must think that burning the bodies would help quell the spread of the disease. Didn’t make much sense to him, but what did he know?

  The military didn’t come anymore after the fire, though the dead continued to gather here and there throughout town, collapsing face down in gutters, bloating on their porches and patios, and many still sat in their cars from all of the accidents and traffic jams. Hell, Travis thought, probably the soldiers died before they could make it back. Handling diseased bodies can’t be great for one’s longevity.

  Now he rode his bike around the empty town. Wind blowing leaves provided the only sound and movement. All else was still. He tried to keep the words at bay, but they came to him anyway:

  Deathly still.

  Hillsboro had been empty for a while now. Weeks. The bodies had become part of the scenery, like mannequins at the mall spread all over and set up in death poses. He didn’t notice them much. In his experience, they mostly kept to themselves. Supposedly, there were reports of zombies on the East coast, but that was hard to believe.

  Then again, all of this was pretty hard to believe. He never would have thought that the masses of humanity could be diminished so greatly within a week or two. Was this extinction? He looked out over the empty landscape that stretched as far as he could see. Close enough, he thought.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  42 days before

  Mitch sat on a green and white striped canvas chair, one of the fold out varieties generally used for the patio or camping. He wasn’t outdoors, though. He was in the basement.

  Across from him, Janice sat on a dining chair partially wedged between the washer and dryer. Her hands were tied together behind her back, with each hand individually lashed to the back of the chair as well. Similarly, her ankles were bound to the wooden legs of her seat. He had been thorough at her insistence. This was how she wanted it.

  Her eyes were closed. He was pretty sure she wasn’t asleep at the moment, though she had been in and out.

  He had one job now, a basement night-watchman-type position. His duty would be to stay awake, to patrol the basement for any signs of his wife dying and/or resurrecting from the dead. Pretty straightforward.

  He tipped his head back to finish another can of Red Bull and set the empty on the concrete floor next to the other drained cans and bottles. The hollow sound of the aluminum tube touching down caught her attention, and she opened her eyes.

  Her cheeks looked puffier now, he thought, and her mouth puckered into the faintest frown perpetually as though she couldn’t quite clear her palate of some sour note. He thought she might speak, but instead her eyelids fluttered a couple of times and closed again.

  His eyes tingled with that wide open energy drink feeling, almost like an electrical current buzzed along the edges of his retinas, and yet he was pretty drunk. He felt the drunk more in his respiration. It felt slow and easy and more pleasant to breathe somehow. It reminded him of times years ago, he and his future wife huddling on stoops with other drunks after the bars closed. Once everyone was drunk enough, the night quieted down, and he somehow felt more alive, just sitting and breathing and looking out into the dark. No matter the time of year, when it got late enough, the night got that chill to it, the air got thicker. Janice often leaned up against his shoulder. He liked those moments when reality filtered down to something simple like that. When there was no need to talk, no need to look very far a
head. They could just be together and breathe and feel alive.

  He wasn’t looking too far ahead now, either. Maybe that’s the magic of alcohol. It dulls your senses, lowers your inhibitions, and diminishes your motor skills, sure, but maybe what it does best is root you in the immediate moment. It blocks out the anxiety that obsesses over tomorrow and lets you live in today.

  Anyway, he thought it might be impossible to look ahead all that far in his current scenario, the version of the near future laid out by his wife. His brain couldn’t make that leap, couldn’t picture her being the mostly normal woman in front of him one second and some kind of mindless monster the next. Couldn’t picture her body gone still, never to stir again. Or worse than that, even, that it would stir again and not be her anymore.

  The word occurred to him then: Unthinkable. That’s what these ideas were. He tried to conjure these images, tried to consider these possibilities. He couldn’t.

  The unthinkable.

  She slept now, he was pretty sure, her chest rising and falling and her eyes moving beneath her eyelids, swiveling and flicking. He wondered what she might be dreaming, what someone might dream when they’re convinced that death is closing in on them.

  As they had moved down here and set things up, he believed her. As he went through with tying and taping her into the chair, he trusted her read on things, her prognosis regarding her condition. But that had been hours ago. Doubt crept in, slow and small at first, but it blossomed in the silence after their conversation trailed off. By the time she nodded off a little over half an hour later, he was more sure than not that this was ludicrous. They’d walk out of here together tomorrow morning like tonight never happened, go get her those antibiotics and be done with it.

  But maybe that wasn’t right, either. He could only really trust things as they were, this state of anticipation in the basement, this underground concrete chamber that seemed stuck between worlds in some way, this time and place where his wife seemed to hover somewhere between life and death.

  At least their basement was on the dry side as far as basements went. It wasn’t all mildewy and dank. Though dusty and cool and smelling faintly of kitty litter, it ultimately wasn’t unpleasant to sit down here.

  He fished a beer out of the cooler at his feet and twisted the cap off of the bottle. It tasted more bitter than usual, and he felt the corners of his mouth curl down in an involuntary frown. He considered the notion that the brew had somehow gone skunky, which seemed odd. He’d just bought it a couple of days ago. Then he remembered the Red Bull. It was some kind of shock to the taste buds to go back and forth between the sweet of the energy drink and the bitter of the beer. His tongue couldn’t get used to it.

  A nauseous feeling came over him, a bloaty feeling in the gut. It wasn’t caused by the beverages, he knew. It was the reality of this scenario creeping in again, the fear taking hold.

  He looked over his wife, her hair hanging down in her face as her chin drooped toward her chest in slumber. Her features looked intelligent. Alert. She always smirked when she slept, like she was perpetually making sarcastic remarks in her dreams. He thought that to be fairly likely, knowing her. She looked older than when they’d met but not by much. She’d certainly aged better than he had, a notion he verified by glancing down at his beer belly.

  He watched the rise and fall of her chest, saw the faintest pulse ripple in the flesh of her neck over and over. It reminded him of a pebble disturbing the surface of a pond.

  And then the flood of questions overtook his thoughts again: Would that pulse really cease tonight? Could any of this be real? Could a person just end like this? Not just a person. The one he wanted to spend forever with. The person he always thought would be around.

  He guzzled down half the beer to try to kill the brain cells where the negativity wriggled. He didn’t figure it’d work, but what the hell?

  It didn’t seem right. None of it. What sense could there be in the world working this way? The people we love weren’t supposed to die. It didn’t make sense.

  He adjusted in his chair, trying to ease some of the strain on his lower back, and his shoe scuffed on the concrete. The sound must have woke her as her head floated back to an upright position, and her lips jerked. After a second she opened her eyes.

  “What time is it?” she said, her voice sounding a little hoarse.

  He glanced at his wrist.

  “2:56 am,” he said.

  A little later than he’d figured, though he didn’t voice that thought aloud. He felt tense about the time since she was so sure about the window of hours during which she’d turn. Anyway, hearing her speak made his panic die down, made his imagination veer back toward believing predictions of her imminent death to be crazy talk. Here she was in front of him, breathing and blinking and licking her lips. How could that just end?

  “You getting tired?” she said.

  “Nah. Not really,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “You can’t fall asleep.”

  “I know,” he said. He sounded a little more defensive than he meant to, so he smiled to try to cover it.

  The quiet settled over the room again, but she didn’t close her eyes this time. She looked around, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I mean the waiting,” she said. “Waiting for it to happen. Waiting to die. It seems crazy, but it’s a lot less dramatic this way. I mean, it’s actually pretty boring when you think about it. Isn’t it dull? Sitting down here in the basement?”

  He pawed at the stubble sprouting along his jaw line.

  “Yeah,” he said, because he didn’t know what the hell else to say.

  “I mean, let’s face it. We’re not passionate people. We’re not one of those passionate couples, you know?” she said. “Maybe we were for a little while. I don’t think so, though. There was no button ripping. No romantic getaways. No shivering torsos. We were too busy working and changing diapers and paying bills and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids and doing loads of laundry.”

  She nodded toward her purse on the dryer behind him.

  “Can you light me a cigarette?” she said.

  She had quit smoking over 10 years ago, but… he guessed cancer was no longer such a threat.

  He pulled the soft pack of Winston Lights out of the purse, shook one loose, lit it. He took a puff. Terrible. He’d never picked up the habit. He walked over to her and put the cigarette in her lips soundlessly. She hit the cigarette and went on talking:

  “I wonder if those passionate couples even exist, really? I mean, can it really exist over the long haul? Doesn’t that kind of romance require novelty which can’t sustain itself very long by default? A flame can’t burn bright forever. It either slows down or burns itself out.”

  Mitch said nothing. He peeled a corner of the soggy label away from his beer bottle.

  “I got a little sidetracked. The waiting. It fits us is what I’m saying,” she said. “It’s what we did, mostly. It’s a fitting end.”

  He examined the lines in her face, looked for malice in the set of her brow and eyelids, but he couldn’t decide what to make of her expression. Was she trying to hurt him? Was she expressing bitterness about the life they’d made together, lashing out with the intent to injure by summing up their existence as a boring one? Or was this less angry and more of a cold, detached look at how she really felt, how things really were?

  “You know you’re going to be fine,” he said. “Need some antibiotics for that leg, but the rest of this talk... I don’t know, Janice. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s wait and see.”

  She smiled a little, but it wasn’t that mean smile she sometimes got when she wanted to rub his nose in something. This smile was a little sad.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think that speech came off how I wanted.”

  He thought she would go on, bu
t instead she gazed out into the room, her eyes slowly going unfocused so she looked like one of those creepy porcelain dolls lined up on the beds in the guest bedroom at his grandma’s house when he was a kid. Hideous things. They didn’t look like inanimate objects to him. They looked dead.

  He peeled the label the rest of the way off of the bottle and let the sopping sheet of paper flop onto the floor. He thought back on her words, tried to think of how else she might have meant them. Nothing came to him. In some way, he thought she was saying that they were together physically but not emotionally, at least not all of the way. She didn’t need him. He knew that, and he knew it was true, that it had been true for a long time.

  But the inverse wasn’t true. He did need her. Left on his own, his life itself seemed meaningless, an exercise in cruelty and humiliation and defeat.

  For the first time, their relationship reminded him of the way she had always described her parents’ relationship: The hard-nosed lady with the meek husband, a nice guy but one that no one could fully respect. As her mother was dying, Janice joked, “Mom can’t die. Who will tell dad what to do?”

  Of course, her dad had surprised everyone and remarried seven months later, but that was beside the point.

  Mitch tipped his chin back to finish off the beer and went to work on another Red Bull. He watched her stare break off into a series of blinks as she seemed to come back from some place far away.

  If it were just the two of them, he would surely kill himself after she was gone. But it wasn’t just the two of them. He would have to find a way. For the boys.

  “Remember when we watched that house for the Gundersons?” she said.

  “Yeah. The house out in the woods?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

  He remembered it well. One summer, just before they got married, they’d watched a house for some rich friends of her parents. He remembered grilling burgers on their screened-in second story deck that overlooked dense woods, a green thicket that stretched out as far as you could see. He remembered watching their HD projector cast movies onto a 90-some-inch screen, messing around in their sauna and hot tub. You couldn’t see any of the neighbors’ homes from the yard, not through the tangle of greenery, anyway. It felt so relaxing to head out there after work and feel apart from all of the people, alone with his girl. They lived the good life for six weeks while the Gundersons cruised the Mediterranean or something like that.