The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  He couldn’t remember how that worked. Did he have to do something to make the waking up process start? What if he couldn’t remember? Would he be stuck asleep forever?

  The panic welled in him, and he inhaled sharply and opened his eyes.

  He jerked awake to find himself staring into flickering bulbs, bursts of light and dark jittering up and down two glass tubes about five feet in front of his face. Reality occurred to him one piece at a time, his brain processing things in short, blunt statements:

  He knew these lights. The wood above them. He was in the basement. He was staring at the basement ceiling. He fell asleep down here. He wasn’t supposed to do that. He dreamed something. Something important, maybe.

  And then wood scraped over the concrete. No longer muffled by swaths of slumber, the sound seemed harsh and dry.

  And close.

  His heart beat faster. He leaned forward, his vision tilting away from the ceiling as his head left the hammock-like indentation it had pressed into the canvas head rest. Pain shot through the muscles in his neck, which felt stiff. He must have pinched a nerve or something, too, as he felt the pain twinge all the way into the crook of his jaw. He rubbed the rubbery ball of muscle on one side of his neck, felt the tenderness there. It’d be sore as hell for the next few days.

  Motion caught his eye as the scrape erupted again. His pupils traced the movement, though it took a full second to process what he was seeing.

  Janice.

  Not good.

  His wife had flopped the chair to the floor and was now wriggling on the ground, torso hunched into a capital letter C, shoulders twitching and writhing in small circles without discernible purpose. He tried to get a read on her state of mortality, but her hair swung into her face to cover all but the tip of her nose.

  One of her hands stretched forward, apparently only loosely bound at this point. It was only a few feet from his ankles. The outstretched hand flopped about on the concrete, seeming to contort in odd ways, perhaps lacking the normal level of articulation, but he wasn’t sure. The curled fingers clawed at the ground, found purchase, and the chair inched forward as she pulled, the cement grinding at the wood, the hunched figure sliding toward him.

  “Janice,” he said, his voice just louder than a whisper.

  The hand retracted, the arm coiling against the chest, and she stopped moving. It reminded him of a rabbit hunching down and freezing in the back yard once it realized a human being was present. He watched her for a long moment, trying to decide whether or not she was breathing based on the movements of her torso. He wasn’t certain.

  “Janice?” he said again.

  Nothing. No movement.

  He scratched his chin, leaned forward in his chair. Should he take a closer look?

  The hand reached out again. As it looped away from the body, he realized the finger tips were bloodied up pretty good. She must have been working at scooting toward him for a long while as he slept. Again the hand arched and flopped like a dying fish before the fingers tensed up to grip the floor. Again the chair lurched forward in slow motion.

  No. This can’t be real.

  He knew what was happening, but he somehow kept any sense of panic at bay. For now, at least. Apart from a vague sense of nausea in his gut and an elevated heart rate, he found himself calm. To an alarming degree. His thoughts seemed clear. Was he in shock? Still half asleep? He couldn’t say.

  He knew this was one of those in-between moments life sometimes presented. This chair straddled the line between the way things used to be and what they would become for the rest of his time on the Earth. For right now, he could sit here in between the past and future versions of the world and watch her moving about on the floor, not quite 100% certain whether his wife was living or dead. It still felt like she was here with him, still a conscious being that existed on the same plane that he did, even if the circumstantial evidence suggested otherwise. He knew she must no longer be herself, but it didn’t feel real. As soon as he rose from this seat, that would change. It would become real, and his life itself would very drastically change. He was pretty sure how this chapter would end, too.

  Death would do them part. Again.

  After one more drawn out scoot, he couldn’t sit still anymore. He stood. He would need to verify her state, and he would need to take care of it.

  He took a step toward the stooped figure, still trying to get a look at its face to be sure. He had to be sure. The hair still covered her eyes, however, hundreds of thousands of strands of brown strung across her visage with a few white thrown in.

  He stepped again, going diagonally to the left instead of straight at the thing, still hoping to get an angle that made things clear. His neck spasmed. It killed. He leaned his head back and rolled it from side to side a few times, his lips and nose wrinkled up.

  When it moved again, he didn’t hear it. He felt it.

  The hand grabbed his ankle, the steely grip somehow more insectile than human. He kicked a couple of times, trying to shake his leg loose, but the thing was latched on. He leaned back instead, trying to pry it free. And finally a touch of panic bubbled to the surface as the notion that he might not be able to pry himself loose took shape in his mind. It wasn’t even the idea of the thing biting him or hurting him at all. Just the irrational fear of being stuck, powerless, helpless.

  He yanked hard, a quick backward stroke, and got loose. It reminded him of plucking a tick from the back of his neck, one that came away with a wad of skin in its mouth. The arm flailed at him a couple more times and retracted back to the coiled position at its chest.

  The nightmare feeling didn’t retreat now that he was free. He realized this as he brought a trembling hand to his forehead and found it sopping with sweat. He pressed the heel of his hand into the moisture. It felt more like grease than sweat. French fry grease stuck to his face. His hand slid down into his eye socket, so he pressed on his eyeball instead. Pink splotches filled half of his field of vision, the shapes shifting as the pressure from his hand increased.

  Fear surrounded him, submerged him in a feeling like defeat, like shoving his face underwater and holding him there. Laughing while he struggled.

  No more dicking around. He had to know. For sure.

  He moved in a semi-circle around the body, light on his feet, nearly soundless, until he stood at the back of the chair. He didn’t hesitate. He leaned down, grabbed a handful of hair and flung it out of her eyes, jumping back immediately. The arm struck, but it fell short, like a cobra trying to strike something too quick for it.

  And then his vision shifted to the face. The whites of her eyes had gone blood red. Her complexion looked like melting butter pecan ice cream, like all of her skin would drip away before long. Streaks of smoky black trailed across the yellow, similar to those around her wound.

  And it was real.

  He felt his jaw clench and his eyes snap shut. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He thought he might vomit or pass out or explode into a red spray or all of the above.

  No.

  No, no, no.

  It was all real. Janice was gone. Forever.

  A thing writhed in her body. A thing that wasn’t her at all.

  How?

  How could the world work this way? How could it just erase someone? Take them away from here, and put something else in their place. A wretched thing. A dead thing.

  He realized he was crying, or something like it, when spit hissed out between his teeth. Hot breath heaved in and out of his mouth, stuck open in a silent scream.

  Death.

  Death.

  The feelings pulled him down into a black place, into some kind of primal heat where his thoughts became murky, more like flashes of emotion than words or images. But one part of him stayed apart, detached. It observed the rest of him, and it noted that he wasn’t sad, exactly. He wasn’t pitiful and inward and some neutered weakling the way he thought he was.

  He was hatred. He was fire. He wanted to detonate
and take the rest of the world with him. He wanted to watch it all blacken and turn to ash.

  She was gone. This couldn’t be real, but it was.

  Baghead

  Rural Oklahoma

  9 years, 126 days after

  The lightning lit the sky again. The black dream replayed. Another variation.

  He climbed a staircase in an empty apartment building. Craters blemished the walls where moisture had gotten in and worn drywall away. What was left looked mushy and gray like some combination of oatmeal and brains.

  He walked the halls where much of the ceiling bulged down toward him like a fat belly, looking poised to cave in. Still, he moved along, going door to door in search of letters and diaries. That’s all he desired. Memories and dreams and ideas written down and lost or left behind. He found them, and he kept them. All of the people gone and forgotten and scattered about, in a way he found them. He collected them and cared for them. That was his life. Collecting the scattered and the dead.

  Even in sleep he searched for them, stalking through buildings both remembered and imagined. Looking for a thousand little stories that told the bigger story better than any other way he knew.

  He sifted through papers on a desk. Fast food cups and bills and insurance documents. Nothing good. So he moved on, onto the next room with holes blasted into the walls like someone took a shotgun to it at close range, to the next where browned bloodstains crusted the carpet around two shriveled bodies.

  Sometimes he dreamed the old way, when he looked like a normal man, when his face was still his own. Sometimes he dreamed the new way, when the hood covered him. Sometimes, like now, this switched mid dream, which was jarring somehow. Upsetting.

  Shadows surrounded him now, dark shapes flitting over the canvas bag on his head. His thoughts jumbled, confusion about how he got here, where he’d go next. An endless hallway sprawled before him, though, and he meant to check behind every door. He knew that much.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  42 days before

  Upstairs, he got the kids up and around to get ready for school. In a daze, he directed them to brush their teeth and then hovered in the kitchen as they ate their cereal. The boys were quiet, mostly. They usually were when they just woke up.

  He paced slowly over the linoleum while spoons dinged against cereal bowls and Frosted Flakes crunched and milk slurped. He watched the circle of light reflect on the floor, watched the lit-up spot seem to move as he walked like it was also pacing, also jittery, also had a lot on its mind.

  While he worked his way through the phases of the morning, his mind remained on the being in his basement tied to a chair. It occurred to him that he hadn’t once considered how he would proceed with this problem, that he and Janice never got into what specific steps he would take. They didn’t own a gun. What would he do, then? Would he stab the thing that used to be his wife? Bludgeon it?

  He tried to picture it, some lead pipe bashing his wife’s head in, her skull all caved in with red seeping out of the cracks.

  Christ on a crutch.

  He shuffled out by the front door, got the boys into their jackets. He tried to smooth Kevin’s hair down a little with his hand, but the cowlick bounced back up.

  “Where’s mom?” the boy said.

  “She had to visit grandma and grandpa,” he said.

  The ease with which the lie formed on his lips surprised him. He sounded so normal.

  “Are they OK?”

  “They’re fine,” he said. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Oh,” the boy said. “Just you said she ‘had to’ visit them. Sounded like something bad happened.”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing bad.”

  He gave them lunch money and sent them out to wait for the bus. It seemed crazy to be sending them away considering the circumstances. It made him feel sick to watch them walk out the door and down the front steps, turning onto the sidewalk and moving toward the corner. It made his stomach churn in turbo speed like it was trying to eat itself, but he needed them out of the house for a bit anyway. He probably wouldn’t be sending them back to school tomorrow, but for today it was necessary. He promised Janice the kids wouldn’t see her this way. So they wouldn’t.

  Once the kids were gone, he poured himself a huge coffee, dumped a ton of sugar and cream into it and sat down at the kitchen table. The coffee was a little too hot to chug, so he blew steam off of the top of it between sips.

  A quiet fell over the house, a calm. He found his thoughts growing clearer. He wasn’t sure if that was due to the caffeine or the silence. Maybe a bit of both. His chair faced the window, so he looked through it, looking at the neighbor’s yard without actually seeing it while his mind tumbled rocks around.

  So how would he actually do this? He needed to brain the thing downstairs, so he would need to select a weapon. He figured that had to be step one. His eyes swung to the counter, danced over the block with all of the knife handles sticking out of it. He supposed he could make it work, but a butcher knife would be kind of a brutal way to do it. Close range. Violent in a way that required a lot of aggression. Messy, too. There must be better options.

  Red movement caught his eye out the window and made his vision come back into focus. A cardinal landed on the neighbor’s fence, twitched its tail a few times and flew on.

  Damn it. If only they had a gun. He had considered buying one, a few times pretty seriously. When the house two doors down got burglarized four years back, he wanted to get a handgun or possibly even a shotgun he could rack in the dead of the night to scare intruders away. He looked into the pricing and everything. Janice didn’t believe in it, though. She said she’d feel like Ted Nugent or something. She said she didn’t want to give in to the culture of fear, didn’t want to live a life of paranoia.

  Sure would be handy right now. Christ. Could he really bash his wife’s brains in? Bury an ax in her forehead?

  He picked the mug up, sipped, the coffee tingling all the way down. Should he go buy a gun now? He turned his head to look at the basement door.

  No. No, he couldn’t leave with her down there. It felt like she was exposed somehow. Alone.

  He saw it again in his mind, the toppled chair, the scrawny frame, the tip of the nose poking out of the hair, the arm folding up to tuck against the chest.

  It reminded him of when they found Mitzi dead in the driveway. The cat sprawled on her back on the line where the cement and grass met, one front paw partially extended above her, the arm locked in that position with rigor mortis. Her eyes were open but blank. He touched her to make sure: cold and stiff. It was such a shock. Janice burst into tears. Inconsolable. They stood around for a moment, and then they went right back into the house out of instinct, maybe to try to process it.

  Once they were inside, though, he didn’t feel right. They couldn’t leave her out there in the open. It wasn’t right. He paced around and looked out the window every two seconds, nausea building in his gut. He only made it a few minutes before he went out to gather her up and bury her.

  He felt that sickness times 1,000 right now. It wasn’t a cat. It was Janice. And she was worse than dead. She was wiggling around without her say so. It was a violation.

  He remembered her as she was before all of this, a montage of images playing in his head with the saturation turned way up so the colors were brighter than real life.

  Yellow sun shined on her face, reflected off of her hair, shadows framing her jaw on the opposite side in grays and blacks. Her jaw was distinct, feminine, striking, attractive. It made her look sophisticated somehow, intelligent, clever. When she smiled, it transformed, her chin becoming more prominent, emitting some wave of happiness into the air, making her seem a little more approachable than the sophisticated version of herself. She was smiling when they first met.

  Even as she pulled on a shirt and her face was draped in t-shirt fabric, he could recognize her by her jaw alone when the fabric pulled taut enough to reveal
its shape. He couldn’t believe it had just happened that way by chance and biology and genetics. Someone must have sculpted it, must have painstakingly selected the lines and forms for it to turn out with such striking character. It was the only way.

  That image faded, and blue water lapped at her shins, her skin pale and smooth as always like cream. She waded out into the water, the sky gray and cloudy above them, the wind roaring all around them.

  Then she stood in the kitchen with her back to him, her neck angled so her head rested beneath her shoulders as she worked to prepare a meal. As she moved to the cutting board, strands of hair shook loose from the rest, spilling from the back of her head to hang down on each side of her face. He saw her arms move, heard the knife thump out a rhythm against the wood as she chopped up some ingredient he couldn’t quite see.

  He smelled her smell now, heard the rise and fall of her voice, felt the smooth and cool of her skin against his.

  There were no words for the weight these memories piled on his shoulders and chest, no words to capture the sense of great fortune and misfortune he felt all at once, a mix of the best and worst luck—the best in knowing her at all, the worst in having her torn away in one swift motion, a gaping void left in her place, a negative somehow, like a black hole threatening to collapse all nearby reality.

  He sat there in the kitchen, shoulders hunched, elbows resting on the corner of the table. Alone in the quiet. The weight of it stacked up on him until it became hard to breathe. He choked on the emptiness, the wind catching in his throat for no good reason. His face got all hot. He wanted a drink, but he couldn’t now. Not for a long while perhaps. He had to keep it together. For the boys.

  Yes. He rubbed his eyes, willing himself to focus on the here and now. He patted a hand on the tabletop just to feel something solid, took the last sip of coffee, lukewarm now.