The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  Weapon. He needed a weapon. At some point they had inherited an ax, but the handle snapped years ago, and he never got around to replacing it or repairing it. Still, he could probably still use the half-handled ax like a hatchet. With the reduced leverage of the short handle, he might have to hack at it a few times to finish the job, an opportunity he didn’t relish.

  The other option was a sledgehammer that had been in their shed when they moved in, abandoned by the previous owners. It had hardly moved in seven and a half years. That would probably cut down on the time necessary to do the deed, pare it down to a single stroke of the hammer. On the other hand, it was heavy to the point of diminishing its mobility, making it a lot more awkward to administer than the ax, especially if the thing was moving at all.

  So the same basic question remained: Chop it or bludgeon it? How could he decide something like that? How could anyone?

  He fished a hand into his pocket, fingers riffling through keys until he found what he was looking for. A quarter. Fortune would decide. Heads for ax, tails for hammer.

  He flicked his thumb and the coin tumbled in the air, paused a moment at the apex of its arc and spiraled down. It slapped the table, bounced three times and then gyrated a while before it finally settled down enough that he could see the face of it.

  Tails.

  So it was decided.

  He stood, his knees creaking, his mouth dry. He moved to the back door. An odd awareness of his surroundings came over him, like he would remember this moment, this walk out to the shed, forever. The way the morning sunlight slanted into the windows, looking bright but not quite all the way warm yet. The sound of his footsteps, the clap of the impact followed by the floorboards faintly squealing from somewhere below. The cool of the door knob against the palm of his hand.

  He pushed the screen door and passed through the doorway, the chilly air surrounding him now. He inhaled, and the cold shocked the flesh inside his nostrils, stinging. He opened his mouth, and his gasp and ensuing breath coiled into swirls of steam in the air in front of him. Too damn cold, especially for May.

  He shuffled toward the shed. His feet crunched on the grass. The sun sat just above the treeline in the distance, the ball of light unable to muster enough warmth to keep the chill at bay.

  His fingers undid the latch and he gave the shed door three tugs before it screeched and came unstuck from the frame. He stepped into the building. It took his eyes a second to adjust to the the lack of light. Once they did, he could make out the handle protruding from the pile of things in the rear left corner. The hammer was where it was supposed to be. He picked his way past a lawnmower and snowblower, and he shifted a few boxes out of the way. There. He gripped the handle, lifted it, felt the heft of it in his mitts.

  He tried to imagine the swing. He could muster a sense of how it would feel in his hands, the strain in his arms reaching the pinnacle of the swing and then the power of the downward stroke as gravity chipped in to hurry its descent. He couldn’t picture it, though, couldn’t picture her as the object of his aggression... or the thing that used to be her. In his mind, he could only imagine a pumpkin on the other end. A jack-o’-lantern bursting into a mushy orange spray.

  He stood there for a long moment with the head of the hammer hovering at ankle height. His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel the throb of the blood in his ears. He felt a tingle in his eyelids, an almost electric sting along the perimeter of his vision that made it seem like he needed to turn the brightness of reality down. His mind was blank. Empty.

  Finally, he shook his head, turned and walked back over the grass through the back door and into the kitchen. He carried the hammer in front of him, holding it out in an awkward dangle like something he was loathe to touch or maybe a little bit frightened of.

  He opened the basement door and flipped the light switch. The fluorescent bulbs flared and brightened. He listened for a moment. Silence. That was good... right? Somehow the quiet made him uneasy, though, and the overwhelming urge to close the basement door and deal with this later buzzed up and down his limbs.

  He brought the sledgehammer up and let the head lean over his shoulder like a baseball player waiting in the on-deck circle. That’d be easier to manage during his descent. Again, he listened. Still nothing.

  Screw it. Enough pussyfooting, already.

  He started down the stairs, scowling and shaking his head a little for the first few steps. His disgust with himself faded as he got closer, though. He needed to focus.

  He moved with care now, each step revealing a little more of the basement floor below. Two steps shy of the bottom, the chair came into focus. Part of the chair, anyway. It had come apart. The back and seat were still connected, but the front legs were gone. More importantly, the seat was empty. She was… He corrected himself. It was gone.

  A scraping gasp made the hair on the back of his neck prick up. Then he realized that it came from his own mouth. Shit.

  The main chamber of the basement stood empty in front of him. Motionless and silent aside from the flicker of the fluorescent bulb over the canvas chair he’d sat in the night before. The rest of the basement remained out of his view, though. He’d need to take a sharp turn upon hitting the floor to get a look.

  Sweat greased his palms and sluiced over his forehead, soaking his brow. His heart beat like a kick drum about to cave in, every thump throttling his ribcage.

  Again, the impulse to run up the stairs came over him. He could feel it like a fiery itch in his legs that he could only scratch by turning about and sprinting.

  But no. Enough of this. No more fear. He had the hammer. Just two more steps and he could see what he was up against.

  His foot lifted off of the step in slow motion, heel then toe. The wood sighed as his weight shifted, and he froze in that position for a couple of seconds, like a flamingo with one leg up. Nothing happened, so his motion resumed, the foot sinking down to the next step, twisting a little as it settled in without sound. Now the other heel and toe lifted, hip rotating forward, foot nestling down on the next step.

  One step to go. This was it. He closed his eyes, sucked in a long, deep breath, and before he could exhale, he felt icy fingers grab his hand. He opened his eyes, tried to free his hand to be able to use both arms to bring the hammer down. Her grip held, though, and he only succeeded in pulling her closer. Wrenching against her hold again, he lost his balance and crashed backward onto the stairs, the hammer falling away and landing beneath him.

  Now her torso lurched forward, her head bobbed. He tried to scramble backward, elbows and hands pistoning, scrabbling along the hard edges of the stairs, but it was too late. Her face got close. The lips brushed just shy of his wrist. Her hair swung down, concealing his hand from view, and then he felt the cold teeth pierce his flesh.

  Travis

  Hillsboro, Michigan

  46 days after

  Sean sat on the swing next to him. They rocked and watched the daylight hitting the street swell and wane over and over as clouds passed in front of the sun. The day drained from yellow to gray and back before them.

  All he wanted was for Sean to leave, which he realized held some irony. They were the last two people in town, the population whittled from 6,600 to two, and he just wanted to be rid of the guy.

  “Saw raiders at the supermarket again last night,” Sean said. “Took a look after they moved on. Looks like they finally got into the pharmacy over there. Too bad. I was hoping to stockpile some antibiotics, you know?”

  “Yeah, that sucks.”

  Sean tilted his head at Travis, squinting.

  “Did you happen to get any?” he said. “Antibiotics, I mean?”

  “Me? Nah.”

  The squint intensified for a second and let up. Sean looked out toward the street.

  “Damn raiders. They’ll tear you a new one,” he said. He said that a lot. He seemed to either not quite grasp the meaning of this idiom or love it so much that he tried to shoehorn it into every
vaguely applicable situation. Travis found both possibilities equally amusing.

  He took a drink and Sean followed suit, both lifting jars to their faces, tipping them. They drank sun tea. Lukewarm.

  It was a booze day, but Travis didn’t want to drink in front of his uninvited guest, didn’t want to tip off the mountain of booze and pills and cigarettes he was sitting on. He didn’t know if this was out of pure greed or a sense that something like that could come between them. There were no laws out here now. If you wanted something enough, you could take it or even kill for it without much chance of consequences. Travis had something he knew people would kill for. A lot of it. He doubted Sean would be the person to do so, but still...

  “You think you’ll ever leave here?” Sean said.

  “I don’t know. You?”

  “Think I might have to eventually,” he said. “I’ve got enough to get through this fall and winter, but even if I got a kick ass garden going next spring, I don’t know if I could build up enough food for another Michigan winter, you know what I’m sayin’? I mean, sure we could go door to door to scavenge more canned goods, maybe even a lot, but a lot has been looted, and at some point those will run out, too. It just seems smart to go south sooner than later, you know?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I guess I’m not worried about it yet.”

  “Hell, you don’t worry about much, do you?”

  Travis shrugged.

  “That’s cool, though,” Sean said. “I wish I didn’t worry so much. You’d think keeping busy most of the day would prevent anxiety, but it sure doesn’t. I can tell you that.”

  He wondered what Sean even did all day. Dudley Do-Right-ing must get exhausting, right?

  Just leave so I can drink, dickface.

  “Hey, though, here’s another reason to get out of here,” Sean said. “Girls. There are no girls here, man. Not one. The end of the world is a frickin’ sausage party, at least in this town.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I mean, we’ve got a lot on our plates at the moment, but that’s going to become a problem,” Sean said. “I haven’t gone this long without getting laid since middle school, man.”

  Christ, what a douche, Travis thought. And a liar. Sean was one of those guys that had no idea how to talk to girls. He endlessly described things that happened in video games or professional wrestling matches to them. They might even be interested in him, but he’d squander it by being horribly, horribly dull or even outright annoying. There was no way he’d been with many girls.

  Not that Travis had acquired a lot of sexual experience, either. He’d had sex with three girls. Two of them he’d known throughout school and had long term relationships with. The third was a black girl he met at a party who was inexplicably really into him. She seemed ashamed the next day. Maybe they all were to varying degrees, but the party girl made no attempt to conceal it. He also might have gotten a blowjob from a stripper at Isaac’s bachelor party. He didn’t remember it very well, but someone made a vague joke about it one time, and when he thought about it, it seemed like a thing that possibly happened somewhere in the drunken blur.

  “Seems like you’re doing better, though,” Sean said. “Those first few days were rough, you know? I kind of thought...”

  Travis avoided eye contact as Sean trailed off. He stared straight down at the planks of wood under Sean’s sandals, noting the green shade the wood was taking on as the weather wore it down and stained it, wondering if he should try to slap a coat of that waterseal stuff on there to protect it while he still could.

  “Look, I kind of thought you weren’t going to make it is all,” Sean said. “Maybe I’m full of shit, but it just seemed like you were going this way.”

  All Travis wanted to do was look away, but he couldn’t. His vision panned along with the movement of Sean’s hand as it rose to his head, shaped itself into a finger gun and fired into his open mouth. Sean rocked his head back, his eyes staring up at the chipped paint on the wood overhead, holding still in that head-blown-off position to complete the suicidal pantomime.

  Go.

  The fuck.

  Away.

  Travis didn’t say anything. He looked at the house across the street, wished there were some way he could teleport there, some way he could will himself into being alone.

  Sean popped up from his death pose, and Travis couldn’t help but see his massive smile out of the corner of his eye. Sean laughed and wiggled his feet in a way that made his sandals slap against the porch a few times.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. Come on, though,” Sean said. “That was funny as hell, and you know it.”

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  29 days after

  As her torso skimmed over the back of the couch, Erin wondered how her life had led to this, this belly flop onto a dead man’s sofa. Even when she was Izzy’s age, when most kids have a touch of daredevil to them, she wouldn’t go down the playground slide face first.

  Izzy stood on her tip-toes and poked her head through the open window, whispering.

  “Hey, Erin.”

  “What?”

  “Watch out for zombies.”

  Izzy’s grin was punctuated by the missing teeth on her top jaw.

  Erin squeezed her eyes shut. She’d told Izzy to quit with the zombie stuff. Which had been a mistake. Want an eight-year-old to never quit doing something? Ask them not to do it.

  She rolled off the couch and onto the carpet, trying to channel her inner ninja. Quiet. Calm. Not scared shitless. She wiped her hands on her jeans before picking up her only weapon -- a hammer. A real ninja would probably have some kind of sweet sword. A katana, or whatever. Also real ninjas probably didn’t get sweaty palms.

  She took two steps, brushing past a recliner. She glanced down and gasped.

  Izzy thrust her head into the living room.

  “What happened?”

  Erin waggled the hammer at her, shooing her back out of the window.

  “Nothing. Stay there.”

  The corpse lounged in the chair, stretched out like it was just getting settled in to watch the big game. The flesh was almost completely gone. What was left behind was just skin and bones. Literally.

  Erin pushed out a quavering breath. Not the first body she’d seen. And it definitely wouldn’t be the last.

  She inched forward, hunched over in a defensive position, reaching a hallway with three doors. She paused after every step, trying to listen over the kerthump-kerthump-kerthump of her pulse. Flattening herself against the wall, she pressed her fingers against the first door. It was like being on the world’s worst game show: Johnny, tell us what’s behind Door Number One!

  Brand new car or brain-eating monster?

  She pushed the door open, hammer clutched in front of her, like that would protect her if a zombie came charging out, teeth bared, intent on taking a big old bite out of her noggin.

  Now that she thought about it, she was less ninja and more like a squirrel running into the middle of the road and then stopping to face the car bearing down on it. Staring at the grill, probably thinking to itself, “Oh fuck.”

  Lucky for her, Door Number One was an empty bathroom.

  She took another breath and moved on to Door Number Two. As this door swung open, she couldn’t help but imagine the homeowner shotgun-blasting her in the face. But this room -- a bedroom -- was empty, too. Same for the office across the hall. Just like every other house they’d been through since they left the FEMA camp, this house was vacant.

  Unless you counted the dead.

  Back in the living room, she addressed the stiff on the Barcalounger.

  The skin was a dark, mottled brown, dried out like leather. And yet so thin she could see through it in spots. She thought of the crispy brown shell left behind after a cicada molts. Maybe that’s what happened to this guy. He didn’t die. He just shed his old skin and left this behind.

  The hair was gone, and so was the nose. The eyes were just empty
sockets, but she could still clearly make out ears. The mouth gaped, showing off a set of perfectly straight teeth. Good genes or braces, Erin would never know.

  It wore a red shirt and jean shorts, both stained from when the body released its juices. Like a Porterhouse on a hot grill.

  She almost retched at the thought of meat in the presence of this stench. Meat was actually one of the few things she didn’t miss from Before. Not that their diet was completely devoid of meat, she supposed. The cans of soup had those little gray gristle chunks floating amongst the noodles and broth the color of radioactive waste. Technically chicken.

  In the beef stew, a darker shade of gray gristle chunks waded in a pool of gravy, mingling with mushy carrots and potatoes. Supposedly beef.

  And then there were the Spaghettios, some of which had the nutritious addition of franks! She didn’t even know what kind of meat those spongy pink tube slices were claiming to be. She probably didn’t want to know.

  It was all for the best anyway, because there wasn’t any fresh meat. Unless she wanted to learn to hunt and butcher her own. And she did not, thank you.

  She got another whiff of death. It wasn’t really the time or the place to be thinking about food, really. And yet food was the whole point of her being there.

  Before she headed to the kitchen, Erin grabbed an afghan from the back of the couch. The corpse’s shirt said, “I’d Hit That,” with a drawing of a golf ball on a tee. Add some sunglasses and a can of beer in a Palm Beach koozie, and it could pass as a bad Halloween prop. She tried her best to keep Izzy from seeing the bodies, fake-looking or not. The bonus here was that she also protected Izzy from seeing that stupid shirt.

  She unfurled the blanket like a flag and draped it over the remains, then signaled that Izzy could come in. Izzy squatted on the windowsill and cannonballed onto the couch, plugging her nose because of the smell.

  “Hey, Erin.”