The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  Now that she looked at it again, she wasn’t even sure it was supposed to be a turtle, but the way the stones were arranged, it reminded her of one. The opal was the shell and the diamonds were the head and feet and tail.

  Izzy came into the room with an old pickle jar clutched in her hands.

  “What’s this?”

  Izzy flipped the jar, revealing a piece of paper taped to it. Scrawled in her eight-year-old handwriting were the words SWEAR JAR.

  “Funny.”

  Izzy set the jar on the kitchen counter.

  “According to my calculations, you owe the Swear Jar five bucks.”

  Erin took a running start, sliding on her socked feet across the tile in the kitchen. She came to a halt next to the sink and reached for the Christmas tin from the old lady’s pantry.

  “This should keep me paid up through the rest of eternity,” she said, pulling the whole roll of money out and stuffing it in the jar.

  “What are you going to do with all that cash?”

  “Something fun.”

  Erin laughed.

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  Izzy wedged her bottom lip between the gap in her teeth, thinking.

  “Chuck E. Cheese.”

  “Good luck with that,” Erin said.

  She gave one last waggle of her hand, admiring the twinkle of the ring. She pulled it from her finger and tossed it back into the suitcase.

  Maybe she’d bury it for safe keeping. Draw a map so she could find it when she needed it. X marks the spot. She smiled to herself.

  Just like a real pirate.

  Travis

  Hillsboro, Michigan

  57 days after

  He pedaled his bike, keeping the pace moderate to conserve energy. A canvas bag dangled at his side, long and army green and loaded with weapons that clanked against each other when he rode over bumps. The sound reminded him a little of ice cubes rattling in a glass but bigger and dryer.

  The train tracks made two parallel lines running alongside this stretch of road, which he could just make out in the darkening sky. It’d been an overcast day, gray sky all the while. And now that the light drained away to night, the gray blackened above him like charred meat.

  He hardly noticed these things, however. His mind tumbled other matters. Visions of the near future and visions of the past intertwined in his thoughts.

  When his dad heard about the incident at the convenience store, the one where Travis got punched and ran home crying, he told his son that violence was the way Neanderthals solved problems, that walking away was the civilized response, that he had nothing to be ashamed of as a man. They sat in the living room, just the two of them, and his dad’s eyes looked all wet. Not like he was on the verge of tears, exactly. Just moist like a dog’s eyes.

  Travis fidgeted with a lighter while his dad talked, spinning the wheel in slow motion so it wouldn’t actually spark, and he hated himself more and more as his father tried to comfort him and tell him that being a huge pussy is somehow still manly. He shifted his legs periodically, the springs in the seat of the chair creaking and groaning. A strange feeling came over him as his father droned on, like his identity had retracted, and all he could do was look down at his pants and play with his lighter and feel the warmth creep into his cheeks, the heat swelling as the talk wore on. He wanted to combust, to vanish into a wisp of smoke, but he sat there and listened and nodded.

  And then his mind shifted gears, and he pictured himself kicking open the door to this factory, stalking back to the office and shotgun blasting these guys in the face one by one until the blood stopped flowing and their hearts kept still and their bodies went cold and rigid.

  The warmth surged into his face once more, but it was different this time. He would go for it. To hell with the risks. He might die trying, but to hell with it. He thought maybe that’s what a man really said, what men like him and his father stopped saying somewhere along the way, but he had it back for the moment, and it felt good.

  To hell with it.

  He pedaled harder and reminded himself to slow down. No rush. Better to arrive just as it gets dark and wait. Wait until the dead of night when they nestle into their bags. Kill them in their sleep. Of course, he knew it could go any number of ways. Much was left to chance here. If he could find a way to isolate any of the men away from the group, it’d be perfect, but he didn’t know a good way to do that.

  He followed the blacktop away from the tracks, riding along country roads spider-webbed with cracks and cratered with potholes, problems he was certain existed before all of this, though now they had little chance of ever being repaired. Not in his lifetime, anyway, he thought. He passed fields of green pocked with the beige of those plants already withering. He wondered how much food out there was going to waste, how many millions of pounds of grain in all of those states that seemingly do nothing but grow wheat and corn. Right now, it didn’t matter so much, but food wouldn’t be so easy to come by before long. He could already imagine revisiting this thought, these millions of pounds of food rotting unpicked, the first time he got truly hungry. It was a matter of when, he thought, not if.

  And then he thought that was a funny thing to think about on a night that he might very well not survive. Hunger could wait for another day, hopefully. For now he needed to concentrate on murdering a bunch of people in their slumber.

  When he rode up on the factory, the truck wasn’t in the parking lot. A sheen of sweat sprouted all at once across the surface of his skin. Shit. What if they’re done here? What if they’ve moved on, and he missed his chance by a day or two?

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  OK no need to panic yet. He circled back about a tenth of a mile to stash his bike in the corn where they wouldn’t see it if they returned and speed-walked to the building to investigate. The light was mostly gone from the day. He could still see, but if he stared straight at anything too long, it got all hazy as he strained to make out detail. He found it best to look at things out of the corner of his eye and only in quick bursts.

  The pavement transitioned to gravel and then to dirt under his feet as he made his way to the door. He adjusted the strap on the gun bag, trying to simultaneously stop it from digging into his shoulder so much and slide his hands into position to rip a gun free should anyone be inside.

  He paused at the threshold, a feeling of déjà vu becoming unavoidable, but at least this time he knew the terrain pretty well. He eased open the door to find the foyer just as he’d left it, dark and empty. He made sure to close the door behind him and followed the yellow line up the steps.

  With his nose inches shy of the next steel door, he listened for a long moment. Nothing. Just the thud of the blood banging along to the beat of his heart in his ears, which reminded him of the sound of wind whooshing off of a ceiling fan just now. Even with no sound on the other side of the door, he unzipped the bag and fished out a handgun. Better safe than sorry. That’s what everyone always said about heading into a demented killing spree, right? Or maybe they said “brandish ‘em if you got ‘em.” He couldn’t decide.

  He eased the door open, the little click as the knob reached the end of its rotation making him flinch a little, his shoulders jerking and his muscles stiffening so the top half of his body went rigid. His eyes snapped to the circle of half light where the jagged hole formed a mouth in the far wall. The gray light reflected off of the concrete to somewhat illuminate the rest of the chamber. Nothing moved. He felt the muscles along his spine release, and he took a breath. Still, he wouldn’t know much until he got a look in the office area.

  He walked, his heart hammering out an angry beat in his ribcage. Even though he stayed light on his toes, only letting the balls of his feet contact the floor, the scuff of his shoes echoed everywhere around him. The sound fluttered around the room like bat wings, he thought.

  He kicked open the door to the offices, arms extended, clutching the gun. It was darker here, but he thought he saw the black rectangle of an empt
y sleeping bag on the floor. He snaked his forearm into the bag again, this time wrenching free a flashlight. He pressed the button. It clicked, and a circle of light appeared. His eyes needed a second to make sense of things. Yes, a sleeping bag sprawled on the floor before him, and, yes, it was unoccupied.

  Interesting.

  That likely meant they were still staying here. If so, they’d be back tonight. Meaning he could wait here. He could hide in the shadows, and he could come out when the time was right.

  He smiled.

  Mitch

  North of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  42 days before

  Nobody spoke as the car trekked south on the highway, going back the way it came. The traffic was much denser now, and they slowed to a near stop every few minutes. The progress coming in bursts and lulls made Mitch think of the vehicle as a salmon fighting its way upstream to lay its eggs. That was something like what he was doing, he guessed. Depositing his offspring somewhere before he died. Not the safe place he wanted to take them, though.

  The cracks in the windshield looked like a firework explosion frozen in place, and every line led to the bullet hole in the center. Someone had taken the cabin, had shot at them. He felt sick when he thought about it. He’d failed. How long could these little kids make it on their own without even having long term access to water?

  He’d tried to call the grandparents several more times. No answer.

  “Dad, who was it?” Matt said.

  “What?” Mitch said.

  “Who was it that tried to shoot us?” Matt said.

  Mitch tried to think about how to answer it.

  “Some bad people must have moved into Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin,” he said. “They thought we were trying to take it from them.”

  “Are you going to call the police?”

  “Yeah, I might. Once we’re home.”

  “Cause you should probably call the police.”

  The conversation trailed off, and the boy went back to looking out the window. Soon enough Mitch’s thoughts swelled once more in his head to assail him.

  How could he let this happen? How could he have spent his whole life coasting toward this ending? He thought maybe that’s how life worked. You waste time and get comfortable and get soft and just when you fully relax, fully let go, fully take existence for granted, time sucker punches you in the throat. It dry gulches you. And you gasp for breath, but it’s too late, fuckhead. It’s too damn late. You don’t get time to say goodbye. You don’t get time to collect your thoughts and process what’s happening. You blink a few times and life winks out, and it’s gone. You’re gone.

  And that’s it. And that’s all.

  The traffic slowed again. They stopped next to a minivan, the driver’s arm dangling out of the window with a cigarette between his fingers. The man brought the smoke to his mouth, wrinkles forming around his lips as he hit it. What an idiot, Mitch thought, and then it occurred to him that this smoker would outlive him without a doubt. That all of the safety he’d felt in his life was a lie, all of the times he looked down on other people for their poor choices came with some sense that he would be OK, that the bad things would happen to other people. But the bad thing had happened to him, to his family, to his wife already gone and him fading away.

  Acid crept up into his throat. It tasted like a mix of vinegar and vegetable broth on the back of his tongue. He was going to die. Death swirled inside of him even now, black tendrils snaking their way ever deeper into his flesh, into his being.

  The loss was inevitable. Life would deny him even the ability to set his boys up in a place where they might have a chance. It would humiliate him, smear his nose in the piss of his own failures and snuff him out. He guessed that was always the case, though, wasn’t it? Life counted down the hours until it could kill him from the moment he was born, the sad ending etched in place all the while. Life is a game that nobody wins. We all die. We all lose.

  Shit.

  All of the cars lurched into motion again, the still nature landscapes on the side of the road slowly blurring once more as they gained speed. He watched the boys in the mirror for a long time. They seemed lost in that trance again, each staring out their own glass screen at the never ending stream of images out there, lulled down into that waking stillness usually reserved for people who have been hypnotized.

  He looked away, and the desperation gripped him around the chest, squeezed his rib cage, constricting the air flow. Pain throbbed in the middle of him. His mouth popped open then, shallow breaths rasping in and out.

  Was he going into shock? Was this a panic attack? He thought this was a panic attack. But what else was there to do but panic?

  How could he live out these last few hours? How could he keep going? Shouldn’t he just implode? Just evaporate into nothing? How could he still be here, still exist for these next few doomed hours? Shouldn’t the weight of it crush him, the desperation overwhelm him and erase him?

  He caught part of his reflection in the mirror. Purpled up bags of flesh puffed beneath his eyes, and the whites were all bloodshot. He looked like shit, but he was here. He was still here. Still breathing. What was he supposed to do, though? How could he fill the time in any kind of way that made sense?

  How could he pretend everything was OK for a while more yet? Shouldn’t he do something drastic or meaningful here and now? And if that proved impossible, why wouldn’t he just curl up in a ball and wait for death? Should he pretend everything is fine and dandy right up until the moment he turned into a flesh eating monster? Should he distract himself with ice cream novelties and reality shows until the end? Why carry on the charade that things were OK?

  For the kids? Maybe. He didn’t know if it was really for them. It certainly wouldn’t do them any good in the long term. Just so long as they didn’t panic right up until he died and became a zombie, right? That’d be a big help to them.

  He craned his neck, his face actually pointed toward his children for the first time in a while, no piece of glass between his eyeballs and them. It seemed intense. Uncomfortable. Unfamiliar. Air passed in and out of his open mouth in ragged bursts, drying out the mucus membranes, and he felt patches of skin on his cheeks and forehead going hotter than the rest. He could picture the red blotches decorating his face. Matt glanced over at him, his head wheeling his way in slow motion until their eyes met.

  “Watch the road, Dad,” he said.

  He turned back, the road ahead again filling his vision through the windshield. His breathing seemed to slow to a normal pace as they barreled down the highway. He knew that some moment had passed. Something that happened here was over, for better or worse. Something he didn’t understand.

  Fast food and hotel signs blossomed in the sky in the distance, jutting up from the ground to tower above the tree line.

  “You guys hungry?” he said, eyes finding comfort in watching them in the mirror’s glass.

  Travis

  Hillsboro, Michigan

  57 days after

  He hugged his knees to his chest, the shotgun snuggling between his legs and belly, the bag with the rest of the guns touching his right hip. The dark and the quiet squeezed themselves against his person, made his head feel like it was going to burst.

  It was sometime after midnight by now. Way after. It had to be. Didn’t it?

  He couldn’t be sure. Time became an imaginary thing here in this dark closet all alone. The rivers of sweat draining down the sides of his face were real. Each breath was real, the inhale and then the exhale, hot air passing through his nostrils and mouth. Everything else, everything outside of this three foot by three foot cell wasn’t all the way real. It was just an idea.

  He’d heard the men return at some point, the rumble of the diesel engine, the slam of the door, the baritone drone of male voices chattering on. He found it impossible to decide how many there were. All of the voices bled together. It almost sounded like one person talking, pausing, interrupting himself. Only when they la
ughed could he hear more than one voice.

  And of course, he probably wasn’t listening to the whole group. There were maybe a handful or less in the room connected to his closet. Others were surely elsewhere, stretching out with their sleeping bags pulled up to their chins.

  What had he been thinking upon hiding in here? How could he possibly kill them all?

  He thought about the shotgun. Two shots and it would need to be reloaded. Jesus. What kind of odds did that give him? He would have to discard the shotgun after two blasts and switch to the handgun. Or perhaps run and try to regroup.

  He breathed through his mouth now, his breath all hot and sticky. He felt his eyes straining to see in the darkness and closed them. This was a death sentence. It was impossible. Should he just run away? Should he cower in here until they leave again?

  Two droplets of sweat ran down his back, one then the other a second later, thick beads that felt like they were the width of quarters. His shoulders twitched at the tickle of the liquid’s movement.

  No. No, he couldn’t run. He couldn’t hide. Better to die like a man than live his whole life a coward, a worthless bed-wetting crybaby coward. Is that what this was all about, really? Some way to be a man after a lifetime of never quite getting there? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. In the dark, his reality filtered down to one idea: he wanted something, one thing, and he would get it or die trying.

  He closed his mouth, his breath feeling awkward and choppy and insufficient in his nostrils, but he kept at it, held off that low level panic and focused on his breathing. Slow and even. In, hold it, and out in slow motion.

  Nothing stirred in the room beyond. Nothing moved but the heave of his chest and the beat of his heart, both growing controlled. Steady. The dark felt infinite now, just blackness and emptiness stretching out around him forever.