The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  “What are we doing?” Matt said, tugging at his dad’s sleeve.

  “Huh? Oh, I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m trying to decide what we should grab. I didn’t think... I mean, I didn’t know people would clean the place out like this.”

  “Oreos. We’re supposed to get Oreos.”

  Mitch laughed and even that came out neurotic and rushed.

  “OK, fine. We’ll try to get Oreos first.”

  “Try? You think people took them all already?”

  “I hope not, but look around man. People are going nuts.”

  They angled left to get back out to the main aisle, working their way through the humanity to get to the Oreos. A squat man rushed past going the other way with both arms clutching hot dog buns to his chest, additional bags of buns dangling from his fists. Mitch made eye contact with Kevin as the bun man passed, and they laughed. He knew his older son was upset, probably a lot more in tune with the reality of the situation than Matt was, so it made him feel better to see him smile. Not that much better, maybe even a sad version of better, but it was something.

  That’s the trick, right? Find these happy moments, these hopeful moments. Find them and hold onto them. Make yourself believe you’re happy for as long as you can, and then slip into oblivion. No amount of thinking can prepare you for death, Mitch thought. You can’t brace yourself in some certain way and ease into it. Better to fool yourself for a lifetime and slide into it when no one is looking, not even you.

  Empty space occupied the freezer display where the pizzas were supposed to be. Mitch pointed a thumb at the bare freezer as he spoke.

  “Damn. The savages ran wild in here. Even took all of the good pizza.”

  “We still have a few at home,” Kevin said. “And who knows how long the power will be out? We should get grain. Rice. Oatmeal. Ice for the coolers. Maybe containers to store water. Stuff for...”

  “After,” Mitch said.

  “Oh, God,” Matt said, covering his face with his hands again. Mitch put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Hey, you’ll be alright,” he said. “You’re tough, aren’t you?”

  “What? Yeah, I’m just worried that the Oreos will be all gone. ‘Cause of the savages, I mean.”

  “Yeah, well we’re about to find out.”

  They turned right, stalking into the cookie and cracker aisle. There were still a few things on the shelf here: chicken flavored crackers, off brand chocolate chip cookies, a couple of damaged boxes of chocolate Teddy Grahams. His eyes jumped farther down the aisle, looking for blue packages, the shitty dehydrated chocolate cookies with a layer of hydrogenated white crap sandwiched between them. Or maybe it wasn’t hydrogenated anymore. He remembered reading something about it.

  A detail from the article sprang to mind: Oreos were as addictive as cocaine. He remembered that. They did a study with rats that found the little guys loved the cookies as much as they loved hard drugs. He could imagine rats here in the store now, scurrying along with the people, fleeing from trouble, gathering supplies to hunker down somewhere.

  That would be a weird job, though. Feeding cocaine to rats.

  A blue package caught his eye on the bottom shelf some 10 feet ahead. He focused on it, his conscious reality filtering down to the blue exterior, the flap on the side where the front and back pieces crimp together like the edge of a candy wrapper. Subconsciously, his brain must still be telling his legs to put one foot in front of the other, but he didn’t feel it at all, didn’t think about it. It just happened. From his perspective, he simply glided closer and closer to the package, the sounds around him fading down into something small and way in the background, like the chatter of a school cafeteria full of people heard from several classrooms away.

  But no. Not Oreos. Chips Ahoy.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Here,” Kevin said.

  He reached deep into the shelf, his hand hovering over bags of off brand ginger snaps that looked more or less untouched. All the way in the back, a package sat atop the snaps. The shape looked right. He pulled the box out of the shadows, and the light revealed blue and white and pink. Pink? Oh, it was the Double Stuf kind.

  “Good eye,” Mitch said, clapping his son’s shoulder.

  Kevin handed the Oreos to Matt, who turned them around to read the label, his eyebrows crushed together.

  “Double Stuf?” Matt said, smearing a finger over the smooth plastic in front of him.

  “Yeah, they have more of the white stuff than regular Oreos,” Mitch said. “You OK with that?”

  “Uh, yeah. This is going to be awesome.”

  The boy tucked the cookies under his arm, and it occurred to Mitch that they had forgotten to grab a cart in all of the confusion upon walking into the bright light. That was dumb.

  “Should we go get a cart?” he said.

  “They’re all gone,” Kevin said. “The rack up front was empty when we walked by anyway.”

  Mitch remembered the guy carrying all of the hot dog buns in his arms. Maybe the lack of carts played a role there.

  “Damn.”

  “It’s all right, Dad. There are three of us. We can carry plenty.”

  “I guess.”

  “This way.”

  Kevin took the lead. They turned back, weaving through an influx of traffic in the cookie aisle. Looking past them, Mitch saw the dark half of the store in the distance. The generators must only power the grocery side, leaving the department store type area in the dark. Damn. He had planned to grab some things from over there. Should they brave the lack of light? The decision could wait.

  They merged into the flow of traffic in the main aisle once more, advancing three rows to find the grain and pasta shelves. Kevin turned sideways to make himself skinny enough to squeeze through a gap between two fat men, and he squirted through to get ahead of his dad and brother. Mitch grabbed Matt’s shoulder to make sure he wouldn’t do the same.

  “Kevin!” Mitch said, his voice rising above the tangle of chatter.

  His older son disappeared in the thick crowd populating this aisle, the red hair swallowed up among the shoulders and torsos. Mitch’s heart sped up.

  Still gripping Matt, he elbowed enough space to maneuver between the stagnant fatties, jostling them out of his way with a little force. One of them, a man with a salt and pepper beard and hair hanging down to cover one side of his face, gave Mitch a dirty look. In turn Mitch stared at him, his forearm touching the gun in his belt once more. The man looked away.

  Now he battled his way through the writhing mass of limbs and torsos. All of the people seemed to be jockeying for position, closing in on something ahead that he couldn’t see. Some of the people were turning back, fighting their way upstream with goods of some kind in their hands, plastic bags of something.

  And then Kevin appeared among those fighting their way back, a smile on his face. Mitch stopped and let his son come to him.

  “The stock boy brought out a couple of boxes, but the people tore them open before he could stock them,” Kevin said. “I got in there and got some.”

  He cradled nine pounds of brown rice in his arms.

  Baghead

  Rural Oklahoma

  9 years, 126 days after

  Delfino put the car in park, and they sat facing the blockade of armed children.

  “So these are the ruthless war mongers you warned me about? A bunch of kids.”

  Delfino said nothing, but the look on his face seemed to lack any trace of amusement.

  “Turn the engine off and get out,” the kid in the front said. “Slow. Hands up, too.”

  “Wait,” Baghead said under his breath. “What are we paying the toll with?”

  Delfino shook his head, his chin tucked in a strange way. He spoke through his teeth.

  “It’s taken care of. Just stay quiet.”

  “But couldn’t we pay someone to take out seven kids?”

  “This is one squ
ad. They have an army that would hunt us for the rest of our lives and dismember us. And a lot of them are kids, sure, but not all. Please, please just shut your mouth.”

  He turned the key, and the hum of the engine died out. The quiet swelled up around them, filling the empty space where the motor had churned, the only sound remaining that of the wind swishing fistfuls of sand around.

  They climbed out of the sedan, stepping out of the shade of the car and into the glare of the direct sunlight. Bags squinted, fighting to keep his eyes open in the brightness.

  The leader waved his hand, and the child soldiers closed on them. They sprinted forward, their footsteps pounding out a heavy clatter on the pavement.

  Two kids moved in on Bags, walling him off from the car, their rifles raised at him. Their lips curled back, foreheads creased, eyebrows clenched up. One of the kids was barely five feet tall with the deadest eyes of the bunch. Bags stared straight into the boy’s face without thinking about it, trying to figure him out and finding only hatred there.

  Looking over, he saw the same scenario playing out for Delfino on the other side of the car. He noticed that Delfino stared straight down at the ground. Perhaps that was the proper etiquette.

  The other two soldiers climbed into the car, one in the front and one in the back. They moved quickly, reaching under seats and rooting their hands around.

  Finally, the one in the back peeled the blanket off of the back seat. Bags held his breath. The kid wadded the blanket up, tossed it back down to the seat.

  “Back is clear. I’ll check the trunk.”

  The kid in the front worked on, fidgeting in the glove box a while, and then running his hand all around underneath the dash. Something clicked.

  “Got something,” he said.

  “What is it?” the leader said.

  He held up a wad of money and a silver chain.

  “Some old world cash and a piece of jewelry tucked in a little compartment under the dash.”

  The leader smirked at Delfino.

  “Hiding the valuables?”

  “Hey, a guy has to try to make a living out here. You know how it is.”

  The leader nodded, placing the cash and jewelry in his breast pocket.

  “Trunk is clear. A few blankets if we want them.”

  “No need.”

  The smallest one with the dead eyes spoke up. Based on the timbre of his voice, Baghead realized he was older than he looked -- probably 14, at least. Just small for his age.

  “What’s with the bag on this one’s head?”

  “Ain’t no business of ours,” the leader said.

  “The hell it ain’t. What if he’s hiding something under there? Why else wear it?”

  “You blind? Can’t you see his eye? The radiation got ‘im, man. Just let it go. They’ve paid the toll just fine, and they’ll be on their way.”

  Everyone hesitated for a second, and Bags stared into the hateful eyes again. He didn’t want to, but he somehow couldn’t look away.

  “Open the gate,” the leader said, and then he waved Bags and Delfino back to their car. “Enjoy your trip.”

  A couple of the kids ran over to wheel the gate out of the way, but the little one hung back. He rammed a shoulder into Baghead’s chest as he moved toward the car. It got Bags just right to make it feel like his lungs had imploded, no longer capable of inhaling.

  The kid didn’t say anything. He walked away like nothing happened, not even looking back to gloat.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  42 days before

  As they moved into the graying tones toward the dark half of the store, they found an abandoned cart in the pet department. They removed two bags of kitty litter and loaded their things into it. Though the shelves had been ravaged, they’d landed some pouches of tuna, a few pounds of oatmeal and quite a bit of rice as Kevin had gone back for another haul.

  “What do we need from over here?” Kevin said, his head gesturing toward the darkening department store around them.

  “Buckets or rain barrels,” Mitch said. “If the water goes out, you can catch rain water from the downspouts. You can use it to flush the toilet. If you boil it first, you can even drink it.”

  “That’s smart. Do you think they’re sold out already, though?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think people are thinking that far ahead just yet. Anyway, be on the lookout for other useful items.”

  By the time they got to the hardware department, it was hard to see. A little light glinted its way across the store, but it felt like walking around in a cave, Mitch thought. They walked past cans of spray paint, and another group of shoppers were suddenly on top of them, appearing as though from nowhere, flitting by like a colony of bats headed toward the light.

  Mitch’s heart hammered away, picking up speed. Sweat slicked his palms and forehead. He left his hand on the butt of the gun, couldn’t quite bring himself to remove it. He didn’t want the boys to know how much this had spooked him, so he talked.

  “You guys see any hatchets? That might be something worth having. A multi-tasker.”

  “Maybe two hatchets, right?” Matt said. “I’d like my own.”

  “Sure. Two hatchets, if we can find them.”

  The cart’s wheels squeaked as they turned a corner, moving into an aisle of nails and screws and nuts and bolts. Shopping proved to be difficult in the half light, Mitch thought. They couldn’t glance down rows, their eyes perusing wares from a distance. Walking within a couple feet of things served as the only way to see what they were looking at.

  They glided past spools of chain to the farthest back corner of the store, and a dark figure took shape at the end of the aisle. Silent. Unmoving. Mitch’s tongue jerked, seeming to stick in the back of his throat like a starfish clinging to the reef. He didn’t like this.

  “What about an ax, though?” Matt said. “Maybe an ax is better than a hatchet, right?”

  “Be quiet, Matt,” Mitch said, his voice all hushed and gritty like sandpaper.

  The figure moved. It was hard to tell at first, but it walked toward them. Something about the silhouette seemed to move in an inhuman way, the footsteps somehow too fluid, the set of its shoulders almost demonic. Mitch drew the gun.

  The thing swooped at them, a lunge quick enough that Mitch lost sight of the figure, seeing only movement among the shades of black that he couldn’t make much sense of. Things moved near him, ceiling hooks and fixtures clattering to the floor. Total confusion. He kept the gun aimed at the ground, feet sliding him forward toward the commotion.

  Matt screamed. No words, just terror torn from his throat. The sound rang out small and pathetic like a lamb being slaughtered, a series of high pitched bleats that reverberated in the silence around them, the echoes somehow otherworldly in the darkness, a filtered ringing quality hanging in the air long after the sound of his voice faded out.

  And Mitch closed in, the gun pointed ahead of him now. He crashed into the dark figure, knocking it flat and falling on top of it. A scramble of limbs ensued. Moving body parts bashing into each other. He found himself on top of the being, and he sat up, glancing for a split second over his shoulder to ensure his children were behind him.

  And he squeezed the trigger, and the muzzle flashed, lighting everything up. The world went into slow motion. In that instant of light, he found no demon beneath him, no zombie or mutant or beastly creature at all. Just a small man with a haggard look about him. Purple bags beneath the eyes. Pit stains darkening his t-shirt. Stubble giving way to a scraggly blond beard. And then time resumed, and the muzzle popped, and the bullet tore open the guy’s gut, and that filtered ring hung in the air again. It was so fast. Just a flash and a bang and the guy was opened up, blood seeping out of him, the dark spot of the puddle spreading around him on the white floor.

  This seemed a lot more permanent now that it was done, Mitch realized. A split decision that would change lives forever. What had even happened here?
He didn’t know, and he knew he never would.

  The man howled once, and Mitch put one in his head.

  “Let’s go,” he said, getting to his feet. “People will come looking this way because of the gun shots. Just act natural and keep moving.”

  Nobody spoke. They rounded the corner, and he put a rain barrel into the cart, and they wheeled back toward the light.

  He didn’t know what happened, but it didn’t matter anymore. Keeping these boys safe was the only thing that mattered now. It was the only thing.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  38 days after

  After standing next to the heat of the fire, the air rushing past as they sped down the road on their bikes felt extra refreshing. Every few seconds, Erin heard the click of Izzy’s gears. The novelty hadn’t worn off yet, apparently.

  When the driveway came in sight, she pedaled a little harder. If she got the fire going quickly, she was pretty sure she could squeeze in a bath before it got dark.

  She coasted through the barn door, parking her bike just inside. Izzy buzzed around the yard, still tinkering with the gears.

  The galvanized tub clunked over the uneven ground as she towed it along beside her. Where to build the fire? That was the question. Remembering the way the trees dispersed the smoke, she considered building it at the edge of the yard, where the shaggy grass gave away to the oaks, hickories, and pines.

  Then again, that was a long walk from the well pump. How many buckets would it take to fill the tub? Her best guess was a shitload.

  The only tree anywhere near the pump was a lone scraggly pine. It cast a patchy shadow over the grass, needles twitching in the breeze.

  Good enough.

  She left the tub near the tree and skipped back to the barn, where she loaded cement blocks into the wheelbarrow she found amongst the junk. The tire on it was flat, but it still worked. Just took a little more elbow grease. And it beat lugging the bricks one by one.