The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  Something reflected the glow of the lighter, and Erin hunched over to get a better look. A key ring, dangling from the belt loop of one of the corpses.

  She forced herself to take a step closer. Just as her fingers brushed the keys, she realized how hot the top of the lighter had grown under her thumb. She tried to stop herself from letting go, but reflex took over and her thumb released the button. The light flicked out, and the darkness closed in.

  Teddy

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  69 days after

  The zombie wandered around the perimeter of its pen, too dumb to find the gate and move on. The feet skittered along the grass, not so much lifting for legitimate steps as sliding forward in uneven jerks that made the torso above wobble and lean at odd angles. Its clothes were tattered. Red covered the shriveled flesh around its mouth, but its eyes didn’t convey any malice or viciousness or much of anything at all. They stared out at nothing, blank like all of the others.

  Teddy smiled. This wasn’t much of a trap, but it worked well enough. In fact, it proved more effective than some of his more elaborate contraptions. If he put a piece of road kill in this fenced-in park with all but one of the gates closed, he could usually pen one in long enough to get here before it found the way out. They were pretty good at getting to the meat, but not great at finding their way out.

  He watched it veer off to the left, wandering past the swings and seesaw, its limp arm flopping against the side of a slide. Memories came to him as his eyes traced its meandering path under the monkey bars.

  The other kids beat him up on the playground when he was really young. Mostly it seemed to be about humiliating him – pushing him down, smacking him around a little – but the meaner kids took it beyond that sometimes.

  Scott Melvin. That was the kid who punched him the hardest. He was a year older than everyone else, held back because of emotional issues. He had red hair and saggy looking cheeks, and he wore metal t-shirts of bands that Teddy had never actually heard. It all just sounded like noise to him anyway. Metal and all the rest of the music the kids listened to. Meaningless ticking and tocking and wailing.

  He remembered watching Scott’s pudgy fist loop in on his forehead in second grade, seeing everything go black with flashes of red when it connected. He came to face down in the red wood chips under the swings. He wasn’t sure how many times he was struck. Just once? Were all of those red flashes times he got hit? His fingers scanned his forehead, locating a single lump at the edge of his brow that sent a twinge of pain through him when he touched it.

  He brought himself up to his knees and brushed flecks of wood off of cheeks and shirt. The kids laughed at that, a semi-circle of them laughing their stupid heads off. It felt like time had passed, like he’d gone somewhere else and come back, but he wasn’t certain. Had he really been knocked out? Or did he psych himself out into fainting? He didn’t know.

  Now he entered the gates of the park, his hand fidgeting along the handle of the hatchet as he moved toward the hunch-backed figure shambling away from him. He was ready to play.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  41 days before

  Mitch sat at the table in the kitchen. A lone candle burned there, and he watched the flame flicker atop it, a river of wax seeping down the side. The boys had gone to bed, but he knew he couldn’t sleep, not like this, so he didn’t bother trying. He could feel the sting of tiredness like sand gritting at his eyes, could feel the fog in his head obscure pieces of his thoughts, but even so, he couldn’t make his brain stop, couldn’t even slow it down. He didn’t know if he even wanted to.

  He thought about what they would do now. Should he take them to their grandparents’ house in the morning? At least that way some kind of guardian would have a chance to find them, assuming ol’ Grandma and Grandpa were still alive anyway. They hadn’t answered the phone or been home, so it was hard to say. On the other hand, they could stay here and make calls. They’d be in a familiar place, with a decent amount of supplies.

  Pain stabbed through his skull again, the headache’s blade entering the top of his head about four inches behind his left eyeball, jabbing about in there, and then leaving for a while.

  He reached out for the phone where it sat on the table, fingers brushing at the screen which did not respond to his touch. He had turned it off to save some of the battery for the daylight hours tomorrow. It was tempting to check it now, but no. Not yet. He removed his fingers from the device, leaving it off.

  With the power still out, the house felt so still and dark. He thought about Janice down on the basement floor, the scrap of tarp covering her face. He saw her in his mind, his wife, the love of his life, now a corpse laid out on the concrete slab with bullet holes running through her. In some way remembering the physicality of her final resting place made her death seem more real, which made his own impending demise a touch less scary. What was he still doing here anyway? What could he hope to do without her? He was nothing on his own. He was no one. Death made sense with her gone, he thought, as much sense as it can ever make anyway. From other angles it was terrifying still, some voyage into the unknown, maybe a drop off into nothingness, but when he thought of her, he felt prepared. He was good to go.

  He looked up to the spot above the candle where the light flickered on the ceiling. It was hard to imagine that this used to feel like a safe place, he thought. It used to feel like home. For years that was the way of things. Not anymore. No safe place existed. No home existed. Not for his wife, and not for him. Maybe for his boys it still could be, but deep down, he didn’t think so.

  He stood and opened the window over the sink for some fresh air. The cool undulated in through the open rectangle, ballooning across his face and the bare flesh of his arms. He closed his eyes and inhaled, felt the chill enter his nostrils and pass through his throat into his chest. It seemed weird, just then, all of the animal things people do to survive, all of the bodily functions. Eating, sleeping, breathing, pissing, shitting, etc. He didn’t consider these things often, so much so that they felt foreign and far away now.

  He stood at the window a long time, staring at the blackness out there. No streetlights. No driveways lit up. Just black along the ground and stars in the sky. Stars that hung up there like impartial judges, that looked down on him the same way they did on his wedding day and the day his wife passed and now the day he would do the same. Stars he had gazed at throughout his life, full of wonder for what the universe might have in store, what life might have in store. With all of the endless possibilities, this is what he got.

  He craned his neck to stare at the stars full on, and for a moment, regret welled in him. Regret for the days gone by, the time wasted, the attention never paid. But it passed. This was how life worked. He knew that.

  It must be quite late now, maybe around 2 AM, he thought. The neighborhood was dead still. He put his hands on the window sill, felt the cool roiling around his fingertips, thought about closing it. The quiet outside made him uncomfortable, a foreboding feeling that made him hold his breath and wait for something to happen over and over again, but he left it.

  He walked back to the table and sat once more, forearms resting on the edge. His abs felt tight, flexed, holding him upright in a manner that struck him as aggressive, almost ape-like. His diaphragm squeezed breath in and out of him.

  They would stay here, he thought. He couldn’t risk further travel, not for his sons, at least, not without knowing for sure the grandparents were out there somewhere. No, they would try to make it here. At home.

  He could feel the cool air from the window roll across the back of his neck. Not a breeze, just the faintest movement of air. It made the hair there stand up, a prickling feeling that spread across the brain stem region in slow motion.

  He closed his eyes. He knew what he had to do now. He didn’t want to do it, but he knew he would.

  Baghead

  Rural Oklahoma

  9 years, 126
days after

  Waves of sand skimmed over the blacktop before the Delta 88. Endless streams of grit that twisted and changed directions. Baghead thought it looked like a miniature flock of migrating birds.

  “Shit,” Delfino said. “This doesn’t look good.”

  He pointed farther down the road. Spirals of sand stood tall against the horizon. Three funnel cloud-looking towers. Billowing dust draped over the road beneath them.

  “A sand storm?” Baghead said.

  “Yeah. Blowing in from the south from the looks of it.”

  Delfino lifted a little in his seat, putting more weight on the accelerator. The car lurched forward, snuggling Bags’ shoulder blades back into the seat.

  “We might be able to outrun the worst of it.”

  Without soil management and irrigation and people to look after it, the first long drought had turned most of the Great Plains to dust. The plant life withered, and the topsoil blew away.

  Looking out at the crags and the cracks and the sand, it was hard to imagine that crops ever grew here. The earth had shriveled, had dried out like the dead bodies still sprawled in the ghost towns up and down the highway.

  “Will it short out the car? The sand, I mean.”

  Delfino’s eyebrows reached up for his hairline.

  “Might. Guess we’re about to find out.”

  They barreled down a hill, and a wall of brown smoke engulfed them. The cloud seemed to hang in the air all around, almost appearing motionless like fog until Baghead stared at it long enough to detect the swirls and eddies and the current of the wind.

  Delfino eased back down into his seat, letting up on the accelerator a bit.

  “Shit.”

  He pulled the car over, easing it halfway onto the shoulder and cutting the engine.

  “We’ll have to wait it out.”

  Delfino dug in his breast pocket for a cigarette.

  With the engine noise gone, they could hear the wind whistling over the vehicle. Something about it seemed lonesome and cold, Bags thought.

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His sleep was dreamless.

  The wind roared over the car. It moaned and hissed and whimpered.

  Dust clouded all things. It blocked out the sun. Turned everything inside the car the color of ash.

  Delfino’s lighter scraped and clicked, the glow lighting his face from below and turning the tip of his cigarette red. He flicked the lighter closed with another click, and the flame cut out. The color drained back to gray.

  “How long has it been?” Bags said, sitting up from his sleep spot.

  Delfino exhaled before he spoke, smoke coiling out of his nose.

  “Not long. Maybe 45 minutes. Maybe less.”

  Bags nodded. He looked out the window at the swirling plume of dirt around them. This was not the nearly motionless cloud they sat in before. It jerked. It pulsated. A throbbing black mass that engulfed them.

  Sand whipped against the car. It tinkled at the windows and rasped over the roof above.

  Clods of filth were visible now and then. Beach ball sized clumps of earth torn from the ground and tossed about.

  “Can I ask you something?” Delfino said.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you believe in souls?”

  Baghead raked his fingers over the canvas shrouding his jaw before he answered.

  “I don’t know. I guess sometimes I do. It scares me, maybe, if we don’t have souls.”

  “Scares you?”

  “Yeah. The idea that we are just strange apes. Here for no purpose. Deluding ourselves into thinking that there’s meaning in our endless drive to consume things. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  Delfino stubbed his cigarette butt out in the ash tray, the red cherry going black with a little hiss.

  “Well… no. I mean, it would, maybe. But I do believe in souls. I never quite made the jump to religion, you know? But I figure if all of those old Greek philosophers believed in souls, there must be something to it. Bunch of people that are a lot smarter than me, you know?”

  “The ghost in the machine.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what they call all of the old beliefs. A lot of the old philosophers all bought into the idea that the mind and body are fundamentally separate, which, if accepted, sort of proves the idea that there is a soul – a ghost in the machine – that makes the whole thing go. But now it’s used as an example of modern people accepting fallacies from more primitive times. I mean, we now understand that our brain functioning is the mind. It’s not fundamentally separate from our physical beings after all, right?”

  They sat a moment without talking.

  “The ghost in the machine. Has a ring to it, anyway,” Delfino said.

  The wind moaned in the seam along Baghead’s door, almost like a tea kettle flipping off and on. Periodically bigger gusts rose up, the pitch of the noise against the car deeper and more powerful, enough to rattle the metal body.

  Delfino squirmed a little in his seat.

  “I was wondering. Since we’re just sitting here a while,” he said. “Might I see it now?”

  Baghead thought about it a second, nodded.

  “I suppose.”

  He plucked the Hand of Death from his pocket, passed it over. Delfino handled it gingerly, fingertips making sure to only touch the edges. He gasped a little upon turning it toward himself, seeming to hold his breath.

  They both looked upon the image for a long moment without speaking.

  The red background held its hue even in the half-light. The black hand stood out that much more, and the skull in the palm contrasted even further.

  “Do you know what the symbols mean?” Delfino said.

  He hovered a finger over the ornate markings, one hovering above each black finger.

  “It’s some ancient occult language. Reading right to left, it spells ‘death.’”

  Delfino nodded. He looked at the card a while longer before he handed it back.

  “Never thought I’d actually see it,” he said. “Man, I bet looking at that thing makes you want to believe in souls, don’t it?”

  Ray

  Houston, Texas

  3 days before

  Dark surrounded the Grand Cherokee like the night was trying to swallow it up. The daylight had faded fast while they were stuck in traffic, and they were still here. Still in Houston. Not good.

  “You were right,” she said.

  “How do you mean?” he said.

  “You said some crazy shit was about to go down,” she said, gesturing to the standstill traffic around them. “It sure is.”

  She smiled. She didn’t seem alarmed to a level that seemed appropriate for an impending nuclear holocaust, but that was probably for the best. She didn’t know about that anyway, of course. He decided he’d tell her after they were out of town, if they ever found a damn way out.

  All roads out of Houston had military roadblocks in place now. They’d tried to get onto the interstate, either 45 or 69, but soldiers turned them away both times. Armed guards directing traffic, waving everyone away. One yelled that the terror levels had been raised and everyone was to stay in town by order of the Department of Homeland Security. He added that it’d probably be lifted in the next day or two.

  Now Ray wrestled with the steering wheel and searched the nooks and crannies of his mind for the remotest routes he could think of. The backroads that seemed least likely to be guarded, and even if they were, the privacy might give them options.

  The sounds of the engines rose and fell in a way that conveyed restlessness, Ray thought. Headlights shone all around, the cars advancing in fits and starts, all the traffic lurching forward and jerking to a stop in unison like some herd of cattle. That’s just what it was like, he knew. All of the people piled up on top of each other like cows getting funneled into the kill chute at a slaughterhouse.

  He wished he had a cigar to chew on, but he hadn’t brought any.

  Mitch
<
br />   Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  41 days before

  The basement stairs creaked beneath his feet, and the wood sagged a little with each step. He felt it bend and contort under the strain of his weight. He wasn’t scared, but he walked slowly, deliberately. It felt like an act of reverence in some way, a show of respect.

  The flashlight nestled into his fist like the hilt of a sword, its glowing blade carving a tunnel of light into the darkness. The circle of illumination bounced along the concrete floor below as he made his way down the steps. It looked like a spotlight beaming onto a stage, the lights turned down so only the star of the show was visible, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to shine the light on the star of this production. Not yet.

  At the bottom, the sag of the wood gave way to the solid cement. He planted his feet there, took a breath. It was cool down here, dank and a little chilly as it always was in the basement, he supposed, but the sweat poured out of him anyway. It seeped out of his forehead and lubricated his palms. He smeared the back of his hand over his brow, left to right, felt the perspiration sluice down the side of his face, clinging to the stubble at the corner of his jaw.

  He stepped forward, again moving with care. The light inched toward its destination, toward the big reveal. The feet came into view at the edge of the spotlight, still and grayed out like they were being broadcast in black and white. He stopped there, looked on the sole of the lone remaining tennis shoe. The tread looked fairly new, not beat and scuffed to hell like his shoes. Jan always took better care of her things like that.

  Air rushed into his lungs with a click and a scraping sound, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He stood and just breathed a while, his eyes dancing away from the feet and moving back toward them, like he wanted to look away but couldn’t. He closed them for a moment, though, and that stuck.