The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  Once more the steps groaned and sagged under his feet. He mounted them slowly, with care, his spine arched back a little to help balance, keeping the weight of her body leaned up against him and letting his legs do most of the work.

  He thought it would be disturbing to handle her dead body like this, but it wasn’t, at least not that much. Maybe he was in shock, or maybe he had accepted the way of things more than he’d realized, and he was OK now putting her to rest, putting his life to rest. A reverence had come over him as he cleaned her up, a feeling that this was important, that it was special, and the feeling remained as he held her now, this tiny being pressed against his chest.

  He felt like he was still with her in a way when he carried her in his arms, an irrational way, of course. He thought it would be more disturbing when she was all the way gone, when the physical being before him was no longer visible, and she was just a gray memory that crept along in his imagination. Of course, she wouldn’t exist in that state for long since his imagination was coming up on its own expiration date.

  The hardest part of the physical labor was almost over. His feet advanced, taking each step with care and hesitating before moving to the next one. He was halfway to the top when the stair shifted under his weight, and he wobbled, his balance slipping away from him. His shoulders leaned too far back, and he could feel the emptiness behind him, the way nothing was holding him up, like that split second when he’d leaned his chair too far back in pre-algebra in seventh grade. He knew his seat was about to go crashing down, knew he’d gone too far, and a moment of queasiness overcame him, a moment of weightlessness and dread that must have only been a second but seemed to stretch out for a long time.

  His right hand shot out to grab the rail at his side, and the broken head flopped away from his chest, sliding down to the crook of his elbow. He fought to right himself like a listing boat’s buoyancy stopping it from capsizing, and the weight of the body shifting forward helped his cause. His torso flailed twice, and then he jerked his weight back over his knees, regaining control of himself. The weightlessness vanished, the ground made solid under his feet once again.

  He stood there a moment, taking a deep breath and letting the electrical excitement tingling in his head and chest die down a little. It felt so strange for that queasy feeling to not pay off in a crash landing, almost anti-climactic. He didn’t fall, though, and he didn’t drop her. This was good.

  He gathered her head up against his shoulder again and climbed the last five steps to the kitchen.

  The car stood before him, the trunk gaping like an open mouth. Mist descended upon him, upon the night, tumbling through the beam of the flashlight without a sound. Its damp slicked his arms, and he felt droplets drain down from his hair to run across the back of his neck. His shoulders twitched, and he began lowering her into the darkness there, but he stopped himself. He retracted his arms, hugging the corpse against his chest once again, feeling the chill through his t-shirt.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t put her in the trunk.

  He rounded the corner of the car, tottering more than walking now, the toes of her shoes scraping against the fender as he moved. With the flashlight occupying his left hand, he had to duck down to one knee, dipping her head to get his right hand to the door handle. Then he had to scramble back a couple of paces to get out of the path of the door so he could swing it open. It took a couple of tries to feel for the cracked opening, to hook his fingers onto the metal well enough to fling it wide, but he got it.

  He lay her body in the back seat, tucking the knees up toward the torso in a semi-fetal position so he’d be able to get the door closed. Stepping back, he looked down on her. From this angle, standing at her feet, he couldn’t see the way the top of her head was blown off. It looked like she was sleeping, like they’d gone out to a party tonight, and she decided to lie down in the back on the ride home and fell asleep there, like he should wake her up now, and they could go in and go to bed.

  Christ, it was late. Was he being noisy out here? His focus zeroed in on her so much that he hadn’t thought about it once during this process. His head swiveled. He looked around, peered out at the blackness shrouding the neighborhood. He saw no signs of light out there, no candlelight flickering behind curtains or flashlight beams moving about. He couldn’t even see the houses across the street.

  With the dome light shining down on the corpse, and the flashlight in his hand, anyone looking on would be able to see him, though. He was the light for the moment, and that notion made a shiver run down his spine.

  He eased the door closed, the click seeming loud now that he felt on display out here. He turned off the flashlight and walked backward a few steps, trying to ease into the safety of the shadows until the dome light turned off.

  His torso shimmied, a chill crawling through him, and he realized how cold and humid it was out here, the air almost as heavy as it was in the basement. While he watched the light, he considered what time it might be. He didn’t have a great guess. It must be somewhere between two and five AM now. Dawn was a ways off yet, most likely.

  Just as the panicked part of his brain expressed certainty that the interior light wasn’t going to turn off, that he didn’t get the door closed all the way or something, it clicked and faded to black. Well. Good.

  He walked toward the car, feet kicking through grass thoroughly saturated with dew. He clicked the flashlight on and pressed it close to the window, looking down upon the back seat. He couldn’t see her very well, just a vague shape. That was good, but he knew it wasn’t good enough.

  He went inside for blankets.

  Teddy

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  69 days after

  He wiped at his face over and over on the walk home, sliding his palms and then fingers over his forehead, bringing the loaded hands down to his side and flopping them back and forth one after the other to fling sheets of black gunk away, a move somehow reminiscent of a wet dog shaking itself dry. He smeared whatever was left onto his t-shirt before going back for more.

  The sky grew darker now, dusk closing out another day. Shadows fell long in the dimming light, draining the color out of the brick facades and awnings plumped up over the storefronts down here. He thought about checking the other two traps but figured leaving them would give him that much more incentive to get up in the morning. With his hand in his face much of the way, he stumbled along on the sidewalk, treading on the broken bits of his town once again.

  Weirdly, he thought the moment of fear, when the chain of the swing touched his back, made this one more satisfying. He could still feel it, the cold metal pressing between his shoulder blades, and that electric shock of fear coursing through him, that moment of total panic. That got him good. Usually cutting them didn’t do that much for him, but today it felt right. It wasn’t like with the animals, though. This was something different. It was more like back in school.

  After a few years of being a playground punching bag, he grew up, swelled up into something bigger and stronger than the rest of them. He weighed 180 pounds by the time he was 12, little to no fat on his body. Just an out of control ball of muscle. No discipline. No impulse control. He bounced around all day, finding it increasingly difficult to sit still. Starting in sixth grade, they put him in special education, which segregated him from the general population of the school. That wasn’t so bad. It was a place with a peaceful energy, and the teachers knew how to calm everyone down.

  In high school, he ate lunch with a chunk of the general student population, though, and things veered back toward the way they were before. They called him a retard and did crude arm motions to mock some of the other special ed kids. All of the bad feelings flooded back up to the surface, the feeling of plucking wood chips from divots in his face while everyone laughed.

  So he waited for the right time, and it came.

  He swirled his chicken nugget in a paper cup of honey, just vaguely aware of the other four hundred people in the r
oom because of the low level chatter droning in all directions like a TV on in the next room. Someone clapped him on the back, and he looked back and up over his shoulder into the face of Chuck Wentworth, a kid with gerbil teeth and a terrible poof of curly blond hair that somehow looked too greasy and too dry at the same time. It reminded him of a Chia Pet. He didn’t know Chuck other than by name, so this touching wasn’t normal or welcome.

  A semi-circle of giggling jagoffs stood behind Chuck, and Teddy knew something was coming. Some laugh riot, Friar’s Club Roast of the retard variety.

  “How’s that chicken nugget treatin’ ya?” Chuck said.

  Teddy didn’t wait for the hilarity to ensue. He turned to the side, getting one leg out from under the lunch table so he could get some torque into his punch. His body coiled and uncoiled in some violent way reminiscent of an ape, and he landed a short, straight right hand right to the kid’s throat. His knuckles connected with a heavy slap and then some hollow throat sound came out of Chuck’s mouth. Teddy could feel the Adam’s apple shove straight back in. It felt like it lodged there, cinching his wind pipe closed. Teddy hoped that it did.

  The kid brought his hands to his neck, gagging, fingers crawling up the sides of his throat like flailing spider legs as though that could help him breathe. His friends stood motionless for a beat, and then they moved in as though they could aid in his attempts to breathe or talk him into it by yelling at him. None of them made eye contact with Teddy.

  Chuck’s face turned all red and then went a little purple. It looked, Teddy thought, like it might explode, that blond Chia poof bursting to spread its fluff everywhere like confetti at a parade. He pictured the swarm of children excitedly picking up wads of Chuck’s hair along with the candy, fat little kid fingers gripping flecks of his scalp and palms cupping bloody shards of bone from his ruptured skull. He laughed so hard that he cried, barely able to finish eating his chicken nuggets, and no one in the cafeteria would look at him.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  40 days after

  Stuck in the dark again. Erin flicked at the lighter in a panic, but it wouldn’t catch. She couldn’t feel her thumb right from the burn. Her movements were clumsy.

  She staggered backwards, toward the door. But when she swung her hand to try to catch the handle, she came up empty. She was back in the lightless labyrinth again. Set afloat in pitch black space. Doomed to be lost forever.

  Her breath came short and fast, and she started to feel dizzy. She was hyperventilating. On TV they always made you breathe into a paper lunch bag if you started to hyperventilate. She didn’t know why. And she didn’t have a bag. So she imagined one instead. Imagined the paper bulging as it inflated with her breath. When she inhaled, the bag crinkled.

  She did this again and again until she got her breathing back under control. She put the lighter in the opposite hand and lit it, keeping her thumb away from the metal. She reached out, disconnected the key ring from the corpse, and scuttled to the door, throwing it wide and lurching through it.

  She took big greedy breaths of the fresh air.

  Relief filled her, and then saliva rushed into her mouth, and a bitter taste rose in the back of her throat. She tried to run for the door, but didn’t quite make it, spewing watery, half-digested fruit cocktail onto the gray tile.

  Back at the bikes, she rinsed her mouth, swishing the water from cheek to cheek before spitting it out. Another squeeze of the bottle shot a spray of lukewarm water into her mouth, and this time she swallowed it.

  Her thumb ached. When she poked at it with her forefinger, she could feel the blister there.

  The keys were all labeled. She found the one that said PUMP 2 and inserted it into the lock. The rest of the keys tinkled together like bells as she turned it. She tried not to notice the dark red crust on some of them.

  The little door swung open revealing a whole lot of electronic equipment. Nothing that seemed to turn the pump on for manual use. Erin stared at it a long while before taking a step back.

  “I give up. You still want to check out the playground?”

  Izzy rested a fist on one hip.

  “No, I decided I’d rather go to the library and read a bunch of books instead.”

  Erin gave her the side-eye.

  “Wait a minute. Did you just figure out how sarcasm works?”

  They rode through another intersection partially blocked by a collection of crumpled cars. The ground around the crash looked like it was studded with diamonds, bits of glass glittering in the sun. As they wove around the destruction, something red caught Erin’s eye.

  She did a double-take, slowing her bike on the second glance. Izzy pulled ahead.

  “Slow down for a second.”

  Erin left her bike on the sidewalk and walked into the center of the street. There was a dark brown El Camino in the wreckage. The wrinkled metal reminded her of the outside of a raisin. But she was less concerned with the condition of the vehicle and more intrigued by what lay in the rear bed.

  It was a red plastic gas can, just like the empty one in her bike carrier.

  Wrapping her palm around the handle, she gave it a shake. The muffled sound of sloshing liquid met her ears. She lifted it, feeling the weight of the gas inside.

  “No way,” Izzy said. “What are the odds?”

  Erin got that feeling she got in the houses sometimes. Even though she’d been prepared to take gas from the gas station, that somehow felt different. This act of pulling the can out of someone’s car felt more like a violation. Like stealing. Maybe it seemed too easy. She knew it was silly, but she found herself craning her neck around, on the lookout as if she were a kid shoplifting a candy bar from the corner store.

  She nestled the new gas can into the carrier with the old one, tucking it in like a baby.

  “I’ll race you to the swings,” Izzy said, then took off before Erin could even get back on her bike.

  “Cheater!”

  Erin ran after her, pulling the bike along to get a better start. Izzy zoomed out ahead, already crossing the bridge stretching over the river. Erin pumped at the pedals to catch up, less because she was concerned about winning the race, and more because she didn’t want Izzy to get too far ahead. She still couldn’t shake the uneasiness of being around all the houses and cars.

  Sunlight filtered through the trees above. The wind rustled through the leaves, casting quivering shadows on the sand at Erin’s feet. The river babbled in the background, a sound that made the world seem a little less empty.

  Erin sat in one of the swings, her back to the jungle gym. She wasn’t really swinging so much as pushing her legs back and forth in a swaying motion. Like a rocking chair.

  She and Kelly used to try to see who could swing higher, pumping their legs back and forth, leaning in and pointing their toes at the top of the arc.

  There was always talk about the kids who had managed to swing all the way around, completing the circle. Of course now she knew that was all bogus. Made up by older kids probably. But back then, when she sort of believed it might be possible, she wondered what would happen if she did keep swinging higher, higher, higher, until finally the swing inverted, flipping her upside-down, chain wrapping around the metal bar. Half of her wanted to do it, and the other half was scared shitless at the thought. What if she got to the top, reached the pinnacle, and she just fell out of the swing, gravity ripping her back down to the ground?

  “Erin! Erin, watch this!”

  She spiraled around to face Izzy, the swing chains twisting into an X.

  Sand kicked up under Izzy’s feet as she got a running start at one end of the sand pit. When she reached the structure, she flung herself in the air like a gibbon and latched onto a zip line. The metallic whir of the wire filled the air. Izzy dangled from the handle, kicking her legs in the air. At the end of the line, she let go, hovering in the air for a beat before she landed the perfect dismount.

  Erin lifted an imaginary scorecard over
her head.

  “Ten-point-oh! Perfect score!”

  Izzy bowed and then ducked into one of the slides and climbed up the wrong way. Erin could almost remember what it was like to be that age. To be able to pretend it wasn’t a jungle gym, but a castle, and half-believe it.

  She lifted her feet and let the chains over her head unwind. The world spun around her in a blur, and then she was back facing the frozen traffic jam across the sidewalk.

  Everything was so quiet now. So still. It felt like walking around in a photograph or a painting, almost. For a moment, Erin pretended that the world hadn’t ended. Someone had a remote control for the world, and they just pressed the pause button at the exact moment all those cars piled up in the intersection. In two seconds, they’d press play again. And the door of the smashed up Lexus would open, and the driver would get out. He’d be pissed off. Shaking his fist at the kid in the blue Volkswagen. An old lady would come out on the porch of the bungalow across the street to see what all the commotion was about. A fisherman would float down the river in an aluminum rowboat.

  If it weren’t for the subtle movements of the grass and the leaves and the little ripples on the surface of the river, she could almost believe the world was just paused.

  It made more sense in some ways. How could the world just end like this, with no notice? Yeah, things had been bad with the outbreak of the plague. The death toll on the news, climbing higher and higher each night. The riots. The power outages.

  Some people even said it was the beginning of the end. But the people on TV — the talking heads and politicians — they all said it was under control. No cause for panic. Her mom repeated it. And she bought it. Because she wanted to.

  Erin wondered if they’d known all along where things were headed. They had to, on some level, right?

  It didn’t matter, though. Not really. She knew from experience that even if you knew the worst was coming, you still found ways to lie to yourself. To trick yourself into believing that everything was OK.