by McBain, Tim
She laid there a while, allowing her breathing to return to normal. But after a few minutes, she gave up on falling back asleep.
The floor was chilly under her bare feet. She pulled on a pair of dry socks and padded out of the room.
At the kitchen window, she looked out into the night and the rain. She could only really see when the lightning flashed.
Izzy was probably right. The generator was likely fried like everything else. Why hadn’t she thought about that before?
It seemed so stupid now. Even if she had been able to get it started, so what? She kept pretending that electricity would somehow solve all of their problems, but that wasn’t true. They still had to find food if they wanted to survive.
Time passed. She knew it must be getting close to dawn, because there was enough light outside that she could finally see a little without the lightning. Everything looked gray in the half-light.
Her eyes wandered from the water dribbling over the gutters to the dwindling store of food in the cabinet. This was only a little rain. What was going to happen when it was snow?
How much food would they need to have on hand to make it through the winter?
She didn’t know.
And how many days had they wasted on the failed generator?
She didn’t want to know.
Baghead
Rural Oklahoma
9 years, 126 days after
He flung himself from the car, hitting the road on his side, his hip bone taking the brunt of it. He bounced once and then skidded over the asphalt, the hot tar and gravel concoction grating at his flesh and clothing. He fought the instinct to dig his feet in or claw at the ground, instead lifting his hands and legs the best he could. Better to let momentum carry him to the shoulder.
As soon as he hit the dirt, he bounced again, flopping face down, his vision obscured by the bag. A bunch of sand poured into the eyeholes, the grit grinding at his face like a dry, power wash version of exfoliating beads.
He skidded to the bottom of the ditch, which wasn’t far, and finally came to a stop. He held still for a moment, almost waiting for a second round of dirt sliding to kick in, and then rolled over onto his back, taking a deep breath as he did so. A bunch of sand spilled into his nose and mouth, though, and caught in his throat. He rolled back over, unzipping the hood at his chin so he could spit the dirt out. The powder burned, especially in his nostrils, and it dried out every mucus membrane that it touched.
He crouched in the vomit position, on hands and knees, for quite a while. No amount of spitting or retching removed all of the dirt from his throat, and no matter how long he kept at it, each brush of his beard flung more grains of sand to the ground.
Finally, he gathered himself and stood. His chest heaved, and he found the top half of his back sore and stiff. Christ. He was exhausted from trying, and failing, to hack up some sand.
A voice spoke behind him:
“You gonna make it, chief?”
He turned to find Delfino standing on the edge of the road above him, the sun at his back in a way that hid his face in shadow. The blacked out face reminded Bags of looking at backlit photographs when he was a kid and everything was still on film.
He looked past Delfino, noting the lack of any 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88s in the vicinity.
“Where’s the car?”
“I told you, man. It ain’t wise to park out here. I found a low spot to park it and jogged up this way. Hopefully the dunes will hide it if anyone passes by.”
Bags nodded.
“Seriously, though, are you OK?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I’ll be picking sand out of my beard for a month, but I’m OK.”
The wind blew then, and feeling the cool air on his chin, Baghead realized that his bag had been unzipped all this time. He’d forgotten all about it after the sand situation. He turned away from Delfino and zipped it up. A weird tingle rippled in the center of his chest, and a heat crept up onto his cheeks.
He stayed turned away, feeling that warmth in his face, and things got quiet for a moment.
“Should we, uh, go check on this kid? Or do you just want to wait around for a lynch mob?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
41 days before
The landscape reflected the glow from the headlights, wet leaves and blades of grass shimmering like ice sculptures. It felt strange to look on this shininess, this embarrassment of illumination, after all of the time he’d spent in the dark so far this evening. The car’s clock confirmed the time to be 4:37 AM. He couldn’t help but think of turning on the brights in this darkness as the equivalent of shining a flashlight in someone’s face, like the whole world was trying to sleep now, and he was just being obnoxious.
The car moved through the outskirts of town, well away from the riots and the busy streets. Here he found shoddy houses and overgrown vacant lots on the side of the road. Various grasses gone to seed stood waist high, waving as he passed.
He glanced over his shoulder every few seconds, though he knew this to be unnecessary. Two blankets and an afghan swathed the corpse in the back seat, the blankets folded to produce enough layers of cover that an onlooker couldn’t discern the shape of the body underneath. She wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything, but he checked on her anyway. He couldn’t help it.
The engine’s vibration thrummed through the steering wheel and into his hands. Not much. Just enough to make his fingers tingle. He realized that he liked driving, especially alone. He liked being at the controls of a machine of this size and power. He liked the white noise of the engine’s hum against the quiet in the car. He liked putting the window down just a crack and letting the cold air blow along the side of his head, flipping his hair up a little.
Even his headache seemed to get lulled into a stupor as he drove, receding from the off and on throb of stabbing brain pain to more of a dull ache that lingered just above the threshold necessary to be considered annoying. It stayed well below the level of miserable or excruciating, though, so he was happy with that.
As bad as it had tasted, he wished he’d brought along Janice’s pack of cigarettes. He could feel the filter adhered to his lips, see the flame burst from the lighter and lick around the paper and tobacco, smell the smoke. He didn’t know why he wanted any of this. Why didn’t matter in most respects now. He just moved forward. He acted first and saved thinking for something to do to kill time during the lulls.
Now the buildings along the roadside grew more sparse, fields of saplings and brush filling in the empty spaces. He passed a few odd small businesses, a snowmobile dealership, a couple of auto mechanics, a veterinary clinic, but most of the land out here was vacant. Desolate. He hadn’t passed another car in a long time.
He didn’t quite know how he was going to do this. Knowing that her priority was that the boys didn’t see her this way, his first thought had been to find some spot way out of town and put her in a dumpster outside of a gas station or something, but that seemed way too crass. An easy answer, yes, but a disrespectful one. He couldn’t see the police digging too deep on something like a Jane Doe in a dumpster anytime too soon with the city on fire, but there was certainly a possibility that they’d identify her in some way. Maybe that could lead to Matt and Kevin seeing her somehow. Torching her within the dumpster crossed his mind as well, but no. She had expressed her interest in cremation, but it was too messy and too attention grabbing. That would get found right away and might drum up enough outrage among the public to warrant an investigation even with the riots and such going on. So yeah, that was out.
Of course, he would’ve preferred burying her in the yard. At home where she belonged. Not having the time to invest in digging a deep grave, though, he worried a heavy rain might unearth her. Or maybe his sons would get curious about the mound of dirt out back and poke around. Kevin would probably know a shallow grave when he saw one, but would that make him leave it be or even more ap
t to check it out? Yeah, that was a no go.
He drove on, engine whirring, air sucking through the crack in the window and floofing his hair around. He was not certain of his destination, but he would know it when he saw it. He let his mind wander, let it go blank to the point that he almost forgot about his headache, almost forgot what he was doing out here at all. He watched the dashed line rush past in the middle of the road, the way the yellow paint reflected the glow of the headlights.
The car descended a small hill, picking up speed with gravity’s help, making his stomach feel that twinge of excitement like being on a roller coaster. Without thinking, he floored it, butt lifting off of the upholstery, foot pressing all of his weight down on the pedal. The engine roared, and the car rocketed through the emptiness, lighting up the black nothing all around.
His heart thumped, though he didn’t perceive it as rushing so much as a more powerful beat, a more confident one. He felt alive, and that notion occurred to him. Feeling alive. Shit. He didn’t feel alive until he was about to die. Better late than never, though, he thought.
He looked down at the speedometer, saw the needle thrust back and forth in the realm of three figures, and let up on the pedal some. Probably not wise to do 116 mph when you’ve got a body in the back seat. He pictured a yellow bumper sticker affixed to his back window that read, “Dead body on board.” Then he pictured getting pulled over for speeding, the cop thrusting his nightstick into the mess of blankets. For whatever reason these images struck him as funny, though. He knew the police were too busy to be worried about traffic violations just now.
He dropped it down to 80 as a compromise and pressed on. The scenery had changed while he sped along. More and more trees populated the sides of the road now. Sparsely wooded grass fields slowly thickened around him as he sped by. Pines intertwined with oaks and maples, blotting the landscape with fuller and fuller foliage like adolescent peach fuzz becoming a fully fledged man beard.
Well, this would do, he thought. He didn’t know why, but it felt right.
Lorraine
Houston, Texas
3 days before
She stared out the window at the blackness, shoulders squared away from the driver. Something about the dark out there intrigued her just now, like if she stared into it long enough, something would have to take shape in the gloom, something would have to make sense of all of this.
Ray hadn’t said a word after the confrontation with the soldiers. Did it even count as a confrontation, she wondered? It was less like he confronted them and more like he sucker punched them with bullets. Not that she was judging him. Life and death were the only judges that mattered for now, maybe.
If she was honest with herself, there was almost something exhilarating about watching Ray put bullets in the soldiers’ heads. The fury of that blaze of the muzzle, the crack of the gun. The violence of that first entry wound, that hole torn in the forehead. The force of the bloody spray exiting the back of the skull, knocking the head toward them on a limp neck as though the man was sneezing. The decisiveness of Ray’s arm swiveling the gun to the second head and firing again. It was brutality. It was carnage. It was flesh separated from bone, brain separated from skull. Life extinguished faster than stubbing out a cigarette butt.
There was a horror to all of that, of course, but she found herself numb to it just now. She’d seen too much death up close to feel it at all. (And maybe the pills played a role in that numbness, too.) Instead she merely sensed the kind of primal awe one felt when watching a knockout punch in a heavyweight fight, when watching a lion pounce out of the weeds to snag a zebra, when watching a shark thrash around to tear up a seal.
The soldiers died quickly, at least. She couldn’t say the same for her husband.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
41 days after
Izzy held a book horizontally across her chest while Erin stacked more on top, right up to her chin.
“Are you sure you’ve got them?”
Izzy’s tongue protruded through the gap where her front tooth was starting to come in. She nodded, all seriousness.
Erin lifted her own pile and followed Izzy into the house. The books clattered onto the carpet in the living room.
Izzy nudged a drug reference book with her toe.
“Why do we need all these again?”
“Because this,” Erin gestured at the cluster of books that looked like fallen dominoes, ”is the old school version of the internet.”
The blank expression on Izzy’s face told her that wasn’t enough explanation. She bent and picked up a book on wilderness survival.
“This one is going to teach us how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together. Hopefully we won’t ever need it, but matches and lighters could run out at some point. You never know.”
She traded the wilderness book for a gardening book that was as thick as a phone book.
“We can read this and learn how to grow vegetables.”
She dropped it back into the pile and selected a title on prepping.
“This book will tell us how much food we need to store for winter and how to preserve the stuff from our garden.”
Izzy still had a puss on.
“What?”
Her lips pouted out.
“I don’t like tomatoes.”
“I see,” Erin said. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My dad had a garden. But the only thing he ever grew was tomatoes.”
“Oh. Well, we can grow whatever you want. Corn, potatoes, melon, squash, lettuce.”
“Strawberries?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Erin settled into the carpet and slid the books around into piles: camping and survival books in one stack, gardening in another, miscellaneous in a third.
It was funny that the library had been left untouched, really. Aside from a handful of things like food, water, and gas, the library probably had some of the most valuable things left at this point. Erin didn’t know dick about survival, but she’d found dozens of books there that could teach her. That was worth way more than their pile of pirate loot.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
41 days before
Falling from a crouch to his knees, he brushed away dead leaves with his fingers, crispy papery bits and soggy flaps alike. Black soil stared back at him, clumps of it clinging to his hands. The earth was moist here. Not wet enough to be mud, but damp enough to have a clay-like consistency rather than a sandy one. He wished he’d brought a shovel, even a small garden spade, but he hadn’t. No use fretting over it now.
The woods towered over him, long and tall and dark. He leaned back a moment to adjust the flashlight clenched between his teeth, taking care not to get his muddy fingers too close to his lips. The light shined up into the trees for a moment, the beam revealing crisscrossed branches hung up above him. Though he’d only wandered 20 feet off the road, he felt enclosed here. Encased by the thick green wall he’d trampled through to get under the canopy of trees where the undergrowth wasn’t as thick.
This was good cover for the hand dug grave he was about to carve into the ground. When he focused on that part, he felt better about it. It wasn’t such a bad resting place. Better than winding up in a dumpster fire, at least.
He scratched out wads of top soil and flung them away, his hands clawing and scooping and flinging with great speed, great gusto. The clumps of dirt rattled through leaves and soon started slapping together into a pile along the edge of the hole. The divot in the ground was small, though, despite his great effort. He knew this would take a while.
He felt the heat build in his face as he worked. The humidity in the air made sure that his sweat didn’t evaporate, so the perspiration drained down from his forehead, drizzling from his jawline to the dirt in little bursts. It soaked his shirt until it was a sopping thing that drooped at the collar from the weight of the moisture.
Still his h
ands flew. The black dirt on top gave way to a sandier color below, more densely packed and not as wet. He probably wouldn’t be able to go much deeper, he knew. Maybe a couple more inches if he put in some elbow grease.
His headache seemed to swell from a consistent dull pain to a sharp one, the stabby feelings coming on harder and faster now. It made his jaw clench involuntarily, a little gritting sound ringing out as his teeth ground against the handle of the flashlight like they meant to shatter it.
As the pain faded, his mind began to wander. How many hours did he have left now? Maybe eight? He mulled that a moment. It was OK, he thought. He just had to make the most of it. Had to.
He heard the drops before he felt them, rain pattering against the canopy above, slapping into the dead leaves on the ground with a papery rasp accompanying the smack of the impact so it sounded a little like a snare drum. A fat one finally got him on the back of the neck. Water so cold it almost stung. It clapped into his flesh and spread, wrapping chilly fingers around his neck. He swiped at it with his hand without thinking, caking mud against his skin.
Shit.
He sat up, feeling almost dizzy from the body heat he’d worked up as he dug. In that sense the rain was a blessing. A few more drops dove into his hair, and now the cold felt good as it spread over his scalp. Still his head remained swimmy like he’d stood too long under a hot shower, the bathroom filling with steam. He sat a while, breath heaving in and out of him. He hoped that holding still would help him cool some, but so far it wasn’t doing much.
He looked down at the grave. It wasn’t deep at all, maybe a foot and a half at the deepest point, but it was going to have to do.
Standing, he wiped his hands on his wet pants, three swipes each, mud streaking over the thighs, and then he took the flashlight out of his mouth. A big drop got him right on the forehead, a blast of cold that didn’t really dim his headache, though for a split second it felt like it might, and even the hope of relief was a good feeling.