The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  “This one is more my style.”

  He lifted and held a sawed-off shotgun over his head like an athlete hoisting a trophy.

  “Always been more of a shotgun guy, I guess. Just racking one of these things gets me half hard, you know? Anyway, we’re armed, finally. Pretty great, right? You want to carry the lantern or this can of gas?”

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  41 days before

  The day wore into the afternoon, the boys finding distraction in playing Horse in the driveway. Mitch didn’t watch them very closely, but he heard. The basketball pounded against the blacktop, the sound echoing in all directions. Their voices rose over each other, a tangle of words he couldn’t quite make out.

  He sat at the table, drinking another glass of water, staring at the blue square of sky visible through the window over the sink. His hand rested on his stomach, now full. He’d fished some lunch meat out of the cooler and made a pastrami sandwich with some spicy mustard that was delicious. His appetite surprised him, and handling the meat made him a little queasy at first, but as soon as he tasted it, he felt better. It was like an old friend coming home after a long time away.

  He thought he would be gone by now, and he kept the Beretta tucked in his belt in case it became necessary. So far it wasn’t. If he had to, he would do it in the shed, he thought. His initial instinct, like his wife’s, had been to hide his death away from Kevin and Matt completely, but when he thought on it more, he decided against it. He wanted to be alone for the act itself, of course, but after that? Well, maybe they should see. It would be disturbing, of course, but they would have closure. Plus, they could retrieve the gun, an item of utmost value going forward.

  Anyway, with food in his gut, all of that felt far away. His mood was better than it had been since before he ventured down into the basement with Janice in the first place.

  He tried not to think about it, tried not to let his hopes breathe, but his faith just grew and grew.

  He turned on the phone again, watched it flash through the cycle of screens. Then it vibrated and beeped. Was that...? He had a text. His chest seized up, a breath caught in his throat. The idea that maybe his boys would have a place to stay after this, someone to look after them, fluttered inside of his ribcage like a bird’s wings. He tapped the screen a couple of times and read the message from Janice’s parents.

  “We are both sick. In hospital. I am doing OK, I think. He is not. Would be great if Jan and the boys could visit. Soon.”

  He closed his eyes. Without looking, he felt around for the proper button with his thumb, powered the phone down, and skidded it across the table to be away from it.

  He paced up and down the hallway outside of the bedrooms. The floor creaked under his feet, the boards squeaking shrill and dry. He tried to run through the options in his mind, but he couldn’t think of any. He could keep trying to call parents of friends, but nobody was answering or calling back, and conserving the battery was probably the better option.

  What else?

  Well, he could pace the floors in his home and wait to die. That one might be worth looking into, he thought.

  But no. He shouldn’t think like that. He didn’t have to die. If it happened that way, it happened that way. Nobody would know until the thing played itself out, he figured.

  He heard the thud of the ball slamming the backboard outside, a long range miss from the sound of it. The sound startled him out of his thoughts for a split second, though.

  He stopped walking and drummed his fingers on his cheek. Was he losing it? Was he fooling himself? He’d sat in the basement, napping in a lawn chair, while his wife morphed into a zombie, and now he was telling himself that he was going to be OK. Total nonsense. Some denial thing, probably some primal function, like part of the survival instinct that would keep him fighting and hopeful in dire circumstances.

  Then again, he had regained his appetite, and his headache had died out almost completely. He couldn’t say for certain that the black streaks running across his chest had lessened, though he thought so. Still, the food and headache were definitive pieces of information. Were they evidence of something or not? He couldn’t say.

  Without thinking, he walked back out to the kitchen, bare feet pattering over the cold linoleum. It felt good. Refreshing. He felt alive again, at least most of the way.

  His hand reached out for the handle to the fridge door, gripping it, and then he stopped himself. He couldn’t browse for food now. The power was out, and they needed to keep it closed as much as possible. Weird how ingrained these habits are, he thought. The compulsion to eat and drink whether or not one was actually hungry or thirsty. He didn’t know what to think of it.

  Letting his hand fall away from the fridge, he turned toward the sink, light shining through the window above it. Something wasn’t right. He knew that, but he didn’t know what it was.

  The boys? He listened. After a beat, the basketball bounced off the driveway a few times and clanged against the rim. No. They were fine.

  Was it-

  His torso convulsed, bending him at the waist. His mouth opened, teeth prying wide, and the second wretch heaved chewed chunks of pastrami sandwich from his mouth, spilling them in wet globs that slapped on the linoleum. The smell of puke and spicy mustard crept up his throat to fill his sinus cavity.

  He tried to stand up straight, but he couldn’t. Two more abdominal contortions tore the rest of the food from him, but that wasn’t all. Blood came up, too, in a steaming spray, projectile vomited against the floor, washing over the chunks of chewed meat and bread. Some kind of black goo came up next. It looked about the same consistency as the blood. Thick. Opaque.

  So maybe he wasn’t fine after all.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  48 days after

  Erin took off, dodging cornstalks. She headed for the path that wound through the woods to the road. She suspected Izzy had gone this way, but she wasn’t certain.

  How could she have run off like this? Did she really have that little sense of how dangerous things were? Even in the best of times, you don’t run toward gunshots. You run away from them.

  A tangle of roots caught her toe, and she teetered forward, knees slamming into the ground. She didn’t even look down, didn’t slow her pace. She could worry about bruises and bloody scrapes later.

  By the time she reached the spindly sumac bushes that marked the end of the field and the beginning of the woods, she was out of breath. Oxygen clawed at the insides of her lungs with each inhalation.

  She kept moving toward the road, eyes scanning, but Izzy was nowhere in sight.

  The trail cut up a hill, winding its way through the trees. Erin climbed upward, bending forward to rest her hands on her knees while she walked.

  Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Izzy had gone back to the house. She had mentioned being hungry. Maybe she just got tired of waiting for Erin to give the go-ahead. It seemed like a silly explanation, but she was just a kid. Kids could be silly sometimes.

  She half-considered turning back to check the house. Just then, the area where the trees thinned to make way for the road came into view. And there was Izzy, standing motionless on the shoulder. She stood so still, at first Erin’s eyes missed her.

  Another jolt of energy came upon her, and Erin darted forward, taking everything in quickly. Izzy’s stillness alarmed her at first. She imagined someone standing just out of sight, pointing a gun at her, telling her to freeze. But her eyes told her Izzy was alone.

  Well, alone except for the dead bodies heaped in the road at her feet. They were fresh, the first fresh dead she’d seen since the plague first started. It was different than seeing the near-skeletons. The dried-up husks left in the houses they scavenged. It was even different than the rotting pile at the gas station. This was scarier. It felt wrong.

  But she could worry about that later.

  Gripping Izzy’s forearm, Erin swung her around. Maybe a li
ttle too roughly than she meant to.

  “What the hell, Izzy? Why would you run off like that?”

  Izzy’s lower lip disappeared into her mouth.

  “I just wanted to see.”

  Erin’s voice went up a notch, incredulous.

  “See what? The psycho who murdered these people? What if he — or they — had still been here?”

  A knot of wrinkles formed on Izzy’s chin. She looked at her feet.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do know. They would have killed you, too. Or worse.”

  Curls fell over Izzy’s eyes, obscuring her face. But her hair didn’t block the sound of her sniffles.

  Christ. Now the kid was crying. It wasn’t what she’d intended, but maybe it would get through to her now. Still, Erin hated how much she sounded like her mom.

  She lowered her knee to the dirt so they’d be at eye level.

  “Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to yell. But you scared the shit out of me.”

  Izzy’s nose quirked as she sniffed. Her eyelashes were all matted together with tears.

  “Language,” she muttered, trying not to smile. Just like Erin knew she would.

  She squeezed the kid’s arm, so skinny she could almost wrap her fingers all the way around it.

  “Promise me you’ll never run off like that again.”

  “I promise.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  Her head bobbed, yes. Erin reached out and pinched one of Izzy’s curls between her fingers, stretching it out until the hair was straight. She released it, the hair bouncing back like a spring.

  They turned to head back down the trail, when a noise came from behind.

  It was a rasping sound. The sound of air scraping over a dry throat.

  Erin instinctively pushed Izzy behind her, peering back at the bodies splayed in the road.

  It was coming from the body farthest from where they stood. A man in his 30s. Maybe 40s. It was hard to tell. He lay on his back, head angled away from them.

  “Stay here,” she told Izzy, then approached slowly. She was careful to walk well away from the bodies. She couldn’t stop imagining one of them reaching out and grabbing her by the ankle, like in a horror movie.

  She skirted around him until she could see his face.

  His eyelids fluttered, seemingly not sure if they wanted to be open or shut. His mouth moved, too. At first Erin thought he was trying to speak, but when she saw how the jaw moved up and down, almost in a mechanical way, she changed her mind. It was more like a spasm, an involuntary motion. Like a puppet or a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  There was a bullet wound in his neck and another in his forehead. She didn’t know why he wasn’t dead, but she figured it was only a matter of time before he would be.

  Erin turned away, gathering Izzy and nudging her back toward the house.

  “Let’s go.”

  Izzy planted her feet, resisting.

  “We have to help him.”

  “How? Even if we could move him, he’d be dead before we got him back to the house. And if, by the grace of God, he somehow wasn’t already dead, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s not like you can just slap a Band-aid and some Neosporin on a gunshot wound.”

  “It’s not right to just leave him like this.”

  Erin gave one more glance back at the half-dead man.

  “There’s nothing else we can do, Iz.”

  Erin’s clothes were almost dry by the time they got back to the house, but she relished changing out of them anyway.

  “Hungry?” she asked Izzy.

  Izzy shook her head, not looking up from the Calvin and Hobbes book she’d picked out at the library. Ever since Erin had given her the funny pages the day they built their first fire, Izzy had become obsessed with comic strips.

  Erin took her silence as moping at first. The kid had been whining about being hungry half an hour ago. And then the grating sounds the dying man made came back to her, and it occurred to her that she wasn’t that hungry, either.

  She couldn’t help glancing at the window facing that section of the road, gaze going beyond the grass and the yellowing corn. She couldn’t actually see the road from there, but her eyes were drawn there anyway.

  Was he still alive up there? Still breathing those terrible rasping breaths?

  She spun away from the window. She needed to think about something else.

  Her focus fell on a box of scavenged food on the counter. It hadn’t been inventoried yet. That would take her mind off of things.

  Except that the crusty red bits around the lid of the half-empty bottle of off-brand ketchup made her think of the almost-dead man’s wounds. Jagged holes in the flesh, torn and cauterized by the bullet. She scooted the ketchup into the darkness at the back of the cabinet, out of sight. The next thing her eyes lighted on was the bag of rice. Nothing sinister about rice. Except that they kind of resembled maggots, which would soon be crawling all over the three men on the road. The cabinet banged shut.

  OK, food was a bad idea. There was a shopping bag on the table, filled with a variety of medications they’d found in the their recent shopping excursions. She’d also scored a pharmacology book at the library, which came in handy since she didn’t know what half of the meds were. The bag rustled as she plucked a pill bottle from its depths. She shook it in her fist, watching the white pills rattle against the translucent orange plastic. Then she spun it in her hands and read the label.

  The name on the bottle was Lucinda Silvie. Below that, the name of the drug was printed: SONATA 10MG.

  She cracked the book, heading for the index in the back.

  Her thumbnail scratched down the page until she found it.

  Sonata, see zaleplon, page 465.

  On a blank page of her notebook, she took down the two names, then flipped to page 465.

  Zaleplon. A non-benzodiazepine sedative hypnotic. Clinical indications: short-term insomnia treatment.

  True enough, she thought. Just reading about it was putting her to sleep.

  She skimmed the page, barely able to make sense of half the words printed there. Class: pyrazolopyrimidine. Chemical name: N-[3-(3-cyanopyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidin-7-yl)phenyl]-N-ethylacetamide. Empirical formula: C17H15N5O.

  A butterfly fluttered past the window. Erin’s head snapped back abruptly. How had she wound up in front of the window again? She peeked over her shoulder. Izzy still sat in the window seat at the other end of the room, curled up with her book. She must have gotten lost in thought and wandered back to the window without even realizing it. Jesus.

  She paced through the kitchen, not able to sit still. What if he was still alive up there? Lying on the asphalt, bleeding out.

  He was going to die. She couldn’t change that. But there was something she could do. She just didn’t know if she had the guts.

  The sun was making its final descent of the day, tinting the whole world in an amber light. It reminded Erin of the old sepia photographs from her American History book.

  Corn husks bumped and rubbed against one another in the breeze, filling the air with a rasping song that gave her the chills. It reminded her a little too much of the almost-dead man’s breathing.

  She passed from the field to the start of the forest, climbing up toward the road. She’d made Izzy swear she’d stay in the house three times.

  The road came into view, along with the two fully dead men. Erin stopped, having second thoughts. Was she really going to do this?

  She thumbed the utility knife clutched in her hand, extending the blade from the case. She still wasn’t sure she could do it, but it made her feel a little less scared with the knife ready.

  She clambered the last few yards up to the road and stared. She blinked once, twice, then pressed her eyes closed. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible.

  The almost-dead man was gone.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  41 days before

&nbs
p; Bare wooden walls surrounded him, beams like ribs and plywood like the flesh surrounding the bone. That put him in the shed’s belly, perched atop an upside-down bucket. Maybe that made sense.

  When he first sat here and looked at the evenly spaced two-by-four beams around him, he saw them as bars, saw this shed as his cell where he waited for himself to administer the death penalty. But maybe it was more accurate to think of the shed as consuming him. He crawled into its mouth-door, and it swallowed him whole. He would never walk out.

  In the belly of the shed-beast, he thought.

  He ran a finger along the plastic lip around the bottom of the bucket. It was hard and sharp and scuffed into a rough texture from its friction with the concrete slab below. The gun sat in his lap. Not quite ready to perform its duty.

  All of the hope drained out of him along with the pastrami sandwich and the blood and the black goo. He knew it was over at that moment, knew that the end would come soon. In some way, knowing was a relief. His mind no longer tussled with his fate as an abstract unknown it could never quite get a hold of. His fate turned concrete, an inevitability, an absolute. A kind of peace came with that.

  Now he was just waiting for the right feeling to come over him so he could go through with it. It felt like swallowing a pill, he thought, having that mouthful of water and a tablet sloshing around on his tongue, waiting that beat, that momentary hesitation, before sending it over the epiglottis and down the drain. His whole life was like that beat stretched out now, waiting to send himself down a different drain.

  He bounced his leg, his shoe scraping a little against the rippled texture of the concrete. It smelled like lawn care products and wood and gasoline here, with other unidentifiable shed odors mixed in. Dried grass caked the edge of the weed whacker and mower, matted chunks of green going brown.