The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)

by McBain, Tim

  Every part of her turned to ice at the sound of the man’s voice, except her eyes, which rolled back and forth searching for him, bracing herself. Would he come hurtling out from behind one of the machines to tackle her? Or would he just shoot her on sight?

  If he didn’t have a gun, she’d have to fight him. She still had the knife. Then maybe Izzy would at least have a chance to escape.

  Seconds passed before she realized he hadn’t spotted her. He hadn’t even spoken at all.

  He was singing. Something about murder and blood and guts.

  Lovely.

  She swallowed, glancing over at Izzy, the look of pants-pooping terror on the kid’s face was probably a mirror of her own.

  Turning back to the key, she twisted but met only resistance. Jiggling right and left didn’t matter. It wouldn’t budge.

  Fuck.

  She could feel the scrape of metal on metal more than she could hear it as she extracted the key. She brought the keys closer to her face to get a better look at the labels, and then the unthinkable happened.

  She dropped them. They hit the ground with a slap and a clang, like a bag of pennies.

  The singing stopped and so did her heart.

  Teddy

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  76 days after

  When the older woman got close enough, she flamed up as well. Another flash, another whoosh, that suction tugging at the flesh of his face again.

  Her hair vanished immediately. Just gone. The remaining scalp looked shiny, red, almost wet. And brighter, hotter flames seemed to lick from the top of it, reaching higher, higher.

  He knew right away that this wasn’t good.

  The fire engulfed the exposed joists along the ceiling, the wood going a touch darker, wisps of smoke rolling off of it. He could picture the whole thing going up. His dream house engulfed in flames.

  The dead thing stumbled about, so far not standing still long enough for any of the wood to catch, but it was going to be close, he knew. Jesus, he was going to burn the house down.

  He lurched forward, pushing the zombie, trying to knock it over. He didn’t know what he’d do after that, but he had to do something. The thing wouldn’t go down, and he burned his hand some, the flaming liquid clinging to his palms until he smothered them against his pants, hands rubbing up and down his thighs.

  The fumes and the smoke twirled dizziness in his head again, the heat around him only adding to his disorientation. The zombies moaned and moaned, all choked gasps and coos and whimpers that he couldn’t even enjoy.

  Another whoosh behind him. A bigger one.

  He turned. The younger one had toppled down onto the landing and both canisters of lighter fluid went up then in bursts. Every four or five seconds a ball of fire shot out of the blaze consuming the bottom half of the steps. Some of the fireballs rained a fiery spray out into the room, lighting up chunks of the floor like mud puddles of fire where the fluid burned atop the concrete.

  The heat shimmered all around him now, hazing and blurring everything, smoke scratching at his throat, the stench of burning bodies intertwining with that of the steps going up quickly.

  His head swiveled up toward the basement door, which seemed so far away just then. The stairs were a roman candle. Impassable.

  He knew now that he was going to die in his perfect basement.

  Ray

  North of Canton, Texas

  2 days before

  They walked among the cars, the heat rising up from the asphalt in a shimmer that pressed its sticky torso against his. He’d sweat through his undershirt, shirt, and suit jacket by now, but there was nothing to be done about it for the moment.

  Lorraine drifted along beside him, a pink blob moving in the corner of his eye. She was a graceful, long necked woman, much like his wife had been.

  Somehow he knew that she was warming to him, at least a little. He knew now that she had heard all of the bad things about him, had been reluctant to go along with him, but that she was seeing that he wasn’t some monster. He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t such an awful person, either. Just a good businessman.

  He didn’t know how he knew all of that, though. Her outward communication hadn’t conveyed a word of it, but he knew it anyway. He thought it was like how a dog could read body language and know what its master wanted with very little aptitude for understanding language. He had the ability to read things in people’s motions, in their posture, in the smirks and twitches and creases on their faces that were painted and erased within a fraction of a second.

  This above all else he attributed his success to. Not smarts. Not talent. An animal thing he couldn’t explain and didn’t understand. He knew people. He knew what they wanted, and he knew how to give it to them.

  He realized that they’d reached the front of the parking lot without accosting anyone or committing grand theft auto. His fingers stroked at the canister in his pocket, but he didn’t draw it.

  They stood in front of the door to Gamestop, about ten feet out from the automatic doors which opened and closed as people flowed around them in both directions. He didn’t know what else to do, so he just stood there and watched.

  A kid walked out. The uneven mustache sprouts on his top lip made it look like he wasn’t old enough to drive, but the car keys cupped in his hand said otherwise. Ray tried to imagine jetting pepper spray into the boy’s face, watching his eyelids swell up and tears gush out.

  “Christ,” he said half under his breath. “This is going to be hard as hell.”

  Baghead

  Rural Arkansas

  9 years, 127 days after

  Baghead reached a hand into the back seat, clutching the girl’s blanketed shoulder and giving it a shake. Her head lolled a bit on her limp neck, and then her breathing changed, a slow inhale. Her eyelids fluttered, opened, pupils momentarily going wide as they looked upon the man before her with the canvas bag on his head, and then contracting to something normal.

  “You should drink some water,” he said, handing her a bottle.

  She took it and drank, her eyes drifting closed as she tipped the bottle back.

  “It lives,” Delfino said, smiling. “I was beginning to wonder. You slept a long time, baby girl.”

  The girl chugged the water as he spoke, taking three quarters of the bottle down at once, stopping for a wet, heaving breath and then finishing it off. Both men looked upon her. Baghead realized that he had no idea what she might say or do next. No idea.

  She set the bottle down on the seat next to her, blinked a few times, eyes screwing up toward the ceiling in thought.

  “I have to piss,” she said. “Pretty bad.”

  After a beat of silence, Delfino busted out laughing, slapping Baghead on the shoulder.

  “Come with me,” Baghead said. “We’ll find a place in the weeds for you to go.”

  He reached underneath the door handle, grabbing the gun and tucking it into his belt.

  Delfino tried to say something, but he couldn’t pause his laughter long enough to get the words out. His face went splotchy and red, tears shining on his cheeks.

  Maybe it was the rain cutting back to a sprinkle and then dying, but Baghead had some heightened sense of time passing in this moment. It’d only been a few minutes since the near car accident so far as he could remember, but it felt much longer.

  “This is Delfino,” Baghead said, walking back to the car from their piss spot just off the road. “Tell Delfino your name.”

  “Ruthie,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty good name,” Delfino said, leaning against the driver’s side door. “Not exactly Anya, but it ain’t bad at all.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Her parents didn’t make it,” Bags said.

  Didn’t make it. Those were the words he’d used when he asked her about them. She had nodded.

  “I was thinking we’d wash Ruthie’s hair before we move on,” Bags said. “Maybe eat something.”

&nb
sp; “That makes sense,” Delfino said. “Might want to check out the car back there first.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking. It couldn’t have been there long. Not on the toll road. They would have cleared it within a day or two at the most, I figure. I don’t know. Just makes me a little paranoid.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it, man. Just feels like the thing doesn’t belong.”

  “Well, let’s go take a look.”

  “Yep. Bring your gun.”

  Delfino scooped up his shotgun with one hand and reached in his pocket with the other, pulling out that sandwich bag of deer jerky again.

  “Here, Ruthie,” he said. “Eat this, and wait in the car. We’ll be back in a minute.”

  The baggie crinkled in Ruthie’s fingers. She climbed into the back seat and closed the door behind her. Baghead watched her tiny hand reach in for a piece of jerky, and he wondered if he’d ever ask her about what really happened to her parents or if he’d just let it go.

  He turned, jogging a couple of steps to catch up with Delfino, and then he followed the driver’s gaze to the car up ahead.

  It was a black Lincoln Town Car, he thought – or maybe a Continental – from the mid to late 1990’s. A boxy thing. Not quite as ridiculous as the Delta 88, but not as far off as one might think for them being manufactured 25 or so years apart from each other.

  Delfino’s gait slowed as they got within a few feet of the Lincoln, and Bags matched his stride. Nothing stirred within the car, each seat empty.

  As they got to within arm’s length of the driver’s side door, they stopped. Still nothing of interest visible inside.

  Bags looked upon his driver, finding his lips tightened, wrinkles etched into his forehead, a web of lines creasing his eyelids. Observing the alarm in Delfino’s features surprised him as he felt no real concern here. Seeing the car was a little weird, sure. They’d literally not seen another vehicle on the road thus far. But the idea of seeing a person – a real live human being out here -- seemed so remote.

  “Something ain’t right,” Delfino said, his voice again grating in that range just above a whisper.

  Baghead looked back at the black car, thinking perhaps he missed something. Instead he found his reflection in the window, the canvas bag stretched over the misshapen dome he called a head, the one messed up eye that seemed to be attempting to droop over his cheek bone and off of the side of his face.

  Others probably thought he wore the mask because people couldn’t bear to look at him, but they were wrong. He wore it because he couldn’t bear to look at himself.

  It always caught him unprepared, the pang of nausea he felt looking at his own face, even the few bits he could see through the eyeholes, but then he looked away and let it go. In a fundamental way, having a face was in his past, being human was in his past. That’s how he felt about it, and that’s how he moved on.

  And then something cracked somewhere behind him. Piercing. An explosion too loud for his ears to make sense of entirely, like pieces of metal colliding at impossible velocities. And his reflection shattered and disappeared as the window fell.

  Mitch

  Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

  41 days before

  His skin crawled, every hair follicle on his arms and legs perking up one after the other. Hot breath heaved in and out of his nostrils, made them expand and contract, and perspiration slimed his skin, oozing from the flesh on his back and forehead, cascading into the crevices between his nose and cheeks.

  The gun trembled against his bottom lip. He tried to steady it, but he couldn’t do it. Any attempt to stop it only made the shaking worse, made the muscles jerk harder, rattled the gun against his teeth and the roof of his mouth.

  His finger stroked at the trigger, felt the smooth of the metal there moistened with sweat. It should be so easy, shouldn’t it? Don’t pull the trigger. Squeeze.

  His eyelids parted, opening a sliver to reveal the shelf and concrete floor before him, the gun and part of his fist still hovering at the bottom of his field of vision. No words rushed through his head just now. No poetic monologue occurred to him. No voice inside reflected or reacted or reassured him in any way. His consciousness became a series of feelings only: a churn in his gut and a sting in his eyes and the soggy feeling of all of that sweat pouring out of him.

  And fear. Fear constricted like a ball of contracted muscle in his belly. Fear like a child’s, like a little kid frozen stiff in the dark, blanket pulled up to cover the head, breath subdued to something that barely moved the ribcage. Fear that throbbed in his skull, some electrical current that made everything outside burn too bright, even with his eyes nearly closed.

  It should be so easy, but his finger rested on the trigger unable to finalize this process. He couldn’t even imagine applying the necessary pressure, couldn’t picture the flex of the hand, the curl of the finger.

  He felt like an idiot animal gone rigid at the sign of trouble, like a baby rabbit hunching down and going motionless while the dog charges straight for it. Frightened and stupid. Too dumb to do what had become necessary. Too dumb to move at all.

  He tasted the grease and the metal in his mouth. Wanted to make them go away.

  And the shelf went blurry, a smudge of brown before him lit up by the daylight streaming in from the cracks above and below the shed door. And the tears caught between his eyelids, and the water made it look like the light formed clear shafts, lines that rotated if he adjusted his squint a little. It reminded him of being a baby, crying in the crib, looking up at the ceiling through his tears.

  The water spilled in time, hot liquid draining from his eyes to mingle with the sweat on his skin. It didn’t feel like he was crying. It felt like something that was happening in the area, happening around him instead of to him, inside of him. It felt like his body was going through the motions, a courtesy gesture of some kind made in reverence to the circumstances, but he was outside of that now.

  He closed his eyes, and he felt his pulse jerk in his neck, and he wished that he could lie down in the shadows under a tree somewhere. He could sprawl on the dusty earth, and he could leave his body, and he could disappear. He could crawl into the black and be done.

  He pictured this, felt the dirt on his hands as he lowered himself into the dark, felt the cool of the ground press itself into his person as his shoulder blades touched down upon it, and he looked up into the purple light weaving through the branches, the day fading out, fading away. And a great stillness came over him, a silence inside and out.

  And his hand flexed, and his finger curled, and he squeezed the trigger in slow motion, the pressure of his flesh upon the metal growing, his eyelids squeezing tighter as he braced for it. He squeezed harder and harder, pushing past the fear, past the anxiety, past the swirl of mixed feelings.

  He squished as hard as he could, the gun shaking like mad now, grinding his lip against his bottom teeth, but the trigger wouldn’t budge.

  His eyes snapped open.

  Oh.

  He forgot to flip the safety off.

  Erin

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  53 days after

  She didn’t have time to think now, it was all auto-pilot. She snatched the keys from the ground, spotting as she did the label that said “Main Office.”

  She jammed the key in and turned. This time it obeyed. The door unlocked.

  As she wrenched the door handle and shoved the door open, she saw him. Next to the claw machine, craning his neck around, trying to figure out where the noise came from.

  His eyes locked on hers, and even from that distance, even in the dimness, she could see the confusion on his face. Like it took him a moment to realize what he was looking at. A person. An actual living human being. She tore her eyes away.

  She waved at Izzy, who hadn’t budged from her hiding spot. For some reason, she didn’t want to speak. Like if she didn’t say anything out
loud, maybe they could just disappear.

  Izzy scurried past her, and then she was stepping into the darkness of the office hallway, and the man was yelling, “Hey!” And this time it was real and not just him singing like some kind of creeper Elvis.

  The door slammed behind them, and only a beat later, he was there, pounding on the steel. It sounded like the booming of a bass drum the way it echoed in the hallway.

  Erin couldn’t see Izzy, but she could feel her standing next to her in the darkness, clutching at her sleeve.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. But I’m scared.”

  Erin took her hand, squeezing it.

  “We’re going to be fine. Just take a few deep breaths.”

  Erin released her grip on Izzy’s fingers.

  “Don’t let go! It’s too dark in here.”

  “I need to get the lighter out,” she said.

  Erin moved Izzy’s hand to her shoulder, then bent to unzip the backpack, fumbling with the straps in the blackness. Her hands shook as she unzipped the front pocket on the bag.

  She flicked at the lighter a few times, afraid at first that it was out of juice. She imagined fumbling down the hallway, trying to make their way by feel. Trapped in the maze again. But the fourth time she struck the flint wheel, it caught.

  The flame illuminated the cinder block walls in a dim yellow glow. There were three doors before them — two on the right and one straight ahead.

  “Now what? We just hide in here ‘til he gives up and leaves?”

  Even though Izzy was whispering, the hallway amplified her words, bouncing the hard consonant sounds around.

  Erin chewed at a chapped spot on her lip.

  She wasn’t sure he would give up. But she didn’t want to tell Izzy that. It had also occurred to her for the first time that there may be another set of keys somewhere in the place. Another thing Izzy didn’t need to know.