The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5)

by McBain, Tim

  When I close my eyes, I see the chocolate spewing out of my mother, and I see the old man spraying blood all over the sidewalk. I see these things, watch them endlessly on the internet and on TV, and it doesn’t feel real. Is it like that for you? It just can’t be real. It can’t.

  14 days before

  I really need to deliver this letter before the stupid world ends.

  Have you been watching the riots on TV? Pretty scary. Today I watched bodies burn in a fire at a mini-mall. People rushed into the burning wreckage to try to salvage supplies. Some of them couldn’t get out in time. Blackened bodies spread out over the floor and melted into countertops, the news camera zooming in, the charred images on the screen shaking and quivering with the camera’s movements, the flames still flickering everywhere.

  I flipped past more footage of sick people. I can’t watch it anymore. All of that human misery. All of that death. Blood coming out of everywhere while journalists wearing surgical masks explain the stages and the symptoms over and over again.

  I changed the channel one last time to see a guy’s skull bashed in by police outside of a hardware store. Their night sticks caved in the top of his head, the shards of bone held together by flapping bits of curly hair that shook as he continued to get pummeled, his arms and legs twitching. I had no context for why they did this, if there was a reason. In my memory, the newscasters didn’t say anything, like they’ve given up on trying to explain any of this to us, the worst parts, anyway. They just turn their cameras on now.

  I know I should be out of my mind. Watching everyone die, watching the whole world burned to the ground, I should be inconsolable. It’s somehow impossible, though, to avoid becoming a little numb to it all. I am scared, for sure, but I should be more upset. I think it’s too big to feel it all the way.

  Still, I can’t believe they just show that kind of violence on network TV, but I guess what’s the use in pretending now? All of this time it’s like we kept trying to present this sanitized version of humanity to ourselves, this censored edition, this idealized image that looks a lot more decent and wholesome and clean than we really are. TV could talk about the bad things, but it couldn’t show them.

  But we have always been all of those awful things. Stabbings and stranglings and bludgeonings with blunt objects. They’re always around. Always waiting on the edge of things.

  I feel like I’ve always known that. Always been unable to see it any other way.

  When I was a kid, I saw this video of a guy shooting himself at a press conference on local access TV or something. I didn’t watch it live or anything like that. It was a widely circulated “shocking video” at the time. I guess he was a state representative in trouble for embezzling money. He might have been innocent, even. I’m not sure.

  He was a fat, bald guy in a suit, standing behind a podium. He rambled about his innocence a while, and then he pulled a .357 out of a manila envelope. Everyone in the room gasped. He stumbled back a few steps, poked the barrel of it into his mouth, pointed it straight up toward the top of his head, and squeezed the trigger. His body slumped back against the wall, sliding into a seated position, and a stream of blood spurted out of the wound. From the look in his eyes, you could see that he was gone right away, his body still.

  And then, after a beat, blood gushed out of his nose and out of the wound, draining down in a spraying spiral exactly like water tumbling out of a bathtub faucet on full blast. So much so, in fact, that it was hard to believe it was real blood, though it surely was. It flowed for a long time. Too long. What seemed like gallons and gallons spilling out. In my memory, it feels like forever.

  I don’t know why I’m rehashing it here in such detail. I guess I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I watch these new horrors on the news. Things like that are happening everywhere now, you know?

  I always wonder about that beat, that pause, that moment of total stillness before the faucet turned on and the blood rushed forth.

  13 days before

  You’re probably already aware of this, but: The apartment building across the street burned down, and nobody ever came to put it out. No firemen. No police. No one.

  It burned all evening and most of the night. I stayed up to watch it. The heat had knocked out the streetlights over there, so I was eventually just looking at red embers glowing in the black of night, unable to discern anything beyond that. The red swelled and ebbed when the air moved, when the wind changed directions. It made it look like the coals were breathing.

  The roof collapsed in the night sometime, too. Loud as hell. I couldn’t see much, though, just glowing pieces shifting and falling and kicking up bursts of sparks everywhere.

  The weirdest thing about all of this, from my perspective, at least, is that I sat 50 or 100 feet from the flames and the smoke and the crumbling walls and bricks and beams, but I was too busy watching the riots on TV and on my computer to notice them on my doorstep, at least for a long while.

  By the time I got a look, the building was beyond the point of any hope for salvation. A bunch of the windows were blown out and bricks crumbled away where the heat cracked the facade. Something about watching chunk after chunk of brick separate itself from the wall and fall away made me think of those dreams where your teeth get loose and fall out. In this case, the tumbling pieces shattered on the concrete below.

  It was shouting that eventually got my attention. Crowds swarmed on the sidewalks below, necks all craned to watch the fire, hands cupped over brows to shade their eyes. Two lumberjack looking guys in flannel shirts got in a fight, and the yells surrounding that finally got me looking away from the computer and TV screens long enough to notice the inferno out there.

  I cracked the window to listen to them all as I watched, the half-disturbed, half-aroused mob two floors down. It was hard to pick out individual voices for very long, but I heard someone say it was probably arson because for the fire to burn hot enough to blow out the windows it almost had to be. I have no way of verifying that hypothesis, though. I also heard it said that no one got hurt. I tried to verify that on the internet, but none of the local news websites have anything about it. They’ve been slow to update lately, I guess. Too much shit to keep up with.

  Looking at the building now, it looks like a damn skeleton. Gazing through the busted windows, you can see right through, see that there’s no roof above, no floors and ceilings left on the top floors.

  I can’t believe no one came to help.

  12 days before

  The power keeps cutting out. For now, it’s only gone down for a few minutes at a time, maybe twenty at the most. Sometimes it’s only half there, like a brownout, I guess. The lights dim down to the shade of a rotten tooth – somehow brown and yellow at the same time -- and the red numbers on my alarm clock pulse and throb in chaotic sequences. But so far, at least, it has always come back. I know a time will come when that won’t be the case, that it will go down for a long, long time. Weeks? Months? Longer? I can’t say.

  I try to brace myself for it, though, for no more TV or internet or refrigeration, but I don’t think I can. Even when it’s out now, I flip the light switches out of habit. I try to turn on the TV or think about how I should look something up on the internet before I remember that I can’t.

  I suppose it’s all the same across the hall, though. That’s the weird thing, right? That all I can do in a letter is relay my experiences and my thoughts to you, transmit my moments to you. Some of these will be things you’ve experienced, thoughts you’ve already had, or worse still, thoughts and experiences you can’t relate to, ideas that mean nothing to you. And I, as the author of the letter, have little way of knowing what will get through and what won’t.

  But no, no. Let’s not get bogged down in this self consciousness now. It’s a waste of time.

  How have you been, though? I’ve been well. Drankin’ some Tang at the moment. It’s not the best, to be honest. Not the best. I think maybe it used to be better than this, but they changed
the formula so it’s half artificial sweetener now instead of 100% sugar. Pretty gross. But I have a lot of it, so I power through a glass a day. We all have to make sacrifices in these troubling times.

  You know, I really, really should deliver this letter before one or both of us perishes due to one of the myriad of apocalyptic factors unfolding in all directions around us. It’d be a damn shame for a letter this long to go undelivered and unread.

  Anyway, I guess my point in writing all of this is that I have a lot of Tang over here, so if you’re ever in the mood for a florescent orange beverage, come on over and mix yourself up a big, tall glass. It doesn’t taste like much, but it has a nice gritty texture to it.

  11 days before

  The old lady in 12H died alone in her apartment. I watched them carry her out, listened to the men talk as they rolled the blanket draped stretcher by my door, down the steps and loaded her into the back of a van owned by the city. I guess they’ve been hauling a lot of the dead bodies straight to the crematorium now. No more funerals. No more wakes. There’s no way for funeral homes to keep up. In a way, it’s a surprise that anyone is keeping up on these things, that society still functions at all, but what else can we do?

  The men wore gas masks, so I couldn’t make out a lot of what they said. That nosy guy, Mr. Cooley, from 12C came out and asked them what was going on, though. They told him that some of the other neighbors had complained about the smell, and I did get a whiff once they opened the door. It smelled like the dead possums flattened on the side of the road near where I waited for the bus as a kid.

  The secretary came up from the office downstairs. She said they hadn’t been able to get a hold of her family or anything.

  I wonder, sometimes, if I will die in here alone.

  I leave the TV on all the time now, even while I sleep. I don’t know. I guess I feel like I’ll miss something if I turn it off, some final nail in the world’s coffin.

  Have you seen the internet clips of the zombies in Florida? (Did I already ask you this?) YouTube blocks them, and the government seizes any domain that posts them, but a few got around anyway. The camera shakes around like crazy in all that I’ve seen, but they look real to me. Deteriorating humans eating other deteriorating humans. Yeah. Like I need to explain what a fucking zombie is.

  That’s all South and East of here, though, so I guess at least we have that.

  Sometimes I flip through the channels just to get a break from the plague and riot news. Like right now I’m watching a soap opera. My stories, I call them. Okay, I don’t really call them that. They’re garbage. Terrible acting. Terrible scripts. Terrible sets. The triad.

  Actually, the worst thing about most soap operas, in my opinion, is the lighting. Horrible, horrible lighting. It compounds the unnatural feel of it all like ten-fold. I am basically watching insane plastic surgery-faced people say really clunky lines to each other on a shitty sound stage under artificial lights. It almost feels like watching aliens pretend to be human.

  Sometimes when I watch these shows and the people kiss, I see it more like two animals, like two monkeys kissing or something. Two strange creatures functioning on pheromones, playing out their instinctual behavior to propagate the species. I don’t see them as individual humans, as distinct from any of the others. Just hairless apes pressing their face orifices against each other to express affection.

  It’s hard to explain. Unpleasant, though. I can tell you that much.

  10 days before

  The power went out in the middle of the night last night and stayed out. It was so quiet. The white noise of the air conditioner and computer fans cutting out in unison made the silence louder, if that makes sense. Their sudden absence accented the void, highlighted the emptiness. It made my skin crawl.

  I got up to look out the window, thinking maybe somewhere in the distance I would see lights. Some sign of an area or neighborhood unaffected by the outage. I saw nothing but the abyss. Blackness. The night stretching out forever. So I guess all of the air conditioners and TVs and buzzing florescent light bulbs all around town died at the same moment. The silence was bigger than I had even realized at first.

  I couldn’t sleep after that, so I sat up for a while in the dark. I had a flashlight on at first, but I didn’t like the idea of my apartment window being one of the only things visible from the street. One beacon of light in all of the blackness.

  I kept thinking about this saying. I can’t remember where I heard it: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Maybe the light that shines in the dark gets extinguished fastest or something.

  Either way, I sat in the dark, and after a while the people crawled out into the blackness, and they made noises in the street. Anxious sounds. Panicked sounds. Strange, throaty moans and howls. They sounded like animals. That’s all I could think of. That’s all I could picture, beings wandering around on the street below, in the middle of transitioning between man and werewolf. That’s really what it sounded like.

  I read somewhere once that grocery stores only have enough food on hand to feed their local customer base for a week or two. Sort of mind blowing, but it all gets restocked every week, so it makes sense. Weird that we’ve spent all of these years only 7 or 14 days away from mass starvation. Of course, so many have died, maybe we’d get 3 or 4 weeks out of it. Maybe a little more.

  The looting will probably be out of control real quickly once we reach the real breaking point. Thankfully I can avoid all of that with my stockpile on hand, at least for a while.

  9 days before

  As soon as I got done eating a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and freezer so as to avoid letting it go to waste, the power came back on. What a surprise, eh? The last ice cream of the damn apocalypse, and I didn’t get to savor it or even enjoy it. I ate it quickly, worrying the whole time about what else I should scarf down before it was too late.

  I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time after that and called myself a stupid shit a few times. All good now. At least I still have plenty of Tang, right? Yay.

  8 days before

  I saw a dump truck full of bodies go by today. I heard the diesel engine rumbling, the sound getting bigger as it moved my way. It piqued my curiosity, so I got to the window just in time to see it. It was flying, the engine roaring. The thing plowed by so fast that it took me a second to realize what I’d seen. It just looked like a heap of knees and elbows in the back.

  It’s hard to believe that all of this is really happening, that all of these people are dead. Almost impossible to believe it. They’re just rounding these bodies up, taking them God knows where.

  That’s a weird thing to think about, you know? There will probably be no coffins when you and I die. They will burn us, or they will flop us into a heap of corpses in a mass grave, or maybe we will just rot out in the open, undiscovered.

  6 days before

  They hauled a bunch more bodies out of the building today, piling the seven body bags into the back of a heavy duty Chevy Silverado with dual rear wheels. There remains something so crass about a pile of people like that, but after seeing the dump truck the other day, it struck me that these city guys completed the task with real care, lowering each body in gingerly.

  But I wonder how much longer they can keep at it. All of the services cut off one by one, society falls to pieces little by little. Soon no one will come pick these bodies up. Very soon, I’m afraid.

  5 days before

  No more cable. More importantly, no more internet, like a piece of my brain ripped out, a jagged bleeding hole left in its place. And all the hole can do as far as thinking is bemoan all of the information it can no longer look up, all of the questions it can no longer find answers to within seconds. The frustration never ends.

  The electricity still runs for now, but what for? No TV. No internet.

  Fuck.

  Is that weird? Is it odd that millions have died, maybe hundreds of millions worldwide by now, I have no way of knowing, but I’m possi
bly more upset to lose the internet? Is it because that’s small enough to grasp, while all of the death is so massive it just doesn’t feel real? It can’t. The neighbors’ deaths don’t feel real. Even my mom’s death doesn’t feel real. Not all the way. The plague and the riots seem like a sad thing that is happening out there in the world. Tragic but at least somewhat distant. At arm’s length, maybe. Like a movie, you know? Like a dream I will wake up from any minute now.

  But it all keeps encroaching on my room, crawling through open windows or seeping through the crack under the door until it has me, too. That’s when it becomes real, maybe. Is that the only way?

  4 days before

  With the internet and TV gone, I watch the world through a different glass screen. I sit by the window all day and watch the people down below. The foot traffic seems higher than before, never ending streams of humanity flowing along the sidewalk. The people all look like scavengers to me now, brows crushed to wrinkles in concentration, eyes shifting back and forth, scanning along the ground, looking for something shiny or something to eat or something to kill. I’m not sure which. Maybe all three. I guess there’s nothing better to do for most of them now but walk around and look for trouble.

  Some wear surgical masks over their faces, but most don’t bother. I don’t think there was ever really a point to it.

  Anyway, I find ways to kill my time indoors. I drink a ton of water and piss and flush the toilet a lot. I fear those activities won’t be available or plentiful for long, so I’m getting my fill in now. Things will not go well if and when the water stops. I think even if I conserve as much as possible and keep the bathtub full for a little extra, I only really have enough water on hand for two weeks. Maybe three or four if I ration my toilet flushes down to like once a week or something. But I’m not going to think about it. Not yet.