The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5)

by McBain, Tim

  I stopped and watched for a long time as the day grew brighter and brighter, as the sun came out and drained the gray out of everything, bringing it all back to full color little by little.

  Every breath felt cool in my throat, and my heart sped up, and my eyes shifted to take in every nook and cranny along the horizon.

  Nothing moved. Nothing. The cars stood still, and the bodies held still, and no smoke twirled at the chimneys, no lights shone in the windows.

  The walk home was lonesome as hell.

  27 days after

  I find that when I’m home I have a hard time sitting still. I pace and twitch and play with the storage unit key dangling at my neck. My mind won’t rest. It wants to go back out and walk around. It wants to feel the open air against my flesh, feel the asphalt just faintly give beneath my feet.

  More than anything, it craves the images out there. New images. New material. New vantage points. It craves fresh rows of still cars and new rotting bodies splayed on the ground. It craves that glimpse of buildings rising up above me, ones that I’ve yet to pass by.

  I wonder if maybe we all crave new images and always have. Before all of this, we could watch a movie to see something new, some picture we’d never seen before. And we’d line up around the block at the theatre to do that together. Before movies, we could view art. Paintings and sculptures that took pictures out of the artist’s head and manifested them before us in precise color and shape and texture. Going tens of thousands of years back, we could draw and look upon cave paintings or those first crude sculptures of large breasted women.

  So yeah, I think that desire for new images is some core piece of who we are. Some primal human urge.

  But now I have little new to look upon. I see my city dead. That is the only new image available to me. Gore. Decay. Everything I’ve ever known crumbling away, the broken pieces drying out on the side of the road.

  28 days after

  Please help me find someone. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to be alone forever.

  30 days after

  I walked in the rain, the water pelting my forehead, trickling down the back of my neck. Black clouds blocked the pre-dusk sun, casting thick shade in its place. But the lightning flashed to break up the endless shadow, and the thunder cracked and rolled down the street toward me like a gigantic invisible bowling ball.

  I knew that I should be looking for something specific – a water source or a functioning car that I could use to get to my storage unit or perhaps a gun to upgrade my weaponry -- but I made no effort in these regards. I wandered. I looked at the city, soaking in the sights and sounds and smells. It was all I could think about, all I could do.

  I could feel how wide open my eyes were, could feel my feet shuffling beneath me, taking choppy steps that slid the soles of my shoes over the wet asphalt with a scuffing sound. I guess I was too distracted by the new terrain around me to pay attention to my walking.

  I watched the lightning flicker on the stone facade of the apartment building above me. One second everything looked dark gray, swathed in the gloom. The next, the lightning flashed, and I saw the shade of the sandy brown stone, little flickering flashes and shadows dancing everywhere upon it.

  As I moved into downtown, the apartments thinned out, and the corporate office buildings rose up above everything, a bunch of phallic symbols reaching their shafts toward the sky. Most of the skyscrapers in downtown Pittsburgh look like they were built in the eighties to me. They have those shimmering mirror-like sides, like you could flip the whole thing sideways and snort coke off of it in a pinch. I’m not even certain what that building material is, the reflective facade, but it looks like something that Donald Trump would have called “tremendous.”

  Even if they weren’t my taste architecturally, there was something awe-inspiring about watching the lightning reflect off these shiny towers. I craned my neck to look upon the rippling electric flashes as they shot down the giant mirror to my left, an intense burst of light and speed, and the thunder followed close behind, throttling me, and the hair follicles tingled all over my body, and I felt like a tiny thing at nature’s whim entirely.

  33 days after

  I finally saw a living being today. If you don’t count bugs and birds, it was the first in I-don’t-know-how-many days, but quite a few. Too many for my sanity, I think.

  It was wet again, the ground slicked with rain and every pothole turned into a mouth full of water. My feet kicked up strings of spatter with each step, flinging wet off of the toes of my shoes so a constant spray moved along in front of me.

  I follow my whims when I walk now, never choosing a destination, never possessing a particular goal, just wandering. I veered off of the street to walk down an alleyway running behind some big, older looking houses. Fancy places, most of them. The whole neighborhood seemed to have an interesting dark palette in terms of paint color, too. Phthalo blue and sangria red and butterscotch yellow.

  I walked along a while, looking at the houses, thinking this might be the kind of place I’d like to live in if I could find a well or some other reliable source of groundwater.

  And then something dark flitted along the ground to my left. I stopped and squared my shoulders that way. Waiting. Watching. A covered pergola shaded one section of a backyard with oversized ferns flapping around it when the breeze blew. The movement seemed to have come from that direction, so I walked toward it, taking slow, careful steps. The grass wet the bottom of my pant legs right away, the moist flaps of denim clinging to the backs of my ankles. I hate being wet, so I grabbed a handful of pant on each side and hoisted them as I moved toward the ferns, keeping them out of the grass and away from my skin.

  The leaves rustled, and the dark thing skittered out into the open, traveling away from me. It was a cat. A kitten. Maybe 2 or 3 months old. Just a tiny brown and black thing. It bounded closer to the house where it turned to hop along the perimeter of the concrete foundation and then the fence, finding no escape. I read a bit of panic in its body language, but not the panic that a feral adult cat would display. It was scared, but I think it was too young to even recognize real danger and real fear.

  I stood still and watched it trot along the fence and then circle back, snout poking at the openings between the chain links. I noticed that it never looked at me directly, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

  I squatted then. I don’t know why. I released my grip on my pant legs and crouched in the center of the cement slab with the pergola overhead. I rested my hands on my knees with my palms up. I guess, looking back, it came without thought to pose myself in a non-threatening way.

  The cat’s body language grew less frantic right away. He or she still paced along the fence, as confounded by it as ever but no longer too frightened. The creature still wouldn’t look at me, though.

  I watched it for a long while, and I realized at some point in there that I was smiling, that I couldn’t help but smile as I looked upon this small thing, as I looked upon life. Eventually it curled up next to the house and slept, and I moved on.

  I think I’ll take some cat food back tonight to see if I can find it still hanging around.

  33 days after

  I went back to the pergola with a dish and a couple of cans of cat food I’d found in one of the vacant apartments. I walked up to the house at half speed, not wanting to spook the critter. I didn’t see anything around, though.

  I doled out a half of a can of meat into the bowl near the spot where the kitten had fallen asleep earlier and went back to the pergola to squat and watch for a bit from a distance. Wind kicked the ferns around again, and it felt cool enough to be refreshing against my torso. I ran my finger along the sharp edge of the storage unit key hanging on the string necklace about my neck.

  I didn’t feel like I was in the city anymore. These yards seemed big for being so close to downtown, and the landscaping here just had an air of country living, I thought. Kids probably played here under this roof, drew c
halk drawings on this cement slab under my feet and bounced various kick balls and tennis balls and such as well.

  I closed my eyes and felt the wind on my eyelids and listened to the leaves hissing in the air and crashing against each other. It sounded different now that everything had dried out. The wet leaves earlier almost had a lisping sound to them, but everything had crisped up in the sunlight, the consonant sounds sharpening.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the cat feasting from the dish. His little head bobbed as he went back and forth from licking to chomping at the meat. I got this weird feeling in my gut like I was seeing something important then. Something precious and temporary and fragile and small.

  36 days after

  I’ve been going to feed the cat every morning. I had to backtrack in my apartment hunt until I found the room with a nice big stockpile of Friskies that I had originally left behind. Salmon dinner in a can. Yum. A few cans of “Mixed Grill,” too, whatever that might be. I guess that’s yum, too, in a different, mystery meat kind of way.

  The little brown animal enjoys both kinds of meat from what I can tell by his rapid feasting. I’ve thought about trying to get to the point where I can pet him, even considered the idea of taking him home as my pet, but it doesn’t seem right. He will live like a king out here once he gets big enough to hunt. I’m sure the rodent population has exploded with all of the pesky humans out of the way.

  I watch from afar, squatted down. Apart from the meat offerings, that subtle communication in my body language, the hunching down which seems to calm him, I mean, is the only thing that passes between us.

  37 days after

  Why do these words occur to me? This never ending stream of thoughts, of sentences constructing themselves in my head? And why do I get the urge to write some of them down? To grasp after the feeling of sharing some of these thoughts even with no one here. To compose them in a never ending letter to the dead girl rotting across the way?

  Where does that urge come from? What is it hoping to accomplish?

  Why do my organs keep going, the juices and enzymes and acids squishing around in my gut to turn food into energy that keeps me around? Why do I bother, both consciously and subconsciously? Why do I keep going?

  What the fuck for?

  40 days after

  The water stopped today. The faucet groaned when I turned it on, and a little hiss of air came out, almost like an “s” sound whistling between gapped front teeth, and then it was quiet and still. In a weird way, it is a relief. I mean, yeah, I could die of thirst within a couple months or die looking around for water, but at least I know where I stand. Not knowing how long the water would flow was weighing on me.

  I’ve dreamed about it so many times, cranking the faucet only to see a little rust come out or blood instead of water, blood spiraling the way it did out of that politician’s mouth and nose in the video. Real life almost felt underwhelming by comparison. Just a little hiss.

  Now that the water’s end is here, I do have a sense of wasted time. A regret that wells in my gut like battery acid. I walked around, my head dancing with all of the visions about me, endlessly gazing upon the stark imagery of a world emptied and made my own, whether I wanted it or not. I still don’t have a gun. I still don’t have a car. I still don’t have any sense of where I might go in search of drinking water. And this storage unit key just hangs at my neck unused, just as my generator collects dust behind a padlocked door.

  But now I will act because I have to. I think that’s how these things usually work. We do what we have to do in life, which doesn’t kick in until it becomes an absolute necessity. We never get our shit together a minute before that. Not really.

  I still can’t imagine my future, which makes sense, I guess. It’s pretty open at the moment. It feels about as open as the top of the well I am plummeting into. At least I would have water if that happened, actually. I’d go out face down in an all-you-can-drink buffet.

  I have to move on, though. I can see that far down the road. Unless I find some kind of well around here soon, which I doubt very much, I’ll have to leave. I guess I knew I would, but it feels weird as hell to think that the number of nights I’ll ever sleep in this bed have been whittled down so much. I’ve looked out this window however many thousand times, and soon I never will again.

  Part of me thinks I should burn the place to the ground when I go. Free cremations for all of the people left here, you know? But it doesn’t feel right somehow. I think I’ll leave it in peace.

  42 days after

  Images of cars and weapons and water pounded in my head as I walked today. My feet stayed on the asphalt to avoid the periodic dead bodies that seemed segregated to the concrete of the sidewalk. It occurred to me for the first time that someone must have moved them, to keep the street free of blockages. What was it people used to say? “Roads are the lifeblood of our economy.” Something like that, anyway. I guess that’s still true even with the plague and the EMP. The roads must remain clear. Even in the damn post-apocalypse.

  It’s strange to look down the streets as far as you can see, nothing moving all the way to the horizon. Some kind of exhilaration came over me as I walked among the human road kill, the abandoned cars, presumably the ones with fried microchips, shoved up onto the curb at haphazard angles to clear a path for traffic.

  The wind blew, a breeze just cool enough to cut through my t-shirt and chill my chest. A tingle roiled in my torso, all of those tiny follicles on my abdomen and arms making themselves felt. Maybe it was being out in the full-on afternoon sunlight for the first time in a while, but I don’t think so. There is something almost perverse about walking around in an empty world, a single figure striding past rows of vacant skyscrapers and restaurants and an endless row of cars gone forever quiet. Incredibly stimulating. It’s almost overwhelming. It all seems bigger, too. Infinite. Like the concrete and asphalt stretch out forever without another soul to happen upon.

  I came to a gas station with the windows and doors all bashed out, the glass shards sprinkled all over the ground between the pumps and the building. I figured it would be cleared out like most of the rest of the places I’d passed, but I decided to get close enough to peek through the windows.

  The soles of my shoes ground glass bits into the asphalt, and little squeaks and screeches emitted from this friction. It sounded like a bunch of tiny versions of nails on a chalk board. But the sound changed, took on a low frequency rumble, almost like the engine of a semi-truck but small.

  Or distant.

  I stopped walking. The nails froze on the chalkboard right away, but the engine kept growling, definitely a diesel engine. I listened to it for a moment, noting the way the volume increased as it got closer. A particular kind of fear came over me. A new fear, I think, a strange mix of terror and excitement and confusion that made my heart thunder in my chest, the blood roaring through my veins. I hadn’t seen a live human being in weeks, and the prospect was scary as hell and exciting all at once.

  So I did the only thing that made any sense. I scuttled away to hide like a frightened cat.

  I hustled to the gas station door, tugged on it and found it still locked, so I hunched down to pass under the bar handle, moving through the place where the glass should be. Staying crouched, I waddled behind the counter and waited for the engine noise to die away. I peeked around the corner and listened. The wind blew then, a noisy gust that made it harder to tell if the diesel rumble was getting closer or farther away.

  I tried to swallow, but my throat seemed to have seized up on me, the muscles all tensed and weird. Rejected by the epiglottis, the spit kind of shot back up into my mouth, and I coughed a few times.

  The engine sound only got louder and louder, until I expected to see some kind of large vehicle go flying by the gas station any second, sort of not believing it could keep getting louder without arriving. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up straight and tall. It almost sounded like two engines, but I couldn’t decide
if that was just my imagination.

  I stroked at my cheek, my fingers momentarily surprised to find the Brillo pad feeling of my beard there. I was used to seeing it in the mirror, I guess, but not used to touching it just yet.

  The sound seemed to be on top of me now, grinding its churn deeper and deeper into my ear drums. Was the sound of a motor this foreign after a couple of weeks that I forgot what it was like?

  And then I saw them. A black pickup truck, a Dodge Ram to be precise, and a semi hauling a huge tank. They pulled into the gas station parking lot, the semi easing up near the pumps, the pickup parking closer to the door. I ducked back behind the counter as they closed in on me, listening to one engine cut off and then the other.

  The silence, the violent absence of noise, felt like a hole in the air where the sound of the engines had been ripped out.

  People.

  People right outside. Probably armed.

  My throat jerked like I was about to vomit. And then I heard the truck doors open and slam closed.

  42 days after

  Voices in the parking lot. Three men. Two baritone and one a little higher. Saying things. I heard them well enough. They even seemed loud in the stillness. My brain wouldn’t decipher their words, though, couldn’t process language somehow. It was just a series of meaningless noises to me, consonant sounds and vowel sounds all smashed together into flowing strings of nonsense.

  The voices stopped, and after a beat a sound rang out like metal scraping against concrete. I remembered to breathe then, concentrating on inhaling and exhaling without sound while the grating and scratching continued for a moment outside and then stopped.