The Scattered and the Dead [Book 2.6]

by L. T. Vargus

“Why are you apologizing?”

  I shrugged. “Because instead of trying to fix it, I have to ignore it. Just walk on past and keep my head down.”

  He kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair, and everything was silent for a time.

  “So I assume these Storm-whatever guys took credit for the lynching?”

  “That, and they cut little “SS” marks onto both foreheads.”

  “I thought there was some order in Roanoke. That unprovoked violence was frowned upon.”

  “It is. But the raiders can do whatever they want outside of town. And there’s no real law in Roanoke, not really. I know I’ve described it like an Old West town before, but there’s no Sheriff or anything like that. Just an agreement among the factions that open violence scares customers away. They want the trade.”

  “Just not from people like me.”

  “Most of the factions don’t give a shit about that. It’s the Storm Squadron that tries to not-so-subtly keep things quote-unquote pure,” I said, then muttered. “Stupid Nazi fucks.”

  “Well, I guess that means I’m out. And Marissa could barely walk for days after last time. She can’t handle that amount of biking.”

  “Yeah.”

  I knew what he was thinking then. That it was madness for me to go back there. Madder still to take a ten-year-old girl along with me.

  “Maybe… what if you just didn’t go? We’re doing OK.”

  I shook my head.

  “You heard what Marissa said. If one of us gets sick, that could be it. Something as simple as strep throat could kill us if we don’t have anything to treat it with.”

  My ear was pressed to the side of Marcus’ chest, and I could hear the rush of air as he inhaled and exhaled.

  “Besides,” I said, “I spent all that time seeking out those stupid Kentucky coffee trees and collecting beans for Kristoff. He said he’d trade me equal weight in salt.”

  Marcus brushed the hair away from my face and pressed his lips to mine.

  “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Careful is my middle name.”

  He smiled down at me.

  “Yeah. Right.”

  There’s another reason I have to go, but it’s not one I would say out loud, because it would sound stupid. Everyone else has a thing they’re good at. For some reason I thought I’d be some kind of savant in the garden, but it seems that Marcus is the one with a naturally-occurring green thumb. Marissa is a damn nurse, for Christ’s sake. And Izzy is turning into a master fisherwoman. She just has a knack for it.

  But me? As it turns out, I don’t seem to be much good at anything. It’s not like I’m completely useless — I can help where I’m needed, whether it’s planting or watering or cleaning fish. But as far as an actual useful specialty? Nothing. I’d say I’m only slightly higher in the rankings than that damned squirrel.

  So I guess this will be my thing. My contribution. Taking stupid risks for the good of the group.

  Your mostly useless BFF,

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Rural Maryland

  10 years, 39 days after

  Another night without sleep last night. We exchanged bullets with a small cell of Crusaders from dusk until dawn. Nightmarish.

  Not a full-bore skirmish or anything like that. More like each side fired a few rounds every couple minutes to keep the other side honest.

  The muzzle flashes flared like sparklers in the distance. Little bursts of orange light in the blackness. And the bullets whizzed past or thwacked into tree trunks. Percussive little ruptures of bark and wood.

  And, of course, our return fire was loud as all hell. Cracks and pops that split open the night. Tore it wide.

  They were out in the pines somewhere. Always moving. Circling us. Taking shots.

  It went on for hours. Like the darkness and the back-and-forth of the gunfire would never actually end. Like the sun would never come.

  Still, we didn’t get so much as a look at them. Some time just before dawn, they fell back. Retreated.

  And in the early light, we crept close to find only the indentations in the grass and ferns where they had lain, spent shell casings littering the ground.

  The Crusaders hide in the hills and woods all around this place. Fucking ghouls waiting to jump out with their rifles and blades, cut men down with zealous abandon. We’ve heard rumors of elaborate traps — land mines and crap like that — though none of us have encountered anything of that nature.

  To the Crusaders, all of this is somehow a religious war. A holy reckoning for some guy they call Father. Sounds like Jim Jones or David Koresh stuff to me. Too much cuckoo Kool-Aid for them. Or maybe not enough Kool-Aid now that I think about it. They might need to adjust their cyanide ratios or something as they seem to be doing it wrong.

  The rumors about Father are more or less boundless. He’s dead. Or he’s not dead. Or he faked his death. Or he did die but then he resurrected, and he’s, apparently, out for blood now. Like that one old Clint Eastwood movie where he comes back from the dead to kill the whole town, you know. I forget what that was called. Good movie.

  One detail that doesn’t seem to be in contention about Father is his lavish lifestyle. Luxury items plucked from the trash heap just for the cult leader. Big screen TVs. Hot tubs. Stockpiles of booze, long expired prescription pills, and so on.

  I kind of picture Saddam Hussein’s palace whenever people describe Father’s excesses. Marble floors. Gold accents everywhere. Hilarious tacky paintings of half-naked women that look like the cover of metal albums or fantasy books from the 1970s. I hope with all my heart that there’s at least one of those paintings at his place. I will loot the dickens out of it after we storm the gates.

  Anyway, I try to imagine those holy feelings. That passionate sense of duty when going into battle. A feeling in my gut, in my heart, in my soul that what I’m doing is right on a cosmic level. I kind of imagine an intense hot and cold tingle not unlike when you fling a fistful of Gold Bond on your junk. I hope that’s pretty accurate.

  It’s hard to do — hard to even imagine feeling that way, I mean. The holy visions and rapturous sensations and all.

  I look around. At the camp. At the empty world. And none of this means anything to me.

  Sat around the fire with a group of the others tonight, mostly the five other dudes in my squad with a couple of randos straggling into the mix. We only get the fire raging in the early evening to cook the beans. Once it’s full dark, we typically keep it real low to hopefully conceal our location.

  Wait. I guess I should introduce the squad, now that I think about it.

  There’s Alabama. Based on the name, you can probably guess that he’s from Georgia. Has the full-on deep South twang. He’s tall and skinny with narrow shoulders that make him seem like an overgrown fifth grader. Can’t grow even a trace of stubble, though if you catch his chin in just the right light you can make out some of that white peach fuzz stuff that older women get. Nevertheless, he shaves more often than the rest of us combined.

  As we sat out there tonight in the glow of the fire, Alabama and Smitty argued about whether the beans we have for most every meal were better served hot or cold and leftover — an argument they’d replayed about six times by now as Smitty knew it annoyed and disgusted the other.

  “Can’t wait until tomorrow morning. Nothing like a cold bean breakfast,” Smitty said.

  Alabama huffed.

  “I always knew you were dumb, but I didn’t know you were crazy until you started in with all this cold bean shit.”

  “Look, it’s hot as hell out here as it is, and the shit tastes like shit either way, right? Way I see it, might as well cool off with a tall glass of cool beans. Treat yourself.”

  Smitty serves the squat redhead role that I believe is mandatory for each squad. He is probably the closest thing I have to a friend out here. (Apart from maybe Jenkins who is more like an oracle I consult with than a peer — the man wears gla
sses for Christ’s sake.) Anyway, Smitty is good for some laughs. I’ve never understood the truly dumb people who manage to be funny — even witty — on a consistent basis, but Smitty delivers the goods. Guy can barely spell his name, but he makes me laugh.

  “Tomorrow morning, I believe I’ll prepare a beautiful brunch for all of us, serving cold beans three ways,” he said. “We’ll have a light kidney bean salad garnished with whatever the flies leave on it over night. Fly eggs, I guess. Fancy fly caviar, I’m sayin’. Then we’ll move on to a black bean puree that you’ll find mealy to the chef’s precise calibration. And finally a dessert of cold navy beans served in the syrup from that can of aged peaches you found back in Virginia somewhere.”

  “You still ain’t ate those peaches?” Meathead said, looking at Alabama and giggling as he spoke.

  “They’re like fifteen years old,” Alabama said. “Probably have botulism or whatever.”

  “You know, botulism is a delicacy in many cultures,” Smitty said.

  While some of the others laughed, Sorensen blinked.

  Chatty Sorensen barely says a fuckin’ word and never laughs or smiles, though he can say a lot with a few blinks of his wet eyes. When those peepers get damp, and the blinks get all slow, you know he’s pissed. Right now, in the midst of hearing Smitty’s breakfast menu, I believe the blinks expressed deep joy and a sense of camaraderie and stuff. He sports elaborate folds of skin like two baggy blankets under his eyeballs that make him look like he’s about 80 and/or a Shar Pei puppy, but he’s neither of those things. He’s probably 23 and a pug or something.

  Then there’s Meathead of the aforementioned giggles, though most call him Meat for short. He’s got a skull like an anvil and one of those faces that is about 50% meaty jaw and chin, so there weren’t a lot of options on the nickname front, I guess. A head like that is either Block or Meat, right? Beyond the cranium, it seems to me that Meat is high on something all the time. I have no idea what the substance would be. I asked him about it once and he just giggled, which I guess is how he responds to most things. Swollen pupils. Weird energy. Smells like ham. I don’t like being around him so much.

  And that leaves only the final soldier in our crew, sitting off by himself. Laughing a little, though his smiles never seem to reach his eyes.

  So far as I know, Henley is the only one among us who actually enjoys this playing army shit. Not in the Dudley Do-Right, sir-yes-sir, kind of precocious way, either. No. He enjoys being a soldier in the “wants to kill a bunch of people” way. A goddamn psychopath, you know? Cleans his gun all the time, stroking his hand up and down the barrel like he’s jerking the thing off. He’s generally the point man, naturally, leading us all to early graves with a jackal’s smile on his face, somehow getting off on the morbidity of it all.

  I am the lone Asian face among the 59 men in our little recon platoon, something I think about often. But I am lucky, I suppose, that the Squadron tolerates people like myself, even if I’m something of a second-class citizen in some of the city spaces. White and Asian is as far as the Storm Squadron’s idea of diversity allows, unfortunately. And now that they run the Sovereign Cities on their own, that’s the law of the land.

  That fact makes me antsy to leave the Free Cities as rapidly as possible. I’d been saving up. Hoping to supply myself appropriately to move out away from all of this. Away from the bat shit Crusaders. Away from the Sovereign Cities ruled by a fucking white supremacist motorcycle gang.

  But it’s hard to get ahead. I mean, it’s fucking impossible when you get conscripted and sent into battle, but even before that it was hard. To save enough to have a few months worth of food, tools, seeds to start a garden — and of course a vehicle and fuel, the most expensive pieces of all. I think I’m about halfway there, monetarily — three jars of dollars and coins tucked under the floorboards of my apartment. Might be six months more of work, but then I can get out.

  Hard to leave the amenities behind, though. If I strike out on my own, there’d be no running water. No electricity for miles and miles. No movies or plays or culture around. Even the markets provide their own kind of culture — the weirdos hawking trinkets and blankets and oddball items scavenged from the wastelands out there. The Free Cities do have their perks.

  But the loneliness I think is what scares me more than the lack of comfort. To leave the only two societies for hundreds of miles, I’d be signing up to live alone, you know? I don’t know if my soul could take that for long.

  Erin

  Blacksburg, Virginia

  1 year, 296 days after

  Kelly-

  The journey has begun. And I won’t lie. Long-distance biking on these mountain roads is a bitch, especially pulling a trailer. Good god almighty, my legs are tired.

  I’ve thought some more about why I’m writing this. And maybe I’m not writing to you at all. Maybe I’m writing to myself, but pretending that I’m writing to you makes it seem less… lonely.

  Not that I’m alone. Izzy is with me. But it is lonely out here without Marcus and that damn squirrel. And even Marissa.

  We’re stopped for lunch and a rest. We must be in horse country, because everything around here is rolling hills and those white rail fences that I associate with horse pastures. It’s pretty, actually. And there’s a nice breeze to cool us off after the ride. We’ve stopped a few times to pick asparagus and added that to our modest repast of smoked trout and radishes. Oh, and strawberries for dessert. Not so bad, really.

  Speaking of which, Marissa was griping up a storm this morning about how we didn’t get all the bones out of the fish when we filleted it. “We” being me and Izzy, of course. Marissa’s too squeamish to touch the raw fish. Which doesn’t make sense, right? Because she’s a nurse. I pointed that out last time we were gutting fish.

  “Marissa, you reset the bones in my leg, sewed up the wounds, and then changed the blood and pus-soaked bandages every day for a month. How could this possibly be more disgusting than that?”

  And her lips pulled into this tight little knot.

  “It’s different. One’s a living human being. The other is a dead animal carcass.”

  “Didn’t you cook meat back when… Before?”

  I’d wondered for a while if she was a vegetarian back then but eventually figured that couldn’t be. She hates most vegetables.

  “Yes, but I only bought things like hamburger meat. I could open the package without touching anything and just dump it all in a pan.”

  I’m guessing Hamburger Helper was a popular dish on Marissa’s table.

  She complains about the bones, but the real issue is that she doesn’t like fish. I don’t know if I’ve ever met another adult that was so damn picky about food. She doesn’t like half of what we eat. If she had it her way (and had access to it), I think she’d get most of her calories from the Scotch she likes to drink.

  Anyway, when she got to pissing and moaning about the bones in the fish this morning, I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from saying anything. The last thing I wanted to do was to set out on this trip having had another stupid fight with Marissa. I guess it’s like my mom used to say. We get along like two strange cats.

  Hissing, spitting, and snarling mostly.

  Actually, I’ve been thinking lately that Marissa reminds me of my mom. High expectations. Hard-nosed. Not the warmest lady I’ve ever met.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that Marissa can be a real bitch on wheels… (I was going to say “sometimes” but that’s not fair. It’s most of the time.)

  Don’t tell Marcus I said that, either. He’ll tell me I shouldn’t say (or write) things like that about Marissa. Any time we have an argument — especially if I’m so pissed off that I’m still grumbling and lamenting the old hag when we’re getting in bed — Marcus pulls me close and says, “She saved your life, though.”

  Which is true.

  But there’s more than that between Marcus and Marissa. They just seem to have a certain bond. I
don’t know if it’s because he’s a guy, but she doesn’t butt heads with him the way she does with me and Izzy. Doesn’t try to nag and boss him around all the time. It could just be that Marcus doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s kind to everyone. Even mean old bitches like Marissa.

  And sometimes I wonder if —

  Sorry. Izzy just ran over and threw herself at me like a human torpedo. Hard to write when a ten-year-old is climbing all over you.

  “How far have we gone, now?”

  She asks this every time we stop. I guess it’s the new version of Are we there yet?

  I got out the map and showed her where we’re at.

  “We’ve gone about 20 miles so far. Almost halfway.”

  Izzy tilted her head up to gaze at the sky.

  “So we could do the whole trip in a day?”

  “Yeah. But we’d get into Roanoke late. The market would probably be closed. And I don’t want to camp inside the settlement.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “It’s,” I paused to think of how to phrase it, “not a nice place. You remember what we talked about, right?”

  Izzy rolled her eyes in the dramatic fashion that comes natural to all 10-to-14-year-olds. Then, in an unflattering voice I assume was supposed to be her impression of me, she recounted my rules.

  “Stay close. Don’t talk to anyone. Avoid eye contact. Don’t touch anything.”

  I’ve thought a hundred times of trying to warn her of things we might see. Like the two people Marissa and I saw hanging from the tree last time. And other things, too. The brothels, for example. They conduct their business inside, obviously, but sometimes a few of the women are standing around outside, and they just have this vacant look in their eyes. Like they’re looking at you but not really seeing you.

  It feels like I should try to prepare her, but I don’t know if you really can prepare someone for how things are in a place like Roanoke.

  “When are we going to put on our costumes?”