The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  “Hey, I said it was better than last time, didn’t I? Sheesh. Always comes down to the rules with you, doesn’t it?”

  “Not always.”

  “Sure as hell seems like it.”

  Deirdre shrugged.

  “Is the little missy out there moving dirt in this storm?”

  “Yes, sir. I just checked on her three or four minutes ago.”

  He grimaced, sucked air between his teeth.

  “It’s too bad. Wonder what she did to wind up down there on a night like this. Musta rubbed somebody important the wrong way, you know?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Didn’t ask you to weigh in on it. It was a damned rhetorical observation. You’re always busting my balls, you know that?”

  “I didn’t know that my not knowing would somehow offend your apparently delicate rhetorical pride. You’re the one that takes everything personally, way I see it.”

  He smiled, one puff of laughter whistling out of his nostrils.

  “Damn. You’re in quite a mood tonight. Quite a mood. Here. Brought you this.”

  He lifted his poncho and unclipped a thermos from his belt, held it out to her. She took the cylinder from him, tilting it upright, but not opening it, just looking at it, feeling it. The warmth radiated into her hands, sinking deeper and deeper into the flesh of her fingers.

  “Coffee,” he said, as she stared at the gift. “Black coffee. Thought you could use the help staying awake, especially since you sit in here in the dark. Or close enough to it, anyhow. Still think that’s pretty weird, by the way.”

  She looked up at him, seeking out his downturned eyes in the half-light and finding them.

  “Thank you.”

  He broke eye contact, foot kicking at the floor that neither of them could really see.

  “It ain’t no thang. I better be getting back to it, though. You stay out of trouble out here.”

  “Oh, I will. Believe me.”

  Ray

  Rural West Virginia

  151 days after

  The car’s engine vibrated Ray’s foot through the gas pedal. He swore he could feel the vehicle working harder when they wound their way up these mountain roads, taking sharp turn after sharp turn that seemed, for just that moment, to go straight up. There was a throb in the engine’s growl at those points like a grunting beast losing its breath.

  Apart from that tingle in the ball of his foot, however, Ray’s mind was elsewhere. He let some autopilot part of his brain drive the car while the rest considered all they’d built so far. With the woman in the backseat joining their ranks, this trip would bring their total population up to 50, and they had piled up enough food to feed everyone for six months. Maybe more if the garden they’d planned took off in the spring.

  “Looks like we made it out just in time,” the woman in the backseat said. He instinctively caught her eyes for a beat in the rearview mirror, that manic energy radiating in them, that red hair framing her face.

  Fiona, he reminded himself. That was her name.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Lorraine said. “Snowing now. Not too bad yet, but…”

  He let his eyes drift up from the road and spied the swirling bits of white in the air just faintly visible. He didn’t think it was anything to worry about. Not yet.

  “You’re from Texas – Houston – aren’t you, Father Dalton?” Fiona said. “Do you get much snow down that way?”

  The question threw him for a second. Not the snow query itself so much as this woman calling him Father Dalton. He shot a sideways glance at Lorraine who was laughing silently. She spoke up.

  “He’s not a priest, sweetheart.”

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t… I mean it just seemed like……”

  “No need to apologize. You can call me Ray. And no, we didn’t get a lot of snow down my way. I mean, I’d seen it before. I’ve met people from parts of Florida and California that have never even seen the stuff. We got a little.”

  “We get our share of the stuff up here in the hills. Sometimes more than our share, I think.”

  “I’d agree with that. There was a little novelty to watching the white pile up on the grass that first night. But that was enough for me, I expect.”

  “Especially now with nobody to plow the roads,” Lorraine said. “It only takes a few inches to get snowed in these days.”

  Now the snow began hitting the windshield, each flake melting at once into a minuscule droplet of water. He didn’t turn on the wipers, instead gazing through the wet to the road beyond.

  Quiet fell over them again, and Ray’s mind went back to his flock, to the community he’d built. He pictured what might be happening in camp now and saw Louis and his men hammering shingles to the roofs of the cabins, Phyllis and Roger toting clipboards around the storage barn, logging the most recent hauls in black ink. He saw Lumpy, Marco, and Higgins lifting green bottles to their mouths and grimacing faintly after each sip, enjoying the skunky beer they’d managed to salvage from the back room of a convenience store. He saw Kate shading in the garden plan she’d drawn up with colored pencils, each patch of a color representing a different crop.

  He saw his people. He saw his family.

  Snow swirled down upon them, falling heavier now, but home wasn’t so far off.

  Decker

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  165 days after

  He lay in bed, shivering, the blanket all rumpled into a tight wad under his chin. He looked across the room, eyes tracing up and down the yellow rectangle of wood there, the barrier between him and everything he wanted. The bedroom door looked about 100 miles off. A rug and a section of bare oak floor sprawled in the area from his person to the doorway. Nothing more. No real obstacles. But it may as well be swamp and jungle and mountain and ocean.

  He propped himself up on his elbows a moment, sitting up halfway into the gray daylight streaming in through the windows. For a moment, the walk seemed possible, the doorknob seemed within reach, but a spin began twisting the walls around him, and an ache cracked and spread behind his forehead like broken glass. His head felt like an anchor that wanted only to do its job – sink until it hit the bottom. He let it drop, pillow encasing the back of his skull once more. He needed to get up, to walk down the steps to the kitchen, to force something down, maybe the last sleeve of the Club Crackers he’d found on his final scavenging trip. Whatever it was, he needed to keep some food in his belly, needed to at least try.

  Or he was going to die.

  But it was hard to even keep his eyes open, hard to stop the tremors in his legs and arms and torso, hard to concentrate with the headache trying to crush the front half of his skull with this insane throb of cranial pressure.

  It’d been nearly a week since he got out of bed. After hauling a couple of buckets of water up from the well on Christmas, he did not rise again. The water had run out a day and a half ago, and he’d pissed in all of the glasses and jars within arm’s reach, eventually reaching for one of the water buckets when it became necessary. That was when the idea of death started to seem real. Like he was giving up on more water at that point, giving up on surviving. Sacrificing it for a little comfort in his final resting place, a little peace on his way out.

  Now he stared at the ceiling and blinked a few times, eyes going blurry and flicking to refocus on the door so far away. Pretty hard to even imagine getting there, actually feeling the handle in the palm of his hand. Let alone all of the ensuing steps.

  Breath huffed in and out of his nostrils, and sweat greased the length of his person now. How did sitting up for a few seconds elicit this strong of a response? Sweat, headaches, exhaustion. He struggled to believe it, to process how sick he must be.

  His eyes drifted shut, fluttering against each other when the eyelashes met, spastic somehow like a bird shaking its wings dry. He fought it, forced his eyes open, stared into that brightest swirl of gray light in the window out of spite. He held them there for as lon
g as he could, the shiver in his body intensifying until his eyelids won out once more for a moment. His eyes cinched themselves shut. He bucked against them again, commanded them to part, to open, to remain ajar, but it didn’t quite take right away.

  When they opened again, the shadows in the room had taken on the viscosity of motor oil. The darkness encroached, the black of night, thick and greasy, a night which he suspected he wouldn’t survive.

  It occurred to him then that it’d been days since he’d seen either of his cats. He was sure they’d survive the winter — there was no shortage of mouse and rat out here — but perhaps they’d moved on while he was down. He could picture them milling around for a while and then departing, figuring him for dead.

  It was New Year’s Eve. For whatever reason, he didn’t think this seemed like much of a party.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  168 days after

  After stowing her bike in the barn, Erin trudged across the drive to the house, gravel crunching under her boots. Izzy was back at the door, pressing her face to the screen. Maybe she’d never left that spot. Maybe she stayed there the whole time, like a dog waiting for its master to return home from work. Erin felt a twinge of guilt.

  But the kid looked happy, flashing her a crooked smile through the door. She’d lost more teeth since the summer, and the varying heights of the new adult teeth growing in left Izzy with a jagged jack-o’-lantern grin.

  “Find anything good?”

  Erin shrugged the bag from her shoulders.

  “A few things,” Erin said, unzipping her pack. She didn’t say the rest of what she was thinking. What she’d been thinking now for a while. Izzy didn’t need to know.

  “So?” Izzy did a little dance, kind of like she had to pee. “Can we play?”

  Erin exhaled. She hated this game, and Izzy knew it. But she also felt shitty for leaving Izzy alone every time she went out to scavenge. Izzy knew that, too.

  “I need to inventory this food first. And then I need coffee.” Erin rubbed her temples. “But then we can play.”

  “Yes!” Izzy pumped her fist and scampered off to set up the game.

  In the spare bedroom they used as a makeshift pantry, Erin lowered herself to her knees and picked up a spiral notebook. She flipped past several pages of her handwriting, a long list of supplies they’d already exhausted, crossed out with a line of pencil.

  The area of town she’d been to the last few times was pretty picked over. Someone else was cleaning the houses out. That was the thought she couldn’t get out of her head. What she hadn’t said to Izzy earlier.

  Of course, maybe someone cleaned them out early on. A neighbor that stayed behind when most of the other people evacuated. She wanted that to be the case. That would mean she wasn’t running the risk of crossing paths with this person or persons. It would also mean that if they hadn’t made it, she might come across their stockpile of food one of these days.

  When she got to a blank line in the notebook, she entered the new arrivals.

  Red enchilada sauce, mild. 90 calories.

  Approximately half a bag of chocolate chips. 850 calories.

  Jellied cranberry sauce. 690 calories.

  Two bags of microwave popcorn. 420 calories each.

  One sleeve of saltines. She didn’t have the nutritional information for the crackers, but she’d become somewhat of an expert at guessing. She estimated that each cracker was about 15 calories, counted 28 crackers in the sleeve. That was 420 calories. She wrote this down in the notebook, then flipped to the page where she kept track of their daily calorie intake. Under her name, she wrote 2 crackers — 30 calories.

  Thirty lousy extra calories. She’d probably already burned that off with a fart.

  She rested the pencil between the pages and looked over their supply. She’d done the math. Dozens of times. Rationed and re-rationed. They were one mean storm away from running out of food. If the warmer weather held up for a little while, she might be able to pull together enough to get them through.

  If she could just find someone’s sweet stash… That was the most frustrating thing about it. She knew there were caches of food out there. She just had no way of knowing where they were.

  Erin shuffled through the cans, trying to decide what they’d have for dinner. She grabbed the can of enchilada sauce and a can of black beans. From toward the back, she pulled a can into the light so she could read the label. Creamed corn. She ran the numbers in her head and nodded. She could make that work.

  Her pencil scratched a line through the enchilada sauce and then the beans. She turned the page, searching for where she’d marked down the can of creamed corn. The paper crinkled as she flipped back, double checking the inventory she’d already looked through.

  That was weird. There was no creamed corn on her list. Not uneaten, anyway. She found an entry for corn with a line through it from weeks ago.

  Her fingers tightened around the can. Maybe she was asleep. The hungrier she got, the more her dreams revolved around food. Usually she was at some kind of elaborate feast with roast turkey and mashed potatoes and cake. There was always a big cake in the dreams. Finding a single can of serendipitous creamed corn was a little lackluster by comparison. But maybe her mind was too tired to come up with colorful details, even in sleep.

  She pushed the pointed end of the pencil into the fleshy part of her palm, just below the thumb. She pressed until it hurt, just a little. Did that actually work to wake yourself up or was it just a TV thing? She didn’t wake up, which didn’t necessarily prove anything, she thought. A divot remained in her skin when she pulled the pencil away.

  Erin didn’t think she was really asleep. Just tired and hungry. Hungrier than she’d ever been in her whole life. And the lack of food made her stupid and slow. Forgetful. A few days ago, she’d let the fire in the stove go out because she forgot to put more wood in. Just plain forgot. She couldn’t make sense of how she’d forget something like that. It was in the top three Most Important Things she had to do every day. Heat, food, water. Four things if you counted not getting eaten by a zombie.

  She must have forgotten to log the corn in the notebook somehow. She tried to think back on when she would have picked it up, but again, she could barely remember yesterday.

  She added the corn to the log and set it back in the pile. If they ate the corn and the beans, Erin would get her full calorie allotment for the day. Tempting. But she needed to keep cutting back until they found more food.

  Erin yawned, stretching her shoulders and upper back. The yawn reminded her of coffee, and coffee pushed all other thoughts from her mind for the moment. She closed the notebook around the pencil. Fuck the mystery corn. She had a date with a guy named Joe.

  Back in the kitchen, she squeezed the bag of coffee. The ground up beans squished under her fingers, and the bag crinkled. Erin measured two scoops of coffee into the French press, followed by hot water from the kettle on the wood stove. Coffee was the only thing she didn’t have to ration. Izzy wouldn’t drink it — not that Erin would have been wild about the idea of loading the kid up with caffeine — so whatever they found was hers and hers alone.

  An electronic voice blared out from behind her in the living room.

  “Attention mall shoppers, there is a clearance at the,” the voice paused, then continued, in true robotic fashion, “fashion boutique.”

  Erin ground her molars together. That fucking game.

  It was even worse than Monopoly - ten times more boring and infinitely more infuriating in how pointless it seemed. It boiled life down to a trip to the shopping mall, waiting for the robot voice to tell you where the sales were, where to go to spend, spend, spend. First person to buy six items wins.

  She didn’t know why Izzy even liked the game. It was outdated even for Erin. She suspected it was all in the gimmicks. There was the three dimensional board with the mall layout, the fake money, the little plastic credit cards. It looked like it had more goin
g on than it actually did.

  Then there was the voice. It was one of very few electronic devices they’d found that still worked. She guessed the novelty of that had something to do with Izzy’s inexplicable fascination. Hearing the recorded voice felt a little like reconnecting with an old friend now that there was no more TV. No more recorded music. No more iPhones loaded with Siri.

  The game beeped and a second voice spoke. “Hi Jessica. Hi Lynn. Hi Tamara.”

  But holy crap, was the game annoying.

  Droplets of condensation formed on the glass inside the French press. She watched a bead at the top loosen and fall, rolling down the side, growing as it combined with other bubbles of water.

  She’d never liked coffee before. Thought it was too bitter, unless you got one of those crazy flavored lattes from Starbucks. Her mom hated those.

  “Six bucks?” she’d say. “For what? A bunch of artificial sweeteners and flavors, a dollop of fake whipped cream, and a few ounces of shitty coffee? That’s the rip-off of the century.”

  Erin poured the coffee, black, into a mug. She was used to drinking it straight now. For the first few weeks, she had a stash of sweetener packets she found at the diner in town. Sweet n Low, Splenda, turbinado sugar. That had helped ease her into it, she thought. She didn’t know if she’d have been able to get into drinking it black right off the bat.

  The ceramic mug warmed under her fingers. She sniffed at the steam that coiled above the liquid, the smell making her salivate. She licked her lips and swallowed. All she wanted was a taste, but she knew it was too hot.

  She remembered hearing adults talk about coffee like it was a drug. She’d always thought it was mostly a joke. But now that she was hooked, she knew the truth. Starbucks was a gateway drug.

  She didn’t notice it at first. It was a few days after she started drinking a cup every morning that she realized how great she felt after. Awake and full of energy, and best of all, less hungry.