The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  It was weird, she thought, how a river kept going, how there was enough water for it to just run continually. It didn’t stop for a break. It didn’t pause to mourn the dead girl that it had carried here. It flowed on and on for perhaps hundreds or thousands of years, babbling to itself all the while.

  A new sound joined the river’s gush. The buzz of the flies faded in, a bunch of them from the sound of it. She knew the noise must have been there the whole time, hovering just beyond her notice. Surely the insects had found the body within minutes and laid their eggs in the open places. Even with her eyes closed, she could see their tiny feet on the corpse, pressing into the flesh and then lifting to rub against each other. When she was little, she thought the flies were praying when they rubbed their feet together, maybe saying grace before they ate whatever they landed upon.

  Sweat clung to her forehead and cheeks. It was hot out here, but she felt only cold. She felt only numb. Dead on the inside.

  The shock settled over her like a sopping blanket, heavy and wet and cold enough to sap all feeling from her extremities. But she knew now that she had to fight it, she had to listen to the detectives for Shelly’s sake. She didn’t know why, but it seemed important.

  She concentrated, half-focusing on the voices, half-letting the sounds come to her.

  “Oh, it’s definitely the Taylor girl,” one detective said. “The trouble is what to do about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Investigating the fiancé would be a delicate thing is all. He has family connections. On the council, I mean.”

  “Oh, right. I follow you.”

  “Rumor is he’s done this kind of thing before.”

  “Gone this far?”

  “Not every time, but yeah. The Peters girl a few years back.”

  They nodded at each other.

  “I remember.”

  “Anyhow, probably best not to stir up that kind of trouble if we can help it. We’ll canvas the girl’s neighbors, I figure, and go from there.”

  “So no search warrant for their place?”

  “I don’t want to be the one to write up the paperwork asking Father for that. Do you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “We’ll canvas, and go from there.”

  “Right.”

  She wanted to walk away, to put one foot in front of the other until she was gone from this place forever. But she found herself rooted to the ground, unable to muster any movement.

  The sound of the flies swelled to a roar, to violent bursts of insectile sound, the buzz drowning all the talk out. She knew this must be happening in her head, must be a hallucination, but knowing that didn’t change anything.

  And the flies seemed hateful creatures to her just then. Disgusting little death eaters with veined wings like demons. They came from squirming maggots and lived only to make more of the same. To plant little segmented worms the size of grains of rice in every creature, to devour all of us, all the dead meat, with a layer of writhing fleshy grubs. Pale things that will wriggle over us until we’re skeletal.

  And the detectives didn’t give a fuck. Nobody did. Maybe this kind of thing happened all the time. Girls got used up. Spent. Left to bloat on the side of the river if they didn’t obey, if they tried to make their own choices. No punishment for that crime. Not even so much as a real investigation. Nobody cares, and nobody pays the price for committing the act. It’s like it didn’t really matter, this person’s life didn’t really matter, didn’t really count.

  The numb was long gone now, those cold feelings of shock giving way to the heat of anger, of hatred, of the violence pulsating in her heart. Wet hot red feelings washed over her in waves, made her grit her teeth.

  She opened her eyes, looked upon the body, upon the discarded girl. The detectives would go through the motions. They would pretend to care for a little while, pretend to seek justice. And in time the whole thing would disappear, would be forgotten.

  It wasn’t going to work that way this time, Deirdre thought. This time someone would pay. She would see to that.

  Erin

  Presto, Pennsylvania

  173 days after

  The spoon clinked against the glass jar as Erin stirred the makeshift rehydration formula. She watched the swirls of golden honey dance and undulate in the water, dissolving into the tornado spinning at the center of the jar.

  It was supposed to be sugar, three tablespoons per liter of water, plus a teaspoon of salt. But they were out of sugar. There’d been a ceramic chicken-shaped sugar bowl in Squirrelman’s stash, but they’d finished that off quickly. So it was honey or nothing. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  Really, he was lucky they had the honey at all, and luckier that Erin had grabbed that survival book from the library. It had a whole section on first aid, including a large quoted passage from an early 20th century medical book regarding feeding an unconscious person.

  She scooted her chair closer to the form in the sleeping bag, leaned down, and propped him a little further upright against the cushions so there’d be less potential for him to choke. The spoon clicked against his teeth as she poured in the first spoonful.

  After the section about feeding a teaspoon of liquid at a time with a spoon or dropper, the survival book mentioned “rectal feeding.” Not a fucking chance.

  Erin hated being near sick people. Ever since her dad died, she’d had a phobia of hospitals. Filled with sick and dying people. The germs. The smell. She was already much closer than she’d ever wanted to be to a dying person again. No need to bring the rectum into it.

  The only reason she was playing nurse in the first place was because she’d taken pity on Izzy. The deal they’d made was that Erin would help her mix up the juice, but Izzy had to do the feeding.

  That was before they’d realized how painfully slow it was to dribble a liter of water into someone’s mouth one teaspoon at a time. Erin hadn’t realized that when the book said, “around the clock,” it was being quite literal.

  A fat blob of the formula dripped off the spoon on the way to his mouth. It hit the surface of the sleeping bag with a splat. She tipped the formula into his mouth. Yeah, he was lucky.

  “One lucky son of a bitch,” she said out loud.

  Izzy’s head snapped up from across the room.

  “Be nice!”

  Erin scoffed.

  “He can’t hear me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Erin turned to address the inanimate form in the sleeping bag.

  “Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me what time it is? I seem to have forgotten my watch.”

  A few light colored spots stood out against the darker color of the sleeping bag. Erin squinted at them a moment before she recognized what they were.

  Erin’s head whipped up.

  “Did you try to feed him Chex again?”

  Izzy’s forehead wrinkled in an attempt to look innocent.

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie. You left evidence behind.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Crumbs! All over the sleeping bag.”

  “It was only like two Chex! Or maybe three. He’s gotta be hungry!”

  “You can’t give an unconscious person solid food, Izzy. He could choke on it.”

  “I crushed them up into little bits.”

  “It’s doesn’t matter! If he-”

  “Nina.”

  Erin froze. The voice was dry, papery, barely even there. If she hadn’t been sitting right next to him, she probably wouldn’t have heard it.

  The spoon slipped from Erin’s fingers and clattered to the floor, and it was a moment before she gathered herself enough to retrieve it.

  “What was that?” Izzy asked.

  Erin kept her gaze glued to the man’s mouth, waiting for it to move again.

  “He talked.”

  Izzy’s eyes bulged, and she crawled closer on her hands and knees. She hovered over the man’s face, angling one ear over his mouth.<
br />
  Erin nudged her. She was wearing a mask and gloves they’d found in one of the first aid kits, but Izzy wasn’t.

  “He’s not doing it now. And don’t get so close. We still don’t know if he’s contagious. Or what he even has.”

  “Well it’s not what everyone else had.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He would have died by now.”

  Izzy was right of course. But it didn’t make Erin feel that much better. What if the disease mutated? What if this guy was a carrier, someone that could keep it for longer than most just to spread to the max number of new hosts? These were not the kind of thoughts she shared with her nine-year-old companion, though.

  Erin went to rub at her eyes but stopped. She needed to take off the gloves and wash her hands before she touched her face after being this close. She set the jar down and stood, bending this way and that to loosen up her lower back muscles.

  “Nina!”

  This time the voice was more than a whisper, and the man moved. Izzy and Erin both jumped back a step, startled by the sudden liveliness of their patient. Their eyes met. Izzy leaned closer.

  “Squirrelman?” she whispered.

  Erin pulled her back.

  “I’m serious. Don’t get so close.”

  Izzy barely acknowledged her.

  “Squirrelman,” she said, louder.

  “He doesn’t know that’s his name.”

  Izzy scowled at her.

  “We have to call him something. You try.”

  Erin scrunched down next to him. She rested a hand on his chest and gave him a gentle shake.

  “Hey… dude?”

  His eyelids fluttered then, and faster than she thought possible for a man on the cusp of death, he had one arm out of the sleeping bag. His hand clamped down on her wrist.

  He pulled her close, and Erin got a good whiff of him. Squirrelman was ripe. The smell reminded her of the palliative care ward her dad had been on before he went into hospice. And then later at the camp, where her mother died. It was the smell of piss and shit and sickness. And death.

  Erin tried to slip free from his grasp, but he held tight. His lips parted, teeth bared, and Erin realized too late that he must have turned. Her free hand stopped clawing at the fingers clamped around her wrist and fumbled at her belt, searching for her gun, but it wasn’t there.

  She’d left it on the counter.

  Baghead

  Rural Arkansas

  9 years, 128 days after

  He smelled the smoke before he could see it. The odor came and went at first. Whiffs of a faint char flitted in the air around him like fragments of smoke from a neighbor’s barbecue creeping across the street.

  The Delta 88’s headlights pierced the gloom around them, trying to reveal the source of the smell. It was no use. Instead, the brights shone only upon the crags of the blacktop stretched out in front of them, the blistered streaks of black where cracks had been patched years before, the strips of dirt and clusters of trees running along the side of the asphalt.

  No flare or flame or orange glow peeked out from the black out there. No light at all but the headlights and the stars above. Even the moon shrouded itself in clouds.

  A little disquieting, ominous, Baghead thought, to smell smoke in the dead of night, but the odor itself wasn’t unpleasant. It really was more like charcoals burning under the grill grate a few porches down than it was like Delfino’s cigarettes or the acrid smell of burnt plastics and such that he’d encountered often in his travels. At least not for now. Being intermittent and as small as it was, he didn’t mind it.

  He turned to the backseat, knowing the girl sat there, but he saw only blackness. Hopefully she was asleep anyway, he thought. Better for at least one of them to stay rested.

  He couldn’t see sleeping anytime soon, himself. No, he still felt a muted version of that electrical flicker in his eyes, the one he’d felt upon encountering the man in the woods. Back then he’d felt it everywhere, lurching and roiling just under the surface of his skin. It had receded some, but it was enough to keep him awake a long while yet, the way he figured it.

  A suction sound erupted to his left to interrupt the thought, something that reminded him of sitting in the dentist’s chair, and then a tiny flicker of flame lit up Delfino’s face from below a second later. Shadows twitched around his nose, and then the flame darkened as it entered the tip of the cigarette. The end of the paper tube turned orange in front of the driver’s lips, and then the lighter’s glow extinguished with a click.

  “Oh, shit,” Delfino said, keeping his voice low. “Mickey D’s at the next exit. What do you think?”

  Baghead wheeled his head around to the window just in time to see the glare where headlights reflected the golden arches and a couple of gas station logos off of the blue road sign. A lot of the signs had been knocked down or defaced with spray paint. This one was intact.

  “For real, though. What are you getting?”

  “Well, nothing.”

  “What? Come on, man. We had a shit day. We’re hitting the drive-thru for a hot meal. We deserve that much.”

  Baghead hesitated, fingernails scratching his beard through the canvas.

  Delfino ashed his cigarette out the window and spoke.

  “Jesus. Nevermind, Bags. You ruined it.”

  “I ruined it?”

  “Moment’s passed, man. No food for you. No food for anybody. Me? I was going to get a Big Mac meal, supersized, with a Coke. No ice. Plus a 4 piece McNug with barbecue on the side. Not anymore. I guess we’ll all have to go without.”

  “I guess so.”

  “No Quarter Pounder. No Big ‘n Tasty. Not even so much as a single fry.”

  They were quiet for a long moment, the hiss of the air rushing through the cracked window producing white noise like radio static to fill the void in their conversation.

  “I guess I’d get a McRib,” Baghead said, finally.

  Delfino scoffed.

  “Well, now you’re taking liberties.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re assuming the McRib is available. That’s no given, my friend. Never was.”

  “I don’t even think I like them.”

  “Like what?”

  “McRibs.”

  “Then why the hell would you go for that?”

  “Because I can’t actually remember what they taste like. I remember Big Macs and double cheeseburgers and all the others. The McRib? No. Not sure. I kind of remember what it looked like, the shape of the rib patty or whatever, but that’s it.”

  Delfino flicked his cigarette out the window, and the cherry burst into a shower of orange sparks when it hit the asphalt. He put his window up, and the suction noise cut out.

  “Yeah. I get that. Well, I happen to remember the McRib well enough, and my decision stands. Big Mac all the way, man.”

  Baghead turned back again, staring into the black behind them. He saw nothing, but he still waited a moment, listening until he could hear the long, slow breaths of the sleeping girl before he swiveled back to face the road.

  “She asleep?” Delfino said.

  “I think so, yeah. Can’t see anything, but it sounded like it.”

  “Weird, ain’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The girl. She’ll never fantasize about Big Macs or nothing. She would’ve been too young to remember.”

  They fell quiet again, the rub of the tires on the road seeming to grow louder around them like someone slowly turned up the volume knob.

  The night stretched on like the darkness would never let up, and the conversation wound around itself. Delfino told old stories. One about vomiting into someone’s shoe. Accidentally, of course. Or at least he thought it was accidentally. He was quite drunk. Yeah. Yeah, pretty sure it was accidentally. Probably.

  Then the driver launched into another lament about the loss of his precious pornography stash. It wasn’t word for word the same speech that he’d given before
, but it was close. Baghead kept checking to make sure that Ruth was asleep as Delfino ranted about smut. Thankfully she was.

  “You know that’s the second time you’ve bemoaned the loss of pornography,” Baghead said. “Kind of interesting, I think.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just says a lot about where we were at before, I guess. You aren’t expressing the loss of human contact. From what you said, you still have some of that in your life. No, you’re talking about this fantasy version of human contact, this fantasy version of sex. Images created to be as stimulating as possible, more stimulating than real life in some ways. We connected to this fantasy version of the world, this dream version of the world all the time. Movies. Music. Fancy restaurants even found ways to make food more fantasy than necessity, right? And I think that became the primary thing driving us, our deepest desires occupied not by realities but by fantasies. We lusted after and obsessed over connecting to images, not people.”

  Delfino scratched the corner of his mouth with his thumbnail before he responded.

  “I guess. I mean, the whole thing kind of sounds like mumbo jumbo to me.”

  “You don’t think about that kind of stuff? Sometimes I think it’s all I think about. Like why did we gather together in theaters to stare up into the screen, full of wonder? Wasn’t that the same impulse that made cavemen draw on cave walls and then gather to look upon the images they’d made by flickering firelight? Where does that come from? Mustn’t there always be something deep down driving us to these behaviors? Like some core part of humanity that we don’t really understand?”

  Delfino shrugged. Baghead waited for the driver to respond, but after a moment he realized the shrug was the extent of his reply.

  “OK,” Bags said. “Let me reframe all of this. What do you think drives us, or what do you think drives you?”

  Delfino grunted a little, fingers clambering along the rim of the wheel like spiders, both gestures that Baghead took to signify a gathering of thoughts. The grunt morphed into a sigh and trailed off into silence. Finally, the driver spoke.