The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  She hesitated a moment, letting his words settle over her.

  “A mean girl?” She blinked. “You think I was a mean girl?”

  Marcus shrugged.

  “I was not one of those girls.” She gritted her teeth. “What were you, then? One of the geeks who sat with the other geeks and wallowed in your bitterness that none of those girls even knew your name?”

  He leaned his head back a little then, sizing her up. And then he angled his face away.

  “Sure.” After a pause, he added, “If I can borrow your bike, the one with the trailer on it, I can probably move my supplies back to the cabin in a few trips.”

  “What supplies?”

  The left corner of his mouth tugged upward again.

  “The food. Most of what’s in the pantry is mine.”

  He looked back at her, eyes boring into hers.

  “Or were you planning on kicking me out and stealing my food?”

  She ground her teeth together.

  “No.”

  She shoved at her sleeves until they bunched past her elbows, feeling too warm from a combination of anger and the extra wood she’d thrown on the fire. She took a few more breaths and counted to three.

  “You can stay until Spring.”

  Instead of thanking her for her generosity, he said, “Until my food is gone.”

  “Until you have the strength to go out on your own.”

  He stroked his chin with his knuckle. He had shaved since he woke from his almost-permanent slumber but dark stubble was already showing again.

  Erin thought they were done and rose to her feet, but Marcus spoke again as she took a step toward her room.

  “Strength is a funny word to use.”

  “What’s funny about it?” she asked, turning back.

  “You don’t think we’d be stronger as a group?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  His eyes moved away from her face, down to one of her exposed arms.

  “You’re skinny.”

  “Uhh,” she said, forehead wrinkling. “Thanks?”

  He pointed a finger at her.

  “I think you were running out of food before you found me.”

  Erin swallowed the lump in her throat and tugged her sleeves back down to her wrists.

  “I have a fast metabolism. I always have. And we were doing just fine before.”

  “The extra holes on your belt and the way those pants hang off you say otherwise.”

  “I didn’t realize we were being judged on our style choices.”

  “I think you found me, and you helped me and kept me alive, but I also think I helped you and kept you alive just as much.”

  Erin was whisper-yelling now, trying to keep her voice low enough not to wake Izzy.

  “Don’t paint this like some mutually beneficial arrangement. I could have taken your food and left you there. I could have killed you, just to be done with you and to make sure you wouldn’t turn. And what could you have done about it? Nothing. Because you were half-dead already.

  “I’m the one who took all the risk bringing you here. The food we took was a tiny fraction of the payment you owe for not being dead as a fucking doornail right now. The first chirp of a spring bird I hear, you’re out of here.”

  He brushed off her rant with a single shrug of the shoulders.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  She pointed a finger at him.

  “And stop calling me that!”

  Before he could say anything else, she whirled around and closed the bedroom door.

  Her heart was still thudding in her chest when she crawled under the covers.

  She couldn’t believe he’d actually suggested that they needed him. That he’d helped them.

  Other way around, pal. Other way around.

  Lorraine

  Outside of Johnstown, Pennsylvania

  225 days after

  It felt good to sit behind the wheel of a car again, to crack the window and let the breeze riffle through her hair. Ray didn’t know that she and Fiona had been sneaking off on recruiting trips whenever he went out on the occasional solo run. She knew he wouldn’t have approved if he’d known. But she could take care of herself, and she had a Glock in her purse in case anything got out of hand.

  Her foot ground the gas pedal to the floor, and the car jerked forward. The speedometer’s hand cranked past the three figure mark and quivered there. A hundred and five seemed about as fast as this Corolla could go. Almost disappointing, she thought, but at least it got up over a hundred. Maybe next time she’d request a car with a little more pick up.

  Still, she liked to hold the wheel in her grip, to feel the engine’s vibration in her feet. Whenever the car responded to her touch, to her will, she felt power. She felt control. Control was freedom, and freedom never got old.

  She glanced over at her red-haired companion. Fiona stared out the passenger side window, a smile curling her lips. Lorraine had to admit it. As weird as Fiona may be, she made good company. Even if the woman said and did enough strange things to creep Lorraine out half the time, things were more interesting when she was around.

  Ray had ventured south into Virginia, so the two of them were headed north into Pennsylvania. Johnstown was the destination, picked out on the map at random. They’d yet to actually come upon anyone to recruit on their three missions so far. Maybe today would be the day. Or maybe not. She wasn’t sure if it mattered to her. Sometimes it was just nice to go for a long drive, to live and move on her own terms again.

  “You ever been up this way?” she said.

  Fiona shook her head.

  “I’ve been to Pittsburgh plenty. Never went through Johnstown that I can recall.”

  “Well, that makes it more of an adventure, I guess.”

  “Yep. Into the unknown.”

  The highway was mostly clear, though they had to slow down to get around a few cars here and there. Someone had worked to clear many of the vehicles off to the sides, angling them down into the ditch. The cars almost looked like a herd of animals lowering their snouts into a watering hole.

  “Today is going to be our day,” Fiona said. “I can feel it.”

  “You think we’ll find someone?”

  “I do. For better or worse, I think we’ll encounter somebody. Hope it’s for the better, but…”

  Something about the comment gave Lorraine goose bumps. She grabbed at her purse, reassuring herself that the weapon was there by feeling inside for the metal and finding it. Wrapping her fingers around the gun calmed her, made her feel in control again.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  Decker

  The Compound

  225 days after

  He lay in bed, motionless but conscious. His heartbeat wasn’t elevated, his breathing sounded even and normal, but he was wide awake. He felt it in the whir of his thoughts, the tension of his jaw muscle that kept delving into a quiver and retreating back to a clenching just shy of a gritting of the teeth.

  He opened his eyes, looked up into the blackness of night, up toward the cabin ceiling he knew must be there, though he couldn’t see it for the moment. He moved, the rough texture of the sheets grating at his skin. These were old. Worn. Not like the ones he was used to in his house up on the hill.

  He felt his bottom eyelids slide up to cover the bottom half of his eyeballs, an expression he’d known rarely in his life, though he knew exactly what it meant.

  An animal rage filled him all at once like a bucket of water finally toppling after long hours teetering on the edge of a crooked step. His fists balled up, fingernails piercing the flesh of his palms. A suction sensation filled his chest, like it was imploding, like his heart was caving in and the force of it threatened to collapse his ribcage inward. He understood this feeling, this anger, but he didn’t quite know why it was there.

  Or why he was here.

  It’d been just another day of scavenging before things went askew. He’d been pi
cking through the junk pile at a ravaged department store in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The M4 dangled at his side as always, his trusty sidekick accompanying him, though he hadn’t fired the weapon since before the winter.

  Broken glass lay everywhere. He crunched over it, taking long strides and tipping the gun back to rest against his shoulder. He moved from the men’s clothing department to the picked-clean grocery area to the cooking department, poking through knick knacks and an assortment of spatulas and other kitchen utensils. Heaps of George Foreman grills and other such small appliances scattered the floor in the two aisles beyond that. Nothing useful that he could see.

  He kept going, creeping away from the windows into the shaded side of the store where the hardware and electronics and pet food all resided. The tools probably held some value, and he may regret not stashing as many away as he could get, but he had enough to last a lifetime it seemed to him. However long that might be.

  He didn’t veer from the main aisle, though, taking a left in the back corner to make his way past the shoes and women’s underwear on his way back to the front of the store. He hadn’t expected to find anything, and he wasn’t disappointed. This was how it usually went.

  Mannequins sported blouses and slacks to his left and right, a couple wearing dresses or skirts, sweaters slung over their shoulders preppie-style. It seemed weird to see all of them upright here. Back in the men’s department, the mannequins had all been dismembered, stripped bare, limbless stumps lying face down in piles of dress shirts and corduroy pants. A few were even beheaded, someone apparently taking the time to hack and tear the heads away from the bodies, leaving jagged edges along the plastic necks that almost looked like pointy, flesh toned teeth.

  Here in the women’s department, the plastic people all looked pretty sharp, almost to an eerie degree. The dead eyes stared out into the distance. The wrists bent at dainty angles, the pinkie fingers arched just a little. Collar bones peeked out from the neck holes in the shirts.

  The skin between his shoulder blades crawled as he walked among them. Some part of him demanded that he stop here, plant his feet right there on the white tiles and listen. He kept going. It was nonsense, of course. An irrational urge. What would he even be listening for?

  The voices rang out then, indistinct, the syllables all swallowed and washed out by the echoes circling the large empty space. They sounded hollow. He couldn’t make out a single word, nor could he place the noise at all in terms of what direction it came from. He knew the sound, though, knew that rise and fall, almost sing-song melody of a woman’s voice. Two of them, in fact, conversing.

  His eyes snapped to the lips of the nearest mannequin. He didn’t know where else to look. The plastic mouth held still, of course.

  His feet had halted, a fact he didn’t realize at first. He stood. He listened. That crawling skin on his upper back spread to his neck and shoulders and trailed down the backs of his arms.

  When the echo of his last shoe scuff died out, no more voices filled the air. Only silence. Jesus, was he going crazy? Again?

  He scanned the mannequins once more, looking for the open mouth, the pursed lips, any tiny mannerism that might hint at having just spoken. Every face wore the same blank expression as always, though.

  Were the voices even real? Did his brain conjure them, freaking out upon seeing the mannequins and reaching out for any sign of companionship? Even if it had to make some up?

  He brought a hand to his head and scrubbed his fingers at his forehead and down the bridge of his nose. He felt a strange pressure just behind that hard candy shell he called a skull, the force of all of that time alone building up and up until it couldn’t be contained any longer. Is that what this was, the pressure finding release by creating figments of sound?

  He closed his eyes and tried to stop himself from listening, from straining his ears to catch the next auditory hallucination, tried to will himself to let it go.

  “Just a quick look is all. It could be fun.”

  OK, that was a real voice. It had to be, and it sounded like it came from the grocery department. His eyes opened, eyelashes fluttering a few times. The mannequins didn’t even blink.

  He moved back the way he came, sliding the assault rifle from his shoulder to his hands and carrying it in front of himself at chest level.

  He walked in a diagonal line, crouched just a little, veering around racks of bras and tank tops. He would flank them, try to guess their trajectory and cut them off from the side. He thought that gave him the best chance to get close enough to see them without being noticed. It certainly sounded like two women talking, but they could be armed and hostile, and there could be more among them.

  The voices prattled on, though he couldn’t make out the words anymore. He figured the one snippet of dialog he’d heard must have come from some kind of acoustical sweet spot that allowed the sound to cut through right to him. Now the syllables were back to being a muffled, hollow mess. Like when someone talking into a PA got too close to the microphone, everything distorted and fuzzy-sounding and indecipherable, all of the syllables bleeding together into muddy mush.

  He moved through the pet department now. All of the areas that had housed cans of cat and dog food had been stripped down to the metal shelves. Too bad for his kitty, he thought. The racks of dog toys remained intact almost entirely, though. Little squirrel and skunk and raccoon shaped rag dolls with squeakers in the tails, tennis-ball-looking creations shaped like bones. He imagined dogs had less need for such things these days. Big groups of them had probably banded together in half-feral packs by now, roaming the city and countryside to pillage and play with anything they wanted.

  The voices grew louder. Each step brought a touch more clarity, though most of the words were still lost in the echoes. Still two women. He could tell that. And they seemed upbeat. Secure. They sure weren’t trying to hide. Talking this loudly either meant that they were armed or a little dim, he thought. He didn’t know which was better. Unarmed people were less likely to kill him, of course, but if they were truly dim, that made them unlikely to be much use to him.

  He looped back into the kitchen wares, squatting over a package of cracked glassware, the lines of shattered glass partially obscuring Rachael Ray’s face on the paper insert, little shattered explosions bursting out of her eyes in a way that struck him as demonic in the half-light.

  They were close and getting closer. He could hear their footsteps now, scuffs and clacks and echoes. It was hard to be sure, but he was feeling more and more confident that it was just the two of them. That was good.

  The electricity climbed up his spine now, the heat flushing his neck and face and head, that boiled water feeling like he’d experienced back at the military camp. His hand twitched, index finger stroking and settling on the trigger, a feeling like a cold spark coming off of the gun when he touched it there.

  He could hear them full on now, but his brain couldn’t quite process the words. Not with that heat seething in his cranium like that. It reduced the world to images and feelings, blocking words out for later use.

  He lifted the gun and pinched one eye closed, staring down the barrel. He sighted the weapon on the white stuff in the middle of a huge Oreo on a poster at the end of one aisle. It seemed that’s where their path would cross his line of sight — the cookie aisle — and he would be ready.

  Vibrations thrummed in his chest, and the familiarity of the moment made pictures open in his imagination. Memories. The soldier’s heads coming apart in slow motion, bone shattering, brain liquefying, blood spraying in a fine mist, and then the movie reversed, and all of the pieces reformed, the soldiers were made whole, the backs of their heads facing him, motionless.

  He licked his lips, and the salty taste of his sweat brought him back to the immediate moment. The soldiers vanished, and the giant Oreo retook its place at the forefront of his thoughts.

  It occurred to him that he was smiling, that silent puffs of laughter were exiting his nostrils in
a steady rhythm as he fingered the trigger of the gun and waited for new people to appear.

  Jesus, what was wrong with him? What was wrong with a person stimulated by these kinds of things, he wondered. The thought of other people — other wackos out there — sharing these feelings, being like him, caught him off guard. It wiped the smile off of his face.

  His chest quivered, trembling hardest when his ribcage swelled at the apex of the inhale, and as he focused on this tremor, his breathing sped up, and he blinked a few times, and it sped up some more. He grit his teeth and lowered his weapon, let the barrel rest on his knee.

  He was hyperventilating, his vision already flickering to black blurs along the edges. Here he was, seconds away from seeing people, seeing women in particular, for the first time since before the winter, and he was going to flop to the floor in an unconscious pile before it even happened.

  His breath caught in his throat, gagging him. Instinct pulled his hands to his neck, and the gun clattered to the floor.

  The voices cut off in the distance right away. They could hear him, he knew.

  He slumped forward, his head leaned against the lip of a shelf, his legs pinned under the limp weight of his upper body. He tried to adjust, to find some balance or at least push his legs out to the side to recline in a way that was comfortable, but his legs only scrabbled beneath him, making no real progress.

  His thoughts clouded now. None of this was quite real. It wasn’t really life, and it wasn’t really death. Something in between.

  A cold hand touched his arm and brought him a little flash of consciousness.

  “Too young for a heart attack, I’d think.”

  “It could be a panic attack.”

  “His eyes are open now.”

  “Are you OK, sir? We’re here to help you.”

  He looked up at them, only seeing two tear-blurred silhouettes, but it looked like they had wings in that moment. Different wings, though. The closer had feathery wings, angel wings, but the other had fleshy flaps almost like lizard skin, like a pterodactyl, maybe. He blinked and the mirage disappeared. He’d intended to say something, but whatever the words had been, they fled from his thoughts.