The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  Marcus gave Erin a look, and they both started laughing. Eventually Izzy joined in, even though she had no sense of what was funny about it. Rocky scurried out of Marcus’ hoodie and squawked angrily from his shoulder, upset at having her nap interrupted. Or maybe she was laughing, too.

  “Bum Fudge Egypt!” Izzy repeated. “It doesn’t even make sense! Marcus, you’re weird.”

  Erin laughed harder then, the kind of laugh that barely made a sound. Only the wheezing of air being forced in and out of her lungs was audible.

  When she could finally catch her breath, she wiped the tears from her eyes and stood, brushing dirt from the seat of her pants.

  “Better get back on the road. We need to find somewhere to sleep tonight.”

  Something sparkled in the distance. As they got closer, Erin saw that it was the elbow of a creek, a jutting curve that didn’t quite touch the road but came close. She didn’t even have to tell Izzy to stop, the kid was already braking as soon as she caught sight of the rippling water. By the time Erin had her kickstand down, Izzy was peeling off her socks and wading in.

  “Don’t get too wet,” Erin said, but it was too late.

  Izzy stepped on a river rock, slick with algae, and lost her footing. Her hair fluttered in the breeze for a moment that seemed to Erin to be in slow motion. And then she went under.

  Without a word, Marcus dropped his bike, vaulted the guardrail at the side of the road, and went in after her, shoes and all.

  He splashed through the water, got a hand on one of Izzy’s skinny, flailing arms, and pulled her upright. Together they waded to shore, and Erin took in the sight of them, clothes sodden and dripping.

  “Two soggy idiots.”

  Marcus slipped into a copse of birch trees to get changed while Erin helped Izzy with her wet clothes. She took the wet ones and draped them over the bikes, looping Izzy’s underwear over her handlebars.

  “Hey, you don’t have to put my undies right out front like that.”

  “It’s your mark of shame for falling into the water like a turkey.”

  Once everyone was dried off and changed, they sat on the bank of the creek, sharing a box of scavenged off-brand Cheez-Its.

  Erin watched Marcus out of the corner of her eye and thought maybe he was right. Maybe they were better off as a group.

  She pulled an orange cracker from the bag and held it out to the squirrel on his shoulder. Rocky took the cheese square and hugged it to her chest, nibbling and vocalizing happily.

  Marcus

  West Alexander, Pennsylvania

  261 days after

  The sun was setting by the time they found a roof to shelter them for the night, the sky streaked with bands of orange and pink.

  It was an old farm house, standing alone on a hill. Judging by the peeling paint, broken windows, and encroaching plant-life, Marcus figured the house must have had a head start on its abandonment. One side was almost completely shrouded in ivy.

  Inside, the walls were littered with spray-painted graffiti, the floors with empty beer cans and cigarette butts.

  Marcus thought back on the first time he squatted in an abandoned building. That house on Percy Street, over by the Catholic Church. It was where the junkies went when they were too high to get into the mission. Or when the mission was full. Marcus couldn’t go to the mission. Not because he was high. He never touched any of that stuff. But he was only fourteen and looked it. He wasn’t sure they’d call the cops on him, but he wasn’t going to take the chance. There was no way he was going back to the home.

  Sometimes he thought about trying to get one of the older guys to lie and say he was his son or brother. But he was too shy. And too afraid one of them might expect something in return.

  “Hellooo?”

  Marcus’ eye sprang open. Erin and Izzy were both staring at him. Izzy looked amused. Erin’s arms were crossed. There was a wrinkle in her forehead… from concern or irritation, he wasn’t sure. She must have asked him a question.

  “What?”

  “I was going to ask you to keep an eye out while I check the rest of this place. But if you’re going to space out-”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Erin went off to skulk through the house. Marcus, Izzy, and Rocky stayed in the living room. Izzy practiced her “sweet moves,” just like he showed her. Meanwhile, Marcus tried to push the memories he didn’t want out of his head.

  Yeah. Right. Might as well waste his time trying to seal this house from a draft. It had no windows and no doors, and time left cracks and gaps in the flooring and the wood siding. Just as the wind would always find ways to creep into the old house, the memories always found their way back into Marcus’ head.

  He tracked Erin’s progress on the floor above them by the creaking of the floorboards under her feet. She was quiet enough that he couldn’t hear her actual footfalls, but she couldn’t stop the old wood from groaning under her weight. If he didn’t know she was up there, he might have thought it was a ghost.

  The unfamiliar noises reminded him of the first night in the home. Just as he’d start to drift off to sleep, a door would close somewhere down the hall and jar him awake. Footsteps echoing in the hallway. Not Nina’s footsteps. Not Nina’s hallway.

  Then there were the other noises. The birds and the leaves and the wind.

  It made him think of the time Nina took him to pick tomatoes. They drove out of the city, out to where there were no tall buildings, no buses, no sidewalks. Just trees and dust and the chirping birds. There was another sound, too. Something he couldn’t place.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise? The birds?”

  “No, it’s a little bit like the birds, but more mechanical.”

  Nina tilted her head, listening. He imagined the sounds floating in her ears, her mind separating them from one another like it was unraveling strands of yarn. Her eyebrows came together.

  “The crickets?”

  Marcus shrugged.

  “You’ve never heard crickets before?”

  Marcus shrugged again.

  “Maybe in movies and TV, but they didn’t sound like that.”

  At the little stand, a blond girl with freckles on her cheeks handed them each a wooden basket. Marcus wondered if she thought Nina was his mother. He liked when people thought that, even with the twinge of guilt that his real mama maybe wouldn’t like that so much. But she was gone now, so it didn’t matter.

  They picked all morning and into the afternoon, filling their baskets. Marcus didn’t know what they needed so many tomatoes for, but he liked being out there. He liked the way the sun warmed the back of his neck. The way the grass tickled against his ankles as he brushed past.

  Back at Nina’s house, she got to work. Cutting, chopping, blending, canning.

  Marcus peered into the bowl, scooping some of the red pulp into a spoon and dribbling it back in.

  “What is it?”

  “That,” Nina said, pointing at the bowl with a paring knife, “is the best salsa in the whole dang country.”

  “Is it hot?”

  Nina laughed.

  “Hell yes, it’s hot. It’s not salsa if it ain’t hot!”

  “How hot?”

  Nina grinned now.

  “Why don’t you try it and see?”

  He sniffed at the gloop, smelling the onion and cilantro and the lime.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Nina said. “You eat a spoonful of that — a big ol’ spoonful — and I’ll take you down to the corner store and give you five bucks to buy whatever you want.”

  Marcus’ eyes went wide. Five bucks bought a lot of candy. He eyed the salsa again and lifted the spoon.

  She wasn’t joking about it being hot. And it crept up on you, too. He did like she said, ate a big ol’ spoon of it. At first, he just tasted the tomatoes and spices. But a second later his lips were on fire, and then his tongue and his throat, and he was running to the sink and gulping cold water straight from the tap.
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  Nina clapped her hands, laughing. Marcus laughed too, spraying water from his mouth as he did. Nina had a good laugh. A witchy cackle. But not a mean witch. More like a funny cartoon one.

  “You sure you don’t want some more?” She held out another spoonful. Marcus shook his head so fast, he almost got dizzy. Nina laughed again.

  “Alrighty, you go get your shoes on. You earned your five dollars.”

  His eyes were still watering from the heat and the laughing, but he was smiling. He tied his shoes while Nina got her pocketbook. On the way to the store, Nina chuckled about how she could just about see the steam coming out of Marcus’ ears after that spoon hit his lips.

  In the old farm house, Marcus’ eyes were watering but not from salsa or laughter. He swallowed the lump in his throat and wiped the tears away quickly when he heard Erin’s feet on the stairs.

  He had learned something over the years, and that was that the good memories hurt worse than the bad ones.

  Decker

  Baltimore, Maryland

  295 days after

  Time slipped past. It seemed to move faster now that he was around people, the constant distractions eating up hour after hour. Some days it felt like he barely woke up before it was time for bed.

  Physically, he was quite busy. He’d transitioned from labor to training for scavenging missions and attending meetings about the same. Mentally, though, he could stay half asleep all day without anyone noticing, without anyone caring.

  Of course people talked to him about the raiders and the grenades and the Molotov cocktails. They called him a hero and wanted to have a drink with him. All of the attention made him uncomfortable, made his upper back tense up and not let go. He’d never experienced these shallow interactions, these strings of meaningless encounters. They gave him nightmares, anxiety dreams where people clapped him on the back and smiled and called him a hero over and over, and he couldn’t get away from them.

  Everyone wanted to talk at him, not with him, and he didn’t have the social skills to do anything about it. He just had to endure it.

  By the time he got his first real scavenging assignment, he was glad to go back out on his own.

  Nothing moved in the city. Nothing but him. He parked at a Krispy Kreme on the edge of Baltimore and walked. He’d taken the car as far as he could, weaving from side to side, even veering up onto the sidewalk a few times to get around all of the obstacles in the road. His supervisors at the compound had told him that the street congestion in Baltimore was worse than most cities, and it seemed they were right about that.

  He felt no sense of wonder as he walked into this concrete wasteland, not like he might have before, back when all of this began. He had his list of things he was to look for, and all he wanted to do was find them, grab what he could, and get out. Be done with the whole thing as fast as possible.

  And if anything got in his way? Well, he had his M4 with him.

  It was easier to pick out a clear path on foot, but he still had to wind around bodies and debris. Garbage and glass and brick drifted like snow piles along much of the sidewalk, getting up over ankle deep in spots. He couldn’t imagine how this much crap could be strewn about here, like everyone emptied their garbage cans directly onto the sidewalk for a few weeks.

  Skeletal hands and feet stuck out of the trash heaps here and there, and he couldn’t help but imagine bony fingers closing around his ankle, pulling him down into the garbage like quicksand.

  Smashed and burned cars clogged the streets, shattered windshields obscuring the dead within. Many of the cars almost looked chained together, forever stuck in clusters of four or six where front ends smashed into rear ends. The cars sandwiched in the middle looked small, hoods and trunks smashed almost flat. Almost square.

  Corpses sprawled here and there along the asphalt and concrete, dried-out things, all bone and sinew and tattered clothes. He had seen one in a residential area he sped past, face down in some front yard with moss growing up onto the neck and the back of the skull.

  These dead didn’t smell. Not anymore. They’d laid out here for a fall, a winter, a spring and now they started their second summer. They were weathered. Aged. The bones had been picked clean of all but the gristle by now, he supposed, the connective tissue and meat that grew too dry to consume. It was still weird to think of all of those people whose entire lives led to this end. Roadkill. Sprawled in the sun. Meat to feed the rats and the birds. Each day of their life had taken them one step closer to that surprise ending.

  Now even the birds were gone. Food doesn’t grow out of concrete, so the animals wandered elsewhere. People, rodents, carrion, cats, and dogs. Even insects. They feasted on the dead and moved on. All of them. All manner of predators and prey and scavengers went to the green areas, the rural places where life grew out of the ground instead of coming out of cans and boxes and bottles and jars. Cities wound up being the deadest places of all in the aftermath. Stone ruins waiting to erode and crumble, waiting for the ivy and vines and grass and trees to overtake them once more, to cover the whole thing over in green.

  As he moved closer to downtown, the buildings on the horizon grew and grew. Skyscrapers that had looked miniature on the drive in now towered over him. The cityscape reminded him of old times. Hard to believe it had been so long now. Almost a year had passed since he’d first walked through Pittsburgh, the wind howling down the empty streets, the flies buzzing everywhere. That old feeling crept over him, of a future unknown, of being alone in an empty world.

  In most ways that was still true even now, wasn’t it? He kept to himself at the compound. Stayed in his cabin most of the time. Aside from the couple of times Lorraine sat with him in the cafeteria, he ate alone. He felt outside of things there, maybe more so than ever. That part of the world wasn’t empty, but it may as well have been, at least for him.

  But physical loneliness, like what he was feeling in the vacant city now, took it to another level of intensity. Currents pulsed through him in a way that made it almost hurt to be alive. To breathe. To blink. It made him feel smaller, too, a tiny speck traversing a huge, open space. The sky stretched up above him, an endless void, an expanse so vast that it seemed capable of crushing him with little effort if it chose to.

  Most everything downtown was burned or blackened. Soot coated brick facades, dark streaks running out of every window where the smoke billowed up and away. Traffic lights lay in the street where the fires had dropped them after burning down the telephone poles and cables, all of the pieces falling on each other like dominoes, toppling to the ground in a crisscrossed broken mess.

  Apparently the riots here had ranked among the worst in the country. The city burned and shut down before the plague caused full on panic everywhere else. He vaguely remembered hearing about it on the news. There was so much going on that it barely registered, though. The details didn’t stick in his memory.

  Looking at the burned out structures reminded him of the apartment building across the street from his, watching the flames lick out of every opening, watching clusters of brick crack away and fall to the sidewalk below, watching in the dark when the ceiling collapsed and the sparks exploded, red flashes in the black of night. After, the sunlight streamed through the windows, light passing through where the roof used to be, and the wind moaned through the openings as well, a low whistling like an owl or someone blowing across the top of a beer bottle.

  But here, all of the buildings were like that. Block after block of wreckage. It looked like a war zone, a bombed-out third world city.

  In the briefing, he was told that the east side of the city was the least scavenged as far as they knew. A map riddled with pushpins hung on the wall, and the suburbs east of Baltimore formed a cluster of blue – unchecked regions. The boss guy with the mustache kept tapping a pencil at that blue cluster. There were two men in charge of the group. He couldn’t remember their names. Everyone’s understanding was that because of the nature of the blockages, and one section in red p
ins that was to be avoided due to some small risk of hostile activity, it may require climbing over and around cars on a bridge to gain access to the zone marked with blue pins. They seemed hopeful that he could find propane tanks and perhaps even a significant number of guns in the residential area over there. They weren’t as optimistic about gasoline, as most of the gas stations had been sucked dry quickly, but they wanted him to check that, too. Anyway, he was to grab what he could, but one guy on foot wasn’t going to haul much. Everyone knew that. It was a recon mission. He was to find a secure route and record a log of the available resources.

  Rick, maybe. The mustache guy might have been named Rick. It sounded right. Kind of.

  He tilted the assault rifle to better balance it in his right hand while he scratched his chin with his left. He couldn’t quite satisfy the itch, so he switched hands, pinning the muzzle of the gun under his left arm and taking the fingernails of his other hand to that pesky chin flesh. Something about this position, this cradling of an automatic weapon in his armpit, made him laugh when he realized what he was doing.

  The quiet was starting to get to him in that weird way it did. Not making him more uptight or more on edge. Just the opposite. Making him feel alone in the way people did when they sang in the shower or talked to themselves. That crazy sensation of your inner self coming all the way out, expressing itself in the open, without inhibition. Almost like walking around in a dream.

  Thinking about that only made it worse somehow. He had the giggles, the full on hallucinogenic kind, and he knew it was only going to get worse from there.

  The grim atmosphere turned hilarious right away. The burned buildings. The trash pile lining the sidewalk. The total lack of life aside from him. It was depressing to an absurd degree.

  The skeletal faces all smiled along with him, bony hands folded over chests to stifle the laughter. They all just lied down for a little cat nap was all. Sprawled out to get comfy. Some of them covered themselves in garbage for warmth.