The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  Looking past them, he saw the traffic light swaying on the line, the source of the noise. The breeze pushed it like a kid on a swing, and every time it reached the apex of its arc, it squawked in delight and swung back the other way. That would fall, too, he thought. Not today. But one day, it would fall and bust apart on the street.

  Decay was inevitable. A matter of time alone.

  “How much farther?” Delfino said, that aggressive edge not quite so prominent in his voice as it was before but still there.

  “It’s just up here,” the man said, looking back at them for a second.

  Baghead searched the stranger’s face for signs of deceit or treachery, but he found none. His expression was blank, perhaps a faint hint of alarm in his eyes being open so wide. Or was it possible his eyes just looked wide, an illusion formed by the dirt surrounding the whites? He wasn’t sure.

  Still, there was something about his eyes. They seemed to follow you, he thought. Even when the stranger seemingly wasn’t looking his direction, it felt that way.

  “There’s a little building up here, almost like a warehouse. That’s Al’s shop. Loaded with scavenged tires and car parts. I know the guy who runs the place, Al Nolan. Everyone around here knows him, I guess. Nice enough guy. I don’t know if he’ll be happy about us rolling up to his place armed like this, but I’ll explain the situation to him, I guess.”

  He trailed off, and the sound of the fire made itself audible. A hiss, a crackle somewhere out there. Probably only a few blocks off now, Baghead thought.

  “How do you know the guy will be here?” Delfino said.

  The stranger shrugged.

  “I don’t. Not for sure. He should be, I expect. He lives in the building, does all of his business there.”

  The man stumbled again, jostling to his left and high-stepping to avoid planting a foot into a scattered area of broken glass. It took him a few paces to right himself, to fall back into a steady gait.

  Baghead found his left hand on the butt of his gun as he watched the stranger put one foot in front of the other. It occurred to him that he didn’t like this. Didn’t like any of it. The walk into a burning city, the smell of it melting, the stranger and his sudden movements and his eyes that followed a person around. He thought about saying something. He knew he should, but he didn’t. He let the feeling linger a moment on the tip of his tongue and then recede into the endless roar of the fire in the distance.

  Decker

  Dundalk, Maryland

  295 days after

  The dead thing stood, still concealed from the waist down by the bushes. Its face was shriveled up like a prune, mouth hanging wide, teeth all green with mold-like growth. The flesh on its arms looked all opened up and scabbed over, dried-out wounds that looked like beef jerky with tattered hot dog skin stretched over it.

  Decker raised his weapon, waiting for the creature to come thrashing at him, but it just stood there, eyes angled toward the ground. It hadn’t seen him, at least not yet. He watched it a while through one eye, staring at the dim looking creature down the barrel of the M4.

  He hadn’t seen one since the FEMA camp, though some of the recruits from Virginia said there were hordes wandering around to the south. He found that notion hard to swallow. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the people so much as that he couldn’t quite picture it. Not in the real world, anyway. Looking at a single one was still hard to process, hard to believe, let alone packs of dead things roving around like rabid animals.

  Maybe things like this were exactly why people were still so gung-ho to believe in the divine powers of Ray Dalton. He hadn’t considered that, but it made sense. Reanimated corpses had a way of changing the order of one’s beliefs, of course. Seeing something that looked like pure evil, like some kind of black magic, made one want to grasp after some kind of good magic to balance things out. Was it called white magic? He didn’t know.

  Its hands twitched. The movement shook him from his thoughts, refocused him on the living dead thing some fifteen feet from him. Its head snapped up, dead eyes locking onto Decker’s person, its gaze swinging from his chest up to his face. An enraged expression further wrinkled its face, and right on cue, Decker squeezed the trigger, putting a round in its head.

  Brains and black blood burst out of the back of its skull, and the force of that pushed the limp thing forward. The broken eggshell head crunched on the ground.

  A little breeze drifted past, rolling in off the water, and the moving air brushed the wet places along his back and forehead and chest, lighting up that cold sweat tickle all over his body. He lowered the gun and pinched his thumb and forefinger at his top lip, the perspiration there gathering on his fingertips and dripping to the sidewalk as he pulled his hand away.

  He walked up to the thing, gave it a little kick, jamming the toe of his shoe into its ribcage a couple of times. Probably best to make sure this second death would stick, he figured. He waited a beat, and the thing lay motionless, which seemed to affirm that it had graduated to a deader form of death. Less walking and biting this way.

  He bashed out another window, not taking two steps into this next house before he found a pistol and two boxes of ammo lying on the dining room table. In his mind, that all but proved that no one had gone through any of the houses in this neighborhood. Nobody would leave a gun. Nobody.

  He glanced through the kitchen, finding more food – a menagerie of ramen packets and three boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. A jar of hot salsa that he was almost tempted to keep for himself. Several more cans of vegetables and soups, too, of course.

  He wanted to move quickly now, opting to forego marking his sheet and just spray painting the door. F for food and W for weapon. He jogged up the stairs, using the banister for leverage and taking two steps at a time.

  The hallway floor groaned underfoot as he peaked into two bedrooms up there. Nothing fancy here. Beds. Clothes. A Nordic Track. A flat screen plasma TV that was worth less than a can of ravioli these days.

  One more door. He tried the knob. Locked. Of course.

  He turned back, looked at the stairs at the far end of the hall. He could just go, leave this closed door for one of the bigger teams to check when they came this way to haul everything out.

  Nah. He better do it right, he thought. If not out of duty, out of a sense of curiosity.

  He swiveled back toward the door, and placed his hand on the wood. It was thin. Light. Comprised of veneers rather than solid wood. Good. This wouldn’t be too difficult.

  He leaned his gun up against the wall to his right, the barrel tucked against the molding on a diagonal, and then he stretched. He arched his chest, rotating one shoulder and then the other. Something in his back crunched.

  OK. Go time.

  He drove his shoulder into the door. The wood popped and cracked, though it didn’t quite give. The second thrust buckled it, bits of wood flying as he burst into the bathroom, losing his balance and stumbling a few paces before catching himself, his hands gripping the edge of the vanity.

  Red the shade of wine caught the corner of his eye, and he gasped, scrambling back away from it, working himself into the corner before he got ahold of himself.

  A body lay propped up in the bathtub, a shotgun nestled between its legs, barrel still pointing at the blown out skull above it, a shattered mess of maroon and brown and white, a congealed splatter where the head should be. The thing had withered in time, its t-shirt and jeans all loose around the limbs and torso. Bone and mummified bits of flesh were all that were left. It’d been here months, he would guess.

  He imagined for a moment what this scene might have been like had there been water in the tub. He’d be looking at skeleton soup right now, most likely. His first priority was to bring back large guns such as this. That meant he would have had to reach into the gelatinous broth comprised of the rendered fat of one human body to fish out the shotgun.

  He shuddered, shoulders jerking.

  That imagined bathtub picture made
the idea of reaching into the dry tub seem not as bad, so he did it, holding his breath as he reached for the gun, one skeletal leg shifting when he picked it up. He felt the heft of the weapon in his hands, which was somehow satisfying. Maybe it made his effort here seem worth it. Either way… Good. Done. He moved for the door.

  He couldn’t help but hesitate in the doorway, though, to take one last glance at the headless body. The arms lay at a strangely limp angle. He pictured them flopping to the sides after the shotgun blast, falling to the porcelain, perhaps bouncing once before they settled into their final pose.

  He grabbed his assault rifle on his way toward the stairs.

  Erin

  Triadelphia, West Virginia

  262 days after

  Overhead, the vultures circled in slow motion. They were patient birds. Always hung up there in the sky, always in motion, gliding without effort, loop after loop. Erin couldn’t help but think of them as the same group of birds all the way from Presto to here, but she knew that couldn’t be true.

  Izzy made a throat clearing noise and then spit a big wad of saliva over the concrete barrier. She and Marcus were trying to see who could get the biggest splat on the highway below.

  Erin crossed to the other side of the overpass and took in the view. Directly below was a Pizza Hut. Not exactly an image she’d put on a postcard. But beyond that, beyond the intersection with the crumpled cars, and the strip mall past that, beyond the suburban still life, the forested hills surrounded them.

  She followed the blue sky up and up until she was leaning her head all the way back, staring straight up into the blue. Spotless accept for a trio of black shapes circling. One of the spots grew bigger, closer, until it swooped past, landing on the road below. The vulture twitched its shoulders as it settled into its feast.

  Erin watched as the bird dipped its head and picked at the corpse.

  Fairly fresh-looking. Fresher than the half-mummified bags of bones they’d become accustomed to seeing after a winter of exposure, at least.

  It bothered her for some reason, this fresh-er corpse. Something buzzed past her right elbow, interrupting her train of thought.

  The whizzing sound ended with a little pop as it disappeared into the towering stack of bags in the bed of the pickup truck just behind her.

  Kitty litter pooled on the ground. She followed the trickle upward to a bag that seemed to have spontaneously sprung a leak. Her boot knocked into the little mountain of clay pellets at her feet as she stepped closer.

  The hole in the bag was about the size of her finger. She poked a thumb into the hole, jabbed around. When she pulled her hand away, the bag ripped open further. Kitty litter avalanched out of the bag, and she hopped back a step to keep it from getting all over her boots.

  As she stepped, that sound again. A high pitched ZIP! And then a mini-explosion of kitty litter. A spray of tiny clay bits hit her face. She squinted and put her hand up to shield herself, but the spontaneous cat litter explosion seemed to have subsided for the time being. She blinked her eyes open and saw the hour-glass-like stream of kitty litter coming from a second bag.

  “What the shit?” Erin muttered to herself. Spontaneously-combusting kitty litter?

  The first bag, the one she’d half-ripped open, had almost emptied its contents by then. Something from the depths of the bag plinked against the side of the truck, hit the ground, and rolled behind the back tire.

  She squatted next to the truck. As she did so, another sound like someone aggressively zipping up a jacket. And then another hole spewing kitty litter.

  She scooted closer to the vehicle, pressing her shoulder to the side of the truck and patting around being the tire until she felt something small and hard. And oddly warm.

  Plucking the object from the concrete, she stood. She held it in the palm of her hand and brought it closer to her face to study it.

  It was a piece of metal, misshapen and almost melted-looking. She rolled it around in the palm of her hand.

  “Almost looks like a-”

  Before she could finish the sentence another ZZZZZZ and a THUNK. Closer this time. Eye-level.

  “-bullet.”

  She stared at the new hole now leaking kitty litter.

  “Bullet!”

  She hunched down and scrambled around the front of the truck.

  “Get down!”

  Marcus and Izzy turned from their position.

  “What?” Marcus said.

  Erin pulled at them until they obeyed, joining her on hands and knees.

  “Someone is shooting at us!”

  “Like… with a gun?”

  “Yes, with a gun! How else would I mean it?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because a fucking bullet just whizzed past my head!”

  “Lang-”

  Erin stuck a finger out.

  “Don’t you dare Language me right now. There are no rules when someone is shooting at you.”

  They sat there for a while, staring at each other.

  “Maybe they think we’re zombies,” Izzy said.

  “What’s your point?”

  “We could show them we’re not zombies.”

  “How? By not eating each other’s brains?”

  There were no more bullet sounds. Just the noise of kitty litter sprinkling down to the pavement. Rocky started to chirp at them from Marcus’ shoulder, and he quieted her with a sunflower seed.

  “What should we do?” he asked.

  Erin had her gun in hand now, and she looked down at the polished metal.

  “I say we grab our bags and go. That way,” she said, pointing at a sparse cluster of trees. “I’m not a hundred percent sure where they were shooting from, but I think that angle would give us the most cover, and then we could hide in the woods.”

  “What about the bikes?”

  Erin patted the black frame of her trusty steed.

  “I think we have to leave them.”

  “What?” Izzy’s mouth hung open.

  “We can’t ride them off this bridge with someone shooting at us. And now I’m starting to think maybe the road isn’t safe at all. If that jagweed had better aim, he would have blown my head off.”

  “But how are we going to carry everything?”

  Erin followed Izzy’s gaze and saw that the kid was already trying to figure out how to bring Mall Mania along.

  “We can’t.”

  Precious seconds ticked by while they muttered and whispered through their plan. Marcus and Izzy each slung a backpack over a shoulder and crawled to one corner of the overpass. They slid beyond the guardrail and waited for Erin to pass them more gear.

  Back at the bikes, she struggled to loosen the ties on the duffel bag Marcus had strapped to his bike. She picked at the knot in the twine with her fingernails, before remembering she had a Swiss Army Knife in her pocket.

  She flicked the knife out.

  Just then, the unmistakable rumble of an engine broke the silence.

  Her head snapped up automatically. Like a zebra startled by a rustling in the grass. It sounded like a motorcycle.

  “Shit.”

  She put metal to twine and snapped the first tie on the bag.

  “Erin!”

  Marcus was at the guardrail, pressing his face between a gap.

  “I know,” she hissed, grasping the second loop of twine. The engine sound was getting closer.

  “Hurry!” he said, and then the twine broke, and Erin was dragging the bag to the edge and hurling it over. Marcus caught the bag, dropped it, and then tried to catch Erin as she vaulted over. Dry grass crunched as she landed, and then Marcus dragged her by a jacket sleeve under the bridge.

  Every sound echoed in the cement cavern underneath.

  “What’d you do with all the extra bags?”

  Marcus gestured to where the sloped sides of the underpass met the edge of the bridge. Izzy popped up from behind a cement barrier, Rocky perched on her shoulder.

  “It’s
all back here,” she said.

  Erin nodded then gave an impatient wave of her hand. She could tell now that it wasn’t just one engine she was hearing. It was many.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here before the psycho motorcycle gang shows up.”

  The three of them crawled in single file through the overgrown grass up the hill and into the woods.

  Deirdre

  The Hole

  9 years, 67 days after

  She waited. Listened. Tried to let her eyes adjust to the black. She played with the little cylinder in her hand, fingernail scratching at the smooth wall of it.

  The mask lay on the table next to her. She’d thought about leaving it on, but what for? It made no difference now what he saw or didn’t see.

  Her heart beat faster in her chest, that sick feeling of anticipation, of doubt, roiling in her guts. All of the planning, all of the hours of surveillance, had led to this moment. The final wait was excruciating.

  The lantern’s light amounted to an orange fleck the size of a dime. It didn’t provide enough light to even illuminate the curved glass encasing it. It seemed to be floating before her rather than sitting on the table – a disembodied ember that hovered just below eye level.

  It was weird, she thought, how this had all started in this little shed in the woods, and it would all end here as well. She never could have seen any of this coming, for her or for anyone else involved. Everything had changed when the lightning flashed to reveal that sopping girl in the doorway.

  No storm tonight, at least. That cool fall humidity had rolled in instead. The kind that made her breath feel heavy and cold in her chest, made all of the grass wet enough to drench her robe up to the ankles on the walk here.

  Was that…?

  She froze, held her breath for a long moment, listening again.

  Nothing.

  It’d been a long time – three hours, she thought – since she whispered in his ear next to the fire. She’d stayed patient, kept her doubts at bay all this time, but they surged in her now.

  She’d thought about whether or not he’d try to bring a posse to get her, to tie up this loose end once and for all, but she doubted that. He seemed more comfortable solving his problems with women in private, placing his hands upon them. In fact, he didn’t seem to consort with other men much at all. She was hoping that both of those observed traits would hold true here.