The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  “Fourteen years, sir. I was in accident when I was little. A car accident, I mean. My daddy’s van got sideswiped by a drunk driver. We rolled. Broke both of my daddy’s arms. Paralyzed me from the waist down.”

  Her eyes looked far away while she talked, and her voice took on a distance that matched her expression. Like she was half here in the room and half back in that somersaulting van.

  He let the quiet linger when she was done talking, and her face stayed in that place. Not all the way here.

  She was a good actress. He couldn’t help but be impressed. They hadn’t rehearsed this scene at all, though Lorraine had surely run through the basic setup with her a number of times.

  She blinked a few times, seeming to return to the here and now. Her mouth curled into a smile again, but she had the saddest look in her eyes. Crazy how someone could just turn something like that on.

  “Have you ever thought about what it might be like to leave that chair behind?”

  Her forehead wrinkled.

  “I dream of it most nights. The same dream, always. I run through a field, and it’s like the whole world goes into slow motion. My legs flex and pump like springs underneath me, my knees absorbing the bumps like the shocks on a car. And the balls of my feet pound against the grass, mashing it down.”

  “Well, I can’t promise you that your dream will come true. I can’t. But I can promise you one thing. We can try. I’ve seen miracles in my time, more than a few. Wouldn’t mind seeing another one. Would you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

  “Good. That’s good, Alice.”

  The preacher turned to the crowd.

  “If I could ask for total silence for these next few minutes, I’d appreciate it greatly. This requires a great deal of concentration, as you might imagine. If any of y’all want to pray along, I don’t see how it could hurt anything.”

  He turned back to the girl and knelt before her, looking into her eyes for the first time. He just stared at her for a long moment.

  Nobody knew the truth but the three of them. Not even those who lived in the cabins down in the valley. Lorraine had concealed the girl from the followers upon recruiting her. She had foreseen all of it playing this way. The girl had slept up at the house over the past few weeks, practiced with the wheelchair. Ray let her be, for the most part. The whole thing made him uncomfortable, but it was set in motion now. They were way too far downstream to stop.

  He put his right hand on one knee, letting just the fingertips touch and quiver there as though under some great strain. The girl closed her eyes, her forehead once more wrinkling in concentration.

  What did you tell someone to get them to go along with something like this? And was he asking himself that question in regards to the girl or himself? They were both participating, weren’t they? Both culpable.

  He pushed the thought aside. He didn’t know. In some ways, he didn’t want to know.

  Just be done with it, already, he thought.

  His other hand slid to the opposite knee, and now both hands closed around the joints. The kneecaps fit neatly in each palm. He curled his fingers into claws and scrabbled them like spider legs every so often as though somehow losing his grip.

  He arched his back in slow motion, going further and further upright, inflating his lungs so that from the other side of the room it almost looked like he was lifting, ascending, perhaps even levitating a few inches off of the floor for all they could see.

  When his lungs reached maximum inflation, he froze, his body gone rigid and motionless. He held the pose for a long time, a statue of a televangelist placed center stage. And then he exhaled, all of his bulk diminishing at once. His chest deflated, and his posture changed from one full of tension back to his usual cocksure demeanor. He plucked his hands from the girl’s legs, one after the other, and tilted his head as he regarded her.

  Her lips fluttered, little whispered bursts of nonsense escaping them. A nice touch, he thought. He hadn’t pictured this going to a slightly eerie place, but it worked. Based on the breathless atmosphere in the room, he thought the others agreed.

  He gathered himself and got to his feet, brushing at the invisible dust now covering his jacket.

  “Alice.”

  She jerked to attention, hands clutching the armrests of the chair, eyes as wide as possible. Her whispers cut off, and her upper body trembled along with her bottom lip.

  “Stand up, Alice.”

  She shuddered, but otherwise she didn’t move.

  “Rise from that chair. You don’t need it anymore.”

  She flinched at the sound of his voice, her hands now the ones doing the scrabbling, fingers scraping over the plastic and metal for purchase. The room was so quiet. Still. Not one of them in that tent was breathing, Ray thought.

  He raised his voice a little.

  “ALICE.”

  Now she ceased trembling. Her hands stopped squirming. She stared at him, and the look in her eyes had changed. She seemed to have been pulled back from wherever she’d gone to the present moment.

  He let the silence linger for a long moment, his voice much quieter when he spoke again.

  “Stand up.”

  Her head tilted down, eyes pointed at her legs. She blinked twice, those slow motion blinks where one’s eyelids seem to adhere to each other and peel apart as though tacky.

  The right foot shivered and dropped from the footrest to the floor, thumping on impact. The left followed. Now her hands slid to cup the corners of the armrests, all of her weight leaned forward.

  She pushed off, straightening at the waist, and her legs wobbled under her for a second, knees buckling once. She hesitated there for a beat, her top half shimmying over motionless legs like a man balancing on a wire.

  With the first shaky step forward, the audience went apeshit. The standing and applauding was so quick, so spontaneous, that it felt more like someone flipped a switch than something that rippled over the crowd.

  The faces shined so bright out there in the crowd, feelings beaming out from every crease running under a gaping mouth or cluster of wrinkles formed around smiling eyes. Joy. Awe. Belief.

  Ray swallowed and felt that lump bob in his throat again. It was contagious, this kind of response. It gripped him harder than he thought it could.

  And the energy in this room, in this place, swelled in his chest, in his heart, and for a split second he almost believed it, too.

  Almost.

  Erin

  Rural West Virginia

  265 days after

  The thing started to move again, and she pointed the gun at it, ready to shoot if it got back up. An arm reached up, but it was long and brown instead of pale and waterlogged. Marcus struggled out from underneath the dead thing, and she bent to help him.

  “Jesus, I thought you were dead,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and pulling.

  He made it half-way upright before his knees buckled and folded up under him. Each breath came in a wheeze and rasp. He sat back against a metal desk looking dazed, his face speckled with zombie pinata bits.

  Erin had about six thousand things she wanted to say.

  “What the hell happened?” was the best she could muster.

  Izzy bulldozed into her, burying her face in Erin’s chest. She was trembling, crying, breath heaving.

  Erin squeezed her tight.

  “It’s OK. You’re OK.”

  Erin stepped closer to Marcus. He had his head down now, pressed into the palms of his hands. She leaned down to touch his shoulder.

  “Hey.”

  He didn’t look at her, he just kept shaking his head.

  “Marcus.” She increased the pressure on his shoulder and jostled him back and forth. This broke the spell. He gazed up at her, tears in his eyes, head still shaking.

  “Why didn’t you shoot it?”

  After a few more shakes, he finally managed, “I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Just now, despite his tall frame and stubbl
e and the fact that he was basically a grown man, he didn’t look like it. He looked like a scared little boy who just woke up from a nightmare and wanted his mother.

  Erin sighed.

  “It’s OK. We’re all OK.”

  Izzy was tugging at her sleeve now. Erin didn’t turn, just tried to brush it off for the moment.

  “In a second, Iz. Marcus. Where’s the gun?”

  She was talking in that half-pleading, half-soothing tone of an adult trying to reason with a child.

  He blinked a few times, a few lines forming between his eyebrows. The blinking stopped when he remembered. He met her eyes.

  “I dropped it.”

  “Right,” Erin said, trying to maintain patience despite the fact that Marcus was determined to remain in La-La Land and Izzy was still yanking on her arm. “Where? Here?”

  He nodded.

  Erin took a step back, squinting at the ground. It was littered with office furniture and files and bits of paper. And water. Lots of dark puddles of water.

  Izzy’s hold grew more forceful then, pulling her.

  Erin heard a thud and a scrape and then Izzy was screaming.

  “Look out!”

  Before Erin could react, something slammed into her, knocking her off balance. The ground bit into her knees as she fell and something claw-like grasped at her arm. Not Izzy. Erin turned to find another zombie within arm’s reach and more finding their way out from the back of the trailer.

  “Oh shit.”

  She aimed the gun at the one clinging to her already. Fired. Missed. Fired again. Got it. Took the next one out behind that. Another shot exploded the chest of a third, but it kept moving. When Erin tried to shoot again, the gun emitted an innocuous click. She was scrambling backward now, half-crouched, shaking the gun, fiddling with the trigger, and it was another beat before it occurred to her that she was out of bullets.

  Erin shoved Izzy toward the door and started to dart away, but Marcus made no move to follow. She darted back, grasping the shoulder of his jacket and pulling roughly.

  “Come on!”

  For a panicked beat she thought he wasn’t going to snap out of it, and she knew she’d have no choice but to leave him there. But finally, something registered. His eyes slid up to meet hers, and she knew he understood. He pushed himself upright from the floor as the next zombie lurched at them.

  “Go!”

  Ray

  The Compound

  343 days after

  The morning after the wheelchair revival, Ray woke to news that 26 people had arrived at the gates overnight. New recruits. No vehicles among them. They’d all arrived on foot, a few trickling in per hour. They waited, apparently, for admittance, lying around on the grass along the sides of the driveway all night.

  He’d walked down in the morning to see it himself, still wearing his bathrobe. He sipped coffee and looked the refugees over. A couple had sleeping bags, but most just lay on the ground which was now wet with dew.

  They stirred upon seeing him, several walking out onto the driveway and falling on their knees before him. He scuttled away from the gate.

  “Give me a minute head start, and then let them in,” he said to the guard. “We’ll process them in the mess hall.”

  The words came out of his mouth, and he could hear his smile in them, but he didn’t know if the grin was a real one. In fact, he had no idea how he felt about all of this.

  Lorraine beamed over her victory. She had been right all along, of course. Put on a show, give people something to believe, and they will grab ahold of it. Even if no one else joined as a result of this faith healing, it had done the equivalent of two or three weeks of recruiting in one night.

  More did join, though. They streamed in throughout the day.

  He couldn’t help but notice the way they all went bug-eyed as they went on the tour. Their eyes flicked over the cabins and guard towers and the house up on the hill. Crazy eyes, all of them. The energy in the camp seemed to ratchet up into something a little manic, which made him uneasy.

  The tally hit 79 by the time he went to bed. The next day topped it with 107 more. It continued like that for weeks – high double-digit numbers that crept into the low three figures here and there.

  The growth was far too fast for their housing to keep up. A mass of humanity hunkered down in the cafeteria every night, sleeping bags lined up across the floor. Every cabin was crammed full.

  The hammers pounded away once more, full time again, their number multiplying as more workers joined their ranks. Some of the new people had engineering and architecture skills, enough know-how for them to start building cabins, both temporary and permanent, from scratch rather than relying solely on kits as they had before. They expanded into an adjacent field from where the original cabins sat. Thankfully there were several empty lots on the grounds, plenty of room to grow.

  All of the new bodies meant a lot more production. Not just in terms of construction, either. An additional crew went to work taking down trees and stacking up firewood for the winter. Last year they’d been lucky in that the weather hadn’t really prevented them from gathering what wood they needed as they went. This year, they’d be prepared for the worst with neat stacks of split wood resting alongside every cabin.

  Their scavenging efforts grew more organized and robust as well. Pushpins were cleared from the maps faster than ever, with large teams performing recon missions, replacing the scattershot solo efforts they’d mustered up until this point. And it worked. Crates of canned goods came in. Beans. Peas. Chef Boyardee. Campbell’s Chunky Soup. Truck loads of lumber bolstered their cabin production. They even found steel I beams up to 75 feet long that might be used to build a real church instead of relying on the mess hall to pull double duty, though that project was probably down the road a ways.

  The armory filled to the brim, the stash growing to the point that they had to build a second shed dedicated to weapon storage. All the guns and ammo anyone could want. One guy even came back with a bazooka of all things. He apparently found it tucked in the drop ceiling of a basement in Newport News, Virginia.

  Most of the guns they’d looted were tucked away, but many of the newcomers wore holstered pistols on their hips. The amount of guns around camp was a concern — something Ray and the council would need to address soon — but for right now, everything was moving too fast to keep up. The growth felt organic in such a manner that infiltration by a raider or a cell of raiders seemed unlikely, but he knew that would become a real threat sooner than later.

  Memories of Lumpy and Higgins still occurred to him daily. The grenade incident wasn’t an isolated one. They’d be back. If not others from the same group, it’d be another group. They had to be ready for it.

  Their fleet of functioning vehicles grew with quickness as well. Mostly nondescript sedans and SUVs joined their ranks, a lot of Buick Skylarks and Pontiac Grand Prix’s from the late 90’s, but one guy came back with a forest green Jaguar that made Ray nostalgic for his own Jag. And his Mercedes. And so on down the line.

  The most useful vehicles, however, were arguably the Ryder trucks and U-Hauls. Seven total. The perfect thing to send in once they’d located a major load of goods to haul. Semis that ran on diesel were no good since that fuel had been sucked dry even more than gasoline. They’d dedicate their diesel reserves on the tanker and construction vehicles. The raiders had a monopoly on the big rigs, he figured. So be it. You could pack a lot of crap into a U-Haul, and at this rate of growth, they’d have almost anyone outnumbered and outgunned before long.

  People swarmed the grounds like bees flitting about the honeycomb, all of the workers set to their tasks that added up to sweeping changes on all fronts. And through it all, Ray Dalton was the most popular guy in camp, of course.

  People shook hands with him everywhere he went, a blur of faces smearing past him. They gripped his fingers and pumped his arm and jabbered about what an honor it was. It made sense, he knew, even if it shouldn’t. First his
face was beamed into a box in their living rooms five days a week, and now he’d performed a fake miracle. What an honor, indeed.

  What was the common denominator there? Why were people so enthralled by the places where reality stretched into something more, the lines exaggerated like surreal images in a painting? Why did they prefer a cartoon version of things instead of something honest? He rooted around in his mind for an answer to that question, and the best he came up with was:

  With great desperation, people wanted to believe the world was better than it really was. This was their way of doing that. Miracles and myths and legendary figures. When they found them, they grabbed hold and didn’t let go.

  Somehow he’d always known how to tip that to his advantage without even thinking about it. He knew what to sell them and just what to say. He always had.

  And now that his talent was back in use, this realization was something he couldn’t tell anyone. Not even Lorraine. The truth was too painful to share. He had to hold it in his head and find a way to be OK with it, a way to make peace with it. If he could.

  Everyone was so happy to see him. Giddy. Cheery. Downright gleeful. They grinned at him endlessly. He smiled back, but his eyes were cold.

  Erin

  Rural West Virginia

  265 days after

  Erin tried not to look back as she ran, but she couldn’t help it. Two zombies spilled out from the trailer after them. When she turned her head forward again, she almost mowed Izzy down.

  “What are you doing? Keep moving!”

  Izzy pointed, and Erin saw movement ahead. More zombies, a proper horde of them. Drawn to the gunshots, she figured.

  It grabbed ahold of her then. The fear. Turning her legs to jelly and tying her guts in knots. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She just stared. It was that deer-in-headlights response that was neither fight nor flight.

  Her eyelids convulsed into rapid fire blinks and her heart trembled and throbbed and finally a singular thought broke through.