The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  Run.

  Erin grasped Izzy’s hand and pulled her into a crouch, darting between a line of cars. She glanced back once to make sure Marcus was still with them.

  She tried to think as they ran, but jolts of searing panic only left confusion. Like an ice pick stabbing her in the brain, blocking off all thoughts, all sense of rationality, leaving only terror.

  Erin kept a firm grip on Izzy. She didn’t know where they were headed. She just knew they couldn’t stop now.

  They cut through a McDonald’s parking lot but halted when Erin spotted more zombies ahead, milling around in the middle of an intersection. This place was infested.

  She backtracked, leading them into a used car lot. They zig-zagged through the rows, using the parked cars as cover.

  Her lungs burned, and her legs ached, but she didn’t stop. She saw a pair of smokestacks ahead and ran for them. She didn’t know why, they just drew her like a beacon.

  It was an uphill climb to the factory. By the time they reached the smoke-stained brick walls, they were all gasping for breath. She risked a look over her shoulder and saw that they’d lost some — but not all — of the horde.

  They scrambled through piles of crumbled brick. Erin spotted a metal ladder leading up to the roof of the factory and told Izzy to start climbing.

  Safely at the top, the three of them surveyed the half dozen zombies that were able to keep up.

  “Can they climb it, you think?” Izzy asked.

  “I would guess not,” Erin said. “But even if they do, a swift kick in the face when they get to the top will send them back where they came from.”

  Baghead

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  9 years, 128 days after

  Blackness embraced him. Held him. A dreamless, painless unconscious state that carried him away from the violent scene and nestled him in the safety of nowhere, of nothingness.

  This was not sleep. Not quite.

  Some part of him remained aware. Aware that the sights and sounds had been shut off for the moment perhaps, but a harsh reality still waited beyond the ebony walls shielding him now. Aware that his hand was gone, that the string of skin and connective tissue would need to be clipped, the severed hand discarded and forgotten. Aware that pints of blood had exited his body, a scarlet flash flood gushing over the warehouse floor that he was laying in even now, most likely. Aware that pain and suffering had merely been paused, not avoided. The same went for death itself.

  Sound bobbed back to the surface of his consciousness first. A scuffing noise pulsed off and on at a steady interval. No, two sets of these sounds, slightly different from each other. Footsteps.

  A sense of movement came next. Wind brushed his cheeks as he pressed forward involuntarily.

  Then sensation faded in along the sides of his neck. No real motor skills returned to him yet. Something simpler. Just the sensation of the muscles in his neck gone limp. Slack. His chin rested against his chest.

  And then he felt that open wound at the end of his arm, and he could picture looking into it again. The fleshy cave, walls of muscle slick with blood. Chipped bone visible at the mouth of the cave. It didn’t hurt. Shock held the pain away still, but it felt wide open. Cold. Almost shriveled. Like a snail withering on a piece of sidewalk too wide to traverse. And somehow he could still feel the sharpness of the blade, that first prick of the metal piercing his flesh, making his teeth grit, making all of his hairs stand on end from head to toe.

  Feeling these things let the loss of his hand sink all the way in again. His mind tried to find a way to sort it, a way to retract this reality, like the whole thing should be a bad dream, something he’d wake up to find undone. But no. It was real. If his hand still dangled there, clinging to his wrist by a thread of flesh, he couldn’t feel it at all.

  His eyelids were too heavy to budge, and his ability to feel them physically seemed to fade in and out. That more than anything reminded him that he was riding the line between consciousness and unconsciousness. It was a moving thing, this state of semi-consciousness he found himself in, alive and thrashing about like a bucking bronco trying to toss him back under.

  With the possibility of the eyelids eliminated, he tried to wiggle his fingers instead. He didn’t know why. Maybe he was trying to tell whoever was moving him that he was awake, though he doubted this information would change anything much.

  He hoped it was Delfino pulling him somewhere. If not, this stood little chance of ending well. Maybe that was the case either way.

  Still, he concentrated on his fingers, all five of them that were still connected to his body. When he focused hard enough, he could feel them. Maybe they seemed a little cold, a little distant, but he could feel them. Feelings flared on in them, some electrical juice flowing through the nerves, cold and vaguely painful. More of a dull sting than the kind of sharp pain he’d felt in the opposite wrist.

  He tried to communicate with the electricity he felt in the good hand, to send signals down those neural pathways, but it was like the power lines were all dead, or at least they only seemed to send one way. He could feel, but he could not move. Not for now.

  He relaxed upon realizing this, almost surprised that the sense of paralysis didn’t make him panic. But no. There was no use in worrying about it. He let himself drift for a time, floating back down toward unconsciousness and stopping just short of it.

  The voices brought him back. He couldn’t place them. Couldn’t understand what they were saying. Sleep muffled everything down to a flowing murmur of syllables. Indecipherable. They seemed to rush their words, though. He could tell that.

  Tightness gripped the wound now. That scared him, the feeling of confinement, of being closed off, wrapped up. He pictured his body wrapped in plastic sheeting, bungee cords cinching it around him. But no. He could still feel the air moving on his cheeks. The tightness only seemed to be at the stumped wrist. Maybe they had wrapped his arm. Cover the wound and apply pressure, that’s what you were supposed to do, right? Still, he felt confined. Trapped.

  The jolt of adrenaline that accompanied this fear woke him up a little more, and his eyelids parted finally.

  It seemed to take his eyeballs a moment to catch on to what was happening. They retracted from being rolled up in his skull a moment after his eyelashes pulled apart. His vision fluttered, pupils unable to settle and then unwilling to focus for a beat.

  He saw the ground first, the cracks in the sidewalk sliding past like the credits at the end of a movie. That meant they were outside. That was good, he thought. Probably.

  He managed to swivel his head on the third try, prying his chin from his chest and rotating his skull in slow motion like a gear in need of grease. Again, it reminded him of a shot from a movie, the camera panning to the left with a kind of deliberateness that created suspense.

  The person there shifted into the frame little by little, the face still in shadow. They were holding him up, he could tell. His weight leaned that way, resting partially on this person’s side. His bad arm draped over their shoulder, the elbow bent around their neck like a piece of macaroni. He could feel it more once he looked that way, like even a partial glimpse at his arm somehow refined his sense of touch in that body part.

  He searched the face, his eyes trying to find what they expected there: Delfino’s features. But it was hard to focus. His eyelids kept twitching, and his eyeballs tried to roll back into them every time they jerked.

  The face seemed to lack detail somehow. He could make out the whites of the eyes, but the rest was blackened to the point that he couldn’t quite bring it into focus. Clear eyes set in a blurry face. Something about it made his skin crawl.

  And then it clicked. He knew the eyes, the soot-smudged face. It was the stranger carrying him, the one who’d led them into the trap and sucker punched Delfino. The one Ruth had turned the gun on.

  Did that mean… were they dead? And either way, what did this person want with him now?

  He wanted to figh
t, to buck and thrash and squirm free of the stranger’s grip, but instead all he could do was start shaking all over. Sweat beaded everywhere, weeping from his pores, each droplet holding still for a beat before gravity tugged. The moisture snaked over and around his goose bumps, crossing paths of perspiration that seemed to grease him up more than cool him at all.

  His eyelids fluttered again, not letting up this time, and his neck quivered and collapsed back to his chest, those cords of muscles along his throat giving out all at once.

  He could hear his heart thumping, the beats quick and almost hollow like what he imagined a bird’s heart must sound like. Weak. More like a squish than a pound. Like his heart was too anxious to do the job properly, just rushing through the motions.

  And then the cold made itself felt, starting in his face and blossoming in his chest and arms before finally he felt it in his legs as well. He was freezing. His flesh frigid to the bone like he’d been left in the refrigerator overnight to chill. It made sense, he knew. He’d lost so much blood.

  But if he sensed it now, it meant the shock was fading. That probably wasn’t good. He hoped it was more of a momentary ebb than a true return to a real world level of pain and suffering.

  His teeth rattled together. Had they been doing that the whole time, and he was just now noticing? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think so but maybe.

  He could hear the fire, louder than ever. The never-ending hiss wasn’t far off anymore, and a spit and crackle now accompanied it. Even so, the only warmth he felt was on each side. Right along the place where the stranger’s shoulder dug into his ribs, and the same area on the opposite side.

  He snapped his head off of his chest and spun it to the right where he found Delfino. So he wasn’t dead. Instead the driver and the stranger were working together to lug him somewhere. What did that mean?

  And suddenly warmth was everywhere, blistering heat that stung the chilled skin on his cheeks and nose, that blurred the air itself with heat distortion everywhere just above the asphalt. Even as cold as he was, it was too much on his face. It made him feel like some amphibious creature getting trapped on the beach and cooked in the sun. He arched his neck back all the way to get a look at where they were headed, and he saw the fire’s glow up there. All the details smeared together so all he could really make out was the undulating orange light dancing and licking. They were headed straight for it.

  That didn’t make sense. Did it?

  It was too bright, though. Too bright to keep his eyes open. He let his chin nestle back against his chest, and almost right away he drifted back down toward sleep. Not all the way, but enough for his senses to fade most of the way out again, enough for the black to overtake him once more.

  He drifted like that for a time, on the edge of sleep. On the edge of life and death, maybe. But it was peaceful, anyway.

  Images flickered in his head. Silent movies that didn’t make any sense.

  “Bags,” a voice said.

  Was it part of the dream? As soon as he considered this, the images dissolved to black, and his other senses faded in some. Something swathed his wrist. It felt like a hand towel bound tight by rubber bands. He pictured that, and then he revised the picture, remembering to lop off the hand in his imagination, morphing it into a towel wrapped around a stump instead.

  “Bags,” the voice repeated.

  It was real. Knowing that didn’t quite shake him all the way out of his semi-conscious state, but it brought him a couple levels closer to the surface.

  He knew the voice. Delfino was talking. He heard the syllables. The tone. Sounded serious. But he couldn’t make out the words apart from his name, couldn’t process them.

  And then he realized that his eyes were open, that he was looking into Delfino’s face as the driver spoke to him. Before he’d been looking through him somehow. Staring without seeing.

  The heat was worse now. The fire close. He tried to focus on the orange blur before him, but it was no use. Too bright. His eyes pinched closed right away.

  His arm felt different. Exposed, he thought. His wound in the open air again. Just as that observation crossed his mind, he felt a little release of pressure, like a butcher cutting a string tied around a ham. A lightness. An unburdening. He couldn’t help but feel a little better about whatever was going on.

  And then the heat was on him. In him. A ball of fire where his hand used to be. A jolt of pain surged through him like lightning rushing up the length of his arm and branching out from there. A white hot flash that coursed all through him. He felt it in the wet flesh inside his cheeks, in the balls of his feet where his toes curled into something like fists, in that space between his temples. A sharp, focused pain pulsed in his elbow like it was being stabbed over and over, and a more nebulous ache seemed to spiral in his shoulder, branching from there out to the rest of his body.

  That spinal jerk made him shudder, tried to move his arm, to take him away, but it couldn’t. He smelled it now. A char. Like that blackened gristle stuck to the grill. He felt wet. Sticky. Like he was sweating on the inside. And his chest quaked. An energy centered there. A screaming thing. Like a tea kettle’s shriek torn from a man’s throat. And then he realized that it was his throat, that he really was screaming. An endless scream that never seemed to come up for air.

  The intensity only grew, only swelled. The pain got worse and worse and worse still, as impossible as that seemed.

  His eyes opened, just for a moment, to see his wrist submerged in the glowing coals where a window sill used to be. They were holding it there. Both men fighting him to keep it there.

  Not even shock could hold this at bay. The pain wasn’t yet close to peaking. When he closed his eyes again, he passed out right away.

  Marcus

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  266 days after

  Their footsteps echoed in the empty factory, feet rasping over broken bits of brick and glass. It wasn’t exactly an inviting location, but given the zombies milling around below them, it was better than the alternative.

  They found a room a little less littered with glass and set about clearing an area on the floor where they could camp for the night.

  He snuck a glance at Erin as she unrolled her sleeping bag and laid it on the ground. Her lips were pressed closed in a hard line, eyebrows scrunching together. She hadn’t said much since their arrival. No one had, really. He supposed they were still in shock. Still processing the events. And he knew that in time he would grow to hate himself for his failure. But at the moment, he felt numb.

  He kept thinking of that phrase, “the calm before the storm.”

  Marcus knew they’d have to talk about what happened eventually. He hated confrontation. Hated when people shouted in anger. Hated the cruel things they said when the rage took hold.

  As much as he wanted to avoid it, he knew it was better to just get it over with. Apologize and hope for mercy. But when he tried to catch Erin’s eye so they could talk alone for a minute, she seemed to deliberately avoid his gaze.

  He felt the fury coming off of her in waves then. Yep. She was angry alright. And why shouldn’t she be? He’d almost gotten them all killed. He had no defense.

  Without warning, her voice echoed across the room, breaking the long silence.

  “Hey, Iz. Will you grab the candles from my pack?”

  Izzy scampered out of the room. This was his chance. He suddenly felt like he might throw up.

  “Erin, I’m sorry.”

  She just shook her head. He wasn’t sure if it was an expression of irritation or an indication that they weren’t having this discussion. It didn’t matter. He had to press on.

  “It… they… came out of nowhere.”

  She lurched forward, finger in the air.

  “You weren’t even supposed to be on the bridge. I told you to wait.”

  “It was my idea.” Izzy reappeared, butting in. “I made him go.”

  Erin scoffed, looking from Izzy back to Marcus.
<
br />   “Oh, that’s even better. Let the nine-year-old call the shots.”

  “Hey!” Izzy said.

  Erin threw both hands in the air, calling a temporary truce.

  “Forget it. It’s been a long day, and we’re going to have to sleep in shifts so someone can keep watch.”

  Erin took first watch, but that didn’t mean Marcus slept at all. He couldn’t stop playing it over and over in his head. Analyzing it second by second. His complete and total failure to do anything.

  Finally, abandoning hope of finding sleep, he crawled out of his sleeping bag. He found Erin next to the ladder they’d climbed earlier in the day, sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the building.

  She didn’t seem startled when he sat down on the other side of the ladder. She must have heard him coming.

  “I fucked up today.”

  She scoffed quietly.

  “You almost got her killed today.”

  “I know,” he said.”

  “You almost got yourself killed.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I can’t be responsible for both of you.”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  “You said we’d be safer as a group. Do you remember our agreement?”

  He swallowed.

  “I remember.”

  She didn’t say it, but she didn’t need to. The agreement was that if he ever put the group at risk, he would go. And he had put them at risk.

  He had the same emptiness in his gut that he felt the day Nina told him about her diagnosis. About how it meant that he couldn’t live with her anymore, that he’d have to go to another foster home. He thought that maybe Nina expected him to fight, to plead, to beg her not to make him go. He wanted to do that. But the empty feeling stopped him. So he did nothing. He just nodded and said OK.

  He cleared his throat before speaking.

  “You should go get some rest. I’ll take the rest of the watch.”

  Erin sighed, and he thought she’d argue. But instead she got up, brushed off her hands, and went inside.