The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  Yeah, maybe he didn’t need to wake up after all. He let himself drift a while.

  And then the thought came to interrupt his sleep. A t-shirt with a cartoonish font: I went to Little Rock and all I got was this bloody stump.

  Puffs of laughter exited his nostrils, and he veered away from sleep once more.

  Indeed, opening his eyes seemed to fully deliver him into the waking world. He blinked a few times, looking up at the Delta 88’s ceiling. Gray light shone through the windows, and he knew it must be just after dawn.

  A beat after he woke, he wished he hadn’t. The pain hit for real, doubling or tripling what he’d felt in his half-sleep state.

  It throbbed through his body, jolts of hurt that seemed to burst in certain areas. Explosions of pain that blocked out his vision with flashes of white light.

  That invisible fist clenched harder than ever. Tightening and tightening like all the cords in his arm would snap any second now, and he kind of wished they would just to be done with it.

  His breath grew shallower. Creaking in and out. It sent out flecks of spit that came falling back to shower his face in spittle.

  Thankfully, he didn’t suffer reality long. He hyperventilated and passed out.

  Erin

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  266 days after

  She scooted along the pipe, trying to get a feel for it. It was thick. Cast iron, she thought, and nearly as thick as one of her thighs. Too sturdy to bend or break, unless she found a weak point.

  Erin swung her bad leg over the pipe, losing her balance and landing with a jarring thud on her hip. The side of her tongue caught between her teeth, and she felt her top right canine pierce the flesh.

  “Fuck!” It came out a hoarse whisper, and instantly Izzy’s voice popped into her head to nag her about her salty language.

  What she wouldn’t give to have Izzy there to set her straight. Well, not there, exactly. Actually, if there was anything to be glad of, it was that Izzy had gotten away. If nothing else came of her current situation, at least there was that.

  But goddamn, did she miss that kid.

  The tears came without warning, running hot, itchy lines down her face. She let herself cry for a minute, bending forward and sobbing into her knees.

  Why was this happening?

  She pulled herself back out before she drowned in the self-pity. Feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to get her out of here. She spit a mouthful of blood out of the side of her mouth, grit her teeth, and inched toward the end of the pipe that ran into the wall.

  Leaning back until the cuffs were taut, she kicked at the end of the pipe with her good leg. The contact of her foot with the iron sent a shock reverberating up her leg bones. Over and over again she drove her heel into it. It didn’t budge. Not even a millimeter.

  She let herself fall against the wall, head lolling forward while she caught her breath.

  Erin slid away from the wall, looking for another point of weakness. It ran a few feet out of the wall before it bent 90 degrees and ran toward the ceiling.

  Balancing on the pipe was easier than she thought. Once she had the cuffs around the vertical section, she could hold onto it with both hands. The fact that one of her legs was rendered useless didn’t even matter.

  She ran her hands up the pipe. Did it run into the ceiling above? No. There was another 90 degree bend just above her head, and then it ran along the ceiling for a ways. She wasn’t sure how far it went.

  The pipe was cool and rough against her forehead when she rested her head against it to consider her options.

  If she got the cuffs up and over the bend, she might be able to shimmy along the pipe with her hands. Somewhere further along, the pipe might narrow. Or have a corroded spot she could break through. She’d already have all her weight on it. It should be easy.

  She gripped the pipe with both hands, took one steadying breath, and let her legs swing down.

  Her shoulders took the brunt of it, but her hands held strong. Now came the hard part. Swinging herself like a pendulum, she moved her right hand a few inches further along the pipe. Then she moved the left. Sliding inch by inch. It was slow progress. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d played on monkey bars, but she’d forgotten how much upper body strength it took.

  Maybe she could get her good leg up around the pipe and take some of the load off her arms. She kicked her leg up twice, missing both times. The effort left her panting for breath. She was starting to sweat. On her forehead, the back of her neck, and worst of all, the palms of her hands. And there was nothing she could do about it. No way to wipe them off. No way to improve her grip. Unless she got her leg around the pipe.

  She heaved again, tightening her abdominal muscles, using her back and arms to lift. Her foot grazed the pipe but found no hold there, and with a gasp, she felt her hands lose their grip on the pipe.

  She panicked, scrabbling at the iron, trying to use her nails to stop the slippage.

  It was no use. Her hands slipped, and she fell from the pipe, jerking to a stop when the handcuff chain went taut. She felt the bite of metal on skin as her wrists caught in the loops of the cuffs.

  She swore again. Judging by the drip of blood trailing down her arm, and the exposed, burning sensation of open flesh, she was pretty sure the left cuff had torn a piece of skin off when it bumped over her wrist bone. She flexed her hand, wiggling her fingers. She didn’t think any bones were broken, though. Hurray.

  If she pointed her toes, she could just barely stand on her good leg, with her arms fully extended overhead. Stretched out like that, she couldn’t move, but she could keep the pressure off her wrists and shoulders.

  Throughout it all, the pipe held strong. She was starting to doubt her plans of finding a loose or rusty connection to break through.

  The urge to urinate returned, stronger this time. The ache of her bladder distracted her from the pain in her leg and wrist. It was deeper and sharper, and somehow made her aware of all of her internal organs. All the pieces inside she couldn’t see. She wondered if it could cause permanent damage to not pee. Because it was starting to feel like it. She tucked her pelvis, a movement she did subconsciously. It relieved some of the pressure, just barely. Enough that her head felt a little less swimmy.

  And again, she was tempted to call out. To tell the man she had to go. And again, she thought, “I’d rather piss myself than ask him for help.”

  She ground her molars together. And what if she did piss herself? So what? There was no one here to see. Why did it feel like some kind of humiliation? It was an animal thing, something she had little control over. At least past a certain point. She could hold it, sure, but only for so long before nature would take its course. So why should she feel ashamed?

  OK, then do it, she thought. Go. Piss yourself.

  She waited. Nothing happened. Her bladder, if it were able, would have been shrieking in pain, but she couldn’t let go. Fighting against years of bodily control was not as easy as she’d thought it’d be. This was somehow more frustrating than almost any of it. The leg, the wrist, the captivity.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think relaxing thoughts. Tried to picture the liquid in her bladder slowly making its way down whatever tubes must be there, flowing out, soaking her jeans. She imagined a meditation guru saying the words, “Visualize yourself pissing your pants, the golden stream cascading down your thigh,” in that soft, soothing voice they always used. She actually snorted out a laugh at that.

  When that didn’t work, she bore down with her abdominal muscles, trying to force it, but that sent a new wave of stabbing pain through her gut, and the smile on her face leftover from her laugh turned into a grimace.

  She shivered a little once the sharpest pain passed. The light sweat coating her skin brought on a chill.

  She thought back to one of her earliest memories then. She was three-and-a-half. Maybe four. She went to daycare during the week while her parents worked. The kids were outs
ide, and Erin was playing on the jungle gym. She had to go. She knew she did. But she didn’t want to stop playing. She was also too shy to tell one of the helper ladies that she had to go potty. So she didn’t. She just kept playing.

  And when the need to relieve herself became too great, when she knew it was too late and she was going to wet her baby blue corduroy overalls, she hopped on the slide. Her thinking at the time was that if she peed her pants as she went down the slide, no one would be able to tell.

  Of course as soon as she jumped down from the jungle gym, it was only a matter of time before one of the attendants noticed the wetness staining her pants a shade darker than the rest.

  “Did you have an accident?” the woman asked.

  This younger version of Erin shook her head, full on denying it. Shame tinged her cheeks pink. The attendant took her hand and ushered her inside to get cleaned up and changed.

  Erin sighed when she finally felt her bladder loosen. The urine felt hot on her sweat-cooled skin. It dribbled down her thighs, soaking into her jeans. The relief of emptying her bladder was almost euphoric. And the warmth felt good for the moment, but she knew that would change quickly. She suddenly remembered the itchy, astringent feel of wet pants from childhood.

  When the relief ebbed, the shame took its place. The same shame she felt when she was four and the daycare worker asked if she’d had an accident. This wasn’t how you treated a human being. This wasn’t even how you treated an animal.

  The shame made her angry. And the anger made her more determined than ever to fight like hell to get out of this.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat, blinked past the tears in her eyes. Her breath heaved in and out of her lungs. She’d been trapped like an animal. Chained like an animal. Forced to piss herself like an animal. What would an animal do to get out of this? Would an animal gnaw off a limb to get free? Break bones? She thought some might. Because animals knew it was only flesh. Only meat. Only bones. And sometimes a sacrifice of flesh and meat and bone became necessary for survival.

  She peered upward in the dimness. She couldn’t see much, but she could see the darker trails of blood emanating from where the handcuffs had cut into her. She folded the thumb and pinky of her left hand together, trying to make her hand as narrow as possible. She tugged at the cuff, and she felt it slide a little further, tightening around where the flesh of her hand got fuller at the base of her thumb. The blood actually seemed to help a bit. It made things slippery.

  She grasped the chain between the cuffs in her right hand and pulled from the left again. Another millimeter of progress.

  Her hand ached now from the compression. The cuff dug into her skin and squeezed the bones and ligaments in ways they shouldn’t be squeezed.

  The sensation reminded her of trying to get a too-tight ring off a finger, how there was always a point where the ring was in the middle of the fleshiest part of the digit, and she’d start to worry that it was stuck there. No going back or forward. And she’d think, “I should have just left it on.”

  She reached that point with the cuff a few times, started to doubt this plan, but after a few semi-calming breaths, she’d get back to work.

  The fleshy muscle at the base of her thumb started to cramp from the strain of being held in one position. She inhaled sharply, breath hissing through her teeth.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” she whispered to herself, followed by every swear word she could remember hearing. She gave her wrist a violent shake, more out of frustration than thinking it would help anything. Her body flopped back and forth, like a fish trying to free itself from a hook sunk deep in its mouth.

  Eventually the cramp passed, replaced by the most intense pins and needles she’d ever felt. The cuff was probably cutting off some of the blood flow. Combined with the fact that her hands had been held over her head for some time now, she was surprised her hand was still bleeding at all. Could that cause permanent damage, she wondered?

  Not as permanent as being dead, the darker part of her brain replied.

  The pins and needles sensation wasn’t pleasant, and periodically it sent strange little spasms all the way down her arm to the elbow that almost felt like being lightly shocked. As a kid, she’d visited a horse farm once, and she remembered the little girl that lived there showing her how to touch the electric fence with a piece of hay to feel the current. The spasms in her arm felt a lot like that. It was nothing compared to the cramping though, so she soldiered on.

  She pulled and scraped and heaved on the cuff until she wasn’t sure she could go on. The metal was lodged against the knuckles at the base of her pinkie and thumb. She tried to squeeze her hand into a smaller shape, but she had almost no feeling in it now. She tried muscling past the joints, but judging by the fresh rivulets of blood on her arm, she’d only succeeded in breaking the skin.

  She broke down, again, body shaking with sobs. Two days ago everything had been fine. She wished more than anything she could go back there.

  Izzy’s question popped back in her head again. Would you rather have no bones or no blood?

  Erin had laughed when Izzy said she’d rather have no bones. Thought the kid was a weirdo. But now Erin was seeing the wisdom in no bones.

  Thinking about Izzy this time didn’t bring further tears. Instead, it hardened her. Made her more determined than ever to get free.

  She pulled again. The metal bit her hand. It opened her up a little more, peeled her skin away so the air touched inside of her.

  God, she just wanted to get that cuff off her hand. If she could get it back down around her wrist at that point, she would have been tempted. But that wasn’t an option anymore. The cuff was only going one way, and that was the rest of the way off. She tugged at it a few more times, but it didn’t budge. She needed more force.

  She looked up into the dimness once again, and her right hand grasped at the chain between the cuffs, pulling it tight. Her eyes traced the length of her arm, looking upon it more as something she owned than something that was a part of her in the moment. This body — this shell — would take great damage in a moment, but it was only meat, wasn’t it?

  She took three breaths, counting as she exhaled.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  She planted her foot as much as possible, and then pushed up off her toes, leaping into the air. She brought her knees up so that her left hand would bear the full weight of the fall. She reached the pinnacle of the jump and felt the weight of gravity pulling her back to the ground. There was a disgusting popping sound from her hand, followed by blinding pain, and then everything went black.

  Decker

  The Compound

  1 year, 19 days after

  The sun beat down on the back of his neck, made the skin there feel like a blackening flap of paper in a fireplace. He stabbed the shovel into the ground, slid it so the metal scraped against the rocks and sand. He lifted the scoop of dirt and flung it up onto the lip of the hole. Something about the sound of it landing reminded him of his mom shaking a rug off of the edge of the porch, the deep whomp of it flopping mixed with the sprinkling sound of grit raining down everywhere.

  Sweat drained down the sides of his face. He mopped his lips with the back of his hand and went back for another scoop.

  He remembered what was said and what was done, the words and images playing over and over again in his mind.

  It was another faith healing. The third since he’d been here. This one was the first within the grounds of their camp. Word had gotten around that Dalton wanted to eliminate any assassination possibilities for a while by keeping his shows within the fences.

  They gathered near the river. Dalton stood before all of the members of his flock — over three thousand people at this point, seated in metal fold-out chairs. The preacher was decked out in a white robe that was too long and billowed out around his feet in the grass. The robe didn’t move much when he walked, so it almost looked like he was levitating around the banks. Hoveri
ng. Decker wondered if the man had practiced keeping his knees tight when he walked to achieve that effect. Dalton had always seemed more like a sleight of hand expert than a man of God to him, a street magician who didn’t know very complex illusions but sold his simple ones well, with passion and charisma.

  Now the preacher spoke:

  “We are all here for a reason, for a purpose, even if we don’t always understand what that might be. We all play our role in this thing. My role seems to have become one of leadership. You might not believe it, but it’s not a role I prefer. Believe me, I’d rather be riding in the backseat than driving. That’s not how it worked out, though. Something a whole lot bigger and more important than me made the call on that one. These gifts fell to me, this duty fell to me, so I serve you all.”

  The crowd cheered this false modesty, and Decker rolled his eyes, glancing around after to make sure no one saw. How much longer could he conceal this contempt?

  “And you all must serve as well. You must find the way meant for you and serve.”

  The preacher gestured wildly with his hands, bringing them above his head often and letting them rest for long stretches straight out at his sides, which Decker eventually realized was to subtly mimic Christ’s pose on the cross. He talked for a long time in that rhythmic yell that so many Southern preachers seem to fall into, though he spoke not of fire nor brimstone nor vengeance nor fear. He spoke of compassion and community, banding together to help each other. It almost seemed out of character compared to the voice delivering it.

  Decker tuned in and out, hearing snippets:

  “What matters now is holding on to what makes us human, resisting the animal urges that would turn us to beasts if we let them. I’m talking about helping one another. I’m talking about loving one another. I’m talking about building a place to stay, a place we can all be proud of, a place where human compassion and community and love can live on even after we’re gone. I wake up excited every morning. Wake up with a fire in me. You know why? Because I know in my heart that we are building something special here. Going out and finding new people to pluck from the wreckage, and going out and scavenging supplies that will feed us and clothe us and protect us. And it’s not labor. Not to me. It’s work, but it’s not labor. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I love to do. I do what I love to do all day. That’s what life should be. In the old world, a lot of people, a lot of them, went through their whole lives without doing anything with real passion. They went to work and they watched TV, and they didn’t care much about what happened in between. Well, the old world is gone. And all of us here can find a better way. We can take all of the passion in our hearts and channel it toward helping each other. We can build a paradise here.”