The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)
Page 45
Marcus gave her another Oxycontin and made her drink a box of warm apple juice they found in the fridge. She sipped at the straw, sprawled on her side in the bed. Izzy perched beside her, keeping watch.
Erin didn’t remember falling asleep. She just started to drift away, and was vaguely aware of someone removing the juice box from her hand and pulling the covers up around her.
She was pretty sure only a few hours had passed when she woke. The sun was setting and the light filled the room with an orange glow. It could have been the next day, she supposed, but she still felt groggy from the pills.
Izzy snored beside her, Rocky curled up under her chin. Through her half-closed eyes, she could see Marcus across the room. He was sitting on the couch, watching the sun set. Or maybe just staring at nothing.
Erin rose, and Marcus stirred, too.
“Are you OK? Do you need me to help you to the bathroom?”
“I’m fine,” she said, grabbing his arm to keep her balance. “I just want to sit.”
She hopped over to the couch on one foot and then let go of his arm, dropping back into the upholstery.
He was just standing there, watching her.
She pat the seat next to her.
“Sit.”
Marcus sat back down, a conspicuous space left between them. She scooched a few inches closer and then laid her head on his shoulder.
He held very still. She didn’t even think he breathed.
Maybe she’d misinterpreted the way he’d gotten flustered when she told him to remove her pants. Or maybe he was just nervous. She wondered if he’d ever kissed a girl before. She thought maybe not.
She leaned forward, balancing on the uninjured parts of her body.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting comfortable.”
She wriggled sideways so her legs were draped over his lap.
“I can move.”
“You can stay.”
“I don’t-”
“You can stay.”
When she settled, he had his hands in the air, as if she’d pointed a gun at him and told him to freeze.
“This isn’t a hold up, Marcus. You can put your hands down.”
He lowered them slowly, placing his balled fists on either side of his lap, not touching her.
“You should rest.”
“I am,” she said and placed her head against his chest. She listened to his heart beat, hard and strong and fast. He was nervous.
She tilted her head back a little so she could see his face.
“Have you ever kissed a girl, Marcus?”
His stony face faltered.
“Why are you asking-”
She moved quickly, before he bolted, or she lost her nerve. She snaked a hand up to the back of his neck and pressed her mouth to his.
He grew rigid for a moment, frozen. This is what it must be like to kiss a statue, she thought. But then his mouth softened, and he returned the kiss, and it was good.
“There,” she said, pulling back so she could look at him through her eyelashes.
“There? There, what?”
“Well, if I die now, at least I know I helped you get to first base.”
“You’re not gonna die.”
“You better hope not, or you might never get to second base.”
Lorraine
Rural West Virginia
1 year, 38 days after
She hadn’t cried when Louis told her. She’d been resting in the house, not feeling up to standing out in the heat now that she was six months pregnant.
She was sprawled on the couch in the basement where it was a little cooler while Ray went to work pulling fake tumors from a girl’s belly. They’d really practiced this one. His technique improved greatly over the course of a couple of weeks. They’d figured it’d be his last for a while. Maybe ever. The miracles had served their purpose. They’d built a community. A society. They’d carved a pattern onto the land — a little order in the post-apocalyptic chaos.
The crowd didn’t sound right. She could hear that, but she hadn’t thought much of it, hadn’t even gotten up to check. She thought maybe the violence she heard in the swell of people was just her imagination, a spat of paranoia.
But no.
She knew Ray was dead just by the look on Louis’s face. He looked flushed, his eyes wet. He told her to grab a few things and get ready to get out. Maybe they’d be able to come back, he said. Maybe not.
She wanted to resist, to disobey his order, but with that look on his face, she couldn’t. This was real.
She’d waddled to the bedroom and packed a bag, shuffled to the car Louis had waiting — an old Buick Skylark — and got in.
They rode in silence for a long while. Louis sucked air between his teeth every so often, a pained noise like a little kid getting peroxide dumped on a scraped knee.
The sky went orange, then gray, then black, and still she didn’t cry. She couldn’t feel it yet. Funny how that worked, she thought. Soon, she’d never be able to stop feeling it, even though it was someone who was no longer there — like a phantom limb. But for now she felt nothing. Louis seemed more upset than her.
The tears would come later, and they’d be hard to stop. She knew that.
Hours drained away like nothing, the car hurtling into the dark. The night only seemed to grow blacker and blacker, the headlights no match for what surrounded them.
It was late. The middle of the night. She realized that she had no idea how long they’d been driving, but she knew they’d crossed a state line in there somewhere.
After hours without a word, she had a question.
“We’re not going back, are we?” she said.
The dash light glowed on the man’s face, a faintly blue tint to it. His forehead scrunched up.
“Probably not.”
She cupped a hand over her round belly and looked out into the darkness.
Father
The Compound
1 year and 69 days after
He stood on the deck, looking down the hill at the grass field where it had all transpired. Cigar smoke twirled off of the brown cylinder in his hand, coiling into his face, and it made his nose wrinkle. He liked the taste, but he didn’t care for the smell. He took a puff and let the smoke roll around his mouth before he exhaled.
He’d never felt so content in his life. Not even when he was a baby. The whole world answered to his command now, it seemed.
The image flashed in his head, Dalton’s hands scrabbling at the paper atop the table, the blood pooling on each side of him, cascading over the edge to the ground below.
He couldn’t have planned it this way if he’d wanted to. Never dreamed that such a traumatic experience would somehow bond him to this tribe the way it did, but he’d finally done it. Finally said the right combination of words so that people would love him, the world would love him. It felt like he’d won the game he’d been playing his whole life.
He was a man of God — their connection to God. And not a phony one like that preacher. He’d saved them from that charlatan. That blasphemer. They all needed him.
The cigar taste began to overwhelm him, clinging to his tongue long after he’d exhaled, the nicotine making his head light and tingly. He crushed the red cherry to the glass at the bottom of the ash tray, smashing it into something flat and black, listening to the ember sizzle and gutter out, and then he pitched the thing, watching it tumble down the hill and disappear among the pine boughs –– his pine boughs. It was all his now in a sense. All that he wanted from the world was his. The whole camp and everyone in it.
Except for one person, perhaps. The one who got away.
The sliding glass door slid open behind him, and he turned. He spied Fiona’s red hair in the opening before her face came into focus.
“Your lunch is ready, Father… er, I mean, Mr. Jones. Will you be eating at the table or would you like me to bring it out here?”
“I’ll be there in a moment.”
> “Coca-cola to drink?”
“Yes. Thank you, Fiona.”
“You’re welcome, Father… er…”
“No, it’s fine. Call me Father.”
Erin
Moundsville, West Virginia
270 days after
“Erin!”
Erin’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Her thoughts were fuzzy. Part of that was being so recently asleep, and part of it was the narcotics.
“Erin!”
There was a note of alarm in Izzy’s voice, and that scared her all the way awake.
Erin propped herself up on one elbow. Izzy stood at the balcony with the binoculars pressed to her face.
“Erin!”
“What is it?”
“You have to come see this!”
Erin inched herself closer to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the side, being careful not to jostle the left one too much. It still hurt like a motherfucker even with the painkillers.
She kept trying to get Marcus to give her more, but he was stingy as hell. Plus, it had been four days since her encounter, and she hadn’t died yet. She figured that was cause for a little celebration, but Marcus only lectured her about tolerance and addiction.
“Hurry, you’re going to miss it!”
“I’m moving as fast as I can.”
She bent forward, snaking a hand under the bed and patting around on the ground for the crutches. With one crutch firmly in place on either side, she stood, tucking the padded section at the top into her armpits. She tested her wounded leg, just leaning a little weight onto it. It was a mistake. Pain shot up and down her leg, and she sucked in her breath sharply. She held it, gritting her teeth. When she got her breath back, she hobbled forward until she stood beside Izzy in the window.
“What is it?”
Izzy handed her the binoculars.
“Just past the fire truck in the bank parking lot, straight ahead.”
Erin took a moment to adjust and focus the nocs. And then she saw it.
A man, or what used to be a man, naked from the waist down. And even his shirt only barely counted as covering. It was ragged and torn and dirty. The naked zombie was just standing there in the street. Swaying, head lolling like a loose marionette.
“You see it?”
“The half-naked zombie? Yeah. I see it. Zombie wang. Zombie balls. Zombie buttox.”
She tried to hand the binoculars back to Izzy, but the kid just bounced up and down on her toes.
“Keep watching!”
Erin sighed. “Fine, but if he sticks his finger in his butt crack and then smells it, I’m throwing you over the balcony.”
It took her a moment to find him again. She always got lost when she was looking through binoculars. She’d just got him back in her sights again when she gasped.
“Oh my God! He’s pooping!”
A squeal of laughter came out of Izzy.
“I told you, remember? I said they had to, or they’d explode!”
The door opened and Erin instinctively jumped a little, but it was just Marcus of course.
“Found some more food downstairs.”
Erin held out the binoculars to him. “You have to see this.”
“The zombie taking a crap? Thanks, but I already had an eyeful.”
Erin jabbed Izzy with the foot of her crutch.
“You showed him before you showed me?”
“You were asleep!”
Plastic shopping bags rustled behind them as Marcus set the scavenged supplies on the table.
“Are you guys gonna come eat, or are you going to continue watching a dead guy take a dump for the rest of the night?”
“This is science, Marcus,” Erin said, still peering through the lenses.
“Yeah. Science,” Izzy parroted.
Baghead
Rural Missouri
9 years, 129 days after
He woke to the image of Ruth peering at him again, her chin resting on the back of the seat. She smiled a little, just like before, that faintest upward turn upon each corner of her mouth.
“He’s up,” she said without lifting her head. Her jaw seemed to pick the rest of her skull up, lifting once for each syllable and putting it down again. Her eyes swiveled toward the driver and flipped back toward the backseat. Something about the movement reminded him of watching his cats at their laziest. The gray kitty often did a similar move. Lying still, his whole body motionless except for the two eyeballs rolling around in their sockets to look around.
“Well, get ‘im a water,” Delfino said.
The girl obliged, disappearing into the front seat for a moment and reappearing with a bottle of lukewarm liquid. She thrust the bottom of the bottle at him, and by reflex he twitched his left arm just a little as though to take it. He didn’t know why, other than that it was closer. He recovered quickly, reaching across his body with his good arm to take it, but something about the moment seemed to linger. Had she noticed that little movement in his stump? And why did that idea make him feel more vulnerable?
“Where are you at as far as pain?” Delfino said, raising his voice a touch. “On a scale from one to ten, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not yet. Give me a second to wake up, I guess.”
The car thudded over a bump, and Baghead’s skull shimmied back and forth in the spot where it lay. Something about the movement made him think of an egg jiggling in its carton. He felt like he was holding his breath, waiting for the pain to resume full force now that he was awake, waiting for the demon at the end of his arm to wake up.
“Give ‘im an aspirin,” Delfino said, lowering his voice. “Actually, give him three.”
Dr. Delfino was on the case. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. Better than nothing, maybe. Better than no one.
He heard the pills rattling in the plastic bottle. Ruthie appeared a moment later, her hand cupped in front of her.
“These are several years past date,” Delfino said. “But they might still work.”
The pills tumbled into his hand as the driver spoke. They smelled like vinegar, the odor strong enough to sting his eyes a little.
“Smells like pickle juice, don’t it?” Delfino said.
“Something like that.”
“They get that when they start decomposing, but I suspect there’s still some medicine in there.”
“I’ll trust you on this one.”
He choked down the pills, washing all three down at once with the room temperature water from the bottle. The bitter taste filled his mouth, seeming to stick in the back of his throat, despite the quickness with which he’d swallowed them. Worst pickles ever.
“On to the next state,” Delfino said.
“Yeah?”
“Yuh. We’re in Missouri now.”
Baghead looked up at the ceiling for a long moment. Missouri. They were more than halfway there, he thought, and in a way, it was almost over.
He closed his eyes.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, 9 years and 129 days after the end of the world.
The Scattered and the Dead
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- About the Authors -
Tim McBain writes because life is short, and he wants to make something
awesome before he dies. Additionally, he likes to move it, move it.
You can connect with Tim on Twitter at @realtimmcbain or via email at tim@timmcbain.com.
L.T. Vargus grew up in Hell, Michigan, which is a lot smaller, quieter, and less fiery than one might imagine. When not click-clacking away at the keyboard, she can be found sewing, fantasizing about food, and rotting her brain in front of the TV.
If you want to wax poetic about pizza or cats, you can contact L.T. (the L is for Lex) at ltvargus9@gmail.com or on Twitter @ltvargus.
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- Books by Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus -
The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5)
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The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1)
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The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1.5)
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The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)
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Casting Shadows Everywhere
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Fade to Black (Awake in the Dark #1)
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Bled White (Awake in the Dark #2)
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Red on the Inside (Awake in the Dark #3)
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Back in Black (Awake in the Dark #4)
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