The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (3 page)

But no, no. Let’s not get bogged down in this self consciousness now. It’s a waste of time.

How have you been, though? I’ve been well. Drankin’ some Tang at the moment. It’s not the best, to be honest. Not the best. I think maybe it used to be better than this, but they changed the formula so it’s half artificial sweetener now instead of 100% sugar. Pretty gross. But I have a lot of it, so I power through a glass a day. We all have to make sacrifices in these troubling times.

You know, I really, really should deliver this letter before one or both of us perishes due to one of the myriad of apocalyptic factors unfolding in all directions around us. It’d be a damn shame for a letter this long to go undelivered and unread.

Anyway, I guess my point in writing all of this is that I have a lot of Tang over here, so if you’re ever in the mood for a florescent orange beverage, come on over and mix yourself up a big, tall glass. It doesn’t taste like much, but it has a nice gritty texture to it.

11 days before

The old lady in 12H died alone in her apartment. I watched them carry her out, listened to the men talk as they rolled the blanket draped stretcher by my door, down the steps and loaded her into the back of a van owned by the city. I guess they’ve been hauling a lot of the dead bodies straight to the crematorium now. No more funerals. No more wakes. There’s no way for funeral homes to keep up. In a way, it’s a surprise that anyone is keeping up on these things, that society still functions at all, but what else can we do?

The men wore gas masks, so I couldn’t make out a lot of what they said. That nosy guy, Mr. Cooley, from 12C came out and asked them what was going on, though. They told him that some of the other neighbors had complained about the smell, and I did get a whiff once they opened the door. It smelled like the dead possums flattened on the side of the road near where I waited for the bus as a kid.

The secretary came up from the office downstairs. She said they hadn’t been able to get a hold of her family or anything.

I wonder, sometimes, if I will die in here alone.

I leave the TV on all the time now, even while I sleep. I don’t know. I guess I feel like I’ll miss something if I turn it off, some final nail in the world’s coffin.

Have you seen the internet clips of the zombies in Florida? (Did I already ask you this?) YouTube blocks them, and the government seizes any domain that posts them, but a few got around anyway. The camera shakes around like crazy in all that I’ve seen, but they look real to me. Deteriorating humans eating other deteriorating humans. Yeah. Like I need to explain what a fucking zombie is.

That’s all South and East of here, though, so I guess at least we have that.

Sometimes I flip through the channels just to get a break from the plague and riot news. Like right now I’m watching a soap opera. My stories, I call them. Okay, I don’t really call them that. They’re garbage. Terrible acting. Terrible scripts. Terrible sets. The triad.

Actually, the worst thing about most soap operas, in my opinion, is the lighting. Horrible, horrible lighting. It compounds the unnatural feel of it all like ten-fold. I am basically watching insane plastic surgery-faced people say really clunky lines to each other on a shitty sound stage under artificial lights. It almost feels like watching aliens pretend to be human.

Sometimes when I watch these shows and the people kiss, I see it more like two animals, like two monkeys kissing or something. Two strange creatures functioning on pheromones, playing out their instinctual behavior to propagate the species. I don’t see them as individual humans, as distinct from any of the others. Just hairless apes pressing their face orifices against each other to express affection.

It’s hard to explain. Unpleasant, though. I can tell you that much.

10 days before

The power went out in the middle of the night last night and stayed out. It was so quiet. The white noise of the air conditioner and computer fans cutting out in unison made the silence louder, if that makes sense. Their sudden absence accented the void, highlighted the emptiness. It made my skin crawl.

I got up to look out the window, thinking maybe somewhere in the distance I would see lights. Some sign of an area or neighborhood unaffected by the outage. I saw nothing but the abyss. Blackness. The night stretching out forever. So I guess all of the air conditioners and TVs and buzzing florescent light bulbs all around town died at the same moment. The silence was bigger than I had even realized at first.

I couldn’t sleep after that, so I sat up for a while in the dark. I had a flashlight on at first, but I didn’t like the idea of my apartment window being one of the only things visible from the street. One beacon of light in all of the blackness.

I kept thinking about this saying. I can’t remember where I heard it: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Maybe the light that shines in the dark gets extinguished fastest or something.

Either way, I sat in the dark, and after a while the people crawled out into the blackness, and they made noises in the street. Anxious sounds. Panicked sounds. Strange, throaty moans and howls. They sounded like animals. That’s all I could think of. That’s all I could picture, beings wandering around on the street below, in the middle of transitioning between man and werewolf. That’s really what it sounded like.

I read somewhere once that grocery stores only have enough food on hand to feed their local customer base for a week or two. Sort of mind blowing, but it all gets restocked every week, so it makes sense. Weird that we’ve spent all of these years only 7 or 14 days away from mass starvation. Of course, so many have died, maybe we’d get 3 or 4 weeks out of it. Maybe a little more.

The looting will probably be out of control real quickly once we reach the real breaking point. Thankfully I can avoid all of that with my stockpile on hand, at least for a while.

9 days before

As soon as I got done eating a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and freezer so as to avoid letting it go to waste, the power came back on. What a surprise, eh? The last ice cream of the damn apocalypse, and I didn’t get to savor it or even enjoy it. I ate it quickly, worrying the whole time about what else I should scarf down before it was too late.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time after that and called myself a stupid shit a few times. All good now. At least I still have plenty of Tang, right? Yay.

8 days before

I saw a dump truck full of bodies go by today. I heard the diesel engine rumbling, the sound getting bigger as it moved my way. It piqued my curiosity, so I got to the window just in time to see it. It was flying, the engine roaring. The thing plowed by so fast that it took me a second to realize what I’d seen. It just looked like a heap of knees and elbows in the back.

It’s hard to believe that all of this is really happening, that all of these people are dead. Almost impossible to believe it. They’re just rounding these bodies up, taking them God knows where.

That’s a weird thing to think about, you know? There will probably be no coffins when you and I die. They will burn us, or they will flop us into a heap of corpses in a mass grave, or maybe we will just rot out in the open, undiscovered.

6 days before

They hauled a bunch more bodies out of the building today, piling the seven body bags into the back of a heavy duty Chevy Silverado with dual rear wheels. There remains something so crass about a pile of people like that, but after seeing the dump truck the other day, it struck me that these city guys completed the task with real care, lowering each body in gingerly.

But I wonder how much longer they can keep at it. All of the services cut off one by one, society falls to pieces little by little. Soon no one will come pick these bodies up. Very soon, I’m afraid.

5 days before

No more cable. More importantly, no more internet, like a piece of my brain ripped out, a jagged bleeding hole left in its place. And all the hole can do as far as thinking is bemoan all of the information it can no longer look up, all of the questions it can no longer find answers to within seconds. The frustration never ends.

The electricity still runs for now, but what for? No TV. No internet.

Fuck.

Is that weird? Is it odd that millions have died, maybe hundreds of millions worldwide by now, I have no way of knowing, but I’m possibly more upset to lose the internet? Is it because that’s small enough to grasp, while all of the death is so massive it just doesn’t feel real? It can’t. The neighbors’ deaths don’t feel real. Even my mom’s death doesn’t feel real. Not all the way. The plague and the riots seem like a sad thing that is happening out there in the world. Tragic but at least somewhat distant. At arm’s length, maybe. Like a movie, you know? Like a dream I will wake up from any minute now.

But it all keeps encroaching on my room, crawling through open windows or seeping through the crack under the door until it has me, too. That’s when it becomes real, maybe. Is that the only way?

4 days before

With the internet and TV gone, I watch the world through a different glass screen. I sit by the window all day and watch the people down below. The foot traffic seems higher than before, never ending streams of humanity flowing along the sidewalk. The people all look like scavengers to me now, brows crushed to wrinkles in concentration, eyes shifting back and forth, scanning along the ground, looking for something shiny or something to eat or something to kill. I’m not sure which. Maybe all three. I guess there’s nothing better to do for most of them now but walk around and look for trouble.

Some wear surgical masks over their faces, but most don’t bother. I don’t think there was ever really a point to it.

Anyway, I find ways to kill my time indoors. I drink a ton of water and piss and flush the toilet a lot. I fear those activities won’t be available or plentiful for long, so I’m getting my fill in now. Things will not go well if and when the water stops. I think even if I conserve as much as possible and keep the bathtub full for a little extra, I only really have enough water on hand for two weeks. Maybe three or four if I ration my toilet flushes down to like once a week or something. But I’m not going to think about it. Not yet.

In the meantime, I read. I drink a lot of Tang. I sleep a lot.

The sirens never sleep, though, do they? They moan all day and all of the night. Sometimes close enough to see the lights twirling against the sides of the buildings. Sometimes farther off, just a whooping cry in the distance. Even those shrill sounds fade from my notice, become part of the background as I distract myself with the window and the Tang. So the sirens become another mournful detail to block out.

I wonder when they will end, when their voices will fade out. They have to at some point, right? Of course they do. It will all end, and it will all be quiet. Silent. Still. We will all be quiet forever.

Soon, maybe.

3 days before

The power fades in and out again, never quite going all the way off or all the way on. It’s enough to have some light at night, sometimes dim, but the air conditioner won’t run. Hard to stomach this heat in the afternoons. Harder still to sleep at night.

After all of this time watching the riots and the overcrowded hospital scenes on TV with the rapidly increasing global death counts scrolling across the bottom of the screen, it feels insane to have no updates, no news, no stream of disturbing images to give a definitive sense of how fucked we are. Somehow seeing nothing and knowing nothing are so much worse.

I listen to the emergency radio, I guess. Mostly it’s loops of pre-determined playlists without DJs. Maybe edited reruns or something. A couple of times I caught part of a news report, but I didn’t get much out of it. Just a long list of countries that have declared states of emergency. One station is just a pre-recorded government message about going to the FEMA camps outside of town and otherwise only leaving your home if absolutely necessary. It’s 97 seconds long, and it plays over and over again.

In a way, the best thing about the radio is cranking it to recharge it. It’s reassuring in that I know it will still function, and the manual labor gives me a sense of purpose.

Have I already mentioned how much I miss the damn air conditioning? My apartment is like a sauna, and weird bodily smells drift in from outside. Like a mild cheese mixed with the odor that wafts out of that crevice between the crotch and thigh.

I should probably be thankful to have mostly avoided the smell of death itself so far, but it’s hard to be grateful for a body cheese smell like this.

2 days before

The air raid siren blared for three hours last night. I lay on my back, coated in sweat, listening to it warble, eyes staring into the blackness, waiting for some air strike, some bombs to light up the night, some nuclear explosion to disintegrate all of us into bloody jellies, but nothing happened.