The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (4 page)

The radio finds no signal now. No more easy listening on an endless repeat. No more government message. No broadcasts at all on any station. Just static all the way across the dial. I spin it back and forth every few minutes anyway. Just in case.

1 day before

As of this morning, bodies rest on the street below. Three of them, sprawled out on the concrete. Two are together, a man and a woman wrapped in each other’s arms, half slumped against the front of the burned out apartment building like a couple who just stopped for a moment to rest their legs and never got up. The other, a high school kid wearing a Penguins jersey, I think, lies face down on the curb, his head flopping down into the gutter with the shards of brick all around. That one is much bloodier than the other two, its head and pelvis outlined in pools of red.

Crazy that the three of them wound up there not far from each other over the course of one night. Maybe they were together. It doesn’t seem like it somehow, but maybe. It makes me wonder what all goes on in the night, in the dark, in all of the places where my eyes can’t go.

The people walking by just step over the outstretched limbs like it’s nothing, their body language showing no signs of disturbance, their necks twisting their faces the other direction. Maybe bodies like these litter streets all over town by now. Maybe they’ve become part of the scenery. I don’t know, really. I can only see this one little slice of the world.

Either way, I have this strong, strong feeling that no one will come around to pick them up. It just feels that way when I look out there. The atmosphere has changed somehow over the last few days. There are less people walking around, almost no cars going by. The world is emptying out.

I have avoided mentioning it, which doesn’t make sense, of course, but I haven’t seen you in a long, long time. Your car is still out in the parking lot, but... It’s probably nothing. I’m just paranoid.

The morning after

The air raid sirens blared again last night for a long time. It felt like hours, but I’m not sure. I think it was about 95 degrees and humid, so I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. I read for a bit, and then I stared at the ceiling again and felt the sweat ooze out of the pores in my skin. No matter how long you spend in that kind of pitch black darkness, you never get all the way used to it. I can’t even imagine what it’d feel like to be outside in it all night instead of in my apartment.

And then the brightest light flashed in the window. It was like a gigantic flashbulb went off in the sky, so brief that I almost thought I might have imagined it somehow, going half mad in the blackness. I waited for a long moment for more flashes, for the boom and the mushroom cloud. My breath caught in my throat, but nothing happened. Maybe a little sizzling sound, but it could have been the wind.

I fidgeted a bit, shifting my shoulder blades beneath me, waiting for some explanation of the flash to come to me. It was too bright to be lightning, I thought, and the lack of thunder seemed to back up that line of thinking.

I realized that the air raid siren had cut off a few minutes ago now. Did that mean the threat was over? And how might the flash fit into that picture?

The silence seemed so huge. I heard no traffic, no echoing clatter of footsteps or strange animal sounds from the street below. Nothing. The world remained mute, leaving the air huffing in and out of my nostrils as the only sound, which made it seem like I was the only thing that was real now.

I squirmed again, my elbow brushing a dry part of the bed that my sweat hadn’t managed to moisten yet. It felt nice. Cool and dry. Too bad there wasn’t much of it.

I closed my eyes and drifted for a time, somehow neither asleep nor awake, neither alive nor dead, or so it felt to me in the moment. I floated in the emptiness, in the darkness as hot and sticky as bad breath, in the black nothing that squatted upon my room, upon my city, upon my world.

And then my mind arrived at a possible explanation for the flash and the air raid siren. I startled myself awake, and my arm shot out to the side, hand scrabbling over the objects on the nightstand until my fingers found my Kindle, grabbed it, pressed the power button, waited for the blinding light from the screen. It remained dark, so I pressed the power button again. Waited. Still nothing.

I put the Kindle down and lay back, the back of my head sinking into the sweaty pillow. An electromagnetic pulse. That would kill my Kindle along with every other electronic device for thousands of miles. This wasn’t enough evidence to be definitive, of course, but an ache crept into my stomach anyway. A raw, acidic sensation in my gut, because I didn’t need more evidence. I knew it was true.

This morning, it sure seems to be the case. No more phone. No more Kindle. Nothing.

The traffic swarms outside my window, a line of cars making their way out of town. All older models, I notice. The pulse probably killed the newer cars.

I haven’t thought a lot about who might have done this. It almost had to be a terrorist group of some kind, right?

People from my building walk out onto the sidewalk and stand and smoke cigarettes and talk, their heads periodically swiveling to follow the traffic going by. The cars must block their view of the corpses on the other side. That’d probably ruin a smoke break real quick, eh?

They mill around, fidgeting, smoke twirling around them. I look down upon the tops of their skulls, at heads of hair that somehow look like discolored broccoli tops from this distance. I try to listen in, to hear what the latest rumors might be, but the constant grind of the engines drowns everything out.

1 day after

The exodus continues. The people flow out of here on car, bike, or foot. The stream of humanity never ends. I don’t know where they’re going. Maybe the government camps from that radio message. Maybe not. Either way, I don’t think they plan on coming back.

I wonder if some of them think they can drive somewhere that still has power. I doubt it. From what I know, EMPs can cover thousands of miles, and if they bothered hitting Pittsburgh, they surely hit everywhere else.

They haul their things with them, as much of it as they can carry. Arms tote cardboard boxes. Bungee cords strap luggage to the rooftops of Buicks and Chryslers. I saw one guy balancing a milk crate full of random crap on the handlebar of his bike.

Maybe I’m just getting used to all of this, but it feels less tense than yesterday. The people move with a purpose, their body language conveying more hope than despair. Rigid postures that display confidence. Faces wearing mostly blank expressions that seem to give off the faintest pleasant hint.

Your car still sits in the lot, unmoved since I last saw you, so I assume you’re still here. On some level, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

2 days after

Guns everywhere. Many of the people walking by are armed now, handguns dangling at their sides, rifles resting on their shoulders. A couple even bobbed crossbows in front of themselves as they moseyed by my window. If I squinted, I could almost convince myself they were t-shirt cannons, and they’d fire up something for me to wear any second now.

T-shirt cannons aside, the feeling in the air has turned harsh now that the biggest groups have moved on. A rougher crowd stayed behind. Or at least the scraggly looking types with guns are the only ones left walking around. Everyone else probably hides much of the time, like me.

It scares me to think I will have to venture out there at some point. My supplies can’t last forever. Not even close.

Sheesh. I hope you have food. I shouldn’t write this down for a variety of reasons, but I’m too scared to check on you. Not scared of encountering someone in the hall or anything like that. Scared that it’s already too late.

4 days after

There are almost no pedestrians now. A handful or so per day. All men. All armed. All wearing scowls on their faces. Dead eyed fuckers, every one. I can’t remember the last time I saw a woman or child out there.

I shudder when I look on them, my shoulders shimmy involuntarily, and I’m glad that a pane of glass separates them from me. Almost like they are just a special effect on TV. Half CGI. Nothing to fear. But I know they’re not.

I need to get a gun. I’ve thought about checking on some of the other apartments. There must be a weapon tucked away in one of these rooms. It’d be smart to start looking now before I absolutely need it.

I wonder sometimes. Who knows how many of these apartments around me are filled with the dead? There are too many cars left in the lot. Not everyone got out during that mass exodus. And still, I’ve seen no one go in or out of the building the past couple of days, heard no activity in the hall. I doubt anyone else was sitting on the food stash that I have. They’d need to get out there to find something to eat, you know?

I don’t like to dwell on this, though.

Looking back, I wonder what the first night of air raid sirens was about. Were there EMPs in other cities that night? Bombs in other cities? All of the radio stuff was shut down the next day, which seems too odd to be a coincidence, I think. So this probably happened elsewhere. Maybe everywhere.

9 days after

The water pressure has decreased quite a bit over the past day. It runs still, but I don’t know for how much longer that will be true. The toilet tank takes over six minutes to refill now compared to fifteen seconds before all of this started. I try to not think about it as I stir my glasses of Tang, but there’s not much else to think about. Not much else to do but think about these things and watch those corpses play hide and go rigid on the sidewalk.

Nothing moves outside. Wait. I take that back. I think, technically, the corpses slowly shrivel in the sunlight. They bloated for those first few days, flies swarming everywhere. By some miracle, the smell didn’t get to my room too badly. I got a few terrible whiffs, but it never quite stuck. It never lingered. I expected much worse, and I suspect I was pretty lucky.

Anyway, I think the smell has died down at this point. The flies have moved on. Now the exposed flesh puckers, wrinkling and darkening a bit. Like three giant raisins sprawling on the concrete.

They seem less real now, less like people who once breathed and talked and dreamed. More like road kill, I guess. Hunks of meat drying out on the side of the road. No one cares.

It astounds me all of the ways I find to distract myself from all of this death, how often it strays from my thoughts or simply doesn’t feel real. I see it every day, everywhere I look, and still I find ways to put it out of my mind. Even those moments when the full force of it hits me remain fleeting. I get upset, feel that acidic sting climb the back of my throat, but it can’t last. I move on. I look forward. I think we are coded for that, at least somewhat. We look forward, not back.

It never really occurred to me that I should be getting sick like everyone else. I watched it out the window, and I was glad it wasn’t me, but I never feared it in an immediate way. I never shined a flashlight into my mouth to look for spots on my throat in the mirror or anything like that.

I guess I’m lucky, though. Or maybe that depends on your point of view. Some might prefer the death penalty to a life sentence to be served in an empty world. No parole.

10 days after

What else is there to say? If you’re still here, you are across the hall, though you may as well be miles from here, and I may as well be nowhere.

I sit. I look out the window. I wait for the water to quit flowing through the pipes.

That’s all.

No more words.

13 days after

I stare out the window at nothing, at the corpses stretched out upon the sidewalk, I guess, at the brown blood crusted to the ground around them. I haven’t seen a living human being pass by for three days now. The last mammal was a dog cruising by, pausing briefly to smell the hockey jersey wearing body with its face planted in the gutter. The beast looked big and black, though it kept its head down making it hard to identify the breed. A Rottweiler, maybe.

I heard a car pass by in the night, the first since the day after the EMP, I think. I got up, but it was already gone before I could even get a glimpse of the taillights. I saw the faintest red glow, not even strong enough to illuminate the silhouette of the burned out apartment building, just a shapeless red tint to the dark.

Everything holds deathly still out there. Sometimes birds and insects flutter by, I guess. Sometimes the wind whips down the empty street and things shake about, but that’s it.

All my friends are dead. Probably everyone I’ve ever cared about is dead. I can’t buy any notion that they’re all safe in a government camp somewhere. I look out at the desolation, hear the wind almost whistle through the skeletal remains of the apartment building across the street, and I know that most everyone is gone.

I know now that you are dead, too, that you maybe have been dead for a long while now. And I know that I will never know you or maybe anyone at all except for myself now. Not really. But I write anyway, because I have nothing else.