The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (8 page)

From what I saw, I’m not sure how they were pumping the gasoline out of the underground tank. I know there are hand crank pumps that you can use in emergencies. In fact, I tried to order one off of Amazon before all of this started, but I didn’t get on it fast enough, and they were sold out. Anyway, it didn’t look like they were doing that, but I didn’t get the best look. Maybe the truck had a pump of some kind. Seems like that would have made noise, but I don’t know.

I waited, hugging my arms against me, crossing them over my chest and squeezing as though that could compact me in some way, help me take up less space. Each hand gripped the deltoid on the opposite arm, fingers digging into the quivering balls of muscle. And then I realized that something sharp pressed against my belly.

I looked down. The machete. I’d forgotten about it and now had it pressed diagonally across my torso, wedging the handle into my shoulder like a fucking moron. I adjusted, kept the blade at the ready across my lap.

I tried to stop myself from thinking it, but it was too late: “I think maybe I brought a machete to a machine gun fight.”

I listened, but the sounds stayed the same out there. Just the faint gurgle of the gasoline moving through the hose, and the wind blowing every so often.

Drops of sweat held on as long as they could before gliding down the back of my neck and soaking into the collar of my shirt. That sweat that seems to seep out with an electrical tingle to it, like I could feel the adrenalin, the fear itself, pooling on the surface of my skin.

Footsteps ground the glass bits into the asphalt, a thousand tiny fingernails screeching against a thousand tiny blackboards again, all of them moving my way. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. I pictured the booted feet advancing over the blacktop, rising and falling and grinding glass into the ground, moving closer and closer to the front door.

I leaned back further, pressing my back flat against the inside of the counter, my sopping sweaty t-shirt like a lukewarm sponge against my skin. Heat filled my head then in some strange way that made my eyelids flutter, made my vision go swimmy. Not good. I remembered to not hyperventilate, to take deeper breaths and slow them down the best I could. It seemed to help.

Once I was sure the footsteps couldn’t get any closer, the sound of the grinding glass stopped and no sound took their place. I listened, waiting to hear the clatter of his feet on the tile floor. I tilted my head as though it would help me strain my ears. No sound. Was he inside or not?

“See anything?” a voice called from outside.

A grunt erupted almost on top of me from where the man stood on the other side of the counter. I jumped, shoulder blades sliding against the counter without a sound. I like to think that my sweat lubricated things in such a way as to keep the movement silent.

“Naw. Nothing here,” he said. “This place is wrecked.”

After another beat of quiet, the footsteps trailed away over the glass. The sound from the hose once again droned on unaccompanied.

My eyelids fluttered again, this time not from faintness but some endorphin release that made my scalp tingle and filled my chest with some chemical bliss that was new to me. It felt incredibly pleasant just to breathe. I knew I wasn’t out of this, not yet, but my body saw fit to reward my survival of that encounter.

Time sped up again, maybe because of that head rush. I felt so good that I wanted to get one more look at them, to see their faces, to see what I might be able to learn about them.

I leaned forward on hands and knees, moving out of the darkest shade under the counter.

“Gotcha,” a voice said behind me, and I could hear the smile in it, and something hard and blunt bashed the back of my head. Black rushed in to catch me then, and I was out before I hit the floor.

42 days after

Consciousness faded in and out for a few seconds at a time. Some panicked part of me kept waking me up, trying to muster either some fight or some flight, but it couldn’t stave off the blackness all the way.

I felt myself being dragged across the floor on my back. Hands clenched my ankles, pulling me. My lower back, shoulder blades and then head bumped over the metal threshold, and then the glass bits ground into the flesh on the backs of my arms, and the sunlight was everywhere, and the heat of the asphalt touched me all over.

My eyelids flittered, revealing bursts of light. The whole sky seemed clear and bright and calm above me. I couldn’t see the face of the person who had a hold of me, just a silhouette hovering up there, the sun at his back leaving only his shadow visible from my vantage point.

The sounds faded in and out as well. Voices rising and falling, every sentence stuttering and cut off. The glass scratched the blackboard at a lower pitch now, and that turned on and off, too, like someone kept pressing the mute button in my head.

And then I realized that I was still. That I had been lying still in the parking lot for a while now, and I peeled my cheek up off of the asphalt from where my head had lolled to the side, but I couldn’t keep it up. It kept falling back to the ground, and I heard them laughing. All three of them, laughing it up.

And then I was out again.

42 days after

When I woke again, I knew a long time had passed. I didn’t move. I listened. The men finished up their work, and I heard that sound again of the metal connecting pieces on each end of the hose dragging along the ground. The trucks fired up shortly after that, one then the other, so much louder now that I was close. And I heard their voices again, but the grate of the diesel swallowed too much of the sounds to be able to make out the words.

The truck doors slammed, and the pitch of the motors shifted when they put the vehicles in gear. The trucks slid away, picking up speed as they moved on. I listened for a while as the noise did the long slow fade out like in an old song.

Even after the sound was gone entirely, I stayed put. Apart from muscle tremors, I didn’t move for what felt like a long time. I lay there and sweat and listened and sweat some more.

I wondered why they left me. For some reason, I didn’t think it was out of kindness. Did they think I was dead? Did they not see me as someone who could ever become a threat to them?

By the time I picked myself up and dusted all of the bits of glass out of the craters they’d formed in my skin, the daylight had begun to fade.

My shoes were gone, pulled off of my feet. I felt at my neck. No string hung there anymore, removed along with the key to the storage unit that had dangled at the end of it. I brought the heels of my hands to my eyes. No more hopes of finding my generator or the multitude of other things I’d stashed there.

I was shocked to find the machete still on the gas station floor. Maybe they’d overlooked it or maybe they didn’t give a shit about a blade when they had guns.

I walked home under the gray cover of dusk, the ground cutting the hell out of my feet.

43 days after

Eighteen hours later and I feel awful. My head pounds and pounds and never lets up. I’ve tried every kind of headache medicine and none have helped so far. I just sleep and get up to piss and drink some Tang. I should fix something to eat, I guess, or force down a piece of jerky. Maybe it’d help, but I don’t have the energy for it.

In my dreams I am powerless. Paralyzed. I lie motionless while dark figures flit about the edges of my field of vision. Shadows hover over me. Voices speak words I can’t understand.

46 days after

Seventy-two hours later, and I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about the men in the trucks, replaying every tiny detail over and over in my head. The sound of the glass against the blacktop, the way the sides of the kneeling man’s head were shaved, my pulse hammering in my ears, the gurgle of the gasoline in the hose. And then the thump on the back of the head, and the sunlight and the sky and the sound of their laughs flickering in and out.

For what seemed a long time before that, I felt like the world belonged to me, like an empty kingdom for me to rule, but a new predator came along and made me feel small. Powerless. Pathetic. In some ways it reminded me of how I felt all of the time before, frightened to be around people, awkward and anxious and apart.

I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

But I’ve seen how things can change, how they must change, how all things must come to ash, how the old ways can die out and become something new. And I know I can change. I can transform.

And so I will.

47 days after

I heard engines again this morning. I crouched under the pergola, and the sound rose in the distance. I could have believed I was imagining it, but that pitch shift when the gears changed tipped it off. It was far enough out to make it hard to tell if it was that pair of diesels again or something else. It shook me up a little bit, the hair standing straight up on my arms, but the cat didn’t even look up from his meat, which somehow lowered my alarm.

Actually, I should say cats. My brown tabby friend brought along a dinner partner, a small gray cat about his same size, so I put meat out for both of them. The gray kitten seems less timid about humans. I mean, he keeps his distance, but he looks at me and everything. Makes eye contact. Seems curious. The brown cat is off in his own world, I think.

Feels a little weird to refer to them by their color here, but I don’t want to name them for whatever reason. It just feels like it’s not my place. The world is theirs as much as it is mine now.

Behold the loneliness. The only thing that’s left. The only thing that was ever real if you stripped away the novelties and distractions, maybe.

My window still frames the same picture as always. The dead bodies, looking more skeletal than ever, with the almost leathery bits of remaining flesh stretched over the bones that look more and more like the beef jerky I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s a rerun, though. I’ve seen it all before. The earlier seasons were good, but the window show is boring now. I don’t get it anyway. What’s the lesson of this supposed to be? What’s the moral of the story that I’m supposed to take away?

I pace the floor, and a fever comes upon me, and my thoughts shoot down new arteries and capillaries, pumping hot and red all through me, and somehow spreading wider and wider, their scale ever expanding, and strange melodies come to me from nowhere, flowing songs that compose themselves in my head while I walk, changing keys and modes on whims, changing arrangements and instrumentation and genre seamlessly. My heart bangs out a backbeat, and I feel my pulse throb in my neck. My skin tingles with that half anxious, half excited feeling all along my torso. It’s almost a medicinal sensation, like what I always imagined dandruff shampoo would feel like on my scalp, except all along my chest and back and belly instead.

I try to envision a future, my future, but it’s difficult in the dark. Maybe impossible. I don’t know where I’ll go or who else might be there. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to want? Who am I supposed to be? Can any of these things make sense anymore?

Will those of us still here spend the rest of our time fighting to get back what we had? What did we even have? Convenience? Novelty? Is that the best we can achieve? Is it even worth fighting for?

Everyone dies. Is that the lesson? That was always the case, though, wasn’t it? Now a bunch of them just died all at once. All together. So what’s the difference? In some ways everything is different. In some ways nothing is different. For me, that is.

Part of me tells myself how I would do it all over, how I would handle things differently. The thought assails me even when I try to avoid it, nags at me in the quiet moments, when everything goes still. It doesn’t suggest a path of honesty and openness. What did those things ever get me?

It wants me to stop looking through things, stop probing for meaning in life and love and such matters. It wants me to take it all at face value, to believe the lie the best I can, to take that lie to the grave. It wants me to calculate and manipulate and present a version of myself that people can love. Forget the truth. Craft and present a version of myself that tells everyone what they want to hear, gives them something to believe, gives support to this surface lie we’ve all agreed upon. And if I give them these things, I can take all that I want in return. All that the animal part of me wants – power, pride, contempt and lust -- all of my primal appetites appeased.

Because that’s the best you can do, maybe. Taking what you want to make yourself feel good. Becoming the one at the top of the food chain. Maybe that’s the only connection that really exists between people, the power we can exert over each other.

Maybe.

48 days after

I look in the mirror and can’t believe how much I’ve physically changed. I’m already all tan from walking around out there, my body going lean and hard from even the miniscule amount of exercise I do now compared to all of that time in front of the TV and computer before. That’s the one thing I’ll say about the post-apocalypse. It makes for decent cardio.