The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (47 page)

The headache had evened out into a steady pain, less of the stabbing throbs. It hurt, but he preferred this to the pain blinking off and on. Instead of a series of stabbings, this was more like someone left the blade in finally, and he’d grown used to its presence. Anyway, the disease must be well into the final stage now.

He walked toward the house, feet skimming over the water atop the driveway. His hand clasped the black door handle on the screen door, touching the cold metal he’d touched thousands of times before, but his thumb hesitated to push the button to open the latch. Should he actually do this? Wouldn’t it be a risk?

No. He needed to trust himself for once. He needed to believe in himself. He had a few hours left, and he could make them count if he had faith in himself. Maybe he couldn’t make things OK for his boys by himself, but he could give them a better shot at it.

The door squawked when he opened it, and as he stepped into the kitchen, he thought about how unlikely all of this would have seemed even three days ago. The reality of the situation bludgeoned him, that this is what his life had become: weighing his options for how best to kill himself.

But first he would get some dry clothes.

He stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. Shirtless. Black swirls clouded most of his chest now, spreading from one shoulder to just shy of the other. They weren’t thick black lines like the ones snaking over his arm. They were small, more like smoky capillaries, the biggest few reaching the width of an earthworm in places, most of the others tiny in comparison. He traced his finger over the flesh, drawing an invisible line above his sternum, but it felt no different than normal to the touch. He turned sideways in the mirror, seeing the same pattern of black webbing over his back.

Wetness still clung to his hair from the cold shower he’d taken minutes before. Letting the chilly water pour over his skull had been overwhelming, hard to get through, but his mind felt clearer now, so he was glad he powered through it.

He slid on a long sleeved t-shirt and made his way out to the kitchen. The phone sat on the table. He’d almost forgotten that that was next on the to-do list. It dinged when he pressed the button, the screen lighting up as it cycled through a few startup screens. There. No new messages. Somehow he wasn’t surprised or disappointed. He’d been planning as though this would be the case. He turned the phone off again to further conserve the battery.

He rooted around in the drawer under the oven until he found a suitable frying pan. The thought of eating made him nauseous now, made a bad taste crawl up from inside to linger at the back of his mouth. He was done with meals, he knew, but he would make something for the boys.

He couldn’t take the idea of cracking open eggs, watching the yolk and white pour into the pan like globs of snot, watching the clear goo go opaque white as it cooked until it was rubbery like some kind of tentacle material.

No. Never.

He’d make pancakes.

Baghead

Rural Arkansas

9 years, 126 days after

The car rocketed forward once more, grass and small trees beginning to fill in along the sides of the road. The plant life almost felt smothering after all of that time in the open.

Bags leaned back to check on the girl. She slept in the back, curled up in a blanket. Blood still crusted her hair, the strands all woven and matted together like leftover spaghetti. He’d wanted to wash it, but Delfino thought it’d be best to put some distance between them and whatever might have been involved with the blood being all over the girl in the first place, and Baghead agreed.

He was still surprised that she had gotten into the car at all. She seemed like a rabid thing that would freak out at the notion of confinement or at least freak out when the car started moving. But she was fine. Of course, the jerky Delfino had dug out of the cooler had probably made the car a lot more enticing.

She scarfed hers and Bags handed over the last half of his, which she wolfed down even faster. Delfino had dug a rag out of the glove compartment and dumped a little water on it, handing it over so she could wipe some of the blood off of her face. After that, she was out.

“You think she can talk?” Delfino whispered.

“I’d imagine so. It’s not like she’s wearing a loin cloth, you know? She has a t-shirt and pants on.”

“No shoes. But yeah, I see what you’re getting at. She seems a little wild, though, right?”

Bags nodded, and they were quiet for a while. The tires thudded over dirt-filled potholes and cracks.

“What are we going to do with her?” Delfino said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Did you just, like, sign up for a lifetime of taking care of this kid? It’s not like we’re going to track down her parents. Shit, that’s probably her parents’ blood smeared all over her.”

Bags had to admit to himself that Delfino had just made a good point. He jumped out of the car to help her because it was the right thing to do, but was taking her along on a road trip with assassins trying to kill him the right thing to do?

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, I guess.”

Delfino nodded, but Bags thought his eyes looked far away. The driver licked his lips and then spoke:

“Just… I don’t know much about taking care of a kid is all, and there’s a damn contract on your life. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“We’re getting her out of a really bad situation. She is better off than she was 45 minutes ago. For now, that’s more than good enough.”

“I guess so.”

Lorraine

North of Houston, Texas

2 days before

The sun glinted down between the brick buildings, the glare reflecting off of the glossy black plastic bags bulging out of the top of the dumpster. Flies circled above the alley, like vultures waiting for something new to die.

She knew this was a bad idea, knew they needed to get gone faster than this, but he insisted, and he always got his way.

She watched him through the passenger window, her eyes bouncing between his head and shoulders, which she could see above the dumpster, and the ground beneath him, looking for any sign of activity in either locale.

“Hurry up,” she said.

“I’m trying. Jesus, Lorraine. Stop pressuring me.”

There. She heard it. The stream of urine slapped the blacktop at his feet.

He put a palm on the bricks in front of him for balance and scooted his legs out and back, bending partially at the waist. The position made her chuckle, though after a second she realized he must be attempting to keep the piss off his shoes.

The thing lurched out of the dumpster before either of them could react. She thought it was a dog at first, a dog lunging up from among the garbage bags to tear out his jugular. Almost like a dog draped in fabric.

It clung to his shoulders, and the face part attached to his neck. It almost looked like a baby sloth climbing on its mother.

He screamed. He screamed like a woman. There was no other way to describe it.

He turned away from the brick wall, and the thing came into view. It wasn’t a dog. It was a girl in a black hoodie. She was dead, or she should have been. The right side of her face was all chewed off, revealing the skeletal view of her cheek bone and temple and teeth. The remaining flesh on the opposite side of her face was yellowed and shiny like sweaty cheese. Her eyes didn’t seem to recognize anything going on around her, but her mouth never stopped reaching out for meat like a baby bird’s gaping beak.

He teetered, hands ripping at the thing, screaming whenever the head nuzzled into him, whenever the teeth ripped at his skin. He stumbled backward a few paces, and then over-corrected, lurching forward, knees skidding down in the piss puddle.

And then the thing tore away a pretty good sized neck chunk, and the blood sprayed like the spigot next to her garden. He gurgled three times, throaty sounds like that suction tube at the dentist removing saliva from the back of the mouth, and he was gone, lying still while the thing ate him.

A rabid dead girl. That was how her husband, Greg, died earlier that afternoon. With his cock out in an alley.

She woke. Back in the dark. Back in the Grand Cherokee. Back with the swearing preacher, a human being more like a lizard than a man. More like a snake. He hung up his phone right away as she opened her eyes, his movements rushed. Suspicious, she thought.

She watched him lick his lips as he drove, his big orange face lit up by the dashboard lights. Why did it work this way? Why did a lizard person, con artist get to live while Greg died a horrific death?

She dug in her purse for one more pill.

Ray

Rural Texas

2 days before

The headlights pierced the dark, but the black still seemed to close in on them, pressing against the windows all around. They drove into the dead of night, no one else around, the Grand Cherokee barreling north on backroads neither of them had ever heard of. The signs on the side of the road mentioned tiny towns that were equally unfamiliar.

She slept off and on, her neck going limp to lean her head down onto her shoulder, a single dribble of drool spilling onto the seat. When she was out, he felt like he was navigating some bigger vehicle as it pressed into the void, a ship of some kind hurtling into the black nothing. It almost felt like driving a house.

Sometime after 3 AM, she woke. She rifled through her purse, pulled out an orange container of prescription pills. Her hands moved to twist its head off, but Ray intervened, snatching the pill bottle away.

“What is this?” he said.

The pills rattled in the bottle, and he felt the muscles in his face tense, his brow crease, his jaw flex.

Her mouth hung open, and he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, but after a second she did.

“It’s my medication.”

This was a tone he hadn’t heard from her to this point. The indignance of the entitled rich woman. A housewife, he would guess. The kind of housewife who was very important with little to do, always planning dinner parties and brunches and get-togethers, an endless stream of meaningless interactions all meticulously plotted out and fussed over.

He tilted the bottle toward the light spilling out of the dash indicators. First he saw her name. Lorraine. Lorraine Murray. Huh. Not a D name after all. He scanned farther. Xanax. A powerful anti-anxiety medicine. One of the most addictive and one of the most dangerous, from what he had learned the hard way.

He caught his reflection in the driver’s side window out of the corner of his eye, saw the scowl on his mouth, the furrow of his brow, and then something in him softened. Why was he so angry? Why was his instinct to intervene here, to tell a stranger how to behave?

He tossed the pills to her.

“Gotta be careful with that stuff,” he said. “Those sedative hypnotics will mess you up bad if you get hooked.”

She gripped the pill bottle as though to open it but stopped and put them away instead.

“Your body gets so addicted that it crosses wires in your brain. When you try to quit, you can go into a coma. Happened to my boy. He didn’t make it.”

He licked his lips.

“But that was a long time ago.”

She didn’t say anything, and a quiet came over the car, a tension. The black pressed even harder at the windows, trying to get inside and swallow them up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I guess with what happened earlier...”

Her head turned, and their eyes met for the first time in a while.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and she put her hand on his arm.

“They’re going to bomb it,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

“Bomb what?”

“Houston. The government is giving up on beating the plague. Killing some so others might live. Probably lots of cities in the South are going down.”

She didn’t say anything, but her grip on his arm tightened.

Erin

Presto, Pennsylvania

48 days after

An explosive crack echoed across the valley to the north.

Erin reached for the edge of the pool and stopped paddling. She held still, waiting.

The noise came again, twice. It was a sound that used to mean hunting season. Or target practice. Not anymore.

Her heart raced. Gunshots meant people. And people were bad enough. People
with
guns… she didn’t want to think about it.

Izzy popped up from under the water.

“How long did I hold it that time?”

“Get out of the pool.”

Erin was already lifting herself out. Water dribbled from her hair and clothes onto the ground.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

She reached out and pulled Izzy from the pool. Four more shots rang out.