The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (51 page)

Erin instinctively pushed Izzy behind her, peering back at the bodies splayed in the road.

It was coming from the body farthest from where they stood. A man in his 30s. Maybe 40s. It was hard to tell. He lay on his back, head angled away from them.

“Stay here,” she told Izzy, then approached slowly. She was careful to walk well away from the bodies. She couldn’t stop imagining one of them reaching out and grabbing her by the ankle, like in a horror movie.

She skirted around him until she could see his face.

His eyelids fluttered, seemingly not sure if they wanted to be open or shut. His mouth moved, too. At first Erin thought he was trying to speak, but when she saw how the jaw moved up and down, almost in a mechanical way, she changed her mind. It was more like a spasm, an involuntary motion. Like a puppet or a ventriloquist’s dummy.

There was a bullet wound in his neck and another in his forehead. She didn’t know why he wasn’t dead, but she figured it was only a matter of time before he would be.

Erin turned away, gathering Izzy and nudging her back toward the house.

“Let’s go.”

Izzy planted her feet, resisting.

“We have to help him.”

“How? Even if we could move him, he’d be dead before we got him back to the house. And if, by the grace of God, he somehow wasn’t already dead, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s not like you can just slap a Band-aid and some Neosporin on a gunshot wound.”

“It’s not right to just leave him like this.”

Erin gave one more glance back at the half-dead man.

“There’s nothing else we can do, Iz.”

Erin’s clothes were almost dry by the time they got back to the house, but she relished changing out of them anyway.

“Hungry?” she asked Izzy.

Izzy shook her head, not looking up from the Calvin and Hobbes book she’d picked out at the library. Ever since Erin had given her the funny pages the day they built their first fire, Izzy had become obsessed with comic strips.

Erin took her silence as moping at first. The kid had been whining about being hungry half an hour ago. And then the grating sounds the dying man made came back to her, and it occurred to her that she wasn’t that hungry, either.

She couldn’t help glancing at the window facing that section of the road, gaze going beyond the grass and the yellowing corn. She couldn’t actually see the road from there, but her eyes were drawn there anyway.

Was he still alive up there? Still breathing those terrible rasping breaths?

She spun away from the window. She needed to think about something else.

Her focus fell on a box of scavenged food on the counter. It hadn’t been inventoried yet. That would take her mind off of things.

Except that the crusty red bits around the lid of the half-empty bottle of off-brand ketchup made her think of the almost-dead man’s wounds. Jagged holes in the flesh, torn and cauterized by the bullet. She scooted the ketchup into the darkness at the back of the cabinet, out of sight. The next thing her eyes lighted on was the bag of rice. Nothing sinister about rice. Except that they kind of resembled maggots, which would soon be crawling all over the three men on the road. The cabinet banged shut.

OK, food was a bad idea. There was a shopping bag on the table, filled with a variety of medications they’d found in the their recent shopping excursions. She’d also scored a pharmacology book at the library, which came in handy since she didn’t know what half of the meds were. The bag rustled as she plucked a pill bottle from its depths. She shook it in her fist, watching the white pills rattle against the translucent orange plastic. Then she spun it in her hands and read the label.

The name on the bottle was Lucinda Silvie. Below that, the name of the drug was printed: SONATA 10MG.

She cracked the book, heading for the index in the back.

Her thumbnail scratched down the page until she found it.

Sonata, see zaleplon, page 465.

On a blank page of her notebook, she took down the two names, then flipped to page 465.

Zaleplon. A non-benzodiazepine sedative hypnotic. Clinical indications: short-term insomnia treatment.

True enough, she thought. Just reading about it was putting her to sleep.

She skimmed the page, barely able to make sense of half the words printed there. Class: pyrazolopyrimidine. Chemical name: N-[3-(3-cyanopyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidin-7-yl)phenyl]-N-ethylacetamide. Empirical formula: C
17
H
15
N
5
O.

A butterfly fluttered past the window. Erin’s head snapped back abruptly. How had she wound up in front of the window again? She peeked over her shoulder. Izzy still sat in the window seat at the other end of the room, curled up with her book. She must have gotten lost in thought and wandered back to the window without even realizing it. Jesus.

She paced through the kitchen, not able to sit still. What if he
was
still alive up there? Lying on the asphalt, bleeding out.

He was going to die. She couldn’t change that. But there was something she could do. She just didn’t know if she had the guts.

The sun was making its final descent of the day, tinting the whole world in an amber light. It reminded Erin of the old sepia photographs from her American History book.

Corn husks bumped and rubbed against one another in the breeze, filling the air with a rasping song that gave her the chills. It reminded her a little too much of the almost-dead man’s breathing.

She passed from the field to the start of the forest, climbing up toward the road. She’d made Izzy swear she’d stay in the house three times.

The road came into view, along with the two fully dead men. Erin stopped, having second thoughts. Was she really going to do this?

She thumbed the utility knife clutched in her hand, extending the blade from the case. She still wasn’t sure she could do it, but it made her feel a little less scared with the knife ready.

She clambered the last few yards up to the road and stared. She blinked once, twice, then pressed her eyes closed. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible.

The almost-dead man was gone.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

Bare wooden walls surrounded him, beams like ribs and plywood like the flesh surrounding the bone. That put him in the shed’s belly, perched atop an upside-down bucket. Maybe that made sense.

When he first sat here and looked at the evenly spaced two-by-four beams around him, he saw them as bars, saw this shed as his cell where he waited for himself to administer the death penalty. But maybe it was more accurate to think of the shed as consuming him. He crawled into its mouth-door, and it swallowed him whole. He would never walk out.

In the belly of the shed-beast, he thought.

He ran a finger along the plastic lip around the bottom of the bucket. It was hard and sharp and scuffed into a rough texture from its friction with the concrete slab below. The gun sat in his lap. Not quite ready to perform its duty.

All of the hope drained out of him along with the pastrami sandwich and the blood and the black goo. He knew it was over at that moment, knew that the end would come soon. In some way, knowing was a relief. His mind no longer tussled with his fate as an abstract unknown it could never quite get a hold of. His fate turned concrete, an inevitability, an absolute. A kind of peace came with that.

Now he was just waiting for the right feeling to come over him so he could go through with it. It felt like swallowing a pill, he thought, having that mouthful of water and a tablet sloshing around on his tongue, waiting that beat, that momentary hesitation, before sending it over the epiglottis and down the drain. His whole life was like that beat stretched out now, waiting to send himself down a different drain.

He bounced his leg, his shoe scraping a little against the rippled texture of the concrete. It smelled like lawn care products and wood and gasoline here, with other unidentifiable shed odors mixed in. Dried grass caked the edge of the weed whacker and mower, matted chunks of green going brown.

Mitch lifted a mason jar full of water to his lips and sipped, his hand shaking a little. He didn’t think drinking did him much good now, didn’t think he could really hydrate himself at this point with his body breaking down into black sludge or whatever the fuck, but it was a comfort. He liked the way the cold water felt on his lips and washing down his throat. He figured it might come back up, but hopefully he wouldn’t be out here long enough for that to happen.

He touched the gun with his left hand, fingers stroking across it and then moving away. Cold and smooth, the steel vibrated against his skin, made the tips of his fingers tingle. Could that be real? Or was it his imagination? It didn’t matter, he thought. Either way, it was too intense, somehow, to maintain contact. For now, anyway.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at the eyelids, pink and yellow splotches exploding in flashes in his field of vision like fireworks. His fingers pressed at puffs of swollen flesh that extended from his eyes to halfway down his nose. It didn’t feel like touching part of his face. It felt like touching two fat slugs, fleshy and slimy and firm. And it was tender, the pain swelling to something significant when he applied any pressure.

Something knocked on the wood, shaking him back into the moment. He removed his hand and opened his eyes, waiting, listening. He blinked a few times, turned his head to point each ear at the door for a moment, as though one of them might reveal something, but no.

Only silence.

Was one of the boys at the door? He hoped not. He’d told Kevin to stay away and to keep Matt away, told him he’d only do it if he had to and told him to get the gun after, and that it’d be OK for Matt to see then, so he could understand the thing, that it’d hurt, but in the long run it’s better to see it and deal with it. He barely remembered saying these things. The scenes all jumbled together in his head after the puke, a rush of panic and talking and heat.

Just as he returned to rubbing at his slug eyes, another knock came and then another. Except now that he wasn’t distracted, he could tell that they were more taps than knocks, and they weren’t coming from the door, they were coming from the roof. He knew this sound. Rain. Just a sprinkle for now with a few bigger drops here and there by the sound of it.

Now.

He lifted the gun with his right hand, brought it to his head in slow motion. The metal cooled his palm, and his index finger poked along the side of the barrel, adjusting down and in to find its place on the trigger.

When he had the weapon at chin level, he paused, the barrel facing up and away from him. How would he do this? He pictured himself putting the muzzle under his chin, but he knew firing through his jaw left a chance for the bullet to glance off the bone and miss his brain or at least do minimal damage to it. It’d tear his face up, yeah, but he’d be alive. More importantly, his brain would remain intact, at least mostly, which made a zombie change possible even if he did die. Same thing with the temple. It could work, but the bone made a fluke ricochet — and thus survival — possible.

He licked his lips and swallowed, the lump in his throat shifting and clicking. His eyes locked onto the gun before him. He watched it twitch and sway along with the muscles in his arm. The more he tried to hold it still, the more it shifted and wiggled and wavered.

Should he put it in his mouth? Blowing out the brain stem was the quickest and easiest way to kill a human, but would that also kill a zombie? He wasn’t sure. Should he angle the muzzle behind his teeth and fire up through the roof of his mouth? That seemed like the best option to ensure the most thorough destruction of brain tissue.

He felt the sweat from his palm smearing into the steel, making the gun greasy in his mitt. Maybe he should wipe that off, he thought. He brought the gun down, set it in his lap, a little tension in his neck and shoulders letting go right away. He wiped his palm on his pant leg a few times, checked it. Still moist, almost like a buttery breadstick feeling, but better than before.

The rain pelted the roof now, water thudding off of the asphalt shingles. He hadn’t noticed the noise with the gun near his head. In that moment, he heard only his heart slamming in his chest, the blood squishing through his ears.

He pivoted on the bucket, feet scuffing on the floor to square his shoulders to the door. The temptation to look outside filled him. He wanted to watch the raindrops burst upon impact with the driveway, watch the blades of grass bob and weave under the water’s assault. Not that these would make great entertainment so much as hearing the rain on the roof without seeing it felt incomplete.

Maybe there was more to it than that, he thought. Water is life, and he was sitting in death, the instrument of its doing resting upon his thighs. Maybe he just wanted to look upon life one more time, to see the rain give life to the plants, to see the worms crawl up from the soggy ground and writhe on the sidewalk.

But no. He turned his head toward the weed whacker, its mouth crusted with green and brown flecks. He wouldn’t look out there. It was a waste of time. He would concentrate and be done with it.