The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (19 page)

Kevin snorted out a half of a laugh.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Mitch said. “But it’s not funny, guys.”

He took a knee. He felt like a football coach rallying the team after a tough series. He would unveil the truth in stages.

“A lot of people are going to be sick,” he said. “And a lot of people are going to die. We have to get out in front of this thing as fast as we can. If we get set up now, we’ll be OK. That’s why we need to find the key. If we get out to Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin, we’ll have access to water and a wood burning stove for heat.”

“Will Grandma and Grandpa and Mommy come with us?” Matt said.

“Maybe,” he said. “We just don’t know right now. Your mother is afraid that she is sick. I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you worrying when we don’t know yet.”

He could taste the lie, an astringent flavor coating the lining of his mouth and throat like some sour, acidic syrup. He felt a tightening in his gut, the muscles all moving to launch into vomit mode, but he couldn’t let them do it. If he started puking now, he was afraid he’d never stop.

Nobody spoke.

He expected more questions. He expected panic and fright and confusion. No. None of these. Blank looks formed on the young faces before him. All of the wrinkles and creases let go until their expressions weren’t happy or sad or mad. They just looked bored and cold and distant, and it was somehow the worst possible outcome. He couldn’t bear to look at them any longer, so he glanced at their reflection in the TV screen again instead, saw the three of them framed in a black plastic box. To his surprise it seemed to help a little.

He said nothing, rising from his position on the floor, moving to the nearest end table and riffling his fingers through the items in a basket there. A jangly sound erupted, giving him momentary hope, but it turned out to be a letter opener clattering against a pair of scissors and some toenail clippers.

He watched in his peripheral vision as the boys moved out, Matt going right and Kevin left. No one talked, but he was proud of them. He should tell them that. He should make sure to tell them that soon.

Moving to the next end table, he found a stack of magazines, a newspaper and a jar of dry roasted peanuts. It occurred to him, as he shifted these things around, that living room end tables were not a likely storage space for keys to a vacation cabin on a lake 90-some miles away. His hands quit digging at magazines. He thought about where he would put such a key.

Two possibilities came to him: on his primary key chain and a backup copy in his bedroom. The picture of the glass jar on his dresser took shape in his mind, full of extra sets of keys and pocket change and matchbooks from weird bars and restaurants they’d gone to on vacation. He left the living room, headed down the hall for the master bedroom. Maybe there’d be a jar there.

“Here,” Matt said behind him.

Mitch stopped, three paces shy of the bedroom door. The jangle of keys filled the quiet in the house. He turned to find his son wielding a big ring of keys, shaking them side to side. The boy stood by the front door, a coat rack to his right and a small table to his left. He smiled, but he didn’t quite look all the way happy.

Of course. Mitch remembered it now. The family kept their keys and purses and such on a table right by the front door, depositing them there as soon as they got home. He’d witnessed it multiple times in the past. He had forgotten all about it, though he supposed his thoughts were jumbled for good reason just now.

He approached his son, who handed the keys over. Kevin appeared, too, exiting the hallway so all of them stood in the square of tile floor that comprised the foyer. Mitch picked through the keys. He couldn’t be certain that one of them was the right key, but there were so many that he was pretty confident. This key chain had an
all the keys
feel.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and closed the serrated metal pieces in his fingers. They had done it, and now the boys stood a chance. Maybe.

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

54 days after

The truck didn’t go far. He heard the sound of the engine change pitch twice; its fury grinding out some low notes, then whirring into a tenor tone. After a long beat, it guttered out altogether. The ensuing silence felt somehow violent. It spread over the cornfields and roads and made the world feel so naked and empty and lonesome. But he knew what he’d just heard had been the noise of the truck parking. The sound couldn’t travel more than a couple of miles, he figured.

The road stretched out in front of him, a faded strip of asphalt gashing its way through the corn. He picked his feet up and put them down, the soles of his shoes applauding each step with loud smacks. He knew the volume of the sound meant his running technique was terrible, that his feet and ankles were absorbing all of the shock, but he was too high to correct it just now. He clopped on with all the grace of a racehorse with a broken leg.

He reached an intersection and trusted his ears, veering right. He felt certain the truck’s final destination was in a 45 degree angle from where he was standing at the moment the engine stopped. He’d alternate right and left turns to move in that direction. He considered taking the straight line through the cornfields, but all those choppy steps over an uneven ground would only slow him down. He raised his arm, hand pointed in the proper direction to remind himself where he was headed.

His face felt cold and hot at the same time, the chill of the moving air embedding itself in the outer layer of skin, his nose and lips left especially frigid, while angry red heat radiated out from within. The rush of air pushing at his eyes made them a little wet, though not quite enough to water. His mouth felt dry, his tongue like some thick skinned mollusk squirming between his jaw and palate, uneasy and unwilling to keep still.

He rubbed his fingers at his nose, swiping at the flesh surrounding the nostrils. It itched like crazy, felt damp, though it was so cold it was hard to tell if it was actually running or just numb. His fingers came away dry, settling that.

He looked out at the landscape, not really taking it in. The beige expanse of dead corn sprawled out toward the horizon with the green of the woods just visible in the distance. He passed a boarded up farm house, long abandoned. The roof sported a hole the size of a medicine ball. Cracks splintered the brick facade into loosely held together shards. The paint around the windows peeled away to reveal rotten wood going black and green underneath.

He thought about how most houses would look like this within a few years. Dilapidated. Decaying. On a long enough timeline, they’d all cave in or collapse in some way. Maybe a few would make it a long time. Maybe some would get taken care of by the few people left. Or maybe some would outlast the people, if the humans wiped themselves out the rest of the way. Empty houses in an empty world.

Left turn now. He raised his arm again, adjusting the angle so his hand pointed in the right direction once more. He tried to find landmarks to help him mark the way mentally, big trees or buildings or anything, but it all looked the same. Endless fields with the life all sucked out of them, so everything left over was the color of straw.

What was he actually going to do if and when he found these guys? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He had no choice now. He just moved toward them like there was some invisible magnetic force that pulled him that way. Some wave in the air that drew him in.

A few turns later, he knew he must be close. Another row of factories and machine shops had taken shape in the distance and grown and grown as he dragged himself toward them with cloppy steps. Now they were just in front of him, no more than a couple hundred yards out. His lungs felt like closed up balls of mucus in his chest that could no longer breathe. They could only burn. But he kept going anyway, most every muscle aching, though he had prepared, he supposed, by dulling all of the pain ahead of time. A preemptive strike.

He jogged past the first of the industrial buildings. Empty. All of its windows were busted out. Weeds shrouded the front door in green along with much of the lower half of the building.

He clopped on, suddenly convinced that they weren’t here. These buildings were all empty. He’d misjudged the sound. He couldn’t even be certain they’d parked somewhere now. He couldn’t trust his own memory being that he was high as hell. They probably drove on to some bigger, better city, to live out their days taking anything and everything they wanted by force while he pissed the bed into oblivion.

And then he spotted the truck parked at the next building. His heart clambered up into his throat, jittering there in double time like a damn humming bird. He stopped running. It felt so strange to just stop, to stand, to let his aching legs and ankles and feet rest for a second. It felt like holding his breath.

Now what?

He hobbled off of the road, down into the tall weeds in the ditch. His eyes didn’t leave the truck except to look over the building where it was parked. Were they stopping here? Staying here? He wasn’t looking where he was going and one foot sank ankle deep in muck, the middle of the ditch being a mud puddle with more mud than puddle. He pulled his foot free, the ground giving off some suction sound that reminded him of a plunger sucking turds free of the toilet hole.

He crouched down. Waiting. Watching. Nothing much moved. Periodically he heard some swell of voices, their words indecipherable, but it didn’t tell him much other than confirming that the bandits were here. There were no windows, so he couldn’t discern much about what they might be doing in there.

Time stretched out, and he remained steadfast. He squatted among cattails, adjusting his legs periodically, straightening them out to relieve the growing tension in his joints. The sun got lower in the sky, evening closing in. He wondered if he should start home before the dark set in. It was a long walk. He had two lighters on him, but no other way to light his path.

Then the voices got louder. The door opened, and the men piled into the truck once more. They talked over each other as they moved, snippets of dialogue that bled together so he couldn’t make out any individual lines.

He crouched lower when the diesel engine roared to life, settling into a steady churn. The truck jerked out of its parking spot, tires grinding over rocks and kicking up puffs of dirt that looked like smoke the color of sand. Then the vehicle eased back onto the road and took off.

He stayed down until after the taillights had vanished over a hill in the distance, until the sound got quieter and quieter and faded out altogether, and then he stood. His legs felt dead, the muscles somehow rubbery and inflexible. He climbed up the slope, his hands scrabbling at the spots where grass held the loose earth together enough that he could get some traction and help his dead legs make the ascent.

When he got to the top, he dusted himself off and listened for a second. He couldn’t hear anything coming from the building. Could one or two have stayed behind? There was no way to be sure. For the first time, he didn’t like going into this with pills coursing through his system. He wished he had a clear head.

The light dimmed in the sky, and the shadow cast from the building seemed darker than it did when he’d arrived. He walked into that shade now.

From here he couldn’t tell how big the building was. It was only one level, but he got the sense that it covered a lot of ground. Some of these factories stretched on and on. He wouldn’t know until he was inside. Blue steel siding covered everything, though, with very few windows. One of those places where you could never tell what time it was inside because, without natural light intervening, it always looked exactly the same. He wondered if they did that on purpose for the sake of their third shift workers, to help them forget that it was the night.

His feet grit stray gravel from the parking lot into the sand as he walked the last ten feet to the front door. Lukewarm water squished in the shoe that had been submerged in the mud puddle.

His hand gripped the knob. His pulse did a drum roll in his temples. He tried to imagine what he would do if someone were in there, but nothing sprang to mind. He didn’t think he could run at this point.

He twisted the knob and pushed. The door hinge squawked like a seagull demanding a French fry. He froze, the half opened door in front of him leading into darkness. He waited for the sound of the footsteps closing in on him, the butt of the shotgun cracking him between the eyes and turning everything black. Instead, nothing happened.

He stepped forward, crossing the line from light to dark as he entered the factory. For a second he swore he could actually hear himself sweating, hear the high pitched sound of liquid seeping out of the pores in his skin like a ringing in his ear, but then it was gone.

The light streaming in the open door lit things up enough to see a yellow line painted on the concrete floor. He followed it for the first five or six steps, and then he was in the dark. He pulled a lighter from his pocket, lit it and held it out in front of him. His eyes squinted involuntarily. At first he could make out only the flame itself, but then the squint let up and he could see.

Looking around, he was in a foyer with four snack and cola machines all busted open and lying on their sides with their guts torn out. He followed the yellow light up two steps to a steel door. Going through it, he found himself on the main floor of the factory. The light was a little better here. At first, he thought it was because of a window on the far wall, but then he realized it wasn’t a window. It was a hole. The air was heavy in this room. Thick. A little sticky. It reminded him of being in a basement, tacky, wet air clinging to his exposed skin.