The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (36 page)

Izzy pedaled by, sticking her tongue out.

“Or you could just stop the old-fashioned way by riding into a swamp. Up to you.”

The water bottle sloshed around as the tires of Erin’s bike bumped over a pothole where the driveway met the road.

It was mostly coasting downhill to town, and the wind at their backs made the ride seem even easier. Almost more braking than pedaling.

The first several houses they passed were familiar: the Slim Jim house, the rhubarb house, and a few others they’d been through, scavenging for food and supplies. But after about half a mile, it was new territory.

In one yard, someone had placed a white and blue sign that said “Stop the Gravel Pit - Vote No on Prop 4.” Well they’d gotten their wish. There would be no gravel pit.

A long stretch of uninhabited road sprawled before them. It was all green on either side. The whisper of leaves in the breeze and the sounds of the birds and crickets and cicadas made it feel like they were in the Amazon. Jungle explorers entering uncharted lands.

Amongst the greenery, the back of a truck came into view, tire tracks leading off the road and through the brush. The front end wrapped around the trunk of a maple. Like the truck was giving the tree a crumpled metal hug. She could just make out the silhouette of the driver slumped over the wheel.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed movement in the cab. A little pulse of panic shot through her. Was he still alive? Was this a trap? And then she saw the tiny shapes flitting about and realized it was flies. Hundreds and hundreds of flies.

Erin turned away, redirecting her focus back to the road.

They slowed at the first traffic light at the edge of town. In the center of the intersection, half a dozen vehicles lay motionless in a pile-up, a knotted mass of plastic, metal, and glass. It looked like someone had taken a bucketful of toy cars and dumped them onto the road, except they weren’t toys. And those weren’t Lego people fused to the road in gory globs. And that wasn’t ketchup smearing the shattered windshields.

It was a slap-in-the-face reminder of how things were now. They were sheltered from most of it at the house. Sure, they saw bodies in houses. There was no power. They were alone. But this display of destruction was a wake-up call. This wasn’t a camping trip. This was the end of the world.

Erin released her grip on the handlebars one at a time to wipe the sweat from her palms. This was the closest they’d come to a densely populated area in weeks. She couldn’t stop imagining a sniper shooting at them from the top of one of the buildings. Or a mob of zombies staggering out of an alley at the smell of fresh meat.

She glanced over at Izzy, hair dancing in the wind like coiled snakes. Maybe she should have come alone. Entering the town would be dangerous. And she couldn’t do a sweep the way she did for the houses. At the same time, she knew she would have been too chicken to come by herself.

Main street rolled into view, and they veered right.

“A playground!” Izzy said.

It jutted out from an oval of sand in the middle of a park at the end of the street. The jungle gym was blue and yellow, a cone-shaped turret on each end giving it a castle-like appearance. A red slide curved around the front, looking like a giant tongue. Beyond the sand, Erin could see the shimmering surface of the river.

“Can I go check it out?”

The breeze loosened a strand of Erin’s hair and sent it fluttering over her face. She tucked it back behind her ear.

“Maybe after we get the gas.”

“Why can’t I go while you get the gas?”

“Because I don’t want you going off by yourself.”

A bank and the post office appeared ahead. Both had their windows mostly smashed. The bank Erin understood. Someone figured the apocalypse was the perfect chance to become a “self-made” millionaire. But the post office?

“I guess someone really wanted their damn mail.”

The next building was the public library, which appeared to be without a scratch.

“Figures,” Erin muttered to herself.

The squeal of Izzy’s brakes sounded ahead of her.

“Hey, look.”

Izzy pointed across the street from the library, and Erin turned her head to check it out.

The gas station windows were busted out, trash littering the ground. Glass shards and convenience store flotsam and jetsam were scattered about the parking lot like confetti. Erin imagined people looting it, arms loaded up so heavily with Snickers bars and cases of Budweiser that bits and pieces inevitably fell from the pile, stomped by the herd. A body sprawled in the middle of the lot, face down with one of the arms at an impossible angle.

Maybe he died of natural causes, she thought. Or as natural as was possible when the apocalypse was happening. Like maybe he was sick, but he decided to pop out to grab a bag of pretzels. But as her bike rolled nearer, she saw the blood on his shirt and the crater in the back of his head and the black stain spreading out on the concrete beneath him.

They’d seen so many bodies now, she hadn’t anticipated anything would be able to shock and disturb her anymore. But this was the first victim of violence she’d seen since they left the camp. Or the first obvious one, anyway.

Thankfully, Izzy seemed to have glided right by it without noticing, fixating on the gas pumps. Erin swooped in next to her, hopped down from the bike, and lowered the kickstand. While she retrieved the gas can, Izzy lifted the nozzle from the cradle of the pump labeled #2.

“Can I pump the gas?”

Erin unscrewed the lid from the can.

“I guess so. Have you done it before?”

Izzy nodded.

The can made a hollow sound like a drum as she set it on the ground. It was one of the red plastic deals, pretty standard.

Izzy bent over it, inserting the nozzle. She squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

Her fist clenched as she squeezed it again, but still the gas didn’t flow.

Erin’s eyes followed the fuel hose from the nozzle back up to the pump. The little windows that usually flashed a price per gallon were dark. She pushed at the button labeled PREMIUM anyway. Izzy wiggled the nozzle and shook the hose to no effect.

Erin’s molars pressed together, harder and harder until her jaw ached and the muscles actually started to shake. Why couldn’t anything go as planned? Why did everything have to be such a goddamned ordeal?

The frustration made her want to flop onto the cement and throw a tantrum, like she was a toddler in a store, one that had been told, no, she couldn’t have the toy she wanted, the shiny box ripped from her pudgy fist.

She tipped her head backward until all she could see was sky. The clouds spread in a rippled pattern, like white caps on a choppy sea. At this angle, it felt like the world had been turned upside-down. Her eyes drifted closed, the sunlight glowing pink through the capillaries in her eyelids.

It was too hard. All of it. The food and the fire and gas and taking care of a kid. She wanted things back the way they were.

Izzy’s voice cut through her silent outburst.

“I bet we need the key.”

Erin blinked, head swiveling back down to peer at the kid.

“Huh?”

Izzy crooked a finger at the gas pump, drawing an invisible line to a shiny circle bumping out from the surface. Taking a step closer, Erin saw the slice cutting through the circle like a little mouth. A keyhole.

“If we unlock that, maybe there’s a switch or something we can flip under this panel so we can pump the gas without electricity.”

This snapped Erin back to reality, and she felt stupid for having her little mental meltdown. Here she was, supposed to be the elder in the situation, and the eight-year-old was the one keeping her cool, taking the problem one step at a time, thinking critically.

Erin ruffled Izzy’s curls.

“You’re a pint-sized genius, you know that?”

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

42 days before

The headaches started on the ride home, flashes of pain, bright and hot and, above all else, sharp. As he drove, he pushed his index finger and thumb into that pressure point where the nose and forehead met. It seemed to help a little.

This wasn’t the constant throb of a normal headache. His head felt fine much of the time with a periodic stabbing pain on one side, like someone peeling back the front left quarter of his skull and jabbing a serving fork into the slab of brain there every 45 seconds or so. He knew what it meant. Time was running out. Even faster than he’d thought. Would he make it until lunch time tomorrow? Probably not.

Christ on a crutch.

They sat at an intersection, headlights shining all around, taillights tinting trunks and rear windshields red. They inched their way up to the front of the pack. Things moved slower with the streetlights out. Their progress came in little fits, all of the cars lurching forward and jerking to stops over and over again, their vehicular body language aggressive, defensive, hostile.

Inside the car, it was too quiet. Mitch didn’t like it. He reached down into his brain and grasped around for words, for ideas, for any coherent thoughts to share aloud. What are you supposed to say at a time like this? Shouldn’t he say something to his sons? Something that would encapsulate a little bit about what this experience of consciousness is supposed to mean now that his was nearly over, some sense of what being alive is all about, or what purpose we’re supposed to serve here? Shouldn’t he have some wisdom to share from his time here? Some perspective now that he was dying? Shouldn’t he have found some route to redemption he could tell them about?

As the car got to the front of the line and moved on, he stirred around in his brains and found nothing solid to be had. No wisdom. No perspective. Nothing to share. He didn’t even know what he thought or felt about any of it. But they were moving now, so forget it.

Go. Just go.

Don’t look back.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

69 days after

He smeared the back of his hand across his brow, his head shaking back and forth of its own volition, which he didn’t realize until he touched it. The first two traps were empty. He was getting nervous.

He hated waiting. He always did.

He crunched over the broken bits downtown again, that sound of glass screeching and grinding against the sidewalk filling the air. He walked past the barbershop he used to go to as a kid. The windows were broken, but the barber pole was untouched. He guessed nobody felt that to be worthy of destruction. Why all of the other glass and not the barber pole? Made no sense to him.

The ground gave way to a sloping grade, his feet slapping their way down the hill. When the sidewalk flattened out again, he could see the chain link fence in the distance. Inside, green grass led up to the sandy ovals worn under each swing on the swing set as well as the place where the slide ended. He couldn’t tell anything for sure yet, but this might be his best hope.

Please. Please just let one be there.
His chest heaved once, a single deep breath, and he strode on.

At first he thought the smell of the rotting meat drew them in, the putrid aroma that filled the air even where he walked now, but lately he’d wondered if the collective sound of all of the buzzing of the flies might be what did it. He wasn’t certain how it worked, but the road kill attracted them well enough, especially if he put it in what was once a well populated area. Could they actually smell or hear or both? He didn’t know. They didn’t seem to be all the way there. That was for sure.

He smeared his hand over his brow again and felt the faintest ache just behind his left eye, a brewing headache. They came when he got stressed out like this. His mama said it was from high blood pressure. He remembered all of the things she said, and sometimes that made him feel like she was still there with him, cigarette perched between her lips, leaned against a wall somewhere always just around the corner from him, just in the next room.

He saw movement in the distance, within the walls of the fence, and all of the nervousness drained out of him right away. A figure stumbled, a man stepping this direction and that, arms limp at his sides, no discernible goal in mind. He was short and stocky, maybe five foot eight and 180 pounds, Teddy figured.

He’d caught one.

Erin

Presto, Pennsylvania

40 days after

Erin took a meandering route to the door of the gas station, wanting to keep them as far from the broken body on the pavement as possible. Where the blacktop of the parking lot met the lighter gray concrete of the sidewalk, she hopped over a bag of Utz potato chips. It had been trampled so badly that one end had burst open, leaking a pale yellow powder of pulverized potato onto the ground.

Bells jangled as she pulled the door open. She was somewhat surprised it wasn’t locked. Not that it mattered. With the windows gone, there were plenty of points of entry.