The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (39 page)

“You were right,” she said.

“How do you mean?” he said.

“You said some crazy shit was about to go down,” she said, gesturing to the standstill traffic around them. “It sure is.”

She smiled. She didn’t seem alarmed to a level that seemed appropriate for an impending nuclear holocaust, but that was probably for the best. She didn’t know about that anyway, of course. He decided he’d tell her after they were out of town, if they ever found a damn way out.

All roads out of Houston had military roadblocks in place now. They’d tried to get onto the interstate, either 45 or 69, but soldiers turned them away both times. Armed guards directing traffic, waving everyone away. One yelled that the terror levels had been raised and everyone was to stay in town by order of the Department of Homeland Security. He added that it’d probably be lifted in the next day or two.

Now Ray wrestled with the steering wheel and searched the nooks and crannies of his mind for the remotest routes he could think of. The backroads that seemed least likely to be guarded, and even if they were, the privacy might give them options.

The sounds of the engines rose and fell in a way that conveyed restlessness, Ray thought. Headlights shone all around, the cars advancing in fits and starts, all the traffic lurching forward and jerking to a stop in unison like some herd of cattle. That’s just what it was like, he knew. All of the people piled up on top of each other like cows getting funneled into the kill chute at a slaughterhouse.

He wished he had a cigar to chew on, but he hadn’t brought any.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

The basement stairs creaked beneath his feet, and the wood sagged a little with each step. He felt it bend and contort under the strain of his weight. He wasn’t scared, but he walked slowly, deliberately. It felt like an act of reverence in some way, a show of respect.

The flashlight nestled into his fist like the hilt of a sword, its glowing blade carving a tunnel of light into the darkness. The circle of illumination bounced along the concrete floor below as he made his way down the steps. It looked like a spotlight beaming onto a stage, the lights turned down so only the star of the show was visible, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to shine the light on the star of this production. Not yet.

At the bottom, the sag of the wood gave way to the solid cement. He planted his feet there, took a breath. It was cool down here, dank and a little chilly as it always was in the basement, he supposed, but the sweat poured out of him anyway. It seeped out of his forehead and lubricated his palms. He smeared the back of his hand over his brow, left to right, felt the perspiration sluice down the side of his face, clinging to the stubble at the corner of his jaw.

He stepped forward, again moving with care. The light inched toward its destination, toward the big reveal. The feet came into view at the edge of the spotlight, still and grayed out like they were being broadcast in black and white. He stopped there, looked on the sole of the lone remaining tennis shoe. The tread looked fairly new, not beat and scuffed to hell like his shoes. Jan always took better care of her things like that.

Air rushed into his lungs with a click and a scraping sound, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He stood and just breathed a while, his eyes dancing away from the feet and moving back toward them, like he wanted to look away but couldn’t. He closed them for a moment, though, and that stuck.

The stab of the headache ruptured in his brain again, and he saw a pink splotch within his closed eyes from where the hurt seemed to occur. He brought a hand to his left eye and pressed on it. It didn’t help, but the cool of his fingers against his eyelid felt good. The headache was worse now, the pain sharper, bigger, coming on more frequently. That wasn’t good, but it was no surprise.

The Sickness. The sickness unto death
, he thought. Those words had banged around in his head in this very basement last night, before she was gone. He didn’t know why he thought them or where they came from. He did know that last night, sitting on the lawn chairs in the basement with Janice, chugging Red Bull and beer, seemed like 50 years ago.

He opened his eyes, and the feet returned to his field of vision. They were entirely motionless, of course, still and dead like mannequin legs, but it still somehow felt like they’d popped up the moment his eyelids parted. Like they were gone, erased until he looked at them.

He took a step forward, hesitated, took another stride. Now color flowed back into the shoe, vanquishing the gray. The pale pink canvas contrasted with the white sole. A little dirt scuffed the left toe, but otherwise no one would know it was six or seven years old. Maybe even older than Matt.

Still, he kept his distance. He stopped a couple of paces shy of the sprawled figure on the floor, but he let the flashlight drift forward, its glow creeping up the body in slow motion, revealing the faded jeans that flared slightly at the ankle. Boot cut jeans for someone who never wore boots, he thought. The bottom of her hoodie covered the waist of the jeans, an oversized blue one that used to be his. It stretched to the point that the fabric was almost worn thin enough to see through at the elbows, all slack and sagged, and she wore it almost like a snuggie. Finally the tarp came into view, light reflecting off of the gray plastic surface, her face sheathed somewhere underneath, her shattered head, her broken body that could never be fixed, all wrapped in plastic.

He brushed his fingers over the stubble on his upper lip and thought about how he would go about this. Should he scoop her up, tarp and all, lugging her over one shoulder? He turned back to glance at the steps. Getting up those would be rough, but he thought he could do it. She wasn’t heavy.

Wheeling back toward the body again, the light caught on the toppled lawn chairs off to his right. Her purse lay there on its side, the pack of cigarettes protruding halfway from the open zipper. The impulse made no sense to him, but he couldn’t resist. He walked to the chairs, knelt, picked up the pack of smokes and shook one loose, resting it between his lips. For a second he just sat there, his nostrils full of the smell of the unlit cigarette like expensive coffee with an extra tang to it, and then he remembered what he was supposed to do next. He braved a hand into the black of the purse’s interior, swimming it around in there, feeling the jumble of items rattling against his palm and knuckles until his fingertips found the lighter and secured it.

The flashlight wobbled on the floor as the lighter’s flame lit up his face from beneath. Only half of the tobacco lit, so he puffed the cig a couple times to get the cherry even. It tasted pretty bad. He’d never acquired a taste for tobacco smoke, but he knelt there and smoked it anyway. He still didn’t know why. Maybe because it was hers.

He picked up the flashlight again, holding it so it pointed to the ceiling and watching the second hand smoke drift through its beam when he exhaled. The idea of lung cancer crossed his mind, and he almost laughed.

It was weird, he thought. In so many ways he’d lived like he would live forever. He’d taken his time for granted on one hand and simultaneously not fully indulged, not fully embraced his passions on the other. It was the worst of both worlds. Maybe this would be the lesson he’d try to teach his boys – that their time is precious and they should use that as a motivator to do something awesome, not a reason to fear a death that’s inevitable -- but then maybe not. He didn’t know if you could learn this lesson without experiencing elements of it, and if so, he didn’t know if he could be the one that could teach it to them.

He stubbed the cigarette butt out on the floor. The red tip crushed into a smudge of black soot with a muffled hiss. He stood then, his eyes returning to the tarp covered body, and he knew how he needed to do it.

Baghead

Rural Oklahoma

9 years, 126 days after

As soon as the sand cleared enough to see, they got moving again. The engine seemed to cough a little as it started up, choking on dust. But the sound evened out, and they rocketed forward.

The car seat vibrated beneath Baghead, and when he stared straight ahead long without blinking, he got a weird sense of how fast they were moving. He almost had to let his mind go blank, let his eyes go unfocused to get there, like looking at a magic eye picture in a mall years and years before.

“Can I ask you another question?” Delfino said.

That shook Bags out of his state of concentration. He tried not to sound annoyed when he responded.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have a real name? I mean, I’m guessing your birth certificate didn’t say ‘Baghead’ anywhere on it.”

“I did. I don’t anymore.”

“I see. You want to tell me what it was?”

“No.”

Delfino’s brow wrinkled for a microsecond, but it smoothed out just as quickly.

“That’s fair enough, I guess. What’s a name even mean out here?”

The conversation died, and the silence in the car got more and more comfortable, Bags thought, like lying in bed, feeling the sheet do that slow motion swell from cold to lukewarm to toasty. It was almost like an anesthetic, a thing that numbed him and calmed him and cleared his head.

They drove past a barn, the roof all caved in, the whole structure leaning to one side like a well-timed sneeze by either of them would take it down once and for all. Even in this state of decay, the structure was an odd sight in the middle of this barren landscape, sand all drifted up along one side of the building like snow. Barns had populated all of this land not long ago, he knew, but almost none were left. The drought and the dust storms changed everything so fast.

His tongue moved to comment upon it, to say something to Delfino to wash away the feeling that prior conversation had surely left, but something held it. The momentum of the silence won out. After a couple of minutes, he was happy for that, to have kept hold of the hushed feeling in here.

The sound of the road lulled Bags into a tranquil state. The rhythmic thump of the tires rolling over the cracks here almost sounded like a horse’s gallop, and the engine’s hum steadied until it felt like a held chord on a background organ, low in the mix, just there for ambiance.

He stared straight ahead, not thinking, not looking at anything, his muscles limp. Asleep with his eyes open. Drool pooled in his mouth, threatening to spill out of the corners of his lips.

“Uh-oh,” Delfino said.

Bags’ eyes blinked a couple of times and then drifted to Delfino’s before finally following his gaze to the road ahead. It took him a second to make sense of what he saw there.

A bloody stump sat in the left lane of the highway, only vaguely looking human. It appeared limbless, though somehow sitting up, the face covered in red.

Delfino slowed the car a little, and they craned their necks to get a better look. All time seemed to slow down for the moment.

The closer look revealed that it wasn’t a bloody stump after all. It was a little girl with her arms and legs tucked into her t-shirt, squatting in the road. Maybe 11 years old. The blood made her facial expression hard to read, but Bags thought it seemed pretty catatonic. Her total lack of acknowledgment of the Delta 88 seemed to back up that assertion. She gazed off at nothing.

She wasn’t dead, however. She blinked, and her blank expression didn’t convey any pain. Hopefully the blood was someone else’s, Baghead thought.

They passed her, and the car picked up speed again. Bags whirled to watch her through the back windshield as she began that process of shrinking, of her discernible features folding up into a black speck that the horizon would devour.

“Pull over,” he said.

Delfino sucked air between his teeth and then spoke.

“We can’t.”

Baghead turned to face him.

“Pull the car over.”

“Can’t do it.”

“I’ll jump out of the moving vehicle if you want me to.”

“Look, that kid might be in trouble, might desperately need our help, or it might be a trap. We can’t know.”

“Unless we stop and find out.”

“And knowing will do us such good after we’re beheaded, won’t it? We’ll be so happy about it, we’ll gush blood out of our necks and roll our heads around on the asphalt a while in glee.”

Bags didn’t say anything.

“I told you. That’s what they do out here. I’ve seen it myself.”

He scratched his chin before he went on.

“For all you know that kid back there is the work of one of the five. So go rolling out that car door to your funeral if you want, but this car ain’t stopping.”

Bags sat back, his jaw all clenched up, and they rode in silence for a while. He angled himself away from Delfino and looked out the window.

Wisps of sand flitted around in the wind atop the dunes, the sunlight catching on the grains in the air so it almost looked like handfuls of glitter being tossed around.

The ride grew bumpy once more, and the Delta 88 slowed in anticipation of a big crack in the road up ahead where the dirt fill had gotten washed out by the rain. The change in momentum made both of them lean forward in their seats, heads pushed out over their knees.