The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (45 page)

Balancing the body in his lap, he squatted to try to push some of the water out of the hole with his hand. It wasn’t much, and he’d rather lay her some place dry. It didn’t work, though, so he gave up.

He peeled back the afghan to look on her face one last time. Seeing the smoothness of her skin was a surprise again. He thought maybe her complexion was starting to go now, and he was going on a lot of hours with almost no sleep, but she was still beautiful to him, at least in a way. She was still the person he loved, even though she wasn’t.

A lump bulged in his throat, but he didn’t cry.

He nestled her down into the grave, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders and up onto her face so her nose peeked out. He didn’t think of it as hiding her, as covering her face. He thought of it as a little extra protection, even though she no longer needed that.

He pushed the dirt on top of her, trying to kick the piles into the hole but finding he needed to get down on his knees and scrape it in with his fingers. The mud flopped down, concealing her feet, then legs, then torso and arms, and finally her broken head. He flung a few handfuls of leaves on top of the black, so the spot wouldn’t stick out quite so much.

And it didn’t feel right anymore. It didn’t feel right to leave her in the ground in the woods. The afghan made no difference. It felt like she would be alone. Forever.

But he knew that wasn’t real. He knew she’d been gone for more than a day by now.

When he got back to the road, the rain was really coming down. His shoulders shivered, and his teeth chattered, and his clothes tugged at him, the weight of the water making them sag and cling to him.

He shuffled toward the car, his shoes making squishy noises with every step.

He sat down and put his hands on the wheel, the lump in his throat quivering and wetness clinging to his eyes. Was he crying, or was it just the rain? He wanted nothing more than to run out there and dig her up, to take her home and figure out some scenario that would keep her dry and safe, but instead he started the car and drove away.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

69 days after

His feet dangled off the edge of the bed again, and he stared up at the skeletal ceiling. A single candle illuminated about a third of the room, a sphere of glow that faded at its edges and gave way to black.

His eyes didn’t really take in the ceiling just now, though. Instead, he pictured the gashed open places in the zombie’s arm, the way its head swung like a pendulum. He liked to remember them all for as long as he could. He could see the thing’s face in his mind now, the droopy eyes, the greasy bowl cut, the flat nose that looked like it had been broken many times. He could picture its every detail for now, but eventually it would all be gone. It would blend in with the rest somehow, and he’d never call it to mind again specifically. He didn’t like that. He wished he could have pictures of them to help him remember. Better still, he wished he could keep them all.

He brought the two liter bottle to his mouth and lifted his head enough to drink. The beverage tingled on his tongue, bright and sweet and delicious. It tasted exactly like the shade of neon yellow-green that it looked like, he thought. Just like it. Right now the bottle looked gray in the dark like everything else, but he knew the color exactly every time he took a drink.

He wondered sometimes if he should move, pack up his few things and go some place nicer, some mansion set on top of a hill. He liked it here, liked his room and his mattress and his ceiling, but he could live anywhere now. At some point, he should take advantage of that.

He took another drink and some Mountain Dew spritzed out of the side of his mouth, dribbling down to the place where his chin and jaw formed an angle and falling to the mattress. Shit. He hated to waste it.

He blew out the candle and lay back once more and pictured the part at the end of the encounter when he let his arms go and the hatchet swung freely. The head plummeted to the ground like a dropped soccer ball, and he hacked at the lifeless torso until it was an unrecognizable puddle of black goo in the vague shape of a man.

The pictures ran forward and backward in his head as he drifted off to sleep. He would treasure these images for as long as he could hold them in his skull.

Baghead

Rural Oklahoma

9 years, 126 days after

The girl still sat on the road in the distance, motionless. Again she looked more like a bloody stump from this far out, though Bags thought her back seemed less bloody than her front.

They moved on her, walking quickly, their shoes clomping on the asphalt. Delfino glanced over his shoulder every few seconds, more like a head twitch, a nervous tick, than a natural movement. Bags kept his eyes on the girl.

As they got closer, her details filled in one by one. First, the red spatter on the back of her shirt came into focus. Then he saw the way the blood matted her hair together into one brownish red clump on the back of her head. A bun held together by dried platelets and red blood cells.

He wondered if she’d run from them once they got close, or if she was so far gone that she wouldn’t get out of the way even if a car came barreling down her side of the road to hit her. Either possibility seemed plausible.

“This is fucked, man,” Delfino said. “It don’t feel right.”

“Well, I happen to think that it
do
feel right.”

“Funny. Make fun of the ignorant man’s grammar as you march him to his beheading.”

“That’s why they call it gallows humor, right?”

“Gallows are for hanging, smart guy.”

“Well, that’s why they call it head-chopping-block humor. Or whatever. Does that thing have a fancy name?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“You’re the one who won’t shut up about getting your damn head chopped off. Seems like you’d know a thing or two about the process.”

“I don’t know every detail. I grasp the gist. That’s enough for me.”

“Quiet now.”

They slowed as they closed the last ten feet toward the girl. Bags resisted the urge to hold his breath and tiptoe the final five paces. He forced himself to walk normal, though something vibrated in his chest. He circled around in front of her and kneeled, not far off but not too close, either. Delfino stayed back, head snapping around to see if any cars were coming.

She looked smaller up close, like a baby bird out in the street, confused, waiting around to get saved or splattered. Then again with the amount of blood on her, maybe she was the one that administered the splatterings rather than receiving them. She showed no signs of being aware of either of them.

“Well,” he said. “You gonna say something to her or did you jump out of the car just to gawk at her?”

Bags turned toward him, whispered.

“Maybe you should do the talking,” he said. “She could be scared of the bag, right?”

“Does she even see us?”

“I don’t know. Just saying.”

“It’s possible she’d be scared, I guess. You do sort of look like a super villain.”

Bags shrugged, hesitated a moment, nodded.

Delfino reached into his pocket and pulled out a sandwich baggy full of jerky.

“Why don’t you try giving her some of this?” he said, handing it over. “Venison jerky. Good as hell, too. That should win just about anybody over, way I figure it.”

Bags looked down at the dried out hunks of meat in the bag. The smell managed to penetrate the canvas over his nose, a peppery odor, and his mouth got all juicy right away. He didn’t eat much meat these days by choice, but this smelled delicious.

He squat-walked over to the girl again and kneeled before her.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

Her face remained blank.

“Are you hungry?”

No response.

He reached into the baggie and pulled a strip of jerky out, the individual strands visible within the red. He reached toward her slowly, palm up with the venison protruding from his fingers as though he gripped the stem of a wine glass.

Still she made no movement aside from blinking.

Bags turned back to Delfino.

“What do you think?”

“Give it a second. The smell might perk up her appetite, snap her out of it.”

The dried meat hovered a few inches shy of her face. He fidgeted with it a little, trying to figure out a way to advance it toward her nose without feeling weird.

Delfino spoke up from behind him:

“The good news is that we’ve yet to get decapitated. The bad news is that you are taking for-goddamned-ever.”

“Shut up.”

“Do the airplane-flying-into-the-hangar thing. Kids love that.”

“That’s for infants. Maybe toddlers. This girl is at least ten.”

“Oh, well I’m sorry. Excuse me for having not studied up on how best to appeal to the appetite of a bloody kid in the middle of the road. I guess your way is best. Please continue sitting there with your thumb up your ass.”

Baghead looked at the knotted up strip of meat in his hand. He rolled it between his fingers, gave it a little test dip like the thing was hitting some turbulence, thinking about whether or not to let it take flight and head for that hangar.

“OK. I’ll try it.”

“The airplane thing?”

“Yep.”

“Mind her teeth, though. You don’t want to get bit by a kid, man. Trust me. Not cool.”

Bags looked at her mouth, finding it too easy to imagine those lips parting and her teeth latching onto his wrist. He shuddered, took a breath.

“OK. Here goes.”

He brought the piece of jerky up to eye level and started bobbing it up and down, weaving it in a serpentine path that meandered toward her mouth. No reaction showed in her face or eyes. Again Delfino spoke up:

“Whoa. What’s with the silent treatment?”

Bags stopped the flight midair.

“Huh?”

“If I’m a kid, I want to hear some jet engines rumbling through the sky, man. Start over and do it right.”

Baghead sighed, his shoulders sagging. He returned the piece of venison to the starting point. This time he pursed his lips and growled out a sound that he thought probably sounded more like a car engine than a jet. He didn’t know if jets changed gears regularly in midair. This one did.

The girl’s eyes locked on his right away and then flicked to the jerky, still blinking often. Her breathing changed, deeper breaths, though not any slower, and her chest fluttered in a way that made her head sway a little. It reminded him of a move that a baby would do when they finally stop crying, their body jerking those little choked tremor sounds out every few minutes for a while.

She brought her hands out of the sleeves of the shirt, resting the heels of them on the ground, and she leaned back on them, just a little.

He wasn’t sure how to read her body language. It didn’t seem aggressive, at least.

The jet swooped into its final descent, and the hangar door opened just in time.

Erin

Presto, Pennsylvania

48 days after

The bag of rice shifted in her hands as the grains flowed from top to bottom like sand in an hour glass.

“Five pounds of rice.”

Erin said it out loud as she wrote it down on the notepad.

One pound per day per person, according to the prepper book. Technically Izzy didn’t need as much as an adult, but she wanted to err on the side of caution. So that meant two and a half days of food.

Her pencil scratched at the paper as she added that to the tally, bringing their estimated food supply to 27 days. Not nearly enough to last the whole winter, but they’d done well so far, scavenging the last seven days from dawn until dusk.

The screen door screeched and slammed. Izzy came in, bouncing from foot to foot.

“You have to come see it.”

“What?”

“I’m not telling. You have to see for yourself.”

Erin slid the closet door shut and followed Izzy out onto the property, past the barn, and into the big cornfield out back.

“I always wondered what was at the end of the cornfield, but I was too scared to go by myself. But not today. Today I was just wandering-”

“Weren’t you supposed to be unloading firewood?”

“I was! But I got distracted.”

Erin glanced back over her shoulder at the nearly full pile of wood still in the bike carrier. She tried to think of a way to explain the direness of their situation, but it seemed like no matter what angle she took, Izzy couldn’t comprehend it.

Maybe it was an age thing. Would Erin have understood how bad things were when she was eight?

As they reached the edge of the field, the excitement became too much for Izzy, and she blurted it out.

“There’s a house! A big one! And I figured it had to have something worth picking. But you have to see it.”