The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (61 page)

But he knew one thing. He needed water, and his jar was empty.

He stood, ankles creaking, knees popping one after the other, calves and thighs tightening up into knots that slowly let go as he rested his weight on them for a moment. He arched his back, feeling the muscles there squeeze and release with the extension of his spine.

He closed his eyes, standing in the shed, breath flowing in and out of him. He felt the weight of his head resting on his neck, felt the puff of the dried out tongue scraping against the roof of his mouth, the tired sting in his eyes, the dull pain that remained of his headache. He smelled the shed smells, grease and dust and dried out flecks of cut grass, heard the sprinkling rain tap at the roof. Even with his mind blank, he was conscious of all of these things and more, billions of pieces of stimulus if he was remembering right. How could he let that go? How could he let consciousness go? It was all he knew, all he’d ever known. The idea of pulling a trigger and vanquishing it? Of shutting off his brain? Of black nothing forever? Fucking terrifying.

But the fear felt distant in some sense, some massive black cloud looming above that he could only catch glimpses of if he squinted his eyes just right. It was almost too big to feel, he thought. He couldn’t quite make it seem real, no matter how dire the intellectual part of him understood things to be.

His eyes opened, and he set the gun down on the shelf before him. It felt good, felt right, to release its heft from his fingers, to feel a lightness take its place. He hesitated a moment, looking down on the firearm there. Part of him wanted to scoop it up and do it, almost catch himself unaware by not planning or contemplating or thinking much at all.

But no. Water.

He stooped and gathered the jar, shuffled over the cement. Again he hesitated at the shed door. Crossing this line seemed to carry some significance. Some gravity. Opening this door, passing through the opening into the light, leaving the shed with his only job here unfinished, putting his boys at risk once more? For what? For a glass of water?

He rubbed at his eyes, the skin greasy and swollen and sore. Shit. Why couldn’t he just close his eyes and disappear? Why couldn’t he just pay someone to take care of this? Why did it have to be so grim and violent and scary?

He was a pussy, he knew. A coward. Oh, he’d told himself that the fear felt distant, that he needed a moment to build up the nerve, that he would do it any minute now, but he wouldn’t. He knew he wouldn’t. He promised. He promised himself he would, but what good was a coward’s word? He’d promised himself all kinds of things in his life, planned all kinds of things, dreamed all kinds of things that never came to be, so many things that he never even tried.

Even so, he was too tired to feel the full force of the self-loathing. He just shuffled through the motions, slouching toward the end. Maybe that was what he did all along.

He crossed the shed again, plucked the gun from the shelf and tucked it into his belt. He’d go get the water, but he would bring the gun along.

Just in case.

Baghead

Rural Arkansas

9 years, 127 days after

He walked slower on the trek back to the car, trying to find a way for his feelings to sink in before he was around people. It surprised him to find that he didn’t feel that much beyond a heightened level of stimulation. Neither ecstasy of victory nor pang of regret for taking a life filled him. Just empty excitement. A vague sense of pointlessness.

Dead on the inside. Maybe he wasn’t much of a human anymore, inside or out.

No lightning lit the sky here, but he felt like he did when he walked through the dead cities in that recurring black dream. When he wondered what fire burned inside of the animals still walking the Earth. When he wondered why we clashed against one another, clawing and maiming and killing each other for eternity. When he wondered why this violence aroused us, entertained us. When he wondered how anyone could look up into the stars and find a meaning to any of this.

Lorraine

South of Sulphur Springs, Texas

2 days before

The road opened up before them again, a path she could stare down. The trees grew sparser here, reduced to clusters among barren fields and the occasional trailer park. All of the grass looked half dead. Beige everywhere.

Maybe it was the lack of captivating scenery, maybe it was something else, but she found she preferred to stare down the empty road, to look on the place where the asphalt disappeared into a shimmer on the horizon. With the land so flat and the traffic so non-existent, it seemed like she could see a long, long way. She had no idea what the actual distance might be, but it felt like miles.

Her eyes flicked toward the driver’s seat. Ray rolled his neck from shoulder to shoulder, one hand gripping the bottom of the wheel. The tension seemed to have drained from his shoulders, and she was glad for that. Typically driving around in a stolen car would have kicked up new anxieties, but Ray assured her that the police were too busy with other matters. She believed him.

The man had surprised her. He’d done much to ensure their survival already, and he’d shown a level of vulnerability along the way that she hadn’t anticipated. He proved to be less of a lizard person than she thought. More like a good dog. She was happy to see him relieved.

And she could understand the feeling. It felt good to be hurtling forward again, to feel the momentum of the car carry them on at top speed, to hear the tires thrum against the asphalt. It felt like home. A new home.

She stared down at that twinkling spot in the distance and let her mind go blank aside from that image. It seemed a comfort for a while.

And then it occurred to her that this was as far as she could see into her future, this visible stretch of road they rocketed down. Houston would be gone. They couldn’t go backward. Just forward down an empty road. Anything could happen after they passed through that glimmer down there.

“Where do you think we’ll go?” she said.

The sound of her voice seemed to break some silent spell that had fallen over the car, shaking them from some half-dream state that had settled upon each of them.

Ray grunted.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Away from here is all.”

“Shouldn’t we make plans?”

“Maybe. I mean, we should get some sleep at some point. I was hoping to get farther on from Dallas before we did that.”

He scratched his stubbled chin against his knuckles, his voice trailing away as he finished his thought.

“Don’t know how far is far enough.”

He fished a hand into the paper bag between them, a crinkling noise erupting as he dug around, and then he pulled a Twinkie free, using his teeth to help rip the cellophane package open with one hand. He leaned forward and spit the plastic flap onto the floor, which was already cluttered with other people’s balled up fast food wrappers.

Twinkies. That’s what she got when she let him do the shopping at the gas station while she filled the tank. Two boxes of Twinkies, a variety of colas, a plastic jar of peanuts and all of the bottled water he could carry. Most of it got packed in ice in a stryofoam cooler, both of which he also bought. At least they had enough cold water for a couple of days.

He unsheathed the Twinkie, licking his lips as he slid the rounded tip out of the sleeve. After a beat he stuck the yellow tube in his mouth. Something about all of this looked equal parts gluttonous and homoerotic.

She looked away, gazing out the window at the endless fields of dead grass. It crisped in the sun like chow mein noodles. A picture formed in her head of setting foot on it, hearing the crunch of each distinct blade as her heel and toe descended. She remembered reading something about a drought up this way. Apparently, it hadn’t been as bad as you moved toward the coast.

Something about that image, the dead grass as they moved away from their homes, didn’t bode so well for their journey, she thought.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

76 days after

Smoke filled the room now, an opaque cloud that hung almost motionless above him, just faintly drifting in most of the room, only really roiling over the landing where the fire raged. The younger zombie lay still in the midst of the flames, her body and clothing now colorless, black, a crisped husk shriveling into the ash of the bottom steps. She no longer groaned, holding silent and still.

The older zombie wandered into his field of vision, wobbling to his right. Her face was blackened now like burnt chicken skin, her features erased into a matte black finish, but the flames on her had died down to almost nothing, glowing red patches of clothing, tiny little flickers around the edges. Her mouth still produced noises, but it sounded tattered and small. Raspy. Perhaps her vocal cords had gotten fried somewhere in there.

Teddy knew what to do now, but he didn’t know how.

He thought about taking off his shirt, using it to protect his hands as he grabbed the older zombie. Then he pictured the t-shirt melting, the dripping fiery fabric sinking into his skin, searing all the way to the bone and melding with the flesh there in his fingers, his palms. It made him shudder.

He’d have to bare hand it. It was going to hurt.

He juked around a fiery mud puddle and rushed the wobbling creature, hands latching on each of its upper arms, fingers sinking just a bit into that burned outer layer, and he flung the thing down like a nose tackle dispatching a running back in the backfield. She toppled over, falling in a heap on the landing atop the other zombie.

It wasn’t until the moment after he released her that he felt the scream of the sting in his hands. He didn’t look. He didn’t have time, but he pictured the heels of his hands and the tips of his fingers and that webbed spot between the thumb and palm all blistered up, bubbled sacs of skin full of yellow fluid.

He ran then, planting one foot and then the other into the back of the freshly fallen zombie, feet landing right between the shoulder blades and pushing off. From there he launched himself up the stairs, jumping clear of the fire and scrabbling up the steps on hands and knees.

He didn’t feel safe until he passed through the doorway and belly flopped on the linoleum in the kitchen. His forehead sank to the floor and rested there, the cool of it comforting him. That was close. Too close.

He knew he couldn’t relax long, that there was still a good chance the fire from the steps would get to the joists and floorboards above them and the whole place would go. With the way the lighter fluid cans continued to give off whooshing fireballs every few seconds, he thought it likely. This place would be a total loss. Still, he had the opportunity to rest for the moment, so he did.

After a time, he lifted his head and looked down the steps to see the older zombie still squirming there, arms scrabbling in flame and ash, unable to get a grip on anything. It slowed, and soon it would stop. Even still, he wished he could keep it.

Baghead

Rural Arkansas

9 years, 127 days after

Delfino squatted by the Delta 88, a handkerchief pressed to the wound in his deltoid. The shotgun lay across his lap. He stood when Baghead stepped out of the woods, gathering up the gun and pinning it under his good arm.

“Jesus,” he said. “Are you OK?”

Baghead nodded.

“You?”

“Well, I got shot, so that blows.”

Baghead puffed a laugh from his nostrils.

“Just a graze, though. That fuck didn’t have the balls to do any real damage. I heard the sound of your gun. Three shots. You kill ‘im?”

Baghead nodded again.

“Damn, dude. I didn’t take you for the psycho type, just marching right out there to do something like that.”

They just stood for a moment. Not talking. Not making eye contact.

“Is she OK?”

“She’s fine. She ate all of the jerky. Kind of acted like she thought she’d be in trouble for it. Figured we’d eat if- when you got back.”

Baghead nodded again. He opened the door to the back seat.

“You hungry?” he said to the girl.

“Well, yeah,” she said.

Delfino wound around the back of the car to dig in the cooler on the opposite side.

“Shoot. Father’s going to have to send a legit assassin if he wants to take out the Baghead,” he said. “I guess he’s got four more cracks at it, eh?”

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

77 days after

He lay in bed, his old bed, staring up into the darkness, knowing the bare light bulb was up there along with the joists and the wires snaking around them. He fumbled a hand into the black beside him, finding the curve of the top of the two liter and bringing it to his lips. Sweet nectar.

Warm Mountain Dew didn’t kill the pain that clawed inside of him, though. He felt small and weak like when the kids called him names in school. Humiliated. Defeated.