The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (13 page)

He leaned back, his hands peeling free from the linoleum with a sound like a cellophane wrapper being peeled open. He sat back in an upright position. His breathing was under control now.

He felt alive.

His mission was clear. That thing still roamed in the basement, however, his blood on its breath. He would need to take care of that first. Enough screwing around, though. No more old fashioned tools. He was going to handle this the Ted Nugent way: shoot it in the face.

The gun felt right in his fingers. They both did, but for now he was handling the Berretta M9. It was all black, had a classy look to it, he thought. Something about the Glock, on the other hand, made it look a little like a toy to him. But it didn’t feel like a toy in his hand. It felt right, too. They both had a nice heft to them.

The light turned green, so he flopped the firearm back onto the passenger seat and drove. The guns clattered into each other as the car lurched forward, a little metallic sound that reminded him of a sound effect in one of those video games where you stalk from room to room, laying waste to every human being you come across. Maybe it was like the sound of reloading. He wasn’t sure.

He drummed on the wheel at another stoplight, willing himself to keep his hands away from the metal in the seat next to him. The sun had raised itself higher than when he’d last looked upon it. It must be creeping up on noon already. Time flies when you’re getting bit by a goddamn zombie, right?

Shopping for guns was an odd experience since he didn’t know anything about them. On the ride over, he had planned to get a shotgun, had pictured himself wielding it in the basement, disintegrating the thing’s face with a load of buckshot. But as he got within a few blocks of the pawn shop, it occurred to him that maybe the kids wouldn’t be able to handle the recoil.

He was thinking handguns after that, but he didn’t know where to start. The guy at the pawn shop told him these would be the easiest guns to get ammo for, no matter what might happen. He told him they were reliable, sturdy, durable. He told him he could use them to hammer nails all day, and they’d still shoot straight. That sounded good enough to him. The guy had a gun holstered at his side as he imparted these nuggets, so he must know something.

Another stoplight. It seemed like there were a ton of pedestrians out, all streaming in the opposite direction of his car. He watched the swells of humanity flowing on both sides of the street. It reminded him of disaster footage on TV, of flash flood water gushing down city streets, picking up cars and taking them along for the journey.

He wondered what the zombie was doing right now, what it was thinking. Did it even think? Did it have any notion that he’d be back? He pictured it in the basement, stumbling from one corner to the next, waiting for some sign of life to pounce upon.

I’ve got your sign of life right here,
he thought, petting the gun. Then he realized that this didn’t really make sense and laughed.

And then he remembered that he wouldn’t actually have any signs of life for much longer... but there was no time to think about that now.

He took a left onto Vine Street and noticed smoke a few blocks in the distance, thick black clouds rolling into the sky. As he drove up on the source, he found an apartment building fully engulfed in flames, fire reaching out of the windows on most every floor. A group of people watched it from across the street, hands cupped around their eye sockets to shield them from the light. It had to have been burning for some time to get this big, but there were no police or firemen around. He knew things were starting to break down, but he didn’t realize it was this bad.

He accelerated out of instinct. Just as he began to wonder why he was doing so, he watched a teenage kid throw a brick through the front window of a stereo shop. The glass spider webbed, white lines spreading out from the hole at the point of impact. It hesitated like that just long enough to remind him of a cartoon featuring breaking ice under some doomed character’s feet, and then the whole thing collapsed. People streamed out of the door with arms full of amplifiers, tweeters, and subwoofers. Mitch realized it was already being looted before the window dropped, realized that all of the stores around him were under siege, that he’d driven into a riot.

Kids cradled stolen candy in their arms. Baseball bats and other blunt objects maimed the windshields and rearview mirrors of cars that had lost the parking spot lottery.

Goosebumps rippled over his forearms and thighs. Fear gurgled in his gut, lifting acid to the back of his throat so he could taste it. Under the fright, though, some animal part of him was exhilarated by the violence of it all. It made his eyes open wider, made his posture right itself, made his breath tingle in and out of his throat, made him feel more alive. That surprised him. Was that a weird response? He didn’t know. It wasn’t violence against people so far as he could see. It was violence against property. He wasn’t in favor of it, of course, but there were worse things people could do.

Without thinking, he reached over and pulled one of the guns into his lap, kept his hand on it. He glanced down to confirm that it was the Beretta. Good. Maybe he had a favorite after all.

He sped through the next several blocks, endless mayhem unfolding along the sides of the street. He saw no more fire, but he did see more broken glass, more people toting flat screens and jewelry and one guy with an arm full of what looked like chicken patties from a fast food restaurant.

And then he saw the beating, saw the crowd circling, the rise and fall of a crowbar and a piece of pipe and hands and feet, all pummeling a figure on the ground of which he could only make out the limp legs wearing blue jeans, the motionless feet wearing what looked to be an expensive pair of Nikes.

Everything slowed down. Reality filtered down to just that image of weapons and fists raining down on a human being gone totally still. Bashing it. Bludgeoning it. Stomping it. The faces of the attackers looked indistinct. They seemed to tuck back into each other’s shadows, to blur together. A bunch of brows furrowed into the same aggressive shape became the only detail he could discern.

The beating stretched on for a long time. Too long. Thinking back on it, he wouldn’t be sure if he subconsciously slowed down the car to watch it or the sense of time slowing was solely due to his perception shifting into slow motion. Either way, it couldn’t have been a very long time — just a few seconds, most likely -- but it seemed like several minutes went by.

And then the figure beneath the attackers was still no longer. The fallen man bucked his hips, his torso jerking partially upright. The attackers fanned out. They backpedaled a couple of steps in all directions, their movements so perfectly in unison that it either looked like they were performing a synchronized routine, or that they were somehow knocked back physically, like some force field suddenly repelled them.

Their victim looked like a dead man somehow sitting up, like a top quality special effects makeup. His forehead was dented, partially caved in. An exposed section of skull above his right eye looked like a cracked eggshell. Blood and bruises shrouded the rest of his face in reds and purples. His eyes looked in different directions. He bucked again, his body jerking in a way that seemed involuntary, and then he remained still, his expression blank, as the attackers circled him again, adjusting their grips on their various weapons and inching closer.

When the victim’s head leaned back unnaturally and his arm looped out in a pathetic attempt at grabbing one of the attackers, Mitch released the gun to bring a hand to cover his mouth. The motion was somehow familiar, the rigid neck, the inarticulate movements of the fingers, the dim look about the face. It was like Janice, or whatever Janice had become, at least. This thing was back from the dead. Perhaps that’s why they were beating on it in the first place.

One of the attackers stepped forward and swung the crowbar like a baseball bat, his legs and hips rotating into the swing with explosive force. The bar struck the eggshell skull, a solid connection knocking it to the side with a high-pitched sound like a tossed horseshoe colliding with the steel stake. A few pieces of chipped skull fell and skittered across the ground like Chiclets.

The zombie lurched, flailing arms cinching around an ankle before the crowbar guy had a chance to retreat. It brought its head forward, moving toward the captured leg, mouth open wide. The other men swelled around the attacker, tried to help him rip free of its grip. One guy kicked at the thing, but it didn’t help.

Mitch watched through the screen of the passenger side window, suddenly acutely aware that he was one step removed from this scene. He found himself focusing on that eggshell forehead. He couldn’t see the actual bite, couldn’t see the teeth sink into the back of the man’s calf. The leg shielded the face from his view. So he watched the broken skull bob just above the ankle, heard the man’s scream hit a falsetto note, saw the others stumble backward, all of their aggressive expressions morphing into terrified ones.

And then it was all gone. Behind him. Shrinking in the rearview mirror. The car moved on. Time seemed to speed back up, and other flickering images of violence played out on the street side, though none were quite so dramatic.

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

48 days after

Clouds blocked the sun and leached some of the color out of everything. He walked down the sidewalk in this muted version of the world, and the dog trotted along just behind him. It felt strange to have a companion now. He looked down, made eye contact with her and watched her tail beat faster. Some part of him couldn’t believe she was still here.

When they’d gotten back the night before, he’d taken a bowl of oatmeal out to the porch and fed her, gave her a little peanut butter for dessert. He didn’t figure she’d want to be inside after all of that time trapped, so he didn’t try to get her to do that. Instead he sat with her on the swing until it was dark and she’d been asleep a long while. He went to bed, expecting her to be gone when he woke, but the next morning she was sitting up on the swing.

Now he needed dog food, and he knew where to look.

The Caslers lived four houses down. Everyone in the neighborhood knew their dogs well enough, three big coon hounds that made noise at all hours. They barked and howled and stood on their hind legs to rattle the chain linked fence of their pen. About twice a week they made weird throaty noises that Travis thought sounded like a man turning into a werewolf.

He’d watched them leave. It must have been five or six days after he buried his parents, weeks ago now. The whole family had been there: The father with the tree trunk legs, perpetually sweating through polo shirts. The mother with big hair that Travis presumed hadn’t changed a bit since her senior pictures circa 1991. The high school aged son, scrawny and pale. They packed most of their things into their SUV, much of it in those big Rubbermaid bins. A few boxes went into the trunk of the son’s hatchback, and the last step was coaxing the three dogs into the back seat of the subcompact, which they accomplished with some difficulty.

Anyway, Travis didn’t think there was any way they could have loaded all of the dog food they must have had on hand. Time to pillage that shit.

He cut through the yard toward the front door. He felt funny as soon as he set foot on their property, like someone would see him, and he’d somehow get in trouble. He hesitated, taking a little half step and pausing. Nothing happened of course.

He knocked on the front door, an empty gesture, he knew, and tried the handle. Locked, of course. Gauzy curtains covered all of the windows. He thought about circling the house to try the other doors, but some part of him wouldn’t have it.

There was no point in pretending any of these formalities were necessary. He had watched all of the people die or leave, could still see many of their corpses bloating around town. This was just an empty building in an empty city in an empty world. He picked up a rock about the size of a softball from a decorative circle of stones surrounding a bird bath. He cupped it in his hand in front of him, hefting it up and down a few times to get a feel for its weight. Satisfied, he chucked it through the big front window.

The rock punched a hole in the glass and flew straight through, ruffling the gauzy curtain and disappearing. There was something very cannonball-like about all of it. The sound of the glass was percussive. It rang up and down the street like a giant bell. The dog flinched, and Travis couldn’t help but swivel his head around, looking for some authority figure to pop up and yell at him.

Nothing happened, of course.

He threw another and another, big triangular shards of glass falling and shattering moments after the cannon balls knocked out their circular holes. The window frame was now the house’s shocked mouth, open wide. The dog cowered behind his legs, back hunched, tail tucked.

“It’s OK,” he said. “No more rocks.”

Her back straightened a little, though she still looked concerned.

He looked up at the house. A row of jagged glass fangs still hung from the top of the opening, but the bottom was clear. He boosted himself up to the sill and pulled himself inside head first, hands reaching into the shade to find the floor and secure his landing, managing to avoid the glass as much as possible.

He got his feet under him, squatting with rocks and broken bits sprinkled all over the dark wood floor below. The quiet in here seemed pronounced after all of that exploding glass. It made him uneasy. All he could imagine was taking a single step forward to have something pounce at him, attaching itself to his face with two rows of claws or a maw full of teeth before he even had time to flinch. He moved his foot a little, glass grinding into the wood. Nothing responded to the sound. Of course, he knew no one was here. Sean was the only person he’d seen on this block in weeks. Still, he couldn’t quite shake that uneasy feeling.