The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (14 page)

He shuffled forward a few paces, out of the glass and rocks, still squatting on the floor. He found himself in a living room, a nice one with brown leather furniture that looked like it belonged in a shrink’s office on TV. The space still felt lived in. A nest of pillows and two rumpled afghans coiled into a pile on the couch, like some place a creature would bed down. A nature magazine lay open on the coffee table, opened to an article about endangered jungle species. He could imagine someone emerging from the hallway any second to curl up in the blankets and resume reading, but another part of his brain knew they wouldn’t, of course.

He looked to the front door, considered letting the dog in, but he thought it better to get in and out as fast as he could. He wasn’t sure she’d be too keen on going inside any building so soon after nearly starving to death trapped in a room. Besides, she would wait for him out front, he figured.

He crouch-walked forward, still paranoid enough to be unwilling to stand upright, as though staying low somehow protected him. The air felt thicker as he moved away from the window. Heavy. Dank. A musty smell assailed him right away as he reached the kitchen door. It reminded him of rotting fruit and mold mixed with some sour smell like pickle juice.

Something small crunched when he took a step onto the gray and brown flecked ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor. He looked down. Nothing. Another step brought about another tiny crunch, rocking his foot from heel to toe slowly revealed a series of miniature pops and cracks. What the hell?

Oh. There were no brown flecks on the gray tiles. Instead dead fruit flies covered the floor. They looked bigger than any he’d seen, almost the size of fat mosquitoes, and apparently they’d been here long enough to get crispy as hell. Sheesh. They must have made quite a swarm at their peak, he thought.

He stepped again, the moving air around him pushing fruit flies along like an invisible broom. Bowls of shriveled bananas sat on the counter. He pulled open a few cabinets and drawers to reveal cereal boxes, utensils, spices and a lot of empty spaces.

The pantry held what he wanted: a big tupperware bin of kibble, mostly full. He picked it up, finally standing. As he left the kitchen, he again imagined something leaping on him as he passed through the doorway, but he was fine.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

42 days before

He watched himself in the bathroom mirror, watched his hand lift the gun to eye level, watched his finger slide to the trigger. He squinted, aimed for the reflection of his face, right between the eyes. He squeezed the trigger and nothing happened because of the safety, so he made a little gun noise by popping his lips, did a pretend recoil where he tipped the barrel up. He felt the need to do this, to run through some kind of mental repetition so that when he got down in the basement, got face to face with this dead thing, he’d know what to do. He’d have something, some kind of ingrained sense or maybe even muscle memory, to fall back on if he panicked.

He ran through it one more: ready, aim, pretend to fire. Satisfied, he lowered the gun and nodded. He looked like hell, purple under his eyes, puffiness to his cheeks. He considered peeling back his sleeve to get a look at his wound, but the image of Janice’s ankle flashed in his head, the missing chunk, the smoky tendrils fouling her flesh. He shuddered. Not now. He couldn’t look. He’d take care of this first.

He stepped out of the bathroom and paced back and forth in the hallway a few times, gun dangling at his side, fingers on the opposite hand brushing back and forth over his lips. The day was creeping into the afternoon now. The kids would be home from school soon, and then the real work would begin. He couldn’t think of that now, though, couldn’t look even an hour into the future. It was too overwhelming.

He still had that bile taste in the back of his throat, that film of acid his nervous belly had fluxed up into his mouth. The taste reminded him of cafeteria pizza when he was a school kid, that grease that sat in the pieces of pepperoni that contorted into cups as the edges cooked faster than the middle. Maybe it was the grease mixed with the cheap sauce.

All right. OK. No more bullshit. Time to do it.

He walked to the basement, opened the door. His hand moved toward the light switch and stopped. It was already on. Right. He’d never turned it off during his post-bite retreat.

OK, that was OK, he told himself, trying to will himself to not be upset. The truth was that he didn’t like it, though. Didn’t like the surprise. Didn’t like feeling out of control before the encounter even started.

He hesitated there, his toes resting on the threshold. He looked down into the chamber below, watched the strobe effect of the fluorescent light flickering around on the floor. He saw no movement down there, heard nothing. Without thinking, he brought the grip of the gun to his forehead, used the rough part to scratch between his eyebrows, the metal cool on his skin.

He started down the steps, pressing forward with some urgency though he was light enough on his feet to remain near silent. His chest heaved, some instinctual pre-aggression deep-breathing thing kicking in, like a boxer sucking wind just before a match starts. He had to really concentrate to keep his respiration quiet.

His feet touched down on concrete, and his head swiveled to locate his target. His eyes flicked their way around the perimeter of the room, both hands on the gun with a twitchy thumb more than ready to flick the safety off.

Nothing.

What the hell?

Could it have gotten out? He tried to imagine it, shoulders hunched, shambling up the steps, hooked fingers somehow opening the door. Impossible. Right? It had to be impossible.

His chest started heaving again, faster this time, shallower. The word “hyperventilation” popped into his head. He stopped himself, forced a long, slow inhale upon his diaphragm, felt his chest get tighter and tighter as his ribcage expanded. Then he let it out all slow, felt the panic subside a touch. Then another deep breath, the expansion of his chest fixing his posture. He squinted as he exhaled, felt the tension ease a little bit more in his neck and shoulders.

OK. He made himself focus. He held his breath and let his eyes do one more rotation around the room, forcing them to take it slow this time.

There. He could see its arm sticking out from behind the folded up ping pong table. The dumbass thing had wedged itself up against the wall. He doubted this was out of some clever attempt to hide. It was just an idiot animal snuffling around at random, falling into motionless dazes like this for long stretches.

He took the barrel of the gun into his left hand so he could wipe the sopping palm of his right on his jeans. It was still moist, but it was better.

He took a deep breath, making no attempt to be quiet now.

“All right, fucker,” he said. “Come and get it.”

The thing banged into the ping pong table a couple of times before it made it out into the open. It shuffled toward him, its head and shoulders leaned so far forward that it seemed to be falling and catching itself over and over with choppy steps, legs staggering to keep up with the thrust of forward momentum.

He raised his arm just like he did in the bathroom upstairs. He aimed, flipped the safety off and fired. The Berretta blazed and popped. The first shot missed, the bullet thwacking into the concrete wall, but he did it again right away, and the second one hit dead center in the forehead, spraying brains out of the back of the skull. The projectile mess hit the ping pong table with a wet slap, smearing red across it like someone had flung the contents of a full jar of slightly runny strawberry jam at it. The impact stood the body straight up for a split second, and then it bent at the knees and went down, folding up into something small on the ground.

His ears rang. His hands tingled. His head got light. A rush of euphoria came over him then, a feeling of accomplishment like none he’d ever felt. He couldn’t fully embrace it, though. He couldn’t quite celebrate, even for a second. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he’d always feared, but he was finding it out too late. His wife was gone, and he was heading for the same destination rapidly. No victory could erase those things.

He grit his teeth, the muscles in his jaw bunching and unbunching in rapid succession.

He still had something, though. He would help those boys. He would make one thing right, as right as he could make it, anyway. But first he would eat lunch.

He figured this turkey sandwich wouldn’t be his last meal, but it was close enough in a way. He had no reason to go light on the mayo now, no concerns about piling the meat as high as he could get it or controlling his portion of potato chips. He filled a small bowl with pickles. It was a delicious meal. It reminded him of being young. Before Janice, when he lived on his own, he ate sandwiches like this often, chugged Pepsi all day. It was a simpler time. There were less apocalypses going on.

Though the meal was satisfying on some gluttonous level, he found himself growing more and more restless as he ate. Sating his hunger finally left his mind able to wander to other things, to mull over his wife’s death. His feelings on the subject seemed to be coming unblocked, to be welling up from beneath the surface, though they still seemed somewhat muted.

Instead of the anticipated sorrow or defeat, however, he found only the heat of rage crawling up to flush his face and make the blood vessels in his temples throb. He felt the sting of it in his eyes and in his teeth, in all of the muscles in his face gone taut.

Some part of him wanted to flip the table over, sweep the condiments and pickle jar off of the counter to send a rushing wave of pickle juice and mustard and broken glass over the linoleum. Then he could go through the rest of the house trashing it. Exploding vases, shattered mirrors, holes punched in drywall.

He felt duped. Like he could suddenly see through the cracks in reality and make out the lack of light underneath.

What was reality, really? Society had created this paradise of distraction, built on novelty and convenience and bright lights and loud noises. But it was all emptiness. Filling his life with TV, movies, video games, sports, treating those like the things that actually mattered. At some point, Mitch thought, it became hard to remember what was real, what was important.

What was it all a distraction from, though? Death, right? Death was something that happened on TV to the bad guys. It was a tragic ending of a Lifetime movie. It wasn’t supposed to happen to him, to his wife, maybe even his kids. How could that be how things worked?

They sold him a better reality, made it seem like the paradise of novelty could be his forever if he played along, that he could connect to some painlessness, some eternal bliss at some unspecified future date. But it was a ponzi scheme. He did his part. He paid with his money and effort and time, giving his life for what? For nothing. For sitcoms and superhero movies and football and beer that tastes great and is less filling.

This was the long con. It kept him obedient and productive, made it so death could blindside him.

Christ on a crutch. Is that the best life can be? Distract yourself for as long as you can.

Just as he crunched down on his last bite of pickle, something creaked behind him. The front door opened and closed. He froze, his mouth stuck in a strange mid-chew. All he could picture was dead Janice stumbling through the doorway to head out on the town.

He turned back to look. No zombies. Instead, Kevin and Matt were taking their shoes off, hanging up their coats. Was it so late already? He glanced at his phone. 1:26 PM. The kids walked into the kitchen.

Kevin’s long face resembled his mother, though he had red hair and paler skin than she did. Matt’s round face showed that he still had some of that little kid chub to him, and his hair was so blond it sometimes looked white in the right light.

“School get out early?” Mitch said, his mouth still half full of pickle and turkey and bread.

They nodded.

“There’s a riot,” Matt said. He delivered this bit of news in a matter of fact way that seemed funny to Mitch. He was 8. He probably barely knew what a riot was.

“A riot, huh?” Mitch said, a smile curling on the corners of his mouth.

He wanted to get the kid to expound upon this notion, to get him to explain his idea of a riot. But then he pictured the rise and fall of the crowbar and the piece of pipe, the eggshell skull bobbing as the mouth closed in on the ankle, and it didn’t seem as funny anymore.

He ruffled Matt’s hair, which he knew the kid hated. The boy made a face, his top lip curling and protruding so that it almost touched his nose. He jerked away from his father and smoothed his blond hair back down with a rigid hand.

“You hear from Mom?” Kevin said, digging a root beer out of the fridge.

Mitch pictured the dead body in the basement. He’d thrown a scrap of tarp over it, but it wasn’t big enough to cover the whole thing. The feet stuck out at the bottom, one pink Chuck Taylor and one bare heel touching concrete, the ankles limp so the toes pointed out. Apparently the thing had lost a shoe stumbling around in zombie mode.

“No,” he said. “I’ll try to call your Grandpa again.”

He scrolled to the number in his contact list, brought the phone to his ear. His heart felt like it was beating in the base of his neck. He was paranoid that the boys would try to go into the basement, though there was no reason for them to do so. All he could picture was one of them and then the other twisting that door knob while the phone rang and rang.