The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (29 page)

A killer. A murderer.

The words didn’t come to him with any sense of shame or pride. They rang out in a matter of fact tone in his head. He was a killer, a person who had murdered other people, rightly or wrongly. That was who he was. He could never take it back, and he didn’t want to.

He took a big drink of rum and Coke, swiped the heel of his hand across his lips. His shoulders nestled back into the recliner, and he stared out the window, waiting for the sun. To hell with sleep. To hell with it.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

42 days before

He sat at the table and listened to the grandfather clock tick. Gray shrouded the kitchen, shadows blackening along the edges of the fridge and the countertops, softening the edges of everything, the fading light from the window unable to compete. Shit. The riot must have knocked the power out. For a second he thought maybe that would be it, maybe the electricity would just never come back on as society disintegrated. But no. Things were still together somewhat for now. They would get it back on for a while at least, though he may not live to see it.

The boys made their way into the kitchen.

“Power’s out,” Kevin said, not making eye contact.

“Yeah, I think it’s from the riot,” Mitch said. “I’m sure it will be back on before long.”

“But why would they want to do that?” Matt said.

“I doubt anyone intended to kill the electricity,” Mitch said. “But fires get out of control. Powerlines melt. Transformers fry. It spreads from there.”

“What if it never comes back on?” Matt said.

“It will,” Mitch said. “There’s work to be done and money to be made. Trust me, they’ll keep fixing it until there’s no one left to fix it.”

“That can happen?” Matt said. “There can be no one left to fix it?”

“Well, no,” Mitch said. “I mean, yeah, I guess it could happen, but I just meant it more like a figure of speech. Don’t worry, Matt. They will keep on fixing it.”

“OK,” Matt said.

“Shouldn’t we do something?” Kevin said. “I mean, like, aren’t there things we should be doing?”

“I’ve been making calls,” Mitch said. “Hopefully I’ll be able to get a hold of your grandparents as soon as possible. That’s probably the most important thing. What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Should we try to stock up on food and stuff like that?” Kevin said, still looking at the floor.

“Maybe you’re right,” Mitch said. “It could get busy with the power out, but it’s probably not out everywhere yet. We could grab food, ice, maybe some flashlights. Bet those are flying off the shelves.”

Mitch made a quick list, and they piled into the car again, though nobody had to hold any boxes on their laps this time. Headlights lit up the night all around. The traffic seemed thick. Cars packed together at intersections like herds of cattle jostling along their fence, looking for some way out. As they waited at a stoplight, the other cars surrounding them, he thought this could be a mistake. That they’d get stuck out here, engulfed in the riot and the traffic somehow and never even get home, encased in the car with zombies closing in, the other cars so close they couldn’t open the doors or climb out of the windows. But the paranoia faded when they got moving once more.

The gun on the passenger seat made him feel a little better anyway. He’d already decided that he’d tuck it in his belt on the way in. Nobody was going to be enforcing any right to conceal permits with half of the city on fire. They’d gotten caught with their guard down outside of the cabin. It wouldn’t happen again.

For a few blocks they saw no signs of electricity, dead streetlights leaving the sides of the road in blackness, but then a glimmer of color took shape in the distance. The golden arches and the Burger King logo glowed yellow, red, and orange. Good. Hopefully the grocery store down here had power, too.

Streetlights and traffic lights returned as they rolled on, though not all of them were up and running. It seemed a little hit or miss. Still, there was enough light to see there was no smoke anywhere too near, no masses of humanity kicking and thrashing and knocking down doors and windows. It looked a little busier than normal, but that was it.

“Damn,” Mitch said as they approached the unlit Kroger sign.

Darkness shrouded the parking lot, the open space made to feel foreign in the gloom. They pulled in, advancing slowly into the shadows, and it felt like creeping across some African prairie, Mitch thought, the way you could see the flattened land stretch off with the occasional lightpost rising up like a tree to interrupt the flatness. The cars were just a texture along the horizon, their details invisible apart from the silhouettes of their tops.

“There’s a light on inside,” Kevin said.

Mitch looked up at the front doors before them and saw the headlights reflected off of the glass there, but only darkness behind the glass. Glancing back at his son, he following the trajectory of the boy’s outstretched finger. Ah. The lights on the other side of the store were on.

“Nice,” he said. “They must have a generator going to power the half of the store with the groceries.”

They eased over to that side of the lot. The businesses along the street walled them off from the traffic, so the night felt silent and empty after all of the time surrounded by traffic. The other half of the lot throbbed with activity, though. Mitch saw the headlights of minivans and SUVs pulling in and parking. Another movement flitted among the shadows. It took him a moment to realize that droves of people flocked toward the store, some streaming out of cars while others arrived on bike and foot.

Shit. He licked his lips, tongue dragging over sharp chapped spots in the corners, almost crusted. The phantoms shifted in the dark places, their faces scrunching when the headlights hit them. He didn’t like it. Too many people. Too much chaos in the air tonight. He swiped fingers at his forehead, felt a little sweat there.

“Can I ask you something?” Matt said, his head appearing at Mitch’s shoulder, in the space between the seats.

“Me? Yeah.”

“Can we get some Oreos?”

He looked at the boy, his face dead serious in the glow from the dash lights.

“Yeah, sure,” Mitch said. “My boy wants Oreos, he’ll have Oreos. You want anything Kevin?”

He tried to find his older son’s face in the rearview, but he saw only the faint red glow of the taillights bleeding through the rear windshield. The boy’s voice piped up from the gloom:

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

The disembodied voice sounded thicker than Mitch remembered. His son was getting older, but he’d never get to see him become a man, start a family of his own. To him, both of his sons would be boys forever, and forever might only be a few more hours.

The despair of the thing settled upon his shoulders as he parked the car. He closed his eyes and put his head down on the wheel, heard the sound of the back doors open and close as his sons exited the vehicle. He sat there for a moment, head touching the rounded top of the wheel, eyes drifting open to stare into the black nothing where his feet must be.

He picked himself up, grabbed the gun and tucked it in his belt as he opened the door and stood. He thought one of the kids might ask what took him so long or perhaps even see him handling the gun under the dome light and confront him about it, but they were distracted. They looked upon the streams of people moving toward the glow of the glass storefront, many picking their way through the narrow pathways between the parked cars rather than braving the aisles where additional cars still roamed.

They joined the throng of foot traffic, following the zigzagging path between the vehicles. The movement all around made Mitch uptight, and yet something about traveling along with this large group felt social, almost on a primal level, some shared experience in a stressful moment. Like nomads pressing toward a watering hole, maybe.

The square of glowing glass before them seemed to get bigger and bigger on the horizon as they advanced. It burned incandescent against the night, not quite a white light, somewhere toward the shade of egg nog. The traffic pouring into the lot let up, and in the ensuing silence Mitch heard a motor growling in the distance like an idling lawnmower, perhaps the generator out back, he thought.

His heart rate picked up as they got close, the fist shaped muscle in his chest squeezing tighter and tighter, rattling the walls of his chest with each beat. He felt kind of dumb about it, about getting jacked up over arriving at the store, but he couldn’t help it. He was awake now. Alive.

Stepping through the doorway, the light was everywhere, white and bright and glaring. Mitch couldn’t help but smile at how overwhelming it was, his eyes squinted down to stinging slits. He pressed his forearm against the gun in his belt to make sure it was still there.

“Dang,” Matt said. “Too bright.”

They toddled forward, half blind, legs staggering out choppy steps as they struggled to keep pace with the crowd around them, all of the people making their way into the open.

Baghead

Rural Oklahoma

9 years, 126 days after

A black dream. No lightning this time. He moved in shadow, walking into nothing, the dark surrounding him, swallowing him up like he wasn’t all the way real. He didn’t mind that idea of himself, his physical being, reduced in some way, still here but not all the way.

He chose his steps carefully, his feet picking their way over obstacles, somehow able to navigate the roughage even without seeing it. It occurred to him that his movements seemed assured, seemed to have purpose that he wasn’t quite aware of. That didn’t make sense. Did it?

He stopped walking. Some feeling here struck him as familiar yet new. Like he’d been in a thousand different versions of this place, wherever it was.

Could it be a dream?

He reached for his face, unsure if he’d find the old or the new. He braced himself for either result – the rough feel of the canvas bag or the smooth flesh of his old face restored. His fingers closed in and closed in and found nothing where the bag should be, where the jaw should be, where the cheek should be. Nothing at all. Empty space.

His hand flailed around, looking for anything solid, finally descending toward his torso, feeling along the collar bone to the place where the skin went vertical, climbing the warm flesh along the jugular and finding it sheared off in a stumped neck. His fingers sank into the hole, a jagged bone surrounded by flaps of throat flesh all opened up and wet.

He woke in the Delta 88, recognizing the sound of the engine first and then the uneven throb of the tires rolling over rough patches of road. He adjusted his bag so he could see, the car weaving back and forth over both lanes to avoid the worst of the potholes.

“You awake?” Delfino said.

“Yeah. I am now.”

“Good. We’re almost there. About five minutes out, in fact.”

Bags nodded, the canvas pulling taut against his forehead and releasing.

He looked out the window, noting that the land had flattened out again, and that there were more weeds here, though still nothing like the grass and clusters of trees he’d been hoping to see. Patches of dirt still showed through everywhere. This land was balding instead of bald.

Life was rougher in the places where food still grew, though. The green places. Out in the desert, things were quieter. You had to have money to make that drier climate life work, or you had to be craftier than most. Finding the spot by the river helped a lot in that regard.

“Here we go,” Delfino said.

Figures formed on the horizon, distorted by the blur of the heat rising off of the road. Seven of them. The silhouettes looked like men holding assault rifles, but something about it looked off, something that Bags couldn’t place. They stood around a metal gate of some kind with a bunch of stop signs attached to it in haphazard fashion, all uneven and some tilted at odd angles. It struck him how clearly he could read their body language and discern their movements, even from a great distance and through the haze rising up from the road. They milled around, shifting their weight from foot to foot, adjusting their grip on their guns or moving them from shoulder to shoulder, leaning forward to spit on the ground.

“Remember, our primary objective here is to not get our heads hacked off. I’ll talk. You’ll do the opposite of talk. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Delfino let off of the accelerator as they got close, the Delta 88 drifting to slower and slower speeds. The haze seemed to clear, all of the details sharpening into focus little by little. They seemed a scrawny bunch, all gaunt faces and stretched-out limbs with deltoids being the only visible muscles among them. Was that what looked so weird from a distance? The rifles rose before Bags could ponder it much, one after another, aimed at their car. A precaution, Baghead hoped.

One of the men in front lowered his weapon and raised a hand, palm out. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign for them to stop or if he was communicating with his people via hand signal. And then he got a better look at the man’s face. Or the boy’s face, he should say. He couldn’t have been over 15, a pale stick of a boy with sandy hair and a single black line painted under his eyes. He looked around at the others, all of them sporting the black paint from cheek bone to cheek bone.