The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (9 page)

I look like someone else. Some confident guy with a light beard. Like a man, I guess. An actual adult man who solves problems, makes sweet moves, attacks life with great gusto.

Anyway, I’ve abandoned the idea of getting a car for now. I’d need to find keys since I don’t have the internet to teach me how to hotwire or anything like that. It just seems too involved to go door to door looking for car keys and then hoping I can find the matching functioning car in the driveway or garage.

The water is all that really matters, so I will focus on that.

I will bike out of town, looking for a well in the country somewhere. Something with a pump, a hand pump, I guess. That’s the one good thing about being in Pittsburgh. There are wooded, rural areas not far outside of town, and I’m sure I’ll find something.

Once the water situation is secure, I will look for a car and a gun. Maybe someday I can find a generator, even if my storage unit has been pillaged, but who knows if there will be any gas left by that time. Those jags in the semi tanker are apparently going around collecting it all, you know? And it’s not like anyone will be refining more oil and shipping it around in its various forms. What’s out there now is all there will be for a long, long time.

49 days after

It wasn’t so hot today. It felt great to be outside, to feel the open air rush against me when the wind picked up.

I sat and watched the cats eat, and I wondered what will become of them once I’m gone. I’m tempted sometimes to inch my way closer day by day, to make them my pets and take them with me wherever I go next. I don’t think it would be difficult. They’re pretty comfortable with my presence now. It’d be nice to have companions, though lately I’m more hopeful about finding human ones down the road.

In some way it feels like meddling to do something like that, to pluck these cats from their lives and make them my property. But isn’t that what the bigger animals always do to the smaller animals one way or another? Isn’t that the way of things in this world? I think it is. Maybe more now than before.

Leaving them be would have been my course of action before, but maybe I’m changing.

It’s crazy how life keeps going. All of these people died, and the buildings burned, and the EMP zapped technology back a few decades or something. And the shock burned as bright and hot in me as that flash in the sky, but now it’s settling, and I am making real plans, really thinking about where my life will go next.

And wherever that might be, I think I’d like some pet cats.

50 days after

I rode the bike for the first time today. The sun seemed angrier than it was yesterday, livid even, and the sweat drained down my back the whole time. The straps of my backpack wound around the handlebars, so it hung there in front of me like a three-toed sloth. I added a sleeve to the bag to serve as a sheath for the machete. It wasn’t the sweet scabbard I might’ve liked, but it made for an easy way to keep my blade with me on the bike.

The city faded out around me as I rolled on. The buildings on the side of the road grew smaller and sparser until grass fields and woods took their place. Something about leaving the concrete behind almost seemed overwhelming, though I couldn’t say why. The world felt so huge and open without a bunch of vacant structures cluttering the horizon.

No more steel. No more brick or cinder block. Just organic material all around me, much of it green. It was natural, I suppose, but it made me uneasy, too. Kept me on alert.

I didn’t really have a particular destination in mind when I set out, but at some point early in the ride the notion of heading by the government camp occurred to me. I remembered the radio message saying that it was off of Interstate 376. Exit 58, I think.

Christ, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? To see the people at the camp. I didn’t think I’d get too close, at least not today. It’d be too much to be around them. But I’d get a look from a distance. See if anyone was still out there, and if so, see what they were up to.

I couldn’t stop picturing what this camp might look like as I rode that way. I pictured cabins, log cabins, I guess, but the slicker, less rustic looking kind that are built from a modular kit. Several rows of cabins with smoke coiling out of every chimney. I pictured laundry hung from a clothesline, sheets and towels and jeans flapping in the breeze. I pictured people sitting around a bonfire out front, a circle of grapefruit sized rocks surrounding the fire pit, kids poking sticks into the flames, prodding at the coals. Men splitting wood in the distance, army and civilian alike, taking turns. The ax falling, the pieces of wood tumbling away from the block.

Wind whipped through the cornfield around me in a way that sounded like sizzling, and that made me picture a cast iron skillet on the fire, bacon shaking around inside of it. Two eggs next to that, the yolks big and fat and yellow, that darker shade of yellow that only the organic eggs possess.

And then I thought about how silly all of this was. How I was picturing something like a summer camp, some place that might serve Bug Juice, when the reality was probably pretty hellish. Cramped, contentious, limited rations to go around, the smell of all of those people shitting in what I’d imagine to be close proximity to their living quarters. Not like they’d have a sewer system out there to take any of it away.

Still, after all of that Tang, the Bug Juice sounded pretty good. I doubt they’d have it, but you never know, right?

Clouds drifted in front of the sun, and the day went gray around me. That got me looking at the sky, thinking about how empty it felt without buildings blocking so much of it from my view, thinking about how small I would look from up in those clouds, pedaling this bike that would have cost more than a beater car had I paid for it rather than borrow it from some dead guy, thinking about why I was doing this, why I was bothering to do any of this, churning my legs, puffing my lungs, playing that endless drum beat with my heart.

But no. I couldn’t think those things. Not anymore. If I wanted to transform I couldn’t think those things.

And then my eyes snapped away from the clouds, and there it was. The camp.

Army green canvas tents covered a wide swath of land. Row after row of them. The big, sort of boxy ones that probably contained a few cots each. And then I saw all of the cars parked in the grass beyond the tents, the sunlight glinting off of the windshields. So many cars and military vehicles and a few buses as well. It looked like the parking lot outside of a mall or some big sporting event. Looking beyond that, I found the long row of blue porta-potties beyond the vehicles. Letting my eyes fall back to the long view, I realized that the whole area was framed in by a fence with barbed wire along the top. A big gate stood partially open by the cars and a handful of watch towers rose up along the fence line.

I hadn’t realized it at first, but I’d stopped. I stood and watched. I stood, in fact, on tiptoes to keep the bike bar between my legs from pulverizing my testicles. It merely propped them up a bit instead.

A lump raised in my throat, like my body had remembered before my mind how close I was to people, maybe even some from my building, maybe even some I kind of knew. The idea that you were there flashed in my head, unrealistic as it might have seemed before I got here. There were buses, right? Maybe that’s why your car was still in the lot. Maybe you rode the bus here. Maybe you were eating a Snickers right now that some soldier slid you on the sly because he thought you were cute. Maybe.

My eyes danced over the images, the new images, flicking from the tents to the cars to the porta-potties and back again, mixing up the order at random. I looked on it for a long time before I realized that something was wrong.

Though the evidence suggested that thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people might be here, nothing was moving. Nothing at all.

50 days after

I don’t remember choosing to set my bike down and walk up to the camp, to the motionless cluster of cars and tents. In my memory, it’s more like I floated toward the scene, like a tractor beam pulled me that way.

I drifted off of the asphalt and onto the grass, my eyes still dancing over the scene before me, but looking for any signs of life now rather than soaking in the images as novelties. But nothing obliged my search for life. No movements. No sounds.

I imagined what it should have looked liked. People swarming near the tents. Lines of them stretching away from the outhouses. More of them huddled over the picnic tables to eat. I heard all of their throats rise as one to chirp out a single, indecipherable sound.

Something brushed the leg of my pants then, and I realized that I gripped the machete in my hand, though I had no memory of pulling it free from the sleeve on my backpack. I looked upon it a moment, watched it bob along with my footsteps.

I asked myself why I would bring that. Why would that occur to me on an automatic, almost subconscious level? Was I scared? I guessed I was. It made sense, of course, once I thought about it, but things seemed to be happening without me thinking just then. My thoughts were always a couple of steps behind.

I crested the last small hill between myself and the tents and began the final descent. As soon as I passed that point, my perspective changed, and I saw them. The bodies sprawling everywhere. In front of the tents. Among the cars.

The vultures and buzzards hunching over the dead kicked up into flight when they saw me, curling into the air with minimal wing flapping so they looked more like planes taking off, all of them falling into their circles in the sky right away.

A hitch jerked my footsteps under me, my legs almost stopping right there, but the tractor beam’s pull didn’t let up. I pressed on, moving slowly, listening, hearing only my shoes swishing through the grass for now.

With some of them, the ones lying flat on their backs or in the fetal position, I could almost believe they were sleeping. They had a peaceful look about them. The ones that piled atop each other, however, looked limp in the way that only corpses can. Others still lay twisted, limbs and necks contorted into unnatural positions and angles.

As I moved closer, the buzzing faded in, the sound lurching and swelling with no discernible meter or rhythm. Flies flitted from body to body like this was a buffet, their wings beating out waves of fizzy sound.

But this didn’t make sense, did it? How could they die all at once? How could the bodies litter the ground this way? Shouldn’t someone have been quarantining the sick and clearing the dead? The few hundred or so people I was looking at couldn’t all just stumble out here and keel over, could they?

The whole scene didn’t look organic somehow. It looked like they all drank poison Kool-Aid together and died within minutes of each other.

And then I got close enough to see the wounds. Chests split open red. Heads caved in. Limbs sheared off into ragged flaps of meat. They were shot, and the severity of the wounds suggested maybe a mounted gun of some type.

The trucks flashed into my head, the tanker and the pickup. Could whoever was organizing that gasoline hoarding movement have been part of this? The men had assault rifles. Maybe they had something more powerful, too.

But then it seemed so brazen to roll up on a military camp and open fire. Probably too ballsy for anyone to actually do. Right?

I took a left along the fence, walking toward the open gate. Nearing the cars, I saw that many of them were burned. Tires blown out, the rubber melted. Glossy paint jobs blackened to a matte finish. The grass around them looked fried to a crispy brown flecked with black spots along the perimeter of each vehicle.

My feet ground rocks into the sandy driveway now. I turned sideways to squeeze through the opening between the gate and the fence, my head trying to arrange these pieces of information in some way that might make sense.

Burned cars. Bodies broken by large caliber bullets. A government camp gone totally lifeless and still.

Maybe the cars were the distraction. They doused them with an accelerant and torched them to get people panicked and out of their tents, then they opened fire. That would make sense.

I could see it in my head, the blaze of the fire in the dead of the night, the flailing and the yelling and the rapid fire of the guns ripping through the blackness, that flash of flame from the muzzles as the bullets cut everyone down.

But was it those gasoline raiders? Or did the military do this themselves?

My eyes flickered over the bodies again. No soldiers. Shouldn’t there be some soldiers among the dead?

I closed on the corpses, and my eyes soaked in these images like they did all new images lately. Taking in these things no one should see and recording them to play over and over again in my dreams.

The first women and children I’d seen in some time, their faces blown to bits, their teeth sprinkled in the grass like sesame seeds on a salad.

Maggots squirmed where pectoral muscles used to be.

Film glazed over the eyes like opaque contact lenses the color of slugs.

In my memory, it seems I didn’t choose to look at any of this. My eyes pointed themselves at things, my feet shuffled me into the heart of it all, and nausea flexed in the center of my torso like a ball of cramping muscle. I didn’t vomit, though I don’t know how I avoided it.