The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (17 page)

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

54 days after

He’d pissed the bed the night after his parents were killed. He woke up wet and cold sometime before dawn, the smell of stale urine like a cloud hanging in the air in his room. It followed him when he walked out into the hall to get clean sheets. It followed him as he built a fire to heat water to clean himself. Even after the sponge bath, it clung to his skin. He could smell the acidity to it, a bright odor, an astringent citrus note that made it all the grosser somehow. It made him picture a glass of lemonade with those scummy piss bubbles floating on top.

He sat in it all afternoon, piss and shame wafting into his face, stinging his eyes, before he finally heated another pot of water and washed again. The smell seemed mostly gone after that, though he didn’t feel much better about it.

He smoked cigarettes and wondered if that was why cowards were called yellow. Because they pissed themselves of fright every night. Later, he drank enough to forget everything, and the rotation was born.

When he pissed the bed this time, some weeks later, he didn’t care. Maybe that was the good thing about staying fucked up through the night and into the next day. He was still drunk enough to be confused, to find the circular piss stain on the sheets and blanket vaguely amusing.

It’s a good feeling,
he thought,
to wet the bed and not care. I bet the great poets have never attempted to describe that one.

A smile curled his lip, and he rolled over and went back to sleep.

Some hours later, he crawled out of bed. The piss was dry now. He couldn’t smell it full on, though he got whiffs now and then. Was his urine less smelly this time for some reason, or was he that used to it from sleeping in it for so long?

The dog lifted its head to look at him from its blanket pile in the corner.

“Hey Hannibal,” he said and she wagged her tail. He named her while drunk, only later realizing the dog wasn’t a cannibal exactly. It ate its human family, though. Close enough.

He walked downstairs and out into the backyard to urinate. Apparently it’d been long enough for his bladder to reload. Steam coiled off of the ground where his urine slapped and wet the dirt. The cold had returned to vanquish that final gasp of summer a couple of days ago. Just standing out here long enough to pee made his shoulders quiver for a second with the chills. The dog galloped out to the back of the yard to pee along the wood fence.

When they went back inside, Travis caught his reflection in the mirror. It wasn’t his face anymore. It was some guy with a broken nose, crusted blood draining down from the nostrils to surround his mouth in red. He brought a finger to his flattened snout, and it was sore.

In the kitchen, he opened the cupboard and fished an off-brand cereal bar out of the box. He ate and tried to think back on the prior evening, but nothing came to him beyond mixing up rum and lime juice and sitting on the porch with Hannibal. After about three strong drinks, he didn’t remember anything. Could he have fallen on his face? That’s supposed to be hard to do, though it’s certainly not impossible, he supposed, when you drink enough to black out. That must be it. He’d probably find a little pool of blood somewhere in the house. The scene of the accident.

He finished the cereal bar and grabbed another. His mind continuing to wander as he ate.

Maybe he didn’t fall. Maybe Sean decided it was high time to reestablish the social order of jocks ruling stoners and punched him in the face. That notion made him laugh. The idea of popularity and social order seemed funny all on its own with the town empty, the whole world empty so far as he knew. He thought about the two of them running for Mayor, putting those dumb signs in their yards and chuckled again.

Today was supposed to be a mellowed out day of smoking weed, but he felt like changing things up. Pills. It would be a pill day. Rotation be damned.

With heaven inside of him, he walked around town. It felt more like he was floating, though. His vision held so tranquil and steady, like a shot in a movie that pans and zooms in slow motion, a shot from within the clouds, rolling puffs of white billowing across the frame, everything hazed in a soft focus.

He wasn’t in the clouds, though. He walked on the railroad tracks behind a row of convenience stores and gas stations. Brick buildings squatted to his right, and beiged-out husks of tall grass stood to his left, rasping against each other in the wind. The whole place smelled like soot somehow. It reminded him of how his hands smelled when he got home from the factory, all blackened from handling metal parts all day, some of the dust worming through his gloves to coat his palms and fingers.

This section of the railroad was where he used to collect bottles when he was a kid. With a refund value of ten cents each, he could often gather enough to get a candy bar or play games at the arcade. And the search for bottles itself was its own adventure, he thought, at least when you’re as poor as his family was. Maybe some kind of nostalgia brought him here now. He wasn’t sure.

Sperm congealed in his shorts again, and his eyes crossed once in a while, usually when the jizzy feelings came over him. He thought about all of the billions of people who lived and died and never felt this feeling, never took these pills that pressed that button on the brain that made a grown man come a little bit just walking around. He felt sorry for them. They had no clue what they were missing, and maybe that meant they had no clue about much else. This level of pleasure brought life itself into a strange focus. It made him feel separate from everyone, made him understand that was the nature of things, that we’re all stranded in our own skulls, all trapped and isolated from each other, never to fully intertwine with any other, and when he was on it, that was just fine and dandy. He walked around alone and somehow still felt complete. When the bliss died down, though, the heightened sense of loneliness was somehow more intolerable than before, more final.

He moved down the tracks past the place where the buildings running alongside them gave way to trees and brush, soon reaching a point he’d never gone past as a kid. No bottles this way. Just plants. Today he kept going, though. Nothing to lose or gain now. Just a whole lot of time to kill.

He stepped from plank to plank, his feet landing with rhythmic thuds. He sipped from a water bottle as he moved. He had plenty of water, he’d filled 13 tanks that held 100 gallons each while there was still pressure in the pipes and stored them in the garage. The water tasted a little funny after sitting in plastic for a while, though. Not bad but not good. Flavorless. Dead. That’s what he thought when he drank it. It tasted dead. Somehow the bottled water he’d looted from the store tasted better. He took another sip. Yep. This water wasn’t stale. Maybe these bottles were sealed better? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t have many of them, though, so he only drank one a day to make them last.

He wondered what the dog was doing. He’d made her stay on the porch when he left. The dog had been trained well. He was sure Hannibal was wandering around the neighborhood by now. Maybe someday she would wander off for good. He hoped not.

As he moved away from the city, the soot smell faded out, and he smelled trees and grass and fresh air. It smelled like the time the whole family went camping when he was 17. Before his dad’s stroke. It wasn’t all that extravagant. They borrowed his uncle’s camper and set up at one of those campgrounds where a grass field full of RVs are hooked up to plumbing and electricity. It wasn’t what he imagined when his dad mentioned a camping trip. He pictured a tent out in the woods. A big fire. Privacy. The silence of nature. He got none of these things.

Still, it wasn’t terrible as far as vacations with the family went. It was the first time his dad offered him a beer, and then the second, third, fourth and fifth times his dad offered him a beer. They all got drunk and played cards by lantern light. His mom got the drunkest of all of them and laughed herself to tears on multiple occasions. He felt close to them. Plus, they lucked out in that their plot was right by the woods, so it at least smelled like they were really camping.

Now he passed steel paneled buildings set here and there in the woods and grass fields along the sides of the rails. The large structures looked like factories, maybe, though it was hard to tell much. No windows or doors on the sides he could see. Just ribbed metal walls.

He thought about taking a look inside of one, pictured the exposed rafters above, the large machines spread about over concrete floors, all of them fallen silent and still, the layer of dust coating all things, the small break rooms with candy and pop machines.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to stop the churning momentum of his feet, though. His knees swung forward, his feet kicking out from under them, landing, pushing off, repeating. Something about the repetitive nature of the motion, the feel of it, the rhythm of it, lulled him into a trance that he didn’t want to end.

Somewhere in the distance an engine growled. Based on the pitch and cadence, he could tell it was a diesel, something pretty big. Even so, he thought nothing of it at first. And then the thudding pound of his feet stopped as its meaning sunk in. People. People driving a car or truck. How long had it been since he’d seen a car in town? How long since he’d seen one go anywhere aside from the grocery store? He wasn’t even sure how long it’d been since he’d seen any living soul aside from Sean. He saw a fat man on a dirt bike driving away from the grocery store. That might have been eight or ten days ago. Maybe longer. Time got weird when he was fucked up like this all the time. Days seemed to divide up in strange ways in his memories. He lost count.

He remained motionless for a moment, listening to the grind of the motor ring out over the silence that stretched out around him in all directions. It was getting louder, getting closer. He was excited and a little bit scared at the same time.

He walked on, heading toward the noise, thinking maybe there was some crossing ahead, that maybe he’d get a look at whatever vehicle was passing by. The thuds picked up, their tempo growing more and more upbeat.

As he raced forward, the sparsely wooded fields alongside him morphed into cornfields at some point, he wasn’t sure exactly when. Other matters occupied the bulk of his conscious thoughts. He could still hear that diesel out there, and it sounded closer than ever.

And then he saw the arms of the metal frame rising above the tracks in the distance, the railroad crossing gates pointed skyward. That meant there was a road, and when he saw the little shimmer of the light reflecting off the blacktop, he knew for sure. He ran now, feet still careful to land on the planks rather than the gravel, and that care slowed him some.

Pictures danced in his head, different versions of the truck barreling down this road. First he imagined a military truck with soldiers on the back ready to administer some vaccine shots, and every patient also got a big chocolate chip cookie. Then he saw a dump truck full of corpses headed to some mass grave out in the boonies, the soldier at the wheel letting his left arm dangle out of the window, his hand half-cupping the wind. Then he saw one of those extended cab pickup trucks, the bed piled high with scavenged bits and pieces: a mattress, a wood pallet stacked with cases of Lucky Charms wrapped in plastic, a pair of big tanks, probably nitrous but maybe O2.

His breath burned in his throat. His lungs ached, two pulsing throbs of flame in his chest. He knew it must be pretty bad to be able to feel it through the infinite numb of endorphins, but he kept running. He fought through it.

Just as he reached the point where the road and rails intersected, the truck bounded around the corner somewhere between a quarter and a half of a mile away, the grill of the military cargo truck swinging to face him. For one second he froze, wide eyes staring at the moving hulk on the horizon, chest heaving. And then he ran down off of the rails, pounding down the gravel slope into the corn husks where he dropped down to his knees.

The truck rolled up on him at a leisurely pace, slowly but surely gaining speed. He crouched farther, broken shafts of corn plants stabbing at him with their pointed bits, rasping out bitter warnings at him whenever he stirred. It wasn’t much cover, but he was hopeful they weren’t paying too close of attention.

Part of him wanted to flag the soldiers down, see what they were up to, but he dare not risk anything. It seemed strange to be so excited by and scared of people at the same time. He felt the blood pulse everywhere in him now, felt it pound in his cheeks, twitter in that soft skin around his eyes.

The smell of dirt surrounded him. He longed for the odor of the diesel exhaust to fill his nostrils, but he knew it wouldn’t until the truck had passed. His eyes crawled over the vehicle as it got closer and closer, watching through the bars of corn husk in front of him. From his vantage point, he couldn’t make out what was in the back as the cabin blocked his view, so he focused on the driver. Looking through the windshield was like trying to gaze through dark water, cold and shiny and murky. Impenetrable. Then he saw the arm dangling out of the window just like he’d imagined it, the cupped hand and all. But wait. It wasn’t the same. A cigarette rested between the fingers, and, more importantly, this arm lacked a soldier’s uniform. Instead a tattered flannel sleeve adorned it, a plaid comprised of red, navy blue and black.

Raiders.

The world slowed down as the truck passed. More raiders sat in the back, two rows of them with assault rifles and shotguns in their hands. Greasy hair hung down into their eyes. Blackened fingertips smudged at noses and brows. Cigarettes bobbed in and out of mouths. Wrists jerked to flick ashes away. A shine came off of them, the glimmer of scars and scabs and zits and yellow teeth. He’d seen plenty of their kind looting the grocery store, though never so many at once.