The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (25 page)

“Dad, what is going on?” he said. “Where’s mom?”

“I told you-”

“Bullshit. You didn’t tell us anything, like always. You never said where she was. You told us the softened version, all mushed up like baby food. Where is she? For real.”

Mitch adjusted his grip on the wheel, a film of sweat greasing the surfaces of his palms like two oil slicks. He wiped them on his jeans, one then the other. His heart battered away in his chest, not fast so much as particularly violent beats.

“Well,” he said, drawing out the moment as though he could find a way out of it if he stalled. “If you want to know the truth, I think she’s dead.”

Matt’s mouth dropped open and he clapped a hand over his eyes.

“You
think
she’s dead or you
know
?” Kevin said.

Mitch craned his head around to face them again, that clammy feeling from his palms crawling over all of him now, leaving its greasy trail everywhere it touched. When his eyes looked into theirs, he blinked a few times, a rapid fluttering of his eyelids, something just shy of flinching. His head felt swollen, and his face felt too hot and too cold at the same time. In no way did this seem like a thing he was actually doing. He felt outside of it, like he was watching it happen rather than participating.

“Guys, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. “She’s gone.”

He turned back around, and silence fell upon the car. That thoughtful quiet one encounters in waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and abortion clinics, places where people mull lists full of bad options, and pain, and unhappy endings.

The sun shimmered in the sky to their right, an orange ball of fire. Mitch opened his mouth, stretched his jaw, felt some amount of soreness in the muscles in the sideburn region on both sides. What the hell? He rubbed his fingers at one of the knotted up spots. Could this be a result of the black gunk spreading through him? A gland there or something? He didn’t know. So many things he didn’t know just now. Important things. He would never know most of them, he figured.

He wondered... If Janice was right about how it all worked, did that mean he would go to Hell? Would he pay forever for the choices he made? Right now it seemed like a kind of justice to him. Just cover him with gas and set him on fire and be done with it. But it couldn’t be so simple. He had two other people depending on him.

“Where the fuck is she?” Kevin said. “Stop bullshitting us. What’s going on? Just tell us.”

Mitch’s hand dropped from his jaw.

“Just look around, kid. The world is going to shit in a hurry,” he said. “A bunch of people are going to die. Maybe most of the people if things go as wrong as they possibly can. Hell, maybe even all of the people.”

“Answer the question, Dad. Where is mom? Why can’t you just tell us the truth?”

Mitch spoke into the mirror, making eye contact with the furious pair of eyes there. It felt safer that way.

“The truth is that I’m going to die, too. I’m sick the same way your mother was. I don’t have long. I’m trying to find a place where you guys can be safe once I’m gone, and I don’t think I’m doing a very good job. The truth? The truth is that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m not sure I ever did.”

The quiet returned after he spoke. Mitch looked away from the mirror, avoiding its gaze to watch the other cars instead. A semi passed on their left, mud flaps wobbling behind the sets of tires. The branches of the trees all drooped along the side of the road here. Even the plant life was withering away.

The tires thumped over cracks in the road. He followed a line of cars onto the exit ramp, felt the centrifugal pull as they curled away from the highway, slowing down all the while. They came to a stop at the light, and Mitch braved a glance into the mirror. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he found them staring out their windows as always. Maybe they looked scared, just a little bit, he couldn’t tell. Mostly their features looked smooth and calm, he thought. Blank as ever.

After waiting at the light, they turned right onto West Main, moving back into town. They were almost home now.

Teddy

69 days after

Moundsville, West Virginia

The empty road ran out ahead of him and disappeared over a hill. From his vantage point, it looked like the woods swallowed the highway up, but he knew that wasn’t true. The woods couldn’t actually do that.

He stalked down the side of the road, walking in that strip of dirt and rocks that separated the green of the woods from the blacktop. Little clouds of dust kicked up with each footstep. The air was still, and the smell of death was everywhere. Flies circled around him, around the duffel bag hanging at his side. The rise and fall of their collective buzzing reminded him of radio static, that endless swirl of noises piled on top of each other that somehow added up to a big nothing.

He watched his shadow walk along beside him, the black copy of his torso and arms stretched comically long over the asphalt, angled so the head of the shadow cheated out ahead of him to lead the way. He was tall, a touch over six feet and three inches. His shadow was more like nine feet tall just now, he thought, most of it torso.

A fly landed on his cheek, and he shooed it away with a flutter of his hand. Touching his face, he realized his mouth was open, jaw hanging wide, so he closed it. He didn’t like that. His mama always yelled at him for it, said the kids at school would make fun of him, and she was right. They called him a mouth-breather and a retard. But that was over now. He’d been out of school for a long time, and all of those people were dead and gone, his mama included.

The sun beat down on the back of his neck, the peeling pink flesh there perpetually sunburned. He touched it, felt the sting of the burn and the wet of the layer of sweat lingering there. His elbow touched the hatchet holstered at his side. Always there if he needed it.

There wasn’t much traffic. Not anymore. In town, he hadn’t seen any passing cars in weeks. But out here on the highway they went by every so often. Enough for him to get what he wanted, apparently.

He got a whiff, a strong one. Freshly dead meat.

And then he saw the black shapes on the road up ahead. They looked like crooked hooded things from here, three of them, their backs all hunched over to feast on the dead. He ran at them, waving his arms and yelling as he got close.

The vultures turned their backs to him at first, two of them splaying their wings to try to intimidate him. Their beaks opened up, and they stared at him with their dead eyes. He kept running, and they took off one by one, doing some reverse swoop that lifted them into their circular patrol of this spot. They had no intention of leaving this meal. Neither did he.

He stood in the dusty spot the birds had just vacated, licking his lips in excitement. A dead raccoon lay at his feet. The animal’s belly had swollen up so big that it pushed all of its legs straight out. He thought it looked funny, like a volley ball with limbs and fur.

He knelt to gather up the road kill and shove it into the duffel bag with the others. He’d always loved animals.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

42 days before

The sound of video game violence blared from the next room, the boys finding solace in blowing off heads with shotgun blasts. He sat at the kitchen table making calls. Nobody was picking up. He stared into the circle of light reflecting off of the wood tabletop with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to it ring, knowing the person on the other end wouldn’t pick up since none of them did.

He’d returned home, a place he never thought he’d be again. Something about it reminded him of an injured dog crawling under the porch to die.

He tapped his toe at the linoleum, swished the other socked foot back and forth. Janice always hated when he did that. It turned the bottom of his white sock black. Nothing to worry about now. The phone rang and rang and rang in his ear, and then it cut off, and a robot voice asked him to leave a message. He hung up.

He and Janice had never really made friends in Bethel Park. Not really. He’d moved them here for a job, and the family had kept to themselves. He regretted that now. Being retired, her dad and his new wife had moved in nearby when the kids were born to do all of the babysitting and the like. Outside of work he didn’t know anyone, and he certainly didn’t know anyone that he’d be comfortable leaving the kids with aside from the grandparents.

The only people he could think of were the parents of Kevin and Matt’s friends, but none of them had answered, and he wasn’t all that comfortable with the notion to begin with. It didn’t seem right to set the fate of his family into the hands of people he barely knew, but he had to try something. Maybe one of these families could watch them until the grandparents were tracked down. That’d be a start.

He hung up on another voicemail greeting, thumbed through his contact list to find another number, selected it. As it rang, he ran his finger along the smooth wood before him, tracing along the perimeter of the circle of light there. His touch skimmed along the surface, just barely making contact so it tingled in his fingertip.

He switched hands, holding the phone with his left now. His right index finger dragged along the table, just as the left had, but no tickling occurred. He had jammed this finger into a car cigarette lighter when he was a kid. The first two times he did it, he’d waited until it faded from red to black and it was still hot but not incredibly so. Just hot enough to feel interesting, to almost sting. The third time, it faded to black very quickly, and touching it sent a poke all through him. The pain shot like a bolt from a crossbow from his finger to his elbow, gave him that spinal reaction where his hand withdrew and dropped the lighter to the floor before he even felt it. He held his finger up to his face, seeing a blackened version of his fingerprint in place, ash which smeared off along with the rest of the tip when he wiped it on the seat. It didn’t truly hurt until after the smear. He cried for hours, though he never really noticed a lack of sensitivity in that finger until just now.

No answer again. Of course.

Daylight faded outside, the sky achieving those gray shades that set in just before the sun goes down. He couldn’t see the black smoke looking out the window from this vantage point, just a clear sky. Staring into the blank heavens a while, he could almost believe society wasn’t collapsing out there, that his body wasn’t betraying him from the inside, disease conquering his innards piece by piece. Sitting here, he could glimpse how things used to be, when it felt like he had no real worries, like he could look forward to movies and football games and beer forever.

If you block out most of the view, you can live in paradise, he thought. Not for long, but for a while. It’s not real, of course, but what you see is what you believe. Is that the best anyone can do, though? Construct a false paradise to live in for a little bit?

Anyway, none of it mattered. Not anymore. He shifted in his seat, and the black smoke became visible in the corner of the window.

His thumb swiped through the contacts again. He’d run through them all now and would need to start retrying. It felt hopeless.

Movement caught his eye. The circle of light reflecting off of the tabletop flickered, dimming down to a faint glimmer that pulsed like a strobe. He looked up at the fixture above as the illumination swelled back toward full power. Just as his eyes connected with the orb of light glowing down on his head, it winked out.

Shade overtook the room. The house went silent aside from the ticking of the grandfather clock, the video game gun noises suddenly cutting off.

The power was out.

Teddy

69 days after

Moundsville, West Virginia

He pulled the dead animals from the bag one by one and laid them in the grass. He’d learned not to dump them out all at once. The burst abdomen of a groundhog taught him that lesson the hard way. Its slimy gray guts slid out and spread over the rest of the road kill like a puddle of gore. He was used to bad odors, but that smell made him vomit immediately. Never again.

Decent haul today. He’d landed three squirrels, though one was flattened, a rabbit and the raccoon. These should work well, he thought. People had always told him not to pick up road kill, not to play with it, not to put it in his locker at school. But everyone was gone. Nobody could tell him what to do anymore.

Funny to think back and know how much trouble animals had nearly caused him. Back before everything went to shit, he was a garbage man. Manned the back of the truck for four years, and he never lost his fascination with the rear loading machine. He threw in bags of garbage, pulled the lever and the blade would come swinging down to pull all of the trash together and squish it into something tiny. Then the tiny bit would get pushed off into the pile.

He could throw anything in there and watch the machine make it tiny. Some things, tall things like the pole from a basketball hoop, would take a few runs. The machine would bust off a piece of the pole and crush it, then another and another. In the end, though, it’d be tiny like all the rest.