The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (28 page)

When she was younger, she and Kelly used to ride around the neighborhood, pretending their bikes were their steeds. Kelly’s aunt was a horse trainer, so she always had a specific breed in mind.

“Mine is an Andalusian,” she’d say.

Erin didn’t know anything about horses, so she’d just pick a color.

“Mine is black.”

“It should be a Friesian,” Kelly said.

“Whatever,” Erin said.

They’d ride their horse-bikes to the crabapple tree at the end of the road and pick a whole bucket full, pretending they were foraging for food. They always snuck an apple or two to feed to the “horses,” and after a long ride they made sure to pause at the creek to let their horses drink. Then they’d collect water at the spring and mix it with dirt to make mud pies. They gathered mint to make poultices. All those hours playing at survival. She wondered if that version of herself would have almost thrived in this new world. Maybe that was why Izzy seemed to have such an easy time adjusting.

She sat up in bed, suddenly, realizing that her dream had solved the riddle of the generator. Had that been the whole point? Had the part of her mind that struggled with words and concrete ideas conjured the image of the horse instead?

She crawled out from under the covers and stepped into her shoes. Izzy stirred.

“Where are you going?”

Erin paused in the doorway.

“To find a steed.”

Erin returned to the jumbled pile of wheels and spokes and handlebars in the barn. One by one she wrenched the bikes free, marching them into two neat lines. Two didn’t have kickstands, so she laid them on their sides. In total there were twelve fully assembled bikes, plus a few extra frames and orphan tires, and the pièce de résistance: one of those bike trailers that functioned as a child seat. She was pretty sure the generator would fit in it.

Erin took her time, deciding which bike looked most promising. The one she settled on was black. A Friesian, she thought, then snorted to herself.

Like everything else in the barn, it was dusty, except for the hand prints she’d left on it when she pulled it from the pile. She wiped a palm along the frame, revealing the glossy finish underneath.

Walking it around the barn, she bounced the tires a little and squeezed the brakes, testing to make sure it wasn’t a dud. The chain looked to be in good shape. A sturdy horse, indeed. Satisfied, she rolled the bike to the door and rested it against the outside wall.

Izzy banged through the screen door of the house, only half-dressed. While she walked, she pulled her t-shirt over her head. Instead of the neck hole, her face found a sleeve, and she had to stop walking for a moment to extricate herself.

“Hey Iz.”

Finally her curly head popped through the correct hole.

“What?”

“Do you know how to ride a bike?”

Izzy rolled her eyes. “Uh… duh.”

“Well, excuse me. Come pick one out, then.”

Izzy ran her tongue over her lips as she surveyed the options in the barn. She wove between the rows of bikes and gripped the handlebars of a steely blue ten speed.

“I was thinking something more like that one,” Erin said, pointing to a smaller kid’s bike with streamers coming out of the handles. “Look, it already has a basket on it so you can carry stuff.”

Izzy wrinkled her face into a snarl.

“That’s a baby’s bike. And it’s pink.” She turned back to the ten speed. “I want this one.”

“Have you ever ridden a bike like that?”

“What’s the difference?”

“It has gears for starters.”

Izzy toed the kickstand up and walked the bike toward the door.

“I’ll figure it out.”

Erin sighed and followed her out.

“At least let me lower the seat so you can actually get on the damn thing.”

“Language.”

After adjusting the seat to the lowest position, Erin steadied the bike while Izzy climbed on.

“OK, you can let go,” Izzy said, scooting forward a little.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Erin hesitated.

“Erin, let go!”

She released her grip, putting her palms out flat in front of her in a defensive position.

Izzy took off down the drive, wobbling a little and then righting herself. She looped onto the grass and headed back toward Erin, standing to get more leverage on the pedals.

“Why is it so hard to pedal?”

“That’s what I was trying to say about the gears,” Erin said, turning in a slow circle to follow Izzy as she wound around her. “Keep pedaling and hit that little thumb trigger with your right hand.”

The bike wobbled again as Izzy readjusted her focus on her hands, but she kept it under control. There was a pop and a grind and Izzy made a little alarmed sound, but then the gear shifted and she was riding smoothly again.

“Ha! I did it!” She changed gears a second time. “So what’s the point anyway?”

“The lower gears make it easier to pedal. Like if you’re climbing a big hill, when it gets hard to pedal, you can switch down to a lower gear and then you don’t have to do as much work. The higher gears make it harder to pedal, but then you can get going faster on flat ground without pumping your legs like crazy.”

Erin turned back to where her bike was propped against the barn.

“We can ride around a little so you can practice some more.”

“Whoa!” Izzy shrieked. “You can pedal backward!”

Erin stopped and pivoted to face her.

“Right, that’s the other thing. This kind of bike has hand brakes,” she pantomimed braking with her hands. “Squeeze the little levers on the handlebars.”

Izzy wrenched on the brake and the bike let out a metallic squeal, throwing her forward and off the seat a little.

“I guess they work.”

Erin swung her leg over the bike and pushed off the ground, propelling herself forward. The wind rustled through her hair and she smiled. When was the last time she’d ridden a bike? She couldn’t even remember. She’d forgotten how fun it was.

When they weren’t pretending their bikes were horses, they were cars. They’d put a bag of chips and a can of Coke in Kelly’s mailbox, and then pretend they were pulling into the drive-thru at McDonalds.

“I want to try the hill thing,” Izzy called back.

“What?”

“The thing where you change gears and it makes going up easier.”

“Alright. I guess we can go down to the road and ride up the hill,” Erin said. “But watch for traffic.”

“Ha. Ha.”

They bumped over potholes as they snaked around the final curve of the driveway and then banked onto the blacktop.

Erin could hear the clunking of Izzy shifting gears behind her. It was a long winding ride up the hill, and before long, she was panting for breath. After a few more pedals, she swung the bike around and dropped a leg down to hold it steady, waiting for Izzy to catch up.

“Think you got the hang of it?”

Izzy nodded. “It’s pretty cool. I wonder who came up with it?”

“Bike gears?” Erin said. “I don’t know.”

She looked across a clearing to her right. Below them, she could see where a bend in the highway cut across the green of the valley. Beyond that, the white steeple of a church rose from the trees.

“Ready to head back down?”

Izzy took off down the hill in response, building speed and making car engine noises.

“Brrrrrrrinnnnnnnnnn-ninnn-ninnnn-niiiiiiiiin!”

As they approached the driveway, Erin realized too late that Izzy hadn’t slowed down. And then everything happened in an instant.

She saw Izzy’s legs pedaling backward in vain, trying to engage a foot brake that didn’t exist.

Erin yelled, “Brake! Brake! Brake with your hands!”

Izzy took her eyes off the road to look at her fingers, but it was too late. The bike swerved off the road and the last thing Erin saw was Izzy and the bike sailing over the edge and into the creek below.

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

57 days after

He rode home in the dark, not pedaling much, just letting the bike coast over the craggy road for long stretches. The tires hummed along the asphalt. The sound of the bike reminded him of the noise of fishing line unspooling in double time as the lure is cast, except a never ending version of that sound that rolled down the road along with him.

Otherwise the night was quiet. He could hear the wind rustle the plants in the fields around him once in a while, and the collective chirp of the insects swelled enough to become audible over the bike sound from time to time, but that was it. He could see a bit, though, compared to the last time he made this trek. The moon reflected off of the surface of the road, lighting it up gray, the cracks marbling it with veins of black. He couldn’t discern any details of the plants in the fields to his right and left, but the silhouette was there, the blackest places forming odd shapes so it almost looked like the field had tightly cropped curly hair.

He rode on, and the night stretched out a long way. It felt like the quiet and the dark would never end. The empty world would sprawl endlessly in front of him, peppered with the scattered and the dead.

When he rolled up to the house, the dog waited on the porch. She stood when she saw him bank around the corner, her head down, her shoulders hunched, her tail wagging too fast to see in that half light just before dawn. He dismounted the bike, leaning it up against the porch rail. Hannibal approached, and he set the bag of guns on the deck to kneel and greet her. He rubbed the beast’s ears with his fingers, his palm cupping the back of her head. The skull felt small in his hand, the flesh warm. The dog looked at him for a second, eyes squinted in an expression he took as happy, and then she looked away.

It felt weird to have a being care when he got home, like a tiny version of the way things used to be. He didn’t know how to describe it, but that was OK. She didn’t care. He liked that you didn’t have to talk to dogs. You could just be.

They went inside, passing through the doorway into the gloom. He lit a lantern, the dog’s nails clicking on the wood floor behind him as she sniffed around near the bottom of his recliner. Ah, she must be hungry, he thought. Out to the kitchen, then. He scooped some kibble into her bowl, and she ate, lifting her head periodically to look at him as her mouth crunched food.

Travis eyeballed the doorway to the steps for a moment, considering bed for a bit, but no. He was much too tired to sleep.

He stirred up a rum and Coke and made his way to his chair in the living room. The dog followed alongside. He sat and sipped and stared at nothing, at the walls and the floor and the shade outside the window that the candles couldn’t defeat. It wasn’t a relaxing stare. Exhausted as he may be, he found no sleepy idleness in sitting still. Electricity thrummed through him, held his eyes open wide. He felt it all over, a tingle in his hands, a clenching of his jaw, a churn in his gut. His thoughts somehow stayed remote, though, at least as far as remembering the violence he’d carried out just a couple of hours ago.

It came to him in little flashes. The silhouette of the bodies sprawled along the factory floor. The squeal of the truck door as he opened it. The copper smell of the blood. The way the red seeped to fill the spaces in the gravel like a miniature version of a flash flood flowing through city streets. But it didn’t seem real. Not all the way. It seemed like a dream or maybe a memory of something that happened in a movie. And it seemed like it was a long time ago.

He slurped warm rum and Coke. He was almost used to drinking room temp booze now. He didn’t think he preferred it yet, but he didn’t mind it. He thought that if he kept at it long enough, he would eventually favor it over cold, if cold became an option again someday. That would be weird. He imagined himself at a bar ordering a lukewarm whiskey sour, the bartender making a face.

He reached down to pet the dog, and Hannibal pushed her cold snout into the palm of his hand as it approached. Then she lowered her head so he could pet her and blinked a few times. She was a good dog, he thought.

The booze caught up with him then, his head going lighter and lighter, taking on that almost dizzy euphoria of the first stage of drunkenness. It had been several days since he’d had a drink. He wasn’t sure how long anymore. Anyway, the time off had resensitized him to this first rush, when the alcohol first elbows in there to kill some brain cells and loosen things up a bit. It felt like old times. Old memories. Old places where old feelings vibrated in the air and echoed down the halls.

He remembered sitting on a couch at a party, talking to a strange girl with severe bangs about old sit-com theme songs, the conversation barely audible over the music, laughing, drinking, being young and drunk and alive. It felt more like thinking about some other person than a memory of himself. Someone he used to know and had forgotten all about until just now. Someone he liked and felt embarrassed for at the same time.

Time got away from him somewhere in there, and then the world went to shit, and all of the people died, even the people he used to be. So who was he now?