The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (35 page)

His arm pressed into the door to the garage, and he stepped through, out of the breeze, into the stillness. He flipped the switch, and the fluorescent bulbs hesitated a second before they flickered on.

A fleet of vehicles stood before him: two Jaguars, three Cadillacs, five SUVs, a matching pair of jet skis and a speed boat. He could only take one, of course. He walked past them, fingers dragging over glossy paint. He knew which one it would be before he even entered the room, of course. The rest had a 50/50 chance to survive the blast, he thought.

A few garment bags hung on a rack to his left. His emergency suits, always ready on short notice. He stripped off his clothes and changed into one. Better to head out this way, right? Everyone trusts a man in a suit.

At the far end of the garage, he knelt before a mini-fridge, reached in and pulled out six bottles of water, hugging them to his chest. These he unloaded in the passenger seat of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. This was his choice, perhaps the most modest of his automobiles, but he figured modesty had increased value now that everything was falling apart.

One more call. One more try, and then he’d leave. The cell phone rang against his ear, his pulse keeping the meter, and the voicemail message came on, and he hung up. It was too weird to hear her voice and have no idea if she was OK.

Maybe she wasn’t dead, he thought. Maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him. The two possibilities seemed about equally likely.

And so he drove out away from his compound, leaving behind all he’d built and all he’d owned, bringing nothing but a few bottles of water along for the ride. Well, those and the handgun in the glove box. He knew he’d be fine, though. He may not have had faith in many things, but he had it in himself. He was an earner. A charmer. Always had been. He’d find his way like he always did.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

69 days after

He drank long and deep. The Mountain Dew was warm, but he’d always liked it that way. He set the bottle down on the floor next to his bed, still feeling the acidic tingle on his lips and tongue. He grabbed a handful of cheese puffs out of the bag resting on his chest and crunched them one by one. When his hand was empty, he sucked the orange cheese off of his fingertips, getting a whiff of death for a split second as his ring finger entered his mouth. He lay there and breathed for a moment, his hands folded on his belly like paws, the plastic bag rising and falling with his chest. Then he went back for another handful.

Here he was, in an otherwise empty room, in an otherwise empty house, in an otherwise empty town, indulging in a private all-you-can-eat-buffet of his favorite food and drink. It felt like a dream, a strange dream.

In some ways he missed the people, the sound of them, knowing they were out there. He missed TV. He missed meat, too. That one he really missed.

Sometimes the old lady that owned the house would give him their leftovers – salisbury steak, meatloaf, roasted chicken, Swedish meatballs, barbecue ribs, and even clam chowder once. The cheese puffs were good, but he missed all of that, missed the sensation of biting down on a well cooked piece of protein and feeling the texture of it as he chewed it up.

And that made him think about the garbage truck again, about the cats and dogs. It never made much sense to him that people would get so worked up about some animals and not others. Why was it OK for cows to get massacred by the thousands in slaughterhouses, but bad for him to throw a few cats into the truck? Why could people like his uncle hunt and kill deer but hurting a dog was bad? Why did the other kids think he was sick for picking up road kill, but when the lunch lady slopped beef stroganoff onto their tray, they ate it all up? None of them thought twice when they went to the grocery store and saw all of the little plastic packages of meat in the meat department. It made no sense.

He liked putting the cats in the truck the same way he liked eating meat. Both made him happy, stimulated, excited. Both made him feel some primal satisfaction, made him feel powerful in some vague sense like he could wrestle the world under his command if he needed to. He knew other people liked meat a lot. He didn’t know why they didn’t like the other.

It was bad, though, what he did to people’s pets. He knew it must be a bad thing, but he couldn’t understand it. Not all of the way.

He crumpled the top of the cheese puff bag closed, rolling it up and setting it down on the floor in such a manner that it would stay closed. It was time to check his traps.

He licked his lips, and they tasted like fake cheese and salt and Mountain Dew.

Ray

Galveston, Texas

3 days before

“Giving people something to believe in is the best gift you can give them,” he said, his fingers tapping at the steering wheel. “That’s what I tell people I do for a living. Sounds a hell of a lot better than ‘televangelist,’ you know?”

She smiled and nodded and looked out the window. She wasn’t much of a talker, but he didn’t mind that. Her black hair sheared off above her eyebrows, a severe line of bangs. It was an uncommon haircut for a woman of her age but one that highlighted the shape of her face.

They sat at a red light, the city around them bustling as usual, people driving and walking and eating their fries and drinking their Coke, no idea that they’d be incinerated before long. He hadn’t even explained that to his new companion yet. Wasn’t sure how to bring it up. He looked at her again.

Her breasts were enormous. Probably fake. He didn’t mind that, either. As far as Ray was concerned, breast implants ranked among mankind’s greatest achievements, one of the clearest symbols of capitalism’s strengths. For a price you could reinvent yourself to any degree, even physically. Any dream could come true if you scratched and clawed and earned your way to it. If you paid the price, it was yours.

In this world, everything had a price. He saw great opportunity in that. Endless possibilities.

He ran into her outside of a Texaco station that the raiders had already sucked dry, a phenomenon he’d only heard about on the news until now. All across the South, these sons of bitches were stealing gas, and the police were too occupied with the riots to do anything about it.

She was standing by the pumps, just outside of her Sebring, the tank apparently empty, and he pulled in to ask if she needed any help. She recognized him from TV. If any magic truly existed, Ray thought, it was the magic power of fame, of television. When your face gets broadcast into someone’s home, they tend to feel like they know you, like they can trust you. Apparently a certain portion will even send you their life savings if you ask for it, and he did ask for it. Often.

“So where are we headed?” she said.

“We’ve got to get out of town,” he said. “Some crazy shit is about to go down. You’re lucky you ran into me, you know that?”

She smiled and nodded and looked out the window again. It struck him that she may be on drugs of some kind, probably pills. He’d taken her slow, medicated feel as an aloofness until now. But heading out of town with a stranger without a second thought was a little weird, even if she did know him from TV.

What was her name again? Debra? Diana? Started with a D, he thought. Maybe a B.

His cell phone itched in his pocket. He wanted to try another call but not in front of his new guest.

Still, already he wasn’t alone. Already he’d found a follower not 15 minutes out from his home. He knew he was going to be just fine.

Baghead

Rural Oklahoma

9 years, 126 days after

The car rolled through the place where the stop sign fence had been moments before, and then they accelerated. The engine hummed. The sand and weeds alongside them returned to their former state of blurriness. It felt good to get moving again.

Bags watched in the rearview as the gate rolled back into place, and the soldiers went back to standing around, just their heads visible above the fence. They shrank and their features darkened until the horizon swallowed them up.

Delfino smiled in the driver’s seat, his eyes opened wide.

“You wanted them to find the money, didn’t you?” Bags said.

“You’re finally starting to figure me out, smart guy.”

“Making them work to find it makes them assume they’ve found your big stash.”

“Righto. And I like to throw in something shiny that they probably don’t see too often. Today it was the necklace, but anything with an air of fanciness will do the trick.”

“So all of your best stuff is actually in the cooler?”

“Now don’t you go worrying your baggy little head about that.”

“Rough bunch of kids there. Not what I was expecting when you said they were ruthless, but…”

Delfino squinted.

“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me or not. They really are ruthless, though. One of them bit me once! Look at this.”

He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a jagged oval of a scar just at the spot where the triceps and deltoid met.

“You ever seen what it looks like when a human bite gets infected?”

“Never.”

“It’s hellish, man. It’s truly hellish.”

The conversation trailed off as Delfino rolled down his sleeve.

Bags checked the rearview again, as though the hateful kid might have reappeared on the horizon, but no. The road trailed away to a point like it always did. Nothing to see.

“Was that true?” Delfino said. “What that kid said about your face, about the radiation?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that was true. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.”

“There wasn’t supposed to be no fallout, but the government fucked it up, right?”

“Yeah, something like that. The radiation should have dissipated in the air. If all of the bombs had airburst, like they were supposed to, the fallout would have been negligible. It didn’t happen that way. Not in Miami, anyway. It’s all dead cities out that way, from Atlanta or so on south.”

“Miami? You been all the way down there?”

“Yeah, I’ve been all over. Haven’t traveled as much this past year, but I’ve been around.”

“That’s juicy butt crack country.”

“What?”

“The humidity down that way, man. Makes my ass all sweaty, and it won’t evaporate, so I’m running around with a soggy ass crack all day. Wearing a pair of boxer shorts you could ring out like a dishrag.”

They were silent for a beat. Baghead pressed his hand into the bag, trying to smash down his beard so it didn’t touch the canvas anymore.

“Well, that’s good to know,” Bags said.

Delfino pulled the tin out of his pocket and lit a cigarette. He spoke again as he exhaled his second puff.

“Not to pry, but you ever get a doc to take a look at it? Your face, I mean?”

“No. I never figured there’d be much of a point. If it’s cancerous or whatever, there’s nothing to be done about it. No chemo or radiation or surgery exists that’s going to fix it. Not anymore. And it’s not like there are any plastic surgeons out there to pretty me up.”

Another beat of silence overtook the Delta 88. Smoke rolled out of Delfino’s nose and ascended, coiling around above his head.

“I’m still here, right? Still walking around. That’s all that matters for now.”

Delfino nodded, smoke still spinning out of his face.

“Mind if I ask you one more question?”

“Go ahead.”

“The Hand of Death. Did you get the card?”

“I did.”

“Do you, you know, have it on you?”

“I do.”

Delfino licks his lips.

“Might I take a look at it?”

Baghead turned his shoulders and looked out the window.

“No.”

Erin

Presto, Pennsylvania

40 days after

It wasn’t until they brought the generator home and unloaded it that Erin realized they’d need fuel for it.

She looked down at the box, and scratched the side of her nose in agitation. It took every ounce of her willpower not to let loose a string of obscenities. But Izzy would give her hell for it. So she kept her mouth shut and let every swear word she knew echo inside her skull.

She’d been so preoccupied with the idea of having power that she just glossed right over the specifics. She’d imagined them hauling it back to the house, pressing a button, and boom -- let there be light.

OK, so they’d have to find gas first. It shouldn’t be that hard. There had to be tons of gas just sitting out there.

They hadn’t ventured into the nearest town since they found the house, but Erin knew from road signs that the village of Presto was only four miles down the road. She filled a water bottle for each of them at the well and tossed a gas can from the barn into the carrier.

Erin watched Izzy mount the bike.

“A little refresher course for you: the brakes are located on the handlebars. You wanna slow down, you give those hand brakes a squeeze.”