The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (4 page)

“Right.”

He sat and managed the lift-and-pull maneuver. An odor struck his nostrils right away, strange and familiar, a particular old car smell he hadn’t experienced in a long time. A blend of must and stale smoke and the faintest hint of old fries and Werther’s Originals. Cigarette burns pocked the upholstery everywhere, jagged little circles in the cream.

Delfino started the car. Where Bags might have anticipated choked sounds and stuttering growls, the engine provided only a smooth purr. Didn’t sound too bad, at least.

“Listen to that shit. That’s the trick, see?” Delfino said. “Looks like ass. Runs like hell yass. I doubt anybody will ever try to steal it, but it gets me around just the same.”

Bags nodded, looked out at the dusty landscape around them.

“So what does this thing get, like 12 miles to the gallon?”

“Funny. Nah, I’ve worked on this fucker, man. Put some serious hours into retooling that shit. Mileage is a helluva lot better than that. Believe me.”

“Seriously, though. Will this thing actually get us there?”

“Oh, hell yeah. I’ve made the run seven times in this old bastard.”

“The full run?”

“Absolutely, my man. I shit you not.”

Bags searched the man’s face, found no signs of deceit, only manic enthusiasm. He nodded.

“Well, it’s not like I have any other options.”

“Shit, man. That’s exactly what I tell every girl I’m with.”

Delfino hissed a laugh between his teeth, amused by his own joke. He took a tin out of the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from it, resting it between his lips.

“Before we settle up,” he said, the cigarette bobbing with every syllable. “I want you to know that I’ve read one of your books. Good as hell, man. You’re a real good writer.”

“I don’t write much of it, you know. Just the introduction for some of the books, really. They’re letters and excerpts from diaries I’ve found out there. I pick the best and weave them together.”

“Right, well, you know what I mean. You put it all together in a way that tells a bigger story, man. It makes it, uh, greater than the sum of its parts and shit.”

Delfino put the car into gear, and it lurched forward. The sound of the tires grinding the gravel into the dirt reminded Bags of the sound of popcorn popping in the microwave, though he wasn’t sure if he was remembering the sound correctly.

“Which one did you read?”

“Postcards from an Empty World, Volume 3. Good shit. I want to read the rest, but I’m a slow ass reader, man. Never been big on the written word, you know? Too quiet for me. I’m more of a talker.”

Baghead nodded.

“Well, it might be tough to come across Volume 1 at this point. We printed it on a hand crank printing press in someone’s basement in Virginia. It got messed up, and the title got left off the thing. It just said ‘Decker’ really big on the front page. No other title or author name or anything.”

“Decker?”

“Yeah. That was the guy’s name. The one who wrote the letter in the book.”

“Well, I guess now I know what to look for.”

The sound below changed as they moved off of the dirt and onto the asphalt, the popcorn sound cutting off. Now the rubber of the tires hummed.

“You know what the best thing about reading that book was? It made me remember how it really was. How things used to be and how things changed. All those little things you forget about through the years. All the shit we’ve lost, you know? Things we used to do or see or think about every day that are gone for good. Some of that is irreplaceable. That’s how these things go.”

They fell quiet for a second before Delfino went on.

“Like I had this gigantic porn collection, yeah? Gone. All of it. Lost it in a fire. See, I was old school. It was all about the magazines for me, and I had a ton. I’m telling you, it would’ve stood taller than me had I stacked them up in one pile. That’s a lot of jerk material, right? Enough to capture my dumb imagination for a lifetime. Now? Now my mind just lusts after images it can’t have. It’s fucking painful.”

The Delta 88 reached an intersection, and Delfino took a right. He pulled a Zippo out of the same pocket the tin came out of, but he didn’t light the cigarette dangling from his lips just yet.

“Some people are pretty squeamish about these things. They don’t want to talk about it. But what the hell? I’m an idiot animal with a sex drive. Why would I pretend to be anything else?”

Bags didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

“Some people get into like one kind of porn, right? Like a fetish, I guess. Not me. I was an all-around porn fan. A jack of all smut, you could say. Black girls. White girls. Asian girls. Latinas. Sweet, sweet Latinas. Big boobs. Small boobs. I mean, yeah, OK, I went through a serious anal phase for a while there, but generally speaking-”

Baghead interrupted.

“Look, you don’t need to tell me all of the particulars.”

Delfino smiled. He finally lit the cigarette and took a big puff. When he exhaled, the cloud blew into the windshield and parted, smoke rolling in all directions.

“Right. You’re right about that. Anyway, yeah, we should talk about the money.”

“The amount I mentioned in the note. I’ll pay half now, which is what I have on me, and half when we get there.”

“Well… I don’t usually work on spec that way, but I’ll trust you. Only because that was a good ass book, though.”

He scratched his chin.

“It’s about an hour’s ride to the place I’m staying. We’ll need to gear up before we hit the road.”

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

44 days after

The grocery shelves looked skeletal. All the meat had been picked off the bones like some unidentifiable carcass lying belly up in the jungle. Certain items remained here and there – the dishwashing detergent was largely untouched, for example. The parts you couldn’t eat were intact. But the edible items, the most useful items, had all been scavenged.

Travis already knew that, though. He’d kept an eye on this place, watched the people come and go over the past 40 days, sometimes exiting with just a couple of items on hand, sometimes taking multiple truckloads of stuff. He’d heard gunshots and screams and terrible sounds that reminded him of a pack of jackals laughing from within the building. During quiet moments, usually in the middle of the night, he’d crept in to gather some things for himself. In time, he’d amassed plenty. Anyway, he wasn’t here for groceries now.

His eyes traced a smear of blood trailing off toward the produce section. He wasn’t headed that way, so he’d never see where it led. Probably for the better, he thought.

He fingered the serrated edge of the key and smiled. The whole walk here, he’d barely been able to keep his hands off the jagged part of the metal. It felt like a magical item tingling in his pocket. A talisman that would unlock the door to a kind of happiness the hero could take back home.

It hadn’t been easy to acquire, the key, but he had it finally, and he was here. He walked into the gloom in the back half of the store, crossing the line into the area that the sunlight from the front windows could not touch. The dark closed in on him all at once, made him feel surrounded, enveloped, like walking into dense jungle foliage. His eyes strained. He could only really discern vague shapes in front of him now, the color palette around him going black, blacker, blackest.

He slowed down, one hand flailing around in front of him to prevent any collisions. He had a lighter, but he didn’t want to use it. Not yet. His eyes adjusted over the next minute or so, and he could finally see a little bit.

As he crossed a wide aisle and moved into the electronics department, he saw the first body. Technically, he smelled it before he saw it. He thought it had been rotting beef from the meat department, but as he advanced, it smelled more and more like ripe roadkill. The odor kept growing.

He stopped when he saw it. He flicked the lighter, held it up. To make sure. He had seen plenty of death, the bodies bloated along the sides of the street and congealed into car upholstery in traffic jams gone permanently still, but this was the first child. A little boy with platinum blond hair lay face down in front of the glass case where the video game consoles used to be locked. A puddle of blood surrounded him, soaked into his white t-shirt. Flies circled near the back of the head, swooping down to land on the face concealed by hair. He was glad he couldn’t see it. It was hard to tell, but Travis figured he might be eight or nine.

The positioning of the body made it seem like the kid died trying to steal an Xbox or Playstation or something, which wouldn’t make much sense since there was no way to play them. And yet, the shelves were empty. Someone had looted the consoles and the games anyway.

Lifting the lighter higher let the light drift farther down the aisle, and he saw a dead man leaned up against some video game accessories. Maybe he was the boy’s father. The corpse’s head hung down, chin resting on his sternum so shadows shrouded his face. Red stained his shirt which was torn in some places. In the half light, it was hard to decide if the holes resulted from bullets or a blade. Travis didn’t care to get any closer.

He released the lighter button, that claustrophobic jungle feeling coming over him again as the dark returned. He brought his drink to his mouth and sucked on the straw. The citrus and liquor odors overwhelmed that of death, made it disappear all at once. He closed his eyes and drank. Warm. Other than that, it was a fine Long Island iced tea, he thought. He’d only ever had one or two before all of this, but he wanted to try his hand at it.

He juiced the lemons and limes himself, made a simple syrup on a fire in the backyard. The fruit was at least a month old by then, but even though the rinds were hard and dried out, there was still a surprising amount of juice inside.

No ice, though. Had to mix it up warm.

Today was a liquor day. He had a rotation.

He moved on, and the door took shape in front of him, less than 20 feet off now. It looked a little dinged up along the edges, but it remained intact. Nobody could bust through.

That’s where the key came in.

He took another warm drink. The alcohol taste made him pucker up. Wouldn’t have happened if it was cold. In a way, he couldn’t wait until the winter, when he could pack the bottles of booze into the snow to keep them chilled.

Then again, he was about to make the booze days a little more boring anyway.

He pushed the key into the hole, twisted it until the deadbolt moved out of the way with a snap, turned the knob, crossed the threshold into the backroom of the pharmacy. The level of excitement he felt bordered on sexual. This room was darker still, almost pitch black. He pulled his lighter out, his thumb grinding the flint wheel around until the spark caught the butane.

By flickering flame light, he pulled open a few drawers to check. Pills, pills, pills. Yes. Everything was still here. It was all his.

He plopped two duffle bags on the floor and went to work filling them up.

Back at home, he stood in the kitchen, mixed himself another drink. More Long Island iced tea. The drink of the day. Wait. Great Lakes iced tea?

No. That was lame.

It was getting dark now. He looked out the window into the yard, his vision doubling for a split second as he watched the dusk give way to night. The wood fence that separated the yard from the alley turned a muted purple like the whole thing was bruised. The two mounds of dirt in front of it were the only things that had gone fully black. His eyes flicked away from them right away.

He reached into his pocket, touched it. Now it was a blister pack of pills he couldn’t keep his hands off of, his finger running along the foil, along the bubbled domes of plastic. So many pills. He kept this pack of pills close, a symbol of all of the others he’d stashed away with the booze and the weed and the mountain of cigarette cartons. He locked all of them in the bedroom, in his parents’ bedroom. Not like they were using it anymore.

He was finally starting a family of his own, maybe: alcohol and nicotine and oxycodone and the rest. His kids. He loved all of his children, but he had a favorite. The new addition. The pills. So much pain would be killed. So much anxiety would be Xanaxed and Valiumed and Klonopined away into nothing, into bliss, into painlessness without end.

He had to wait. Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a pill day. He had a rotation.

He chugged down the rest of his drink and took a step forward on the ceramic tile, his legs going a little wobbly underneath him. He smiled. This was all he wanted. He felt numb, and tomorrow he would feel number still. That was the game plan. From now until oblivion.

He walked into the living room and sat down, pulled a pack of Parliaments from his pocket. Cigarettes had been his first stop, before food even, and he had a ton: Marlboros, Camels, Winstons, Pall Malls, Newports, Basics, Kents, and on and on. Brands he’d never even heard of. He had counted the cartons up, but he couldn’t remember the number now. 226 or something like that. A lot. If he smoked a pack a day, he had enough for over six years. He kind of figured he’d cut back to half a pack a day toward the end to stretch them out for another year or two.