The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (40 page)

When the car got down under 30 miles per hour, Baghead opened the door and jumped.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

He peeled the tarp back from her face, and there she was, the broken being he’d sworn to have and to hold. He guessed he would hold her once more after all.

From the brow up, her head was mostly gone, a haggard concave dome of bone with dried blood gummed up all over it. Beneath that it still looked like her, though, especially after he dragged a hand over to her eyelids to close them. He dipped a rag into the bucket of warm water next to his leg, and went to work washing her face. Grime wiped away from her cheek, a second swipe clearing that crevice where the nose and face meet.

He knew this gesture wasn’t for her. She was gone. It was for him.

As he dipped the rag again and wrung it out over the bucket, the water made sounds that reminded him of taking a bath as a boy, of giving his sons baths when they were young. It was a happy sound and a calm one. He brought the rag to the opposite cheek and repeated the process.

As the smudges of black faded away, her skin beamed so clear and smooth. She looked like herself again. Strange how a person’s face comes together, the pieces form into something that looks so intentional, like a painstakingly crafted sculpture instead of the random chance of genetics and biology.

He thought this task would be an unpleasant one, but it wasn’t. It was important to him somehow. There would be no tarp as he carried her now, and he wouldn’t sling her over his shoulder like a bag of rock salt. He would do it in a way that made sense to him. He didn’t know if it was a way she would’ve wanted, but he hoped so.

The rag navigated the jagged edge where her skull cleaved off, scrubbing there, clearing away most of the blood, though he knew he couldn’t get it all. Again his hand dunked into the warm, the rag soaking up fresh water to help clear away the blood. Again he twisted the piece of cloth, and again the water dripped down into the water in the bucket, the sing-song melody of its impact reminding him a little of wind chimes.

Her dying wish was that the boys not see her like this, not see her as a zombie, especially one with her brains blown out. He would make sure that was the case. He could do that. Time was short, though, and digging a grave six feet deep wasn’t an option.

He and his wife would need to take one last road trip.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

69 days after

Teddy’s hatchet hacked hard enough at the thing’s neck that with just one stroke its head flopped down, dangling along with the tatters of black t-shirt draped over the sickly gray skin of the chest. The thing hissed, and when it tottered toward him, the head swung back and forth like a pendulum. Teddy laughed. It seemed too funny, like something in an animation, the way it hissed and dangled at the same time.

It was never quite right killing them, though. They never whimpered or looked scared how they were supposed to. He liked those sounds the animals sometimes made in the back of the truck, little feminine mews and cries. The noises made his heart flutter, made his teeth grit, made his cock so hard it throbbed.

It wasn’t like that killing the zombies. They didn’t show any feelings beyond a mindless aggression. There was only one thing that really made them seem to suffer, but it was involved. He could only do it so often.

He raised his hatchet again. He knew another whack at the neck would finish the job, most likely, as decapitation did the trick. He aimed, but he couldn’t do it. Not yet.

He changed his grip and swung at the arm twice. The skin split open like the scored slash on a seared duck breast and black goo oozed out. He guessed that was old blood of some kind. These things didn’t make much sense. Even after he cut them open and looked at all of the insides, they didn’t make much sense to him. Just black globs and gloop and shriveled bits.

He backpedaled, letting the thing come at him, that dark substance seeping down its arm, the head grunting and hissing and clattering its teeth upside-down in its dangling position.

Something cold brushed at his back, and he jumped. He could picture the second zombie creeping up on him, its arms gripping around his waist as its teeth sank into the curve where the spine and neck meet. But no. It was just the chain of one of the swings.

The surge of adrenalin rendered his hands cold and shaky within a second of the contact, excitement and fear and life flowing through all of him. He took a breath and hurled himself at the zombie, hacking and slashing with great gusto.

The head flopped to the grass, but he leapt again for the body, falling with it as it tumbled to the ground. He straddled it and bashed away at it for a long time after it was still, his arms and chest and face wearing a spatter of thick black blood. Gummy drops mixed with sweat trailed down from the sides of his brow, flowing into the creases between his cheeks and mouth.

He realized his mouth was open, so he closed it.

Lorraine

Houston, Texas

3 days before

Houston rolled by on the sides of the street, the endless urban sprawl. Fast food signs and streetlights cut arches and wedges into the swelling shadows of dusk. When she looked up at the lights, she could almost believe things were normal, that everything was the same as it had always been. No plague. No zombies. No riots. None of it.

Then movement in the driver’s seat caught her eye, and she turned to see not her husband, Greg, but Ray Dalton, the televangelist, manning the wheel, taking his cell phone from his ear and hanging it up. So things were not normal. Not at all.

She didn’t know why she got into the car with Dalton. Not really. She was out of it, standing at the gas station with nothing left, pretty far gone on prescription pills, and then he showed up. Of all of the people in the world, the multi-millionaire snake oil salesman pulled up in an SUV. She knew he wasn’t a good person, knew all the rumors about his whole operation being a money making scheme, that he talked more about attaining wealth than scripture, that studies showed he spent 70% of his time on TV asking for money rather than preaching, that he didn’t even read any of the prayer requests sent to him, just had grunt workers remove the checks from the envelopes and throw the rest away.

Still, she needed to get out of town fast, and his car seemed to have gas in it. Maybe she would stick with him for a while. Hell, if anyone would survive a nuclear blast, it’d be the cockroaches and Ray Dalton, right?

She thought about telling Dalton what Greg had been told by his boss, that several major metropolitan areas in the South would be nuked, Houston among them. She looked at him in the driver’s seat, though, his chiseled jaw, his thick head of silver hair, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He’d already said they were headed out of town. That was good enough for now.

She couldn’t tell him what her husband had known or what had happened to Greg.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

With her face clean, he looped one arm under her knees and the other under her neck. He lifted her that way, like a sleeping child, her broken head resting on the edge of his pectoral and shoulder. After hours on the concrete basement floor, she felt like cold meat against his torso, the way a leftover Thanksgiving turkey gets that chill to it after a few hours in the fridge.

He adjusted the bulk in his arms before moving out, staring down a moment into that black chasm where her brain used to be. The smell of the congealed blood wafted in his face, a familiar odor. Not a rotten smell, at least not yet. It smelled the way pennies tasted, he thought, recalling putting one of the coins in his mouth as a child and getting yelled at by his mother.

He walked across the basement floor, and the legs dangled from his arm, the head flopping and bouncing against him with every step. He had expected to find her muscles stiff with rigor mortis, but perhaps the rigidity had already passed, or perhaps the zombie virus sped it up or prevented it in some way. He didn’t know, and he guessed it didn’t matter much.

Once more the steps groaned and sagged under his feet. He mounted them slowly, with care, his spine arched back a little to help balance, keeping the weight of her body leaned up against him and letting his legs do most of the work.

He thought it would be disturbing to handle her dead body like this, but it wasn’t, at least not that much. Maybe he was in shock, or maybe he had accepted the way of things more than he’d realized, and he was OK now putting her to rest, putting his life to rest. A reverence had come over him as he cleaned her up, a feeling that this was important, that it was special, and the feeling remained as he held her now, this tiny being pressed against his chest.

He felt like he was still with her in a way when he carried her in his arms, an irrational way, of course. He thought it would be more disturbing when she was all the way gone, when the physical being before him was no longer visible, and she was just a gray memory that crept along in his imagination. Of course, she wouldn’t exist in that state for long since his imagination was coming up on its own expiration date.

The hardest part of the physical labor was almost over. His feet advanced, taking each step with care and hesitating before moving to the next one. He was halfway to the top when the stair shifted under his weight, and he wobbled, his balance slipping away from him. His shoulders leaned too far back, and he could feel the emptiness behind him, the way nothing was holding him up, like that split second when he’d leaned his chair too far back in pre-algebra in seventh grade. He knew his seat was about to go crashing down, knew he’d gone too far, and a moment of queasiness overcame him, a moment of weightlessness and dread that must have only been a second but seemed to stretch out for a long time.

His right hand shot out to grab the rail at his side, and the broken head flopped away from his chest, sliding down to the crook of his elbow. He fought to right himself like a listing boat’s buoyancy stopping it from capsizing, and the weight of the body shifting forward helped his cause. His torso flailed twice, and then he jerked his weight back over his knees, regaining control of himself. The weightlessness vanished, the ground made solid under his feet once again.

He stood there a moment, taking a deep breath and letting the electrical excitement tingling in his head and chest die down a little. It felt so strange for that queasy feeling to not pay off in a crash landing, almost anti-climactic. He didn’t fall, though, and he didn’t drop her. This was good.

He gathered her head up against his shoulder again and climbed the last five steps to the kitchen.

The car stood before him, the trunk gaping like an open mouth. Mist descended upon him, upon the night, tumbling through the beam of the flashlight without a sound. Its damp slicked his arms, and he felt droplets drain down from his hair to run across the back of his neck. His shoulders twitched, and he began lowering her into the darkness there, but he stopped himself. He retracted his arms, hugging the corpse against his chest once again, feeling the chill through his t-shirt.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t put her in the trunk.

He rounded the corner of the car, tottering more than walking now, the toes of her shoes scraping against the fender as he moved. With the flashlight occupying his left hand, he had to duck down to one knee, dipping her head to get his right hand to the door handle. Then he had to scramble back a couple of paces to get out of the path of the door so he could swing it open. It took a couple of tries to feel for the cracked opening, to hook his fingers onto the metal well enough to fling it wide, but he got it.

He lay her body in the back seat, tucking the knees up toward the torso in a semi-fetal position so he’d be able to get the door closed. Stepping back, he looked down on her. From this angle, standing at her feet, he couldn’t see the way the top of her head was blown off. It looked like she was sleeping, like they’d gone out to a party tonight, and she decided to lie down in the back on the ride home and fell asleep there, like he should wake her up now, and they could go in and go to bed.

Christ, it was late. Was he being noisy out here? His focus zeroed in on her so much that he hadn’t thought about it once during this process. His head swiveled. He looked around, peered out at the blackness shrouding the neighborhood. He saw no signs of light out there, no candlelight flickering behind curtains or flashlight beams moving about. He couldn’t even see the houses across the street.

With the dome light shining down on the corpse, and the flashlight in his hand, anyone looking on would be able to see him, though. He was the light for the moment, and that notion made a shiver run down his spine.

He eased the door closed, the click seeming loud now that he felt on display out here. He turned off the flashlight and walked backward a few steps, trying to ease into the safety of the shadows until the dome light turned off.

His torso shimmied, a chill crawling through him, and he realized how cold and humid it was out here, the air almost as heavy as it was in the basement. While he watched the light, he considered what time it might be. He didn’t have a great guess. It must be somewhere between two and five AM now. Dawn was a ways off yet, most likely.