The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (54 page)

There were two bottles of water and a purification kit. They only had one of those, and Erin decided Izzy should have it. She hoped they’d find another one somewhere.

Each bag also had a blanket, a multitool and pocket knife, and some basic first aid: Tylenol and ibuprofen, antibiotic ointment, Amoxicillin tablets, alcohol wipes, and some bandages.

Izzy held the bag on her lap after they’d finished, staring at the canvas fabric. Her head was cocked to one side, and Erin could tell she was lost in thought. She worried Izzy was thinking on the possibility of being separated.

Finally, she spoke.

“So it’s a ditty bag.”

“A what?” Erin said.

“That’s what my dad always called it when we went camping. A ditty bag.”

Ditty bag. It sounded a lot more innocuous than panic bag.

“OK then. Ditty bag, it is.”

That night Erin climbed the narrow staircase into the small finished attic. Scooting around the desk that took up most of the floorspace in the tiny attic-turned-office, she knelt in front of one of the bookcases lining the wall. She didn’t know why she remembered seeing it when they first went through the house, but it was still there, right where she’d left it.

It landed with a thud on the kitchen table, rattling the salt and pepper shakers.

“What’s that?” Izzy asked.

She had a pinky finger jammed in one ear, de-waxing or just being a gross kid, Erin wasn’t sure.

“Seriously?”

Izzy pulled a waxy finger from her ear and stared at Erin, impatient for an explanation.

“It’s a phone book.”

Seeing that this wasn’t registering, she elaborated.

“Before the internet, this was how you found someone’s phone number. The first section here, the white pages, those are personal numbers. People’s houses.”

“For phones like that?”

Izzy pointed to the black cordless model bolted to the wall next to the refrigerator.

Erin nodded.

“The back is called the yellow pages, and it’s all businesses. So here, I’m looking through the G section.”

She ran her finger over the thin page and stopped when she found what she wanted.

“Guns. And then it has a list of places that carry guns.”

“We’re getting guns? Finally. I keep trying to tell you-”

“Please don’t start with the zombies again.”

“Well how are you going to kill a zombie without a gun? I mean, one zombie, maybe. But a bunch? We need firepower.”

She looked so serious, Erin couldn’t help but laugh.

“So what are we getting? M-14? AK? .357 Magnum?”

Erin took her eyes from the page to give Izzy a long look.

“What the hell? How do you even know all those?”

Izzy shrugged.

“Call of Duty.”

“You were allowed to play Call of Duty?”

She shrugged again.

“Technically, no. It was my brother’s.”

“Oh, right.”

Erin kept her head down like she was still perusing the phone book but lifted her eyes to sneak a glance at Iz. She watched for a sign that bringing up the past and the people from Before might have upset Izzy, but she seemed normal.

They tended not to talk about their families much. It was sort of an unspoken thing, and Erin had just stepped right into it without thinking.

Erin turned the page.

Someone needed to write a book about post-apocalyptic etiquette.

Ray

North of Canton, Texas

2 days before

Dust kicked up everywhere when the wind blew, little clouds of it puffing and scattering all around them, whipping grit into their faces. They walked along the side of the road, still headed north.

“We either have a few hours or about a day,” he said. “I can’t remember exactly what Ted said as far as the timetable.”

“The arrival time of a nuclear blast seems like the kind of thing you’d want to remember.”

There it was. The rich lady tone again. He should have known she’d want to twist his nuts up about this. He knew she wasn’t wrong to do it, though. Jesus, how could he forget something like that?

“Look, it was a lot to process, and I haven’t slept. Maybe Ted wasn’t that explicit about the timeframe. I can’t remember for sure. Anyhow, I’m not making excuses. I wish I knew.”

They walked for a time, the shadows of the taller trees reaching out to brush across their cheeks and the backs of their necks, a little flicker of light and dark playing exclusively on their right-hand side.

His head throbbed along with that flicker of shadow and sunlight. How could he let someone get the jump on him like that? Embarrassing. Worse than embarrassing. They reached into his pocket and took his keys and phone while he was unconscious. He felt violated. He brought his hand up to his forehead.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Fine. Just my head hurts some.”

“Take this.”

He turned to her and she held out her hand, dropping a pill into his. Xanax. He turned the bar over in his palm.

“This ain’t exactly headache medicine.”

“It will help you calm down is all.”

He thought it might be a mistake to dull his senses in any way at this point, but he didn’t care for the moment. Any relief was welcome. He popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it dry. It felt stuck in his throat, so he pawed at his neck, wiggled his Adam’s apple back and forth as though that might help shake it loose.

“Thank you,” he said after a moment.

A truck passed by on the road, and the engine growled, and the air rushed at them, more clouds of dust whipping around everywhere.

“If we had the gun, we’d have a better shot at getting another vehicle,” he said. “Any weapon, I guess, would help our cause.”

“Wait.”

She stopped and opened her purse, digging around a while. This purse was full of solutions, he thought.

“Here.”

She pulled a little plastic canister out. Yellow with a black lid. It almost looked like a travel sized can of hairspray or maybe one of those old school breath fresheners that people always squirt into their mouths in movies just before a big date. He took it from her, spun it around to read the label.

Pepper spray. Police strength.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

76 days after

He sat on his new couch now, watching the dust motes drift in the bars of sunlight glinting through the front window. Settling in at the new house was coming along well. It smelled cleaner here, and it already felt like home, felt like his own.

He didn’t sleep much that first night, tossing and turning on a new bed, his eyes unwilling to stay closed, but that had already passed. He felt fancy sleeping up high on a mattress not touching the floor, a mattress long enough to support his feet rather than leaving them to dangle off the end. Even the blankets were softer here, no longer scratchy.

He wished he had some ice cream to celebrate the move. A bowl of vanilla bean would be great. Or meat. Meat would be even better.

He stood, gathering a couple of cans of lighter fluid that had rested on the couch cushion next to him, tucking one under his arm and one in his hands. He passed through the kitchen to the basement, pausing outside the door, listening to the sound of shoes scuffing on the cement down there.

He’d already lured a pair of zombies into the chamber, which was exciting at first, but in the hours since he’d secured them, something about it had become disappointing. For all of the effort it took to trap them and have them follow him all the way home and down into the basement, it was anticlimactic. They didn’t moan at all in their cell, didn’t whimper to acknowledge the power he had over them. They just shuffled from wall to wall, pressing their hands into the concrete and moving on, mostly undisturbed.

It angered him somehow, like a decent movie with a bullshit ending. He knew how to liven things up, though. It’d get messy, but it would be worth it.

He twisted the key in the padlock, opened the basement door and descended into the cell. He let his feet fall heavy on the steps. He wanted them to know he was coming.

The creatures turned their heads toward him, their facial expressions still as dim as ever, mouths hanging open, eyelids all drooped. They were both girls, one with long brown hair, maybe 15 or 20, the other with short salt and pepper hair, probably in her 40s. He tried to picture their features un-zombiefied, but it was difficult. Maybe they were even pretty before all of this. He couldn’t say.

Their shoulders squared toward him, their hips twisting around to match a beat later, and the feet now scuffled in his direction, rubber soles sliding over the cement.

He popped the top of one of the cans of lighter fluid, swiveling the red nozzle out and letting the other can fall to his feet on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. He pointed the red tip at the younger girl, squeezed the can.

A burst of fluid spurted in her face, and she didn’t even blink. The sides of the can tinkled out a little two tone melody when he let go. He squeezed again, harder this time so he could maintain a steady stream like urine, the lighter fluid trailing down from her eye to her gaping mouth, spraying inside, slapping against the inside of her cheek. The sound of the flammable juice pooling echoed in the hollow of her throat.

Something about all of this satisfied him beyond what he had expected. He’d doused zombies with accelerants before but never in his own home. It just felt right.

He moved to his left, walking around the perimeter of the room like a boxer staying outside, making the opponent chase him. The zombies followed, too slow to ever catch up.

He sprayed the older one, lighter fluid spritzing her hair with such velocity that little droplets flung off in a mist that seemed to hover above her. Then he pointed the bottle lower, wetting her body a little, almost embarrassed to do so at first. He found confidence soon enough and worked the bottle up and down on diagonal lines like a paint roller, soaking their bellies and boobs.

The fumes filled the room now, made him a little lightheaded. Time to end the suspense. Time to give them what they came here for.

He tossed the can of lighter fluid onto the landing with the other and reached into his pocket, fingers fishing around, tumbling and fumbling the little wooden sticks around in there before he finally got a hold of one and pulled it free.

He scraped the match against the zipper of his jeans, and it hissed and flashed as the chemical tip ignited. He held it at eye level as the flash died down and the wood maintained the smaller flame.

This was it. Just about as aroused as he could be.

He flipped the match at the younger one, sent it in a spiraling arc toward her face, trying to land it in her mouth like a three point shot.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

41 days before

He stomped his foot, the sole of his shoe pounding into the concrete slab with a smack and a thump. Right away, the endless chirp wavered and cut off like something falling out of the air around him. The silence welled up to fill the shed, and his shoulders tensed, and it felt weird to move, to breathe, to exist at all.

He scratched behind his ear and thought about what this meant. The sound reacted to him, to his stomp, and the nature of the sound guttering out was definitely organic, a living thing. Not a light bulb or some electrical noise. It must be an insect after all.

His eyes darted back and forth, scanning along the place where the floor and wall met. Could it be some kind of cricket? One of those fat cicada-type things with black veins stitched through its wings? What being could possess this shrill, gravel-throated voice? And how could it screech for minutes at a time without stopping to inhale? Did it not need to breathe?

Nothing stirred in the shed, though. No six-footed creature stepped forward to reveal itself, pattering out to the center of the room with one arm raised.

He let his eyes drop to his lap, looking upon his hand resting on the firearm there. He grit his teeth and wished he could do it all in one motion, just lift the steel to his face, pull the trigger and be done with it, a flash and a pop and off to oblivion, off to somewhere else or maybe nowhere, but he couldn’t do it.

The sweat seeped from his pores again, beads of moisture glomming together into pools that clung to his skin all over. The wet did nothing to ease the heat inside of him. It just made him feel soggy and sopped into his clothes so he felt like he was wearing wet rags.

He thought that from afar suicide seemed like mostly a sad thing, an abstract thing, maybe even romantic in a tragic way, someone in so much pain that they couldn’t go on, someone choosing a time and place to leave because they couldn’t do it anymore. But up close it was so violent. Sticking a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger felt like such an aggressive act now that he stared its reality in the face. How bad did you have to hate yourself to be able to do that? A person didn’t just have a streak of sadness or a lack of confidence in that case. The feelings they had toward themselves probably had more in common with the people who shoot a bunch of kids at their school. They wanted destruction. They wanted blood. They wanted bones splintered and brains disintegrated and their face erased into a bloody jelly. Maybe that wasn’t true in many cases. He couldn’t be sure. But it must be true in some. Up close, that’s what felt necessary to be able to do it, to overcome the fear.