The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (56 page)

“I hereby challenge you to a Skee-Ball tournament.”

From Skee-Ball, they moved on to the Jump Shot basketball game nearby. A little more imagination was required when it came to playing the more traditional arcade games. First they climbed into one of the race car games and pretended to careen around the road. Next up, Erin found a cowboy themed shooting game. She only had the artwork on the machine to go on, but Erin assumed you were probably a sheriff shooting outlaws. Or Indians if it was from a less politically correct time. But she put her own spin on it and told Izzy they were killing zombies when she handed over the plastic gun controller.

“Oh no! Get that guy!”

Erin pointed at the top of the screen and Izzy aimed and fired.

“Yeah! You got him! Right in the penis!”

Izzy giggled as Erin gestured to another area.

“Look out!”

The trigger clicked three times in rapid succession.

Erin wiped an imaginary bead of sweat from her brow.

“That was a close one.”

Then she stopped, staring wide-eyed at the screen.

“Is that…? It can’t be… my God! It’s a zombie horde!”

A quaking finger shook over Izzy’s shoulder.

“Shoot, Izzy! Keep shooting, don’t stop or we’ll be done for!”

She kept up like that for as long as her vocal chords would allow. Finally, Izzy lowered the gun and blew on the end.

“I think I got ‘em all.”

Erin put a hand on her shoulder.

“Yep, I think so. Good job, kid. Not sure why you had to shoot all of them in the junk, but I ain’t complainin’.”

She leaned sideways into the machine, and adjusted something in the pocket of her hoodie.

“Holy cow! You must have set the high score or something, check out all these tickets!”

Erin pointed at the length of red cardstock protruding from her pocket like a limp tongue.

“Go on, take it,” she said.

Izzy reached out and pulled. Erin gripped the center of the roll of tickets from inside the pocket, so Izzy could unfurl an uninterrupted strip of reward tickets. Izzy laughed as the tickets formed a spiraling mass at their feet.

“Should we scope out the prizes?”

Izzy scooped the tangle of tickets from the ground and took off for the prize depot.

A plethora of dollar store crap awaited: bouncy balls, stuffed animals, glow sticks, candy, plastic radios, finger cuffs.

Erin pulled a giant inflatable hammer down from the rack and bopped Izzy on the head with it.

“Erin, look!”

Izzy pointed to a bin containing a very recognizable brown, white, and red logo.

“Tootsie Rolls!”

They raced to the bin, each grabbing a handful. Izzy stopped.

“You can taste it first. It’s your thing.”

Erin reached out and ruffled her hair.

“Let’s eat them at the same time. Count of three.”

The wax paper wrapper rustled as they counted. At three, they each tossed a little brown candy log into their mouth.

The candy was, not surprisingly, stale. Erin’s jaw worked double time to chew it.

Izzy smacked on the candy, chawing with her mouth open. She swallowed, then raised her eyebrows at Erin.

“Well?”

“About how I remember them,” Erin said.

That night they set up camp near the Ms. Pacman machine. It wasn’t much of a camp. Erin wanted to keep things light in anticipation of bringing home a lot of loot from Cabela’s. She hadn’t packed sleeping bags, but they each had a blanket. And the new down coats they’d nabbed made decent pillows.

Erin made Izzy close her eyes again. When she opened them this time, there was a Swiss Cake Roll with a tea light on top of it. Erin sang her Happy Birthday, and she couldn’t get over how eerie it sounded. One lone voice singing in all this quiet.

Plastic crinkled as Izzy ripped open the snack cakes. She handed Erin a roll before shoving the other in her mouth in one bite. Erin was more meticulous about it, peeling off the outer layer of chocolate first.

“So was it a good one?” Erin asked.

Izzy yawned, mouth gaping.

“Yeah.”

“Ready to blow out the candle?”

Izzy grinned, pursed her lips, and blew. Darkness wrapped its waiting arms around them.

Baghead

Rural Arkansas

9 years, 127 days after

When the sun rose, no pink orb emerged from the horizon. No orange hues tinted the road and the plants. No bright flash glared from the hood of the car. Instead the black clouds above showed marbled patches of gray where the sun tried to power through, and the rain doused everything in sight.

Blades of grass nodded in fast motion as the raindrops pelted them. Water funneled down over the shoulder where it gushed in a stream running alongside the car. The rain smacked the windshield too fast for the wipers to keep up, and it pounded out a bongo beat on the roof.

Even still, the girl slept in the back. Bags figured she’d been down 14 hours at this point. Maybe longer. Soon he thought he’d wake her to get her to drink some water. She had to be getting dehydrated by now.

He eyeballed the pistol he’d tucked in the little storage compartment under the door handle. The thing made him uneasy.

“This here is Ozark country,” Delfino said.

Bags made eye contact with him, nodded. It was true enough.

The landscape had changed in the night, the flat fields of the plains giving way to the hills of Arkansas. Everything seemed to slope up and away from them now, like the road had slowly etched itself deeper and deeper into the earth, all things rising away from it.

They passed buildings now here and there, too. That was new. Of course, most of them were houses or barns with the shingles all scattered away from the roofs, the naked wood sagging or pocked with wet looking holes with sizes ranging from that of a bowling ball to that of a manhole. Today’s rain wasn’t doing these structures any favors.

“You know what sounds good?” Delfino said. “A ham sandwich.”

Bags remembered the taste of lunch meat, so salty, sometimes cured to the point of having an underlying chemical flavor, though not in an unpleasant way. It’d been so long, but if it were here in front of him, he didn’t think he would eat it. Too many beings had died already. No need for more unless it was a life and death necessity, the way he saw it.

“A pile of thin shaved ham on some real good sandwich bread, right?” Delfino said. “Lettuce, onion, pickle, tomato. Slather some Grey Poupon on there. And mayo. Extra mayo, man. Not that Miracle Whip shit, either. Mayonnaise. The real thing.”

Delfino seemed so lost in thought, Bags noted, that he wasn’t actually talking to him anymore so much as imagining this sandwich out loud.

“Some potato chips on the side. I like those thick, kettle cooked kind. And an ice cold Dr. Pepper to drink. Holy fuck.”

Baghead could see the beverage in his mind, a glass that tapers at the bottom, Dr. Pepper gurgling within, freshly poured, that head of foam dying back, carbonation bubbles rushing up the sides, forcing the ice cubes to shift a little along the surface.

And then he realized that there was a black car stopped in the road in front of them, and Delfino wasn’t braking or swerving out of the way. He panicked. Tried to yell, to explain what was happening to snap Delfino out of it, but managed only:

“Hey!”

He could already feel the impact, could already hear the headlights smashing, the front end of the Delta 88 buckling as it rammed into the bumper of the black car. He put his hands on the dash, bracing for it. Hoping that the girl’s seatbelt would do its duty, at least.

But his one word warning was enough. Delfino swerved, missing the car by less than a foot and skidding to a stop some 50 or 80 feet beyond the vehicle.

For a long moment, nobody moved apart from the tremors rattling Baghead’s arms and torso. Despite the spasms quivering through him, he stared straight ahead at the dashboard. He heard the breeze kick up outside, swishing blades of grass around, and he heard the tired hum of the idling engine.

Both men snapped their heads around to look at the black car, finding it empty. Abandoned on the toll road with no one in sight, at least as far as Bags could see.

That established, they looked at each other. Bags mouthed “wow,” which Delfino couldn’t see behind the mask. The driver took a breath, cupping his hand over his eyes and smearing that hand down his face. He locked eyes with Baghead and said:

“Holy shit. I’ve always thought -- and I say this in all seriousness – I’ve always thought that I would die doing some heroic shit, like saving kids from a burning building or something. Instead I just about biffed it thinking about sandwiches. For real, man. I just about biffed it.”

He shook his head, eyes drifting back to the car.

And still the little girl slept.

Teddy

Moundsville, West Virginia

76 days after

The flame shot up with a whoosh, and he felt something like wind rushing away from him, like all of the air had been sucked out of the room.

The girl screamed. Her face, though anguished, still lacked the depth of expression a human face would convey, but the noises poured out of her all harsh and dry and shrill.

He reveled in the sound, eyes squinted down to slits from the heat and the brightness, so he watched the whole scene in two zombie silhouettes – one flaming, the other not. Yet.

The scream died down into a moan, a sharp, bright sound. Intense, intimate, almost sexual whimpers, he thought, but clearly pained. This was better still. This was what his guests came for.

Her t-shirt melted, shriveling and tightening against her torso, melted wads of polyester falling away in flaming drips like when he held plastic bags over a bonfire as a kid. From there, the fire climbed up onto her neck and face, just blackening her hair on one side, the ear disappearing in the darkened spot.

Her mouth stole the show, though. It lit her head up from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern, cheeks glowing red, that gaping maw housing a fireball.

God, he wished he could keep her. He wished he could burn her and keep her at the same time, but he knew he couldn’t. It didn’t work that way.

Erin

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

53 days after

Erin counted out Tootsie Rolls in her dream, adding them to the food inventory. Someone hummed in the background as she filled a mason jar with the candies and screwed on the lid. She tilted the jar, rotating it in her hands, watching the candy shift.

They’d need more Tootsie Rolls if they were going to make it through the winter.

But that wasn’t what was really bothering her. There was something else.

Slowly she became aware that the humming wasn’t just in her dream.

And then she was fighting, pushing, urging herself to wake up. It was like lying at the bottom of a lake and struggling to get to the surface. Through the looking glass of the water, the sun and sky and air looked so close. She kicked and kicked, but the dream held her back, not wanting to let her go yet.

Finally she broke through, jumping awake.

She panicked for a few seconds, not remembering where she was, and then there was a new sound that went with the humming. Feet crunching over broken glass. Broken glass from the window she’d broken to sneak into Chuck E. Cheese.

She crawled around the side of Ms. Pacman and peered out at the front windows. The silhouette of a man stood outlined there. At the sight of him, her breath caught in her throat.

She froze. Her hand went to her pocket, confirmed that the knife was still there. At least there was that.

There was only the one man, so far. A group would have been worse. Or a zombie. She hadn’t gotten a great look at him, but she was going to hazard a guess that zombies didn’t hum.

But they were still trapped in here, with the man standing right in front of the exit. They could leapfrog around the place, hoping to stay hidden. Maybe hide in the kitchen. But what if he spotted them? And what if he had a gun?

She cursed their luck at not finding their own gun yet. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to use it, couldn’t imagine just shooting someone like that, but it would be useful in terms of scaring people off, at least.

Her eyes fell on the keys next to the wadded up coat she’d used as a pillow, and a plan began to form.

First, she needed to wake Izzy. She covered Izzy’s mouth and gave her a nudge. Izzy stirred, eyes fluttering open. Erin hoped the finger at her lips and the wide-eyed look of alarm she gave was enough to communicate one word: Trouble. The kid seemed to get it, fear crossing her face. Erin almost felt bad about scaring her. But this was the world they lived in now.

Erin gestured that they should pick up their things. She was most worried about the coats — the fabric seemed the type to rustle with any movement. Luckily, it was just a whisper, and the humming guy was still taking his time poking around the front of the place.