The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (6 page)

He guzzled down half the beer to try to kill the brain cells where the negativity wriggled. He didn’t figure it’d work, but what the hell?

It didn’t seem right. None of it. What sense could there be in the world working this way? The people we love weren’t supposed to die. It didn’t make sense.

He adjusted in his chair, trying to ease some of the strain on his lower back, and his shoe scuffed on the concrete. The sound must have woke her as her head floated back to an upright position, and her lips jerked. After a second she opened her eyes.

“What time is it?” she said, her voice sounding a little hoarse.

He glanced at his wrist.

“2:56 am,” he said.

A little later than he’d figured, though he didn’t voice that thought aloud. He felt tense about the time since she was so sure about the window of hours during which she’d turn. Anyway, hearing her speak made his panic die down, made his imagination veer back toward believing predictions of her imminent death to be crazy talk. Here she was in front of him, breathing and blinking and licking her lips. How could that just end?

“You getting tired?” she said.

“Nah. Not really,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “You can’t fall asleep.”

“I know,” he said. He sounded a little more defensive than he meant to, so he smiled to try to cover it.

The quiet settled over the room again, but she didn’t close her eyes this time. She looked around, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean the waiting,” she said. “Waiting for it to happen. Waiting to die. It seems crazy, but it’s a lot less dramatic this way. I mean, it’s actually pretty boring when you think about it. Isn’t it dull? Sitting down here in the basement?”

He pawed at the stubble sprouting along his jaw line.

“Yeah,” he said, because he didn’t know what the hell else to say.

“I mean, let’s face it. We’re not passionate people. We’re not one of those passionate couples, you know?” she said. “Maybe we were for a little while. I don’t think so, though. There was no button ripping. No romantic getaways. No shivering torsos. We were too busy working and changing diapers and paying bills and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids and doing loads of laundry.”

She nodded toward her purse on the dryer behind him.

“Can you light me a cigarette?” she said.

She had quit smoking over 10 years ago, but… he guessed cancer was no longer such a threat.

He pulled the soft pack of Winston Lights out of the purse, shook one loose, lit it. He took a puff. Terrible. He’d never picked up the habit. He walked over to her and put the cigarette in her lips soundlessly. She hit the cigarette and went on talking:

“I wonder if those passionate couples even exist, really? I mean, can it really exist over the long haul? Doesn’t that kind of romance require novelty which can’t sustain itself very long by default? A flame can’t burn bright forever. It either slows down or burns itself out.”

Mitch said nothing. He peeled a corner of the soggy label away from his beer bottle.

“I got a little sidetracked. The waiting. It fits us is what I’m saying,” she said. “It’s what we did, mostly. It’s a fitting end.”

He examined the lines in her face, looked for malice in the set of her brow and eyelids, but he couldn’t decide what to make of her expression. Was she trying to hurt him? Was she expressing bitterness about the life they’d made together, lashing out with the intent to injure by summing up their existence as a boring one? Or was this less angry and more of a cold, detached look at how she really felt, how things really were?

“You know you’re going to be fine,” he said. “Need some antibiotics for that leg, but the rest of this talk... I don’t know, Janice. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s wait and see.”

She smiled a little, but it wasn’t that mean smile she sometimes got when she wanted to rub his nose in something. This smile was a little sad.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think that speech came off how I wanted.”

He thought she would go on, but instead she gazed out into the room, her eyes slowly going unfocused so she looked like one of those creepy porcelain dolls lined up on the beds in the guest bedroom at his grandma’s house when he was a kid. Hideous things. They didn’t look like inanimate objects to him. They looked dead.

He peeled the label the rest of the way off of the bottle and let the sopping sheet of paper flop onto the floor. He thought back on her words, tried to think of how else she might have meant them. Nothing came to him. In some way, he thought she was saying that they were together physically but not emotionally, at least not all of the way. She didn’t need him. He knew that, and he knew it was true, that it had been true for a long time.

But the inverse wasn’t true. He did need her. Left on his own, his life itself seemed meaningless, an exercise in cruelty and humiliation and defeat.

For the first time, their relationship reminded him of the way she had always described her parents’ relationship: The hard-nosed lady with the meek husband, a nice guy but one that no one could fully respect. As her mother was dying, Janice joked, “Mom can’t die. Who will tell dad what to do?”

Of course, her dad had surprised everyone and remarried seven months later, but that was beside the point.

Mitch tipped his chin back to finish off the beer and went to work on another Red Bull. He watched her stare break off into a series of blinks as she seemed to come back from some place far away.

If it were just the two of them, he would surely kill himself after she was gone. But it wasn’t just the two of them. He would have to find a way. For the boys.

“Remember when we watched that house for the Gundersons?” she said.

“Yeah. The house out in the woods?”

She nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

He remembered it well. One summer, just before they got married, they’d watched a house for some rich friends of her parents. He remembered grilling burgers on their screened-in second story deck that overlooked dense woods, a green thicket that stretched out as far as you could see. He remembered watching their HD projector cast movies onto a 90-some-inch screen, messing around in their sauna and hot tub. You couldn’t see any of the neighbors’ homes from the yard, not through the tangle of greenery, anyway. It felt so relaxing to head out there after work and feel apart from all of the people, alone with his girl. They lived the good life for six weeks while the Gundersons cruised the Mediterranean or something like that.

“I dreamed that we were back there,” she said. “When I was sleeping just now, I mean. I dreamed that we were sitting on the deck, and you had something cooking on the grill. I watched wisps of smoke spill out from around the edges of the lid, smelled the charred smell. We didn’t say anything. We just looked out into the woods, and it was peaceful.”

Mitch stroked his thumb over the can in his hand. It traced a line into the sweat coating the aluminum.

“That was fun,” he said. “At that house, you know. We had a good time there.”

He wanted to tell her that he had dreamed of that place, too. Not recently, but he had dreamed of it off and on through the years. In some ways maybe that was the high point of their time together, of his life. Six weeks that left a high water mark they’d never touch again. He wanted to tell her that in his dreams, he could still feel what it felt like to be young with her, when they felt all the way together, and it felt like anything was possible. He wanted to tell her, but he thought better of it.

The words describing his dreams percolated up to his tongue, but he held them back.

“We had fun there, didn’t we?” he said.

“We did.”

He wondered if the Gunderson home was really as great as it felt in his memories. Was the hot tub really so wonderful? Was that massive screen that special? Or was being young with a life of endless possibilities in front of them what they really missed? And even then, was it really like that, or was nostalgia flattering reality, making all of the colors look brighter, all of the images clearer and more pure.

The conversation trailed away to a shared moment of thoughtful silence and from there degraded into nothing. In time she fell asleep again. He watched her eyelids now, closed with a dark undertone radiating purple hues from beneath the flesh. The hot water heater rumbled a while behind him and then kicked off.

And alone in the silence he grew angry with himself. How had he gotten so soft? So unable to express himself, unable to even feel his own emotions all the way, numbing them always with TV and beers and detachment. How had he let life rush past like this? He remained sedentary as the fruit withered on the vine, as the time dried out and blew away in the wind.

One of the fluorescent bulbs began flickering above him, an uneven crackle accompanying the strobe effect. He didn’t find it unpleasant, though. It was more like a little white noise that broke up the starkness of the quiet. Janice didn’t seem to mind, either. She didn’t wake anyhow.

Disease.

Death.

Shit. How do you prepare for this? How do you brace yourself? You can’t, can you? He knew it couldn’t be all the way real until it happened, knew that he couldn’t anticipate the depth or scale of the thing, but he understood one thing: This was going to hurt so bad.

If it was real, anyway. It could all be fake after all, couldn’t it? She could be wrong. She could be.

These concerns and doubts circled in his head in an endless loop as his eyes drooped closed, and his head nestled into the chair, and he drifted into unconsciousness.

Travis

Hillsboro, Michigan

45 days after

Travis sat on the gliding swing on the front porch, rocking in silence. He was so high on oxycontin that he periodically jizzed a little bit in his boxer shorts. Not a full load of ejaculate, just a little squirt, like pre-come. He was aware of each and every spurt, intensely so, but gave no thought to changing his shorts or pants. The swing kept right on going, and the air tingled and swirled outside of him, around him, a living, spiraling thing he could breathe in. The world was bright and blurred and a little bit farther away than usual. His core was so warm, but the tip his nose was icy cold.

As the swing moved, the blue sky rose and fell in his field of vision. The houses across the street lurched up and down like boats on an angry sea.

The street was dead, as it had been for many days. Most everyone was gone in one way or another. Today, he didn’t see anyone until Sean stopped by in the afternoon. With all of the people dying and fleeing for the government camps, Sean was the only person left in the neighborhood that Travis knew. He’d been three grades ahead of Travis in school. One of those achiever types. While Travis looked for ways to spend the school day with a buzz, Sean got good grades and lettered in multiple sports. Between that and the age gap, they’d never been friends or anything, but now here they were with no one else.

Sean climbed the front steps and stood on the porch. It was September, a little chilly, but he was still wearing those Adidas sandals he always wore. Travis found this amusing but didn’t say anything.

“What up?” Sean said.

“Swingin’,” Travis said, still gliding back and forth. “How’s it going?”

“I’m good. You seen them raiders around?”

“Not in a couple of weeks. I think they got all they wanted and moved on to rape and pillage larger towns.”

He tried to look at Sean while he talked to him, but he had a hard time focusing. The blur of all things smeared right up onto his neighbor’s face, the whole world smudged and clouded like butter on the sides of a glass bowl.

They fell silent a moment, Sean turning to look out in the direction that Travis and the swing faced. The vacant house across the street wasn’t all that interesting, but they looked at it anyway.

“You haul anything good lately?” Travis said.

“Mm... Snagged about ten more propane tanks at that Shell station outside of town,” he said. “Busted the lock off of the cage by the air compressor.”

“Nice.”

“So my grill has plenty of fuel. Wish we had meat to cook,” he said. “We gotta go fishing or something, man. I need the protein.”

Travis smiled, nodded. Sean squinted at him.

“Bro, are you fucked up?” Sean said.

Travis tried to hold back a chuckle, but he couldn’t.

“Nah, man,” he said.

Sean tilted his head as if mulling this over.

“Your eyes look funny is all,” he said.

Travis chuckled again.
I’m full of pills, idiot.
He laughed a little harder. Yes, liquor was fine, and he liked marijuana OK, but the pills pulled heaven down inside of his brain and held it there for a while. Euphoria. Bliss. He felt untouchable.

And he closed his eyes and drifted into the blackness behind his eyelids for a moment, the warm feeling swelling up to take his consciousness for a few seconds, pulling him under. And images of blood smeared on black and white ceramic tile came to him with violent intensity like they were being burned into his imagination. He heard whimpering so shrill and pathetic.