The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series (7 page)

His head bobbed back up, shaking off the nightmare. He was scared for a second, but then he felt the warmth, felt heaven inside of him once more.

Sean just stared at him.

“I’m sorry. Did you say something?” Travis said.

“No. I didn’t say anything.”

He turned to face the street, and the two of them watched the empty neighborhood again. Eventually, Sean said goodbye and wandered off, but Travis stayed out there for a long time. The swing lurched back and forth, and he smiled, and a little more jizz spurted onto the semen already crusted to his boxer shorts.

In the evening, Travis felt itchy. A mess of tingles piled on his skin and crawled all over each other like snakes. He sat in the living room, candlelight flickering on the walls around him again. He rubbed another oxy in a wet paper towel, his fingers and thumb shifting the soggy paper back and forth over the tiny pill. This process removed the time release coating that ensured the medication would be doled out slowly over a period of 24 hours. Instead, eating this uncoated tablet would deliver the full dose at once. Crushing and snorting it would put all of it in his bloodstream within seconds.

Decisions, decisions.

This wasn’t part of the plan. He was supposed to follow a strict regimen of rationing, and it certainly didn’t involve snorting. Discipline. Following the rules. That’s how the rotation worked. But maybe his sense of dosage was wrong. All of this pill stuff was new. He would need to dial things in, right?

The coating removed, he set the pill aside and lit a cigarette. Camel Lights today. His favorite. Smoke swirled off of the end of the cig, and his thoughts swirled as well. He felt guilty. He was already breaking the regimen on day one? That didn’t bode well. He was set for a long time, a few years. Running out of pills and booze any faster than necessary would be a nightmare. And from the more dramatic angle, he had enough intoxicants on hand to kill himself many times over if he were reckless. He didn’t figure this to be a real risk. He wasn’t gluttonous that way, but it wasn’t impossible if he started sliding down that slippery slope.

Without thinking, he picked up the remote off of the end table and tried to turn on the TV. It didn’t work, so he pressed the button a few times. Oh. Right. A single laugh puffed from his nostrils, and he tossed the remote. It tumbled end over end, glanced off of the wall and landed somewhere behind the couch. Perfect place for it, he thought.

Damn. He missed TV, though. He missed the internet. He missed being around girls. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in a while. Too busy working and getting high to keep up with all of the other stuff. Still, he missed the fleeting interactions he’d had with them of late. He missed the smell of them. Seemingly few of the local females had survived, and those who had lived hadn’t stayed around. He wasn’t certain when he’d last seen a living woman. It had been days. He hit the Camel, let the smoke billow about in his lungs a moment before he exhaled. He missed his parents, too.

And the images came to him again, the memories. He tried to stop them, but he couldn’t.

He peeked around the corner into the kitchen, crouched, afraid. Red puddled out across the black and white tiles. His dad was already dead, crumpled in the corner in a loose fetal position, throat slit by the looks of it, though it was hard to tell for certain with all of the blood.

The man’s hands gripped his mother’s throat in the center of the room. He straddled her, his knees pinning her arms to the floor. Her eyes looked wide, wild, almost comical if not for the circumstances. The man smirked, somewhere between disinterested and mildly amused. He lifted her then, and bashed her head into the floor. The others in his group looked on, their faces similarly blank, like this wasn’t a real human skull being cracked on the ceramic tile like an egg on the side of a frying pan, like it wasn’t really happening, just something on TV, some rerun they’d seen countless times before.

But Travis couldn’t stay for the end of this episode. He turned and ran, gliding through the hallway and the living room, fleeing through the front door, feet pounding down the steps, onto the sidewalk, into the street. He ran a long time. It wasn’t until he stopped that he realized that he was crying.

With the candle out, he sat in the dark in the living room. The cherry on the tip of his cigarette provided just enough light to see its red glow. All else was black. And quiet.

He squirmed in his seat, the chair squeaking under him, and he thought about the room around him that he couldn’t quite see. Living room. It seemed a strange term all of the sudden. Living room, the room you mostly lived in, he guessed. But was he living here? Not really. He was slowly killing himself in the living room with drugs and drink. Dying in the living room. It might take years, but that’s all it was.

He stood and walked out to the porch, dragging his fingertips along the wall to feel his way. The air was cool out here and thick and wet. He felt the cold humidity grip his torso like a soggy hug, though it felt somewhat far away thanks to the numbing flame of narcotics burning inside of him.

Around him, the black night stretched out forever. Total silence and nothingness stood in front of him. No moon or stars lit up the sky. Just gloom. He couldn’t even see the house across the street.

He brushed the back of his hand at his mouth and felt the vomit crusted to his chin. Whoops. Forgot to clean that up, apparently. He licked his fingers and tried to scrub at the barf.

He’d puked in the backyard after snorting that last oxy. That happened to him often, though. Whether he ate it or snorted it, oxycontin usually made him throw up, a weird watery vomit. Clear, mostly. And then as soon as he puked, he could feel the euphoria kick in, and nothing like puking really mattered quite so much anymore. He guessed that was why he forgot to wipe off his chin.

With the crust removed to his satisfaction, he felt around for the swing, found it, sat on it, and rocked in slow motion. Cold air tingled against his arms in a pleasant way, though his nose felt like a pointy piece of ice.

He thought of his parents again, this time remembering the process of dragging them out into the back yard to bury them. He’d cried the whole time. Inconsolable, shaking sobs like a baby. Then he cleaned up the puddle of blood where his dad bled out, the smear of red where his mom struggled. He mopped and scrubbed the tiles until the light ones went from red to pink to white again.

The power was still on then. People were sick and dying everywhere, and order was breaking down, but there was hope that things might get back to normal. It almost seemed funny to think back on it now.

He rocked the swing harder, and the cold dug its fingers deep into the meat of his arms. He flicked his cigarette butt out into the yard. That used to piss his dad off like nothing else, but it didn’t matter anymore. He was gone. Everyone was gone.

Diseases came and killed some, and people came and killed some, and the others all left once the power went out. And when his family needed him most, when life and death teetered on the line and they needed his help, he ran. He ran and ran and ran until he puked chili into the bushes outside of the post office, his lungs on fire, his throat on fire, his mouth on fire. He bent at the waist for a long time trying to get his breath back, a string of saliva dangling from his bottom lip, a pile of half-chewed beans in the dirt at his feet.

He’d run away. He’d always run away. The first time he got punched, he was outside of a gas station where kids bought Coke and junk food after school. He’d mouthed off to a kid with zits all over his face and the back of his neck. Couldn’t even remember what he said to him, but he was sure he was just busting balls. Nothing too mean. Running his mouth was all he ever did when he was in high school, all any of them did, but he was harmless, so nothing ever came of it, usually.

Anyway, this kid didn’t like it. He didn’t say anything in retaliation. He walked up and punched Travis, a right hook that went a little wide of the mark and got him in the ear. It didn’t hurt that bad, but Travis ran home crying. He was 14. Too old for that response, he knew, but so it went. The other kids made fun of him later, of course. He didn’t care. He was a coward. He knew that well enough without anyone pointing it out.

He slowed the swing down so he could light another cigarette. The burst of flame from the lighter made the world seem bright and warm for a split second. It hurt his eyes a little, and a pink splotch hovered in his vision where the fire had burned. He sat back, rested his shoulders against the swing, and breathed smoke while the oval of pink danced across the black nothing.

Mitch

Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

42 days before

They walked on the beach in his dream, bare feet sinking into that wet sand right at the water’s edge. The wind blew so hard it felt like it might knock them down. It was cold as hell, too. The chill enveloped him, snaked icy tendrils deep into the core of his body, but he somehow found it more exhilarating than miserable. He stretched his arms out to the sides, and his jacket billowed and flapped behind him.

Mitch looked at Janice, but she did not look back at him. They walked together, but it somehow felt more like she was passing by. She stared into space, her face expressionless like one of those dead porcelain dolls again.

Dead. That seemed important. Mitch thought about it, tried to make sense of it. He looked down at the water while he thought, watched the wet lap at the sand.

A thud emitted somewhere nearby. It sounded like it came from straight ahead, but there was nothing there but sand, so he stopped walking and swiveled his head around. He saw nothing. Just beach that stretched out forever, and water that went farther still. The sound didn’t fit this place, either. It sounded like something solid landing on asphalt or concrete. Things landing in the sand would make a muffled noise, and things landing in the water would mostly sploosh, he thought.

What the hell?

He couldn’t puzzle it out, but he knew now that something here didn’t make sense. He jogged a few paces to catch up with Janice. They walked on a while, and there were no more sounds but the wind and the waves.

Still, he couldn’t shake that paranoia, that tingling feeling that he should know more about what’s going on, that he was missing something obvious.

As soon as the scraping started, he knew the beach must be a dream. He recognized the noise. It was the distinct sound of something dragged over cement. Something heavy. Maybe something on a sidewalk or a driveway. He pictured someone pushing an upright piano over the sidewalk in front of their house. The scrape sounded warbly and far away, though, almost like it was wet. In Mitch’s experience, that’s the way the real world sounded when you heard it from within a dream.

He turned to Janice.

“I’m dreaming,” he said.

She said nothing. She didn’t look at him, just walked into the wind with that same dead look in her eye.

“I need to wake up,” he said.

The wind blew harder now, and sand whipped at his face, the grit getting in his eyes after a second. He leaned over and rubbed at his eyelids with the heels of his hands. He knew you weren’t supposed to do that, that you could scratch your cornea, but he couldn’t help it. He needed to wake up.

He couldn’t remember how that worked. Did he have to do something to make the waking up process start? What if he couldn’t remember? Would he be stuck asleep forever?

The panic welled in him, and he inhaled sharply and opened his eyes.

He jerked awake to find himself staring into flickering bulbs, bursts of light and dark jittering up and down two glass tubes about five feet in front of his face. Reality occurred to him one piece at a time, his brain processing things in short, blunt statements:

He knew these lights. The wood above them. He was in the basement. He was staring at the basement ceiling. He fell asleep down here. He wasn’t supposed to do that. He dreamed something. Something important, maybe.

And then wood scraped over the concrete. No longer muffled by swaths of slumber, the sound seemed harsh and dry.

And close.

His heart beat faster. He leaned forward, his vision tilting away from the ceiling as his head left the hammock-like indentation it had pressed into the canvas head rest. Pain shot through the muscles in his neck, which felt stiff. He must have pinched a nerve or something, too, as he felt the pain twinge all the way into the crook of his jaw. He rubbed the rubbery ball of muscle on one side of his neck, felt the tenderness there. It’d be sore as hell for the next few days.

Motion caught his eye as the scrape erupted again. His pupils traced the movement, though it took a full second to process what he was seeing.

Janice.

Not good.

His wife had flopped the chair to the floor and was now wriggling on the ground, torso hunched into a capital letter C, shoulders twitching and writhing in small circles without discernible purpose. He tried to get a read on her state of mortality, but her hair swung into her face to cover all but the tip of her nose.

One of her hands stretched forward, apparently only loosely bound at this point. It was only a few feet from his ankles. The outstretched hand flopped about on the concrete, seeming to contort in odd ways, perhaps lacking the normal level of articulation, but he wasn’t sure. The curled fingers clawed at the ground, found purchase, and the chair inched forward as she pulled, the cement grinding at the wood, the hunched figure sliding toward him.