The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2.5)

by Tim McBain

  I shut off the mower, and the stillness after the loud drone of the engine seemed appropriately reverent for the moment. I took the can from him. It was cold. Moist with beads of condensation.

  “Where’d you find this?” I said.

  “I’ve had it a while. Last of the beer we scavenged way back. Put it out in the water a while ago to chill it. Something about mowing and beers go together, you know?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I popped the top. Took a big swig. I was expecting a hint of skunk, knowing that it would have been sitting a long while, but it was fresh and clean and pretty much fucking delicious. He was right, too. The smell of the freshly cut grass seemed to compliment the beer’s flavor like a perfectly paired wine.

  Hellickson had this look on his face like he was waiting for me to comment, so I obliged.

  “Damn, that’s tasty.”

  I chugged down the rest of the can on the second drink, which got Hellickson laughing pretty hard, but I figured it was the smartest thing to do. Get the first 20 ounces in me pronto to get a little buzz going, and then nurse the other two to keep it strong. I’m not an idiot. I mean, I probably am an idiot, but still…

  After so long without much to drink, that first beer slammed me pretty hard. It was glorious, really — a kind of euphoric, relaxing drunk that reminded me of being a teenage kid. Your humble narrator had a real good time finishing up that lawn. Made me forget all about my tooth for the next couple hours, too.

  And the kids did have a lot of fun playing badminton out there. I didn’t play myself. I just rode out that last little bit of a buzz, watching them slowly get the hang of swinging those little rackets and whacking that birdie around, smiles growing on their faces.

  A man wants some relief from reality from time to time. Myself included. I ain’t proud of it, but I don’t see no reason to lie.

  With those beers polished off, there’s no booze to be had out here. No painkillers, or at least nothing stronger than ibuprofen. You have to get pretty creative to find escape from what pains you. I thought about mixing up a big glass of nutmeg and water — I read about prisoners using that to trip when I was a kid. I think it was described in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was the best book I ever read for school. (Well, that and A Clockwork Orange.) I saw that the Hellicksons have quite a stash of nutmeg among their boxes of chow in the basement, so I gave it some thought.

  Anyhow, getting nutmegged sounded a little over the top. I remember reading that it is a terrifying hallucinatory drug trip, and I’m just looking for something to kill this pain and help me relax, you know? I don’t need any reality-bending experiences or what have you. I’m not out here looking to expand my mind.

  But there is a five gallon can of gas in the shed now for the mower, so I doused a rag and brought it back to my cottage. I’d never huffed before. I had some friends who used to get cans of duster once in a while and go nuts, but I always thought it was a pretty trashy way to catch a buzz. Undignified.

  At this point, though, I’d simply like a few minutes here and there away from that aching rot I call a mouth. Stupid tooth.

  I put the rag over my mouth and nose and breathed in.

  The gasoline vapor entered my mouth and plumed into my chest. Tasted and smelled awful — chemical and alien and somehow insectile — but worse was the feel of it in my throat and lungs. The wet membranes inside of me went ice cold for a beat and then the irritation hit and all of me was burning. It stung like crazy — a mild chemical burn, I guess. My lungs felt so raw almost right away, but I didn’t let up. I kept puffing on the rag.

  After 8 or 10 breaths, the taste and smell faded away, the bite in my lungs receded, and my consciousness seemed to distance itself from my body and the rest of reality. My head went all warm, and my torso and then limbs soon followed. I closed my eyes, somehow resolving to keep huffing without thinking about it much.

  I felt far away from everything and everyone. Even myself.

  My senses dulled, and I was dazed to the point that I couldn’t remember what the hell I was doing. When I opened my eyes, my vision had reduced to a tight tunnel just in front of me.

  I realized I was still huffin’ and puffin’, so I ripped the rag away from my face and threw it across the room where it skidded under an end table. I guess some part of me knew that to keep breathing the fumes was dangerous, especially as I lost track of time and reality, but in the moment I was confused about why the hell I threw it like I did. It’s like I couldn’t remember why I did it even as I actually did it.

  For that matter, I couldn’t remember most anything. What in the world was I doing in this cabin? How did I ever make my way out here? I couldn’t piece together a sequence of events that would have brought me here and sat me on the floor with my back leaned up against the bed. And it made no sense to me. No sense at all.

  I closed my eyes again, a little sore that I didn’t have the rag to breathe some more. But it occurred to me that my buzz was still growing in intensity, still peaking.

  Reality closed itself off from me the rest of the way. The sound of the ocean morphed into a whooshing sound, almost like a really slow ceiling fan going through a phaser, and I got the overwhelming urge to lie down on the floor, an urge I obeyed in fumbling fashion almost immediately.

  That was when the hallucinations started.

  I sunk into the floor, the wood planks going soft beneath me and lowering me a good three feet deep. The dark of my closed eyes deepened along with my descent. Blackened.

  Somehow this wasn’t frightening or even mildly alarming. In that moment, it was simply the way the world worked and amusing in a distant sense.

  My breathing sucked in and out of me — greedy lung gasps that filled me and emptied me.

  And then I saw myself in the barn, ripping that tarp away from the Delta 88, hay tumbling out of the way. It was a dream in which I could somehow participate and watch myself at the same time, if that makes any sense. Like my consciousness had divided in two.

  I flipped the tarp off to the side, watched it billow and drift down into the dirt and hay all slow like a picnic blanket, and then I climbed into the car. I didn’t start it or anything. I knew, somehow, that it wasn’t time to go yet. I just settled into the driver’s seat and stroked the wheel a bit. I could feel the smooth of it against my palms, and I ran my fingers over the indentations on the bumpy side. It felt so real, though I could kind of remember that it wasn’t. To me, it seemed like this stroking went on for hours, but I think it was a couple minutes at most.

  After a time, it occurred to me that Meatball was riding shotgun, that is if we ever got rolling. That seemed funnier than it should have somehow. Like I’d have a kickass dog sidekick out on the road with me.

  The scent of the gas bobbed to the surface of my awareness again, though it was still quite muted. Anyway, that started the process of the real world coming back to me, a strange and confusing thing that happened one little piece at a time.

  As the dream dissolved back into reality, I had the distinct sense that I was lying in a tube of some kind, almost like the mouth of a water slide I would shoot down any second now.

  It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I remembered about the cabin and everything. Wow. North Carolina. The Hellicksons. These ideas seemed so remote, so unlikely to be the real way of things. I marveled at it as I stared up at the ceiling.

  Imagine how unlikely — how damn near impossible — this reality would have seemed just a few short years ago. The plague and all of that. What the hell? Now I’m here, huffing gas in an empty world, nursing a bad tooth, arguing about zombies and what not.

  It’s a wild, thrashing world, you know? It’ll knock you on your ass in ways you never thought possible.

  While I lay there, I tried to remember what it was like to think normally. Couldn’t do it.

  My thought patterns were withered. It’s the only word I can think of that comes close to describing it. They were all shrunken and dry and
wrinkled up.

  I remembered reading that the high you feel from huffing is the actual damage you are doing to your nervous system. It’s the physical experience of your brain dying, if only for a little while — all of those nerves in your head flailing and lurching their way toward eradication.

  At some point in there, Meatball wandered out to the cottage, and when I came around, he was lying on the end of the bed, giving me a funny look. I lifted my head to address him.

  “Whatsamatter, Meat?” I said, my words slurred some.

  He didn’t say anything. He just gave me a side-eyed glance. Looked pretty uncomfortable.

  I let my head flop back to the floor.

  The uglier parts of reality invaded around that time, seeping in slowly and surely. It was easiest to chart the progress by considering how badly my mouth tasted like gas. The tang of the fuel swelled and swelled upon my tongue, pushing well past what seemed possible in terms of awful flavors.

  Eventually I crawled outside to vomit in the weeds, my mind seeming to retract again in the moment of sickness so I didn’t experience the full horror show of it, which I was thankful for.

  I dragged myself back inside after that and lay on the floor for some time longer. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else.

  It’s a weird feeling, when your brain is dying for a few minutes like that. It is not as unpleasant as it must sound.

  Sometimes at night, Meatball will get to woofing. Not really barking so much. Shorter, choppier, low-pitched sounds. His mouth opens just a crack and puffs out these noises. I think they’re warning yips, like he hears or smells something outside the cabin. Raccoons or something, probably.

  The first time, it startled me pretty good. I sat up and spoke into the darkness.

  “What is it, Meat?”

  As soon as the words were out, I felt very, very vulnerable. Like I should have stayed silent. Like maybe something or someone really was out there. Listening.

  Anyhow, I’m teaching him to be quiet. I hiss out a truncated shush, and he usually obeys. We practice during the day, and I’ve been doing the whole positive reinforcement thing with little chunks of lobster meat. It’s weird, somehow, to intuit how to teach things like this to a pup. I never had a dog when I was a kid or anything, but I feel like I understand him innately. We’re not so different, me and Meat. Both simple creatures.

  Tonight, however, I heard rustling out there just after he gave a few woofs. It sounded like something trudging through the weeds. Something big. Something in the taller stuff that grows right along the cabin.

  I lay there for a long time, listening, very thankful that the dog was disciplined enough to stay quiet.

  I pet him after a while, and I could feel that his hackles were up.

  Still, as I kept listening and hearing nothing, I began to doubt that there’d ever been a noise. I mean, it’s possible that my brain is still a bit addled from the gasoline earlier. Maybe it was a hallucination? Hard to say.

  I lay back down and slept through the rest of the night without incident.

  Erin

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  7 days after

  Kelly-

  What a day. I worked in the quarantine tent all morning, and then my mom and I went and washed some stuff in the river with a group of other people from camp. Mostly ladies. Usually we use a bar of soap, but today someone actually had a bottle of Tide they passed around to share. Even with the detergent, you can’t quite get the clothes as clean as with a washing machine. They dry all stiff and weird. But it at least makes them less stinky.

  On the way back, I saw that Max was at the tree. I strayed a few steps behind my mom so I could give him a hand signal telling him I’d be there in a few minutes. I hung my pile of stuff on the clothesline as fast as I could and then high-tailed it back to our spot. Even from a distance, I could tell Max was in a good mood. He was sort of pacing back and forth instead of sitting, but it was more of a bouncing pace than a contemplative or anxious one.

  When he caught sight of me, he thrust his hands into his pockets and tried on a dour expression. As if he could fool me.

  “Oh please,” I said. “I could see the shit-eating grin on your face from the other side of camp.”

  He cracked immediately, laughing and raising both fists in the air.

  “You are looking at the official winner — the champion — of the first annual M Company EMP Repair Derby.”

  I clapped my hands together. “You did it?”

  He nodded.

  “I knew you would,” I said and held up my hand for a high-five.

  He swung a leg over the tree and sat down next to me. "It was actually kind of ridiculous how easy it was. All I had to do was—"

  "Rip and Jailbait, sittin’ in a tree…"

  We both turned. Bennett had a jubilant smirk on his face as he strolled over to us. I held up both middle fingers, but Max pushed my hands down. Like I'm scared of Bennett.

  “You beautiful bastard,” he said to Max. “I knew you were good for something!”

  Of course. He’d get part of the credit for the team winning, being a squad leader and all, despite the fact that according to Max, he’d done jack shit in terms of actual work on the project.

  “Top is sending three groups out on a resupply mission now that we have some functioning vehicles. See if we can’t beg some supplies and whatnot from the bases in the area. We’re on the first ride out of here, my man.”

  The smile slid from Max’s face. “What? When?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s bullshit. We’re supposed to get a week off duty, not another fucking assignment!”

  “Rip, buddy. You’re not thinking clearly. We get to leave camp! It’s like a vacation!”

  Bennett grabbed Max’s shoulder and jostled him side to side.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You’ll see. Once we get out there on the open road, with the windows down, fresh air tousling our hair, you’ll be glad as hell you got a chance to get out of this stinking pisshole for even a day.”

  Judging by his body language, Max remained unconvinced.

  “In any case, we’re set to leave at sunrise. So don't stay out too late canoodling, you two." Bennett inclined his head toward Max and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Might want to get one final farewell BJ from your jailbait before we go.”

  "Fuck off."

  Usually Max’s tone with Bennett is mild annoyance, but I could tell he was mad this time.

  But Bennett was already striding away, chuckling.

  "Sorry about that," Max said, rubbing the back of his neck.

  I shrugged. "I couldn't give a single fuck what he thinks."

  The conversation sputtered out, and the sound of the crickets and cicadas seemed to swell.

  "I wonder what it'll be like out there. I haven’t seen anyone go by on the road in days. It’s like a wasteland.”

  A hot, itchy discomfort squirmed in my gut at his words. I wanted to tell him not to go. Or maybe what I really wanted was to tell him how I feel about him.

  "Promise you'll be careful? And you'll come back?" I said.

  "Come back? What are you talking about? Of course I'll come back.”

  I suddenly felt on the verge of tears, so I said nothing.

  “You haven’t finished the book yet,” he said. “I have to come back so you can tell me what you thought of it. Right?”

  I kicked at the ground, scattering a dandelion seedhead with my toe. Tiny white parachutes took to the air.

  “I guess.”

  He shifted his weight to the left, so his arm would bump mine. The contact, however small, made me feel better.

  “You know I’m right.”

  I chewed my lip, thinking.

  “OK, how about this? I’m not finishing it until you get back.”

  Max’s eyes squinted down to slits.

  “Are you saying that if I for some reason didn’t return, you would never fini
sh the book?”

  “Never.”

  “Diabolical,” he said, and I laughed.

  He put out his hand, like we were shaking on a deal.

  “Erin, you drive a hard bargain, but I accept your terms.”

  I took his hand. His fingers were soft and warm.

  “Don’t leave me hanging,” I said.

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  So that’s it. He’ll probably be gone by the time I wake up tomorrow morning. I feel almost sick with anxiety already, and he’s not even gone yet. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sleep.

  Your BFF, whose stomach is lousy with butterflies,

  Erin

  Erin

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  7 days after

  Kelly-

  After a marathon session of tossing and turning, I did finally fall asleep last night. When I woke up and saw how light it was outside, I knew it meant Max was gone. Any motivation to get up off my cot vanished.

  Eventually my mom came in and told me that if I didn’t get up, I was going to miss the morning meal. That would mean not eating until late afternoon. It will come as no surprise that this was enough to get my ass out of bed.

  I dragged myself to the mess tent alone, but as I made my way through the serving line, I saw Breanne in one corner. She was at a table with Bennett.

  I almost burst into song at the sight of him. If Bennett was still here, that meant Max was still here. Maybe their mission had been delayed. Maybe it had been outright canceled. Either way, I didn’t care.

  I practically danced a jig on my way over to the table they were sitting at. As I approached, I noticed a few things. Bennett’s body language, for one. He was sort of slouched down in his chair, like his spine had been replaced with a wet noodle and could no longer keep him upright. Also, he was scowling. That’s not totally out of the norm, depending on his mood.

  Just as I reached them, Breanne leaned over and tried to sort of nuzzle against him. He jerked away.