The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2)

by McBain, Tim

  He knew it would happen soon, that it had to happen soon.

  Erin

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  266 days after

  He stood over her, rough hands on her neck. Pinning her to the work bench. She clawed at him with both hands, bad and good, not caring now, and she saw his face contort in rage. He lifted her by the throat and slammed her head back onto the workbench. He did this three times before he settled back in to choking her.

  She squirmed beneath him, but he was bigger and stronger. The sound of her pulse in her head seemed to drown most everything else out, and time itself seemed slower.

  She noticed things, things that didn’t matter: his t-shirt, covered in orange smears and blood and black zombie goo. A fleck of spittle dried in the corner of his mouth. A trickle of red at his temple, where she’d struck him with the hammer.

  The hammer.

  She stopped her fruitless attempts at removing his hands from her neck, and let her hands fall to her sides. They flailed around in search of the hammer. Had she knocked it off the bench when she fell? Why had she set it down in the first place?

  Her fingertips brushed something hard and smooth. Her hand floundered at it, but it was just out of reach.

  The world was starting to pulse in and out, her vision blurring. And then the grip at her throat loosened a bit.

  There was a hissing sound. It reminded her of a leaking bike tire. It was a moment before she realized it was the sound of air sucking through her constricted throat.

  Things came back into focus. The man had removed one hand to bat at the tiny fists clubbing him in the head. She could hear Izzy screaming over the roar of the fire and the roar of blood in her ears.

  The man swiped at Izzy, but she didn’t stop her furious attack on him. Erin reached for his arm, trying to keep him from touching the kid, but it was too late. He snatched her arm, gave a tug, and Izzy fell forward. She caught herself on the edge of the window before she toppled all the way into the room.

  Terror seized Erin, and she stopped her random attempts to slap and claw at the man. No matter what happened to her, she wouldn’t let him have Izzy.

  Her hands changed course, moving to his waist. She wasn’t thinking now, some other part of her brain had taken over. The desperate animal part. Her fingers crawled over him like a spider, feeling the belt loops at the waistband, snaking around behind, finding the handle tucked there. They wrapped around the head and pulled the weapon free. She twisted her arm for a better angle and struck, sinking the hatchet into his ribcage.

  It was a disgusting feeling, this sensation of metal piercing living flesh. It hit him off to the side, lodging between two ribs, and the sensation of metal scraping on bone reminded her of a dentist's pliers wrenching a tooth out of a socket.

  He howled, releasing her and arching backward. She meant to hold tight to the wood, but her hands were slick with blood, and it slipped from her grasp.

  His hands floundered at the axe protruding from his side. She brought her good leg up to her chest and kicked at him, knocking him back another few steps.

  Oxygen was heaving in and out of her lungs. It was equally painful and wonderful. Her vision was still blurry, and her mind felt half-numb. She didn’t think she had much fight left in her. Just getting to her knees was almost more than she could manage.

  She heard Izzy scream again, and when she looked over her shoulder, he had wrenched the weapon free. His arm swung up in an arc, blade flashing and flicking her with tiny droplets of his blood.

  This was it. This was the end.

  Erin flinched, turning her head and squeezing her eyes closed. Her hands shielded her face by reflex. She knew they would protect her little from the sharpened blade.

  Time seemed to slow down. A beat went by and nothing happened. And then another. She forced her eyes open, peeking over her shoulder.

  The hatchet was still raised in the air, but there was a hand wrapped around the wrist. For a split second, before she could take in the whole scene, she thought it was Izzy, and her heart shuddered in her chest.

  She blinked, and another arm wrapped around the man’s neck. That’s when she saw the way the flesh was wrinkled and torn, oozing with black.

  He got his arm free and swung the hatchet, hacking the zombie open in a diagonal line across the neck, ear to collarbone. It did not scream in pain or stop its advance. A second creature materialized out of the smoke, lunging for the man and sinking its teeth into his thigh. A high-pitched wail escaped his throat.

  Grasping and biting and pulling, they took him down under their combined weight. More staggering shapes approached through the smoke, falling on the kill, tearing at him like hyenas on a scavenged zebra.

  Fingertips brushed the side of her neck. She recoiled, thinking it was another zombie, but when she turned she found Izzy’s tear-streaked face, begging her to hurry.

  Erin swayed when she pushed herself upright, but Izzy wasn’t letting her go now. She guided Erin through the window, pulling with more strength than Erin thought her small body possessed.

  Erin clawed at the ground, grass and dirt wedging under her fingernails as she dragged her feet through the opening.

  Behind them, the man was still alive, she could hear him screaming.

  Izzy was pulling her still, urging her on. The first floor of the house was consumed by flames, and heat radiated off it in waves. The hot air stirred the loose wisps of Erin’s hair.

  She managed a crooked crawl over the lawn until they were at a safer distance. Izzy tried to help her stand, but the world spun too fast. Erin collapsed in the grass.

  The ground felt soft, and the clean air was sweet in her lungs after the smoke.

  Izzy tugged at her arms again with new urgency. Erin cracked an eyelid and saw silhouettes approaching, drawn by the smoke from the burning house. More zombies, she suspected, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have anything left. She’d gotten free, and Izzy should go now. Erin tried to tell her to go, but the words were choked off by a cough.

  So she laid still, no fight left in her.

  The sun was bright and warm on her skin after the dark of the basement and the choking smoke.

  She was free now.

  She closed her eyes and let go.

  Teddy

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  266 days after

  He was the meat now.

  Teeth separated his flesh from bone, impossibly hard and sharp. They opened him up and pulled him apart. The mouths attached to him were cold, but the blood made everything wet and warm and red. It spilled out everywhere, a puddle growing in slow motion.

  His own pets descended upon him. Dismembered him. Devoured him.

  The smoke clouded everything, so he could only see dark shapes writhing atop him, and those he could only make sense of by feel.

  Knees and elbows dug into his torso where they leaned on him. They were all over him. He was surrounded by bodies again. Dead ones, too, though not in the way he preferred.

  But it couldn’t end any other way. We all become meat sooner or later, he thought.

  Some part of him tried to detach, to find a way to think of this as the relief he sought, an end to his torment, but it couldn’t. The pain was too much.

  He died screaming.

  Decker

  The Compound

  1 year, 37 days after

  The next faith healing took place in the field on the south side of the camp. Decker stood next to the wood pile, close to the front but not so close that Dalton might be likely to notice him. He thought that to be the best approach here.

  Once more the preacher wore a white robe. Perhaps a new one this time since the other had been ripped and stained. He had a table with white paper on it next to him. It almost looked like a doctor’s examination table, Decker thought.

  Dalton and the table stood at the bottom of a hill, and the throng of followers accumulated before him. Decker figured it must be 4,500 people at least by now, m
aybe more. The recruiting efforts had grown exponentially of late, and the camp itself had expanded. There was a mass production of shacks under way, going up in a different field from Decker’s neighborhood.

  Energy vibrated through the crowd. The people couldn’t keep still. They fidgeted and squirmed and shifted their weight from foot to foot. Decker could hear the level of anticipation rise and fall in the pitch of the chatter around him. Every time the preacher moved, the pitch went higher, almost like an electric whine, but it fell back down as he stood still, waiting for more people to file in.

  A group of kids stood on a wood pile in front of him, another with his hands wrapped around the handle of the axe wedged into the stump that served as a chopping block. A handful of others climbed up onto the aluminum roof of the out building off to his right — a large tool shed — but the preacher whistled to get their attention, gave two flicks of his fingers, and they climbed down, embarrassed looks on their faces.

  Decker searched the front row for Lorraine, his eyes scanning back and forth four times, but she wasn’t there. Maybe she didn’t want to be on her feet, out in the sun all day now that she was further along in her pregnancy.

  The green tang of cut grass filled the air, and it felt strange to walk on a manicured lawn. The grass was maintained with push mowers from here up to the cul-de-sac where the preacher and his council lived, unlike the scraggly area where Decker and the other nobodies lived. In the slums, some of the grass was trampled down like matted hair, but the blades around that grew tall and wagged in the wind.

  Looking up the hill, beyond the figure in white, Decker could partially see the preacher’s house through the cluster of pines up there. It was a large, two story home with dark bricks along the bottom half and rustic wood panels stretching up from there.

  Decker thought it strange to hold the ceremony here, within sight of this display of opulence when so many of them slept on cots in cramped little shacks. Maybe there was some angle in it that he couldn’t figure. Dalton didn’t seem the type to do things without a reason.

  The preacher raised his arms, the drape of his robe shifting, folds of fabric falling over each other, and the pitch of the chatter from the mob ascended like sped up music. Hisses burst out everywhere, people shushing each other, and then it all fell so silent that Decker could hear his pulse beating in his ears.

  “In this community, God protects us. He protects me, and he protects you. He smiles upon this little camp we’ve built.

  “Will we live forever? Of course not. God will call each of us when it’s our time. We will leave this plane to spend eternity in his kingdom. But it only ever happens when it’s meant to be, right? Trust me, he will make sure we get enough time before all of that. And I will do my best to make sure of the same.”

  He paced back and forth as he talked now. No one in the crowd moved.

  “The girl I’m about to call forward has cancer. She’s just seventeen years old. The disease started in her pancreas, and the doctors say it’s in her stomach and lungs now, spread to her lymph nodes. They say she has about six weeks to live. Seven if she’s lucky.

  “But I don’t think that’s enough time. And neither does God. So he will do something about it. My hands will be the ones laid upon her, they will be the ones healing her, but it is God’s power willing those things to happen. I’m merely the conduit through which he works.

  “Melanie? You want to come on down?”

  The crowd stirred finally, heads snapping around, looking for any movement, Decker’s skull swiveling along with them.

  There. A tall girl with dark hair picked her way forward, weaving around some people and turning sideways to slip between others.

  The preacher moved behind the examination table and pulled a towel out from under the table, which he held in his hands. He smiled as Melanie approached and nodded toward the table.

  “I need you to lie down, honey, and lift your shirt up to expose your belly.”

  She did as he asked, the paper hanging over the edge of the table flapping up for a second from the air moving as she reclined. She blinked a bunch of times. Nervous. And then she peeled up her sweater, stopping at that place where the belly and ribs intersected.

  He rolled the towel up and lay it on her skin parallel to her shoulders, making a border between her skin and sweater.

  “This towel will keep any of the blood from the incision from getting on your shirt,” he said as he tucked the towel in place. She nodded, and the preacher turned to the crowd.

  “For those of you who are squeamish around blood, I suggest you look away here in a minute. It won’t be a great quantity of blood, but the cancer coming out of her is nasty stuff. I promise it won’t be the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

  He took a bowl of water out from under the table and placed it to his left, dipping his fingers into it and reaching under the table again, his hands falling out of view of the crowd, his shoulders and elbows jostling up and down as he dried his hands.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t feel any pain. Just a little pressure, a little tightness as the disease is worked out. Maybe a little moisture.”

  He brought his hands to her stomach, the tips of his fingers prodding at the flesh just underneath the towel. His left hand, the one closer to the audience, seemed to be doing more intricate motions, each finger articulating individual procedures, while the right clustered all four fingers to a point and thrust all of them into the crack under the towel together. Was he left handed? Decker had never paid attention to it.

  And lo! Let there be blood. Let there be a rivulet of red blood snaking away from the place where his hands worked, now pressing deeper into her belly.

  The crowd gasped.

  The preacher looked up a second, all surgical hand activity halting, and his brow crinkled as though annoyed with the distraction. The murmur died down, and he went back to it, the fingers of his left hand moving almost like they were playing some classical piano piece on her stomach.

  Decker looked upon the girl then, shifting his focus to her face and noting the terror in her eyes. She blinked non-stop, a little line of moisture trailing away from her eyelashes where a tear had fallen not long ago. There was nothing false in her expression or body language, he thought. She was either a great actress or this was genuine fear.

  He scratched his nose. That notion threw him a little. If she wasn’t in on the gag, did that mean… It couldn’t be real.

  Could it?

  Another tear welled at the corner of her eye, hanging on for three more blinks before it drained down her cheek, tracing down the wet line from before. Nobody was that good of an actress. Nobody.

  It dawned on him. They told her she had cancer. They had doctors or people pretending to be doctors examine her and give her the bad news. That way, when Ray “healed” her, she’d believe right along with everyone else. Even more so, probably. She’d become a symbol, an avatar championing his powers everywhere she went.

  The preacher’s body straightened then. His back stiffened, almost arching away from his hands which still twisted upon the girl’s abdomen, his fingers seeming to dip under her skin, blood smearing everywhere.

  “Here it comes,” the preacher said between gritted teeth.

  His hands worked together now, digging in the same small area. And then something was there, a fleshy object just seemed to appear, some hunk of purple meat that appeared to be attached to her, rooted inside of her. He tugged at it, one hand wrestled around the base of it, the other clawing the exposed tip, trying to grip it like the claw in one of those grabber machines full of shitty stuffed animals.

  The hunk of meat pulled free slowly, more and more of it stretching out of her, a quivering stringy looking thing. And then it snapped out, flinging upward like a rubber band. Fatty yellow lines ran down the purple piece of flesh.

  The preacher pulled a glass bowl out from under the table and plopped the purple meat into it. It stuck to the side and rolled down in slow mot
ion.

  “That’s cancer, folks.”

  The crowd erupted. Hoots and howls and applause. People clapping each other on the back.

  The man in white closed his eyes and raised his hand, bloody fingers facing all of them. Everyone fell quiet at once, a hushed reverence roiling in the air that even Decker found hard to deny.

  “I’m afraid there’s quite a bit more where that came from, but we’ll get it all. I promise you that.”

  He dipped his hands in the water again and reached under the table to dry them, elbows and shoulders jostling again. A little murmur of chatter followed his announcement, but the silence returned as soon as his hands went back to that bloody oval of flesh along the towel. His fingers scrabbled in the red again, painting and erasing lines on her belly over and over.

  And how the illusion worked suddenly occurred to Decker. He closed his eyes for a long moment and listened to that blood thrumming through his ears. When he opened them, he blinked a few times.

  And then he strode forward, pushing past the people in front of him, and pulling the axe free of the block on his way to the preacher’s table.

  He bobbed the axe in his hand a few times, getting a feel for its weight in his hands, then he hoisted it over his head.

  “Everybody get the fuck back.”

  Erin

  Moundsville, West Virginia

  266 days after

  Fingers wrapped around her arms. She let them. She didn’t fight. She couldn’t, even if she’d wanted to.

  Arms pulling her, lifting her. The disorienting feeling of not knowing if she was up or down. The warmth of someone else’s skin against her, the hardness of muscle and bone.

  Someone was carrying her. It was him. He’d gotten free from the zombies and free from the inferno of the house somehow, and he had come for her. Come to finish the job.