The Scattered and the Dead [Book 2.6] Read online

  Contents

  Title & Copyright

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  Erin

  Jeremiah

  The Scattered and the Dead

  THE SCATTERED AND THE DEAD

  Book 2.6

  Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus

  Copyright © 2018 Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus

  Smarmy Press

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Jeremiah

  Rural Maryland

  10 years, 38 days after

  When I close my eyes, I still see it. The blood. The wounds. The human body with its insides taken out. Guts all strewn through the branches of a bush.

  Just the thought makes my throat tighten up as though to vomit. Makes my insides flex and squish and cinch up.

  I can’t sleep with that horror show projected on the insides of my eyelids, of course. Not even close. I volunteered to do a double shift on watch. Let the others sleep, if they can. That’s the way I figure it. Jenkins was happy enough to oblige my request.

  Makes no difference to me.

  I’m sitting next to the fire now, scrawling in a notebook. The night hangs thick around me, cool and heavy with wet, and the crickets chirp endlessly all around. The other men sleep in the tents that form a crooked circle off to one side of the fire.

  That’s the one thing I’ll say for Captain Peters. He made sure our platoon had a bunch of paper and functioning pens — fresh packs of blue BICs that look like they should be hanging in a display at Wal-Mart instead of out here in the woods. He said we’re going to see some shit out here, some awful shit, but that writing it down would help.

  And some part of me believes what he said. Some part of me thinks that writing it down really will help, really will get it out for keeps. If I put it on the page, lay it all out just the way it happened, it won’t be a mess of abstract thoughts in my head anymore. It’ll be a story written in a notebook. Something that lives in the concrete world, entirely outside of my brain, outside of my memories.

  So here I am. Reporting for writing duty. Private Jeremiah Chen. Sir, yes sir and all that shit.

  Maybe it’ll work, this writing thing. Maybe not.

  Either way, I should start from the beginning.

  We patrolled at dawn. I don’t know what for. I never know what for. Dawn is better than night, I guess.

  Wait. Let me clarify that.

  The whole platoon headed out as though for combat. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think the lieutenant is all there. It’s a whole Don Quixote playing army type of deal. We all just go along with it.

  Anyway, we trudged through the thick grass, field after field of it, dew moistening my shoes and socks until my ankles were soggy.

  It was our fourth day camping in this location, and our fifth time walking this route. This was the longest we’d stayed in one area, so the terrain was beginning to look familiar. That conjured a new feeling. Usually everything seemed so alien, so threatening. By comparison this march was almost relaxing.

  Almost.

  The first thing we came upon were the dead zombies. All the way dead, I should say. The corpses lay in the ditch on the side of the road, three of them kind of stacked there in a haphazard pile as though they’d been tossed. Someone had sliced them up pretty good, heads and limbs dangling by the thinnest threads of flesh, white bone glinting through the slashed places, pearly like teeth.

  The stench of death was unreal. Like roadkill, I suppose, but hundreds of pounds of it. An earthy smell intermingled with the odor of rotten meat, like when dead leaves reach that point of breaking all the way down, reverting to rich black soil.

  “Jenkins,” the platoon leader bellowed. “You wanna come have a look?”

  Jenkins is older. He’s the one guy we all look up to, I guess. He’s smart. Or he wears glasses, at least. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

  A ripple formed in the pack of men as Jenkins picked his way toward the front. The disturbance worked its way on the diagonal from left to right. Bodies shifted. Shoulders turned. At last, he appeared.

  He looked older than I remembered. Gray hair and whiskers marbled the once dark stuff on his cheeks and head, gone all the way white in places. And he looked tired as hell. The creases in his face gone hard and severe, like the lack of sleep folded his skin and pressed it pretty good.

  He moved slowly despite all eyes being trained on him. Walked to where the bodies lay. Knelt.

  The daylight glared rounded shapes in the lenses of his glasses as he’d made his way over, so I couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t get a sense of his expression.

  Now his back faced the crowd, and his head tilted toward the pile of gore before him. Apart from the hand stroking at his jaw, he didn’t move.

  No one spoke for a long time. A religious hush fell over the lot of us, breaking up at last when the platoon leader cleared his throat.

  “Do you think it’s them? Their work?”

  Jenkins turned. Stood. His face was blank. Hard to read.

  “Could be.”

  They didn’t speak what we all knew. Not explicitly. The bodies hadn’t been there when we’d patrolled this route some 14 hours earlier, near dusk. Finding one dead zombie might not mean much. But three? Carved up like this? Thrown together in a pile? It meant Crusaders had probably been through here, and they could still be near. That was the most logical explanation, anyhow.

  A voice spoke up from the back of the pack. I think it was Smitty.

  “Should we burn them?”

  “No,” Jenkins said. “The smoke. Someone could see. That’s bad for business.”

  “Bad for business?” Smitty said, the confidence leaking out of his voice with each syllable.

  Jenkins stood as he answered him.

  “I reckon Crusaders swarming this valley wouldn’t be conducive to our survival. And that’s one thing I have observed about death — it’s generally bad for business.”

  No one spoke as Jenkins picked his way back through the crowd, the walls of humanity closing behind him, hiding him among the shoulders.

  “We’ll send word up the chain,” the platoon leader said.

  This was what he always said. Like it might do some good to send word to the higher-ups. Like any of this might mean anything at all.

  Intestines. The gutworks. Tubes of flesh wrapped around the bare branches of a bush, strung all through them like Christmas lights.

  That’s what we found at the little farmhouse not more than a mile from where the pile of zombies lay. And these weren’t from a zombie body. They were still fresh.

  Flies swirled around them — the innards, I mean — filthy little insects up to their elbows in gore. Loving every minute of it.

  Up close, the brown purple color of the flesh came clear. The guts looked more like something you’d find in the sea. Some awful creature that wraps itself around the coral. An ever-expanding parasite. Catching things in its tendrils and sucking the li
fe out of ‘em.

  We followed the trail of guts around the side of the barn, and there he was. A teenage boy from the looks of it. Maybe sixteen.

  His scrawny frame was nailed to the gray planks of wood that made up the side of the barn. Railroad spikes driven into him, holding him upright, something strangely slack in his carriage.

  The spikes entered him at each elbow, so his upper arms splayed out from the body. The forearms, legs, and neck were left limp, though. Dangling. Head all leaned forward. With that strange posture, he looked like a scarecrow. A floppy thing, almost comical.

  Except his guts were all ripped out, gaping walls of red meat left in the middle of him. A vacancy.

  And words popped into my head at the sight of this empty space: Body cavity. Abdomen.

  Looking lower… Well, it took a second for me to make sense of what I was seeing when I looked lower.

  His genitals had been removed. Cut out. A ragged wound left in their position. Slightly indented. A cupped place — all red and jagged — where his manhood had been.

  No stump. No remnant. No sign that there’d even been anything there at all.

  A couple of the men stutter-stepped back from the sight of him, turning on their heels and walking away, but most of us stayed. We didn’t say anything. We barely even breathed.

  Whoever had done it had left a message, beyond the one written in his skin. The words were smeared up above him, scrawled in his blood in spiked, angry letters.

  “For father.”

  Erin

  Ripplemead, Virginia

  1 year, 296 days after

  Kelly-

  I know what you’re thinking. “Erin, why are you still writing to me when there’s pretty much a 99.999% chance that I’m dead just like everyone else?”

  Well, I don’t know. Maybe because there are so many people I know that are definitely 100% dead that I cling to that tiny shred of hope that you’re out there somewhere.

  Maybe it’s just the Roanoke connection.

  Remember how we found that book in the library in seventh grade? I think it was called Unsolved Mysteries of American History or something like that. It was the one with stories about Amelia Earhart and D.B. Cooper and so on. And one of the stories was about the colony in Roanoke that vanished.

  Well, in an ironic twist of fate, the colony of Roanoke lives again! Except I’m talking about the town in Virginia, not the island in North Carolina.

  My point is, there’s a settlement. As in people. In large numbers. You could almost call it a city, I suppose. But no one does. It is The Settlement. And that’s where Izzy and I are headed.

  Why would I do such a thing, you ask, especially when I am clearly dreading it so much?

  Supplies, my friend. Specifically, antibiotics.

  See, when we first crossed paths with Marissa, I was in pretty bad shape. My leg hadn’t fared too well after that tangle with the bear trap. And then it got infected. We had some antibiotics, but Marcus and I didn’t really know what we were doing. So by the time Marissa found us, I was in the early stages of sepsis. I don’t even really remember it, because I was delirious with fever.

  Luckily, Marissa is a nurse. Or was a nurse. Either way, she had a ton more meds than we did, and she knew exactly what kinds and what doses to give me to turn the infection around. She also reset my leg, which is good because I find the ability to walk to be a handy skill.

  So after all that, we’re low on antibiotics. “Dangerously low” is the term Marissa uses. Frequently.

  She and I already made the trip once, back in March, but apparently there’d been a flu going around the area, so we were only able to scrounge up half a bottle of Amoxil. Not enough, Marissa says. Kristoff and Mia told us we’d have better luck if we came back when the weather is nicer so the scavengers have a chance to venture farther out.

  It’s about 55 miles from our place in Ripplemead to Roanoke. In a few minutes, as soon as the sun starts to peek out over the tops of the trees, we’ll leave this place behind and begin our journey.

  Like an idiot, I kept myself awake all last night, convinced I was forgetting something. I couldn’t stop going over the checklist in my head, telling myself there was something missing.

  Food and water for the journey… check.

  Sleeping bags, rain gear, two tarps, extra clothes in case we get wet… check.

  Pistol (and a box of ammo), hunting knife… check.

  Lighter, matches, packet of dry kindling, zip ties, multitool, screwdrivers… check.

  The trade goods… check. (It would be pretty dumb if I forgot those.)

  And lastly, in case we need to do any on-the-fly bike repair: spare tubes, tire levers, patch kit, pump, chain tool and chain joining links… check.

  I tossed and turned for two or three hours before I finally got up and went over my pack again by candlelight. It was only when I unrolled my tool kit that I finally figured it out. Scissors. I hadn’t packed any scissors.

  So simple. So stupid.

  I tiptoed around the house in search of a pair. I checked the kitchen, the desk in the living room, even the toolbox. Nothing. Nobody ever puts the damn scissors back when they’re done with them. Not even me.

  I turned half the house upside-down before I finally found a pair in the garage. Right next to where I’d found the scissors was a stack of several rolls of duct tape, and I realized I hadn’t packed any of that either.

  You’d think that figuring these things out would have eased my mind, but no. It only made me wonder what other essentials I’d forgotten. I grabbed a roll of duct tape, whirled around, and almost had a heart attack when I saw the dark silhouette of a man standing in the doorway, watching me.

  He stepped forward, features sharpening in the light from my candle.

  It was Marcus, of course.

  “Goddamn it, you scared me!”

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked, not looking at all apologetic. “It’s not even close to daylight yet. You need to sleep.”

  “I forgot scissors. And duct tape. And probably other things.”

  He followed me across the garage to where my bike stood ready for the journey. I tucked my precious finds into one of the panniers, and before I knew it, I was going over everything again, touching the spokes and the chain and the trailer to make sure I hadn’t missed something else in my preparations.

  Marcus took me by the arm and tugged me gently toward the house.

  “That’s enough. Come back to bed.”

  “I know, but I just want to be sure.”

  “You’ve gone over it a hundred times.”

  “But what if I forgot something else?” I whispered at him as he pulled me into the house and upstairs. “Or what if I don’t bring something because I think we won’t need it, but then we do? What if there’s a freak snowstorm? I didn’t pack heavy coats.”

  Marcus nudged me into bed before blowing out the candle and crawling in after me.

  “It’s not going to snow.”

  “It could. I’ve seen it snow in May before.” I sighed. “I miss the Weather Channel.”

  We were quiet for a minute, but my eyes stayed wide open. Staring at the sliver of moonlight coming through the window curtains.

  Marcus rolled closer and wrapped an arm around me.

  “I think I should go with you.”

  I probably went a little rigid at that, but I tried to keep my voice composed.

  “No. You and Marissa have all the corn, squash, and beans to plant. And the tilling.”

  “Izzy can do it. She won’t be as fast as me, but that’s OK. I should be the one going. The one there watching your back.”

  There was silence as various horrible scenarios ran through my mind.

  “I’m not an idiot, Erin. I know there’s another reason you don’t want me to go. But you won’t say. What is it?”

  I sighed. I hadn’t wanted him to know. Wanted to protect him from the cruelty of this new world forming around us.

/>   “The fucking Storm Squadron,” I said, not really meaning to say it out loud. But there it was.

  “Who?”

  “It’s one of the raider gangs.”

  “I figured. But why them in particular?”

  “Storm Squadron, Marcus,” I said, emphasizing the words. “As in SS? They’re Nazis.”

  “Oh,” Marcus said, and then he said it again, as if another layer of understanding had descended upon him.

  It was that second Oh that I’d been trying to avoid all this time. Because I know that a little piece of Marcus’ innocence left over from Before died right then. And I’d wanted to keep it. Maybe that was selfish. Keeping it from him, I mean. He has a right to know the facts of our reality. But I just couldn’t do it.

  Finally, after digesting it for some time, he said, “You really think they still care about that stuff?”

  “I know they still care about that stuff.”

  It had been almost three months since Marissa and I made the first journey to the settlement in Roanoke. And just as clearly as if I were standing there now, I could see the massive white oak that stood just outside the settlement in my mind’s eye. It was a striking tree all on its own. One of those 300-year-old behemoths with a base so wide you could carve it out and live inside if you wanted.

  But it wasn’t so much the tree that had burned itself in my mind. It was what swayed from one of the lower boughs. Two bodies: Naked. Mutilated. Rotting.

  I heard my voice start to tell the story then, but it didn’t feel like I was saying the words. I was numb all over. Detached.

  “We saw the bodies hanging from the tree on the way in. Heard in town that the lynching had happened only a few days before.”

  “They were black?”

  “The woman was. The man was white.”

  “Well how… I mean… Are you sure it was a race thing?”

  “They’d carved the N-word into the woman’s chest. On the man, they’d written the same, but added Lover.”

  He went quiet again. I turned over so I could see him. Pulled him close.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.