The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1.5) Read online

  Beckley, WV

  138 days after

  My eyes snapped to that bandaged spot on the back of his right hand. Clean white gauze still occupied that square of his flesh, held down by a perimeter of medical tape. The mark. The mark of the beast. Could it still be real? Could this demon be torturing me? Making me feel guilty when he knows I shouldn’t?

  I squinted, as though I could look through the man, as though I could hold my eyes just right and see through his skin, see what was really going on in there.

  The notion that I was mistaken or morbid or insane still lingered, but I couldn’t know, could I? I couldn’t say with any certainty.

  He looked at me then, and his pupils had swollen into black pits, exaggerated and demonic and strange. This expression on his face seemed to convey equal parts fright and stimulation. Were these symptoms of the poison? Or was he morphing into his ultimate form in front of me?

  “Something isn’t right,” he said.

  He spoke between clenched teeth, and though his eyes still met mine, his neck tilted at an odd angle so it almost seemed like he was talking to the ceiling instead of me.

  “I’m cramping up. All of me. All of my muscles.”

  His feet curled under him, toes and ankles flexing so it almost looked like he was attempting to do the pointe technique in ballet, trying to stand up on his tiptoes.

  He fought against it, wriggling on the couch, strained noises torn from his throat and delivered through his clenched mouth. The muscles of his face tightened as he squirmed, eyebrows raising first, then his cheeks going taut, his lips pulling back to expose his teeth in a fixed, demented grin. It looked like when a dog’s lip gets caught in a way that exposes its front teeth, something off in the expression it created. Something a little dim and unintentional.

  To my surprise, he stood. His hands rubbed at his chest and his shoulders a moment, and then he walked to the other side of the living room. Jerky footsteps pounded on the floor and made the glass stand in the corner shake. It sounded like cutlery shaking around in a drawer pulled open too fast, all the forks and knives and spoons rattling against each other.

  He hesitated in the threshold between the living room and kitchen, his hands still feeling up and down his person. Spastic energy radiated from each of his movements, every step and gesture somehow twitchy, flickering, nervous looking.

  He turned back to look at me, those pools of black staring into my eyes like a wounded animal’s. His mouth still wore that dopey grin, but his eyes conveyed fright and injury and defeat all at once. Panic. And it struck me what a wretched creature a human could be, what loathsome, ugly beings we are, though I didn’t know if I thought this because of him or because of myself. Maybe it was both of us.

  His neck jerked, muscles convulsing, angling his head up toward the ceiling again. The muscle spasm turned his eyes away from mine and seemed to lock his head in place, chin jutting skyward. His eyes blinked a few times and swiveled within his motionless head so he looked like one of those creepy glass-eyed dolls.

  We made eye contact again, and he spoke through clenched teeth, his lips just faintly moving at all.

  “EpiPen.”

  “What?”

  “I must be having some kind of allergic reaction! Do you have an EpiPen?”

  “I’m not… Just… Let me look.”

  I rose and strode past him to the bathroom, legs jiggling beneath me like Jello. The shade grew stronger as I approached this part of the house, the little light slanting in from the hallway not helping me much, and my eyes wouldn’t get time to adjust. My fingers scrabbled along the cabinet door, struggling for a moment to find the knob. I opened it, the intertwined smells of soap and toothpaste greeting me. I could just make out the lighter rectangular shape within that I knew to be the first aid kit. I grabbed it and walked back to the living room.

  He still stood there in the same spot, fidgeting fingers picking at the seam at the bottom of his shirt. That unintentional smile seemed to have gained intensity. His lips pulled so taut that they flipped open a little along the edges like they were about to flip inside out, and those creases under his cheeks deepened to match them. His breathing took on a labored hiss, little flecks of spit throbbing between his teeth with each breath.

  Back in the light, I crouched and ripped open the first aid kit. I moved with urgency as though this might actually help him. My fingers picked and poked through alcohol and gauze tape and little pill bottles and utensils until I found the cylinder marked epinephrine auto-injector.

  “Here.”

  I handed it over and he popped the blue safety lid off. He held the tip of it just shy of his neck and paused.

  “Neck, right?”

  “What?”

  “Do I jam this into my neck or what?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you did it in your leg.”

  An angry sigh whistled between his teeth, and he turned the pen sideways to read the fine print on it. Those demon pupils stared at the pen, his eyes going crossed and uncrossed in little twitches. He leaned into the candlelight, slowly bringing the cylinder close enough to almost touch the tip of his nose, and after a beat tried moving it farther out, almost arm’s length.

  “I can’t.”

  He tossed the pen to me, and I wasn’t ready for it, so it ricocheted off my arm and skittered across the floor into the kitchen.

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I can’t read the fucking thing! It’s all blurry and shit.”

  I stooped to pick up the EpiPen and brought it close to read those tiny letters.

  “It says to place the black tip against the fleshy portion of your outer thigh. You may give the injection directly through your clothing.”

  He poised his right hand near his thigh, curling his fingers as though they held the pen. My eyes flitted to that bandaged spot on the back of his hand for a beat before they flicked back to skim to the next pertinent bit of instruction.

  “’With a quick motion, push the auto-injector firmly against your thigh. This will release the spring-loaded needle that injects the dose of EpiPen. Hold the auto-injector in place for a few seconds after activation.’”

  I looked up at him.

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  I tossed the pen, which he caught and injected in one motion. It snicked as it met his thigh, and he held it there, a strange projectile tube with its head smothered in the leg of his jeans.

  I hated to see him, to gaze upon him, to know the havoc I’d wreaked. The look on his face was so demented, like some awful subhuman beast in an old monster movie.

  But it would all be over soon, I thought.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  138 days after

  It wasn’t over soon. At all. It went on for hours. His body contorted, head, neck, and back arching, all of the muscles of his torso turned to cords, to pieces of rope that pulled him as hard as they could, tried their best to bend his spine the wrong way. In time, his legs stiffened as well and stuck straight out like tree branches, his toes still curling in on themselves.

  We sat on the love seat. I held his hand and rubbed his chest with my other hand. I didn’t know what else to do. A fevered feeling settled upon me, a heat that somehow detached me from this moment. I talked to him, said soothing words, caring words, like a nurse, like a mother, but most of me was somewhere else, somewhere far away.

  He made noises, but he hadn’t spoken actual words in a while now. I didn’t think he could speak with the way the muscles of his face had twisted up. He looked more like a Halloween mask than a man by this time, like some gruesome special effects makeup. Something designed to frighten small children, to spoil their dreams.

  “You’ll be OK,” I said. “Just try to stay calm, baby. You’re having some kind of seizure, but it will pass if you keep calm.”

  He moaned a little, drool spilling out of one side of his mouth. The fear was evident in his face even with the skin pulled so tight t
hat he barely looked human.

  His eyes looked to be all pupil now. The blackest, deadest holes like those of a shark, I’d say, if he didn’t look so scared.

  Something about the way he stiffened made it seem like he was turning to wood, muscles hardening into fibrous, grained lumber. He tried to thrash against it, tried to stave off the growing rigidity with flailing and stretching and squirming, but his range of motion tightened and tightened until the best he could muster was the faintest quiver.

  Pulling on his arm really did feel like pulling a tree limb. It was hard, but not entirely inflexible like steel. It had that little give to it, like pulling a maple branch and letting it snap back.

  And I rubbed his chest some more, and I told him that he would be OK, but I knew he wouldn’t. He would never be OK.

  His body trembled, my hand vibrating where it rested on his sternum. His breathing was uneven now, and soon those neural pathways from his brain to his lungs would get crushed by these rigid muscles to the point that his respiration cut off. He would die here, contorted, paralyzed, unable to breathe and fully conscious all the while, just like the rats up above the ceiling in the garage.

  And all I could do now was hold my palm to his chest and feel his body shake, a haphazard tremor that seemed to convey great force. I hoped that it offered him some comfort, at least.

  Time passed. I don’t know how long. I zoned out for a while, staring off at nothing until his breathing changed.

  Breaths jerked in and out of him in uneven bursts, sometimes cutting out for a good 20 seconds or more before resuming. His back and neck arched as far as they would go, curling his body closer and closer to the shape of a capital letter C. The angles of everything made it look that much more grotesque, like something you might find at the scene of car crash.

  His chin tucked into the top of his collar bone and just kept inching back until it was like his head was almost behind him, almost under him, too, in fact, as his pelvis arched up above the rest of him. His arms bent up against his torso, muscles all knotted up.

  The breathing cut out again and stayed out, stayed silent. I heard one little throat noise. A click. That was all the effort he could muster.

  His body shook more violently, chest quaking for what felt like a long time but was probably only a minute or so. He looked like a stretched out spring about to break.

  And then the motions cut off, and he was still. He was dead.

  Marissa

  Hialeah, Florida

  88 days before

  The traffic parted before us like the Red Sea. The siren screamed and everyone got the eff out of the way, cars and trucks and vans drifting off to the sides. It was a good feeling.

  We roared the final blocks to the hospital in a dead straight line like a dragster at top speed, and my blood thrummed in my ears, and pins and needles throbbed in my hands. I could barely hear Tony’s breath over the engine, but it was there, so I knew he would make it.

  The hospital took shape to our left, a towering brick building with ornate spires that made it look like a handful of churches stuck together rather than a medical building. I drove there most every day and never looked at it, but now I was, and it was immense and impressive. Regal, maybe. It sat back from the road, a grass field and a large parking lot lying between us and the front doors. Walls of stone the size of bowling balls surrounded both, piling up into gates around the driveway.

  The cop car jutted through the gates and into the lot, the siren’s wail seeming to elongate as it changed directions and moved away from us. I followed after a beat, and we zoomed to the front of the building, flying past the grass and the cars, the red and blue lights twirling over all of it.

  My heart shimmied up into my neck as we wound around the curved drive to the front doors. Everything in my throat squeezed, and blood flowed all through me, squishing a fevered, red feeling up into my face. Something like standing too long in direct sunlight and growing dizzy.

  Time seemed fast and slow at the same time. The cop car jerked to a stop, and the officer ran inside for help. Candice and I released our seatbelts and got out in unison, opening up the back doors and pulling a limp Tony free. I grabbed his ankles and pulled while she lifted his shoulders, the bloody blankets falling away to reveal a scrawny pale boy gone purple around the eyes, his neck limp, his mouth dangling open. I saw him blink once, or I might have thought we were too late.

  When we turned around, the cop was already there with nurses and a stretcher, and they grabbed my boy and flipped him onto the gurney, his arms and legs flopping like noodles. Candice and I stood shoulder to shoulder as we passed him off. The people must have been chattering and yelling around us, but I heard none of these things. I heard my pulse in my ears, that beat and swish of the blood flowing through me.

  I stood and watched them wheel him away, watched the automatic doors open like a mouth to swallow him up, watched them disappear, the door closing behind them.

  The pins and needles in my hands crawled up my arms and swelled in my chest.

  We made it. We actually made it.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  138 days after

  I dragged the body out into the snow, as stiff as a statue. He was heavy, a load to move, but in some way I thought his stiffness might have been making him easier to maneuver than a limp corpse would have been.

  Burying him wasn’t really an option with the snow and the ground probably frozen, but I got him out into the edge of the woods. That felt like he wasn’t completely exposed, completely left out in the open, at least, I thought.

  I stood over the corpse, the arched body face down in the white, the hair ruffled on the back of his head. It seemed like something should happen, something dramatic, something emotional, but nothing did. I’d waited all that time that I sat with Doyle, I knew, for my feelings to bubble up from my subconscious, waited for the involuntary reaction to occur so I would know how to feel about it all, but nothing ever came. I remained numb, listless, shocked.

  I realized that the strychnine didn’t feel like something I did, something I caused. It just felt like something that happened. Something that was over now. Some fact of the universe to be merely observed, not judged.

  I walked back to the house, following that weird, uneven trail in the snow where I’d dragged the curled up body. I looked out over the emptiness in the distance, the stark landscape, the untouched snow in all directions for as far as I could see. The wind howled, and the powder kicked up everywhere, sheets of it moving in diagonal lines in the air around me. It was so quiet just then, and somehow it seemed colder than ever, lonelier than ever.

  So maybe I didn’t cry. Maybe I didn’t scream, didn’t wail, didn’t throw a tantrum.

  But the world sure seemed quieter now, and it sure seemed empty as hell.

  As soon as I made it back inside, I went to work on the fire, building it up and up, a teepee of split logs nestling over flaming balls of phone book paper. The orange brightened when the wood caught. The warmth grew and grew until the heat surrounded me, seeming to compress my ribcage, to press itself deeper and deeper into the flesh of my face, so hot I could imagine blisters forming on my cheeks and lips, my skin frothing up like spit bubbles. I could even see the shimmer of heat distortion in the air around the stove, every line becoming a squiggle.

  I didn’t mind the heat, though. I wanted it. I wanted physical sensations strong enough to make me forget. It just made sense to me in that moment. Forget all of this and feel the warm surrounding me, enveloping me, swallowing me away from the empty world for a while.

  All of the chapped places ached from my time out in the cold with the body. My lips stung, the cracks probably bleeding again. My hands hurt worst of all, though. I held them up, examined the way the lines on my palms had gone white and crusty. I balled my fingers up into fists and released a few times, watching those cracked lines in my hand crease and wrinkle like the edge of a sheet of paper.

  And then I turne
d them over. The left hand looked normal, all things considered. Areas of my skin flaked here there and one spot went a little pink and scabby, the irritated flesh pocked with tiny red spots.

  A black wound marred my right hand, though. A matte black X that looked wrong entirely, more like ash than any skin or scab I’d ever seen, like the burned out coals left at the bottom of the stove. I squinted, trying to see the wound better. I felt as though I couldn’t quite focus on it, couldn’t quite see it correctly, but narrowing my eyes didn’t seem to help at all.

  I lowered my hand, the black mark drifting out of my view, and I stared into the fire. Just forget it. Forget all of it.

  The flames curled around the wedges of wood, hugging them with orange arms. I focused on the flicker, on the heat once more biting at my face.

  I closed my eyes, the warmth gripping my eyelids right away, and I could still sense the fire’s glow fading and swelling in the stove. I let my mind drift, totally blank. In a way it felt like standing under the shower, the hot water soothing me, the heat in the air in a cloud around me, the atmosphere almost thick with warm.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  139 days after

  I dreamed of Doyle, of me on top of him, our hearts thudding, our bodies moist with sweat, my skin against his. The dark did not shroud him this time, though, did not cast shadows that reduced him to a masculine silhouette. I saw him as he was. As flesh and blood. As a stubbled jaw and wet eyes. As a man.

  He moved strangely, though. A fluidity marked his movements, a liquid quality to the squirm of his chest and shoulders and neck. But the heat filled my face and melted such thoughts from my brain.

  And I leaned back to tower over him again, to feel that power once more. And I felt the chill where the air touched my skin as our torsos parted, felt his eyes on my body, his hands on my body. My eyelids narrowed to slits and then closed, and I felt him writhing under me, slithering even, something serpentine in his motions.