The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1.5) Read online

  When I opened my eyes, the light in the room had changed, going yellow. Bars of glow shined through the shades, striping his face in light and dark, half blocking him out. He licked his lips, tongue flicking in and out of the shadows.

  I brought my hands up to block him the rest of the way out, palms sliding over the rough of his five o’clock shadow, over the sweat slicked cheeks, fingers settling on the clammy skin of his eyelids. The hard bridge of his nose pressed into those meaty balls of muscle near my thumbs like a bird’s beak.

  He bucked his hips a few times, his pelvis thrusting as though to throw me off. I pressed harder on his face, thumbs seeming to disappear into those smile line folds along his nostrils. His torso wriggled, squirmed, and now he almost seemed more wormlike than snakelike, a slimy cylinder of thrashing flesh gripped between my thighs.

  And finally he bucked and just stayed up in that upright position, all rigid, pelvis arched above the rest of him, and then I saw those shark black pupils peering out at me between my fingers, and the permanent smile etched onto the mouth below the heels of my hands.

  I pulled back my hands, unveiling the scrunched up Halloween mask of a face, and then he grabbed me, one curled up arm unfurling, the hand latching onto my forearm and pulling me close. My face hovered just above that demented smile, close enough to see that his teeth had dried out from being exposed for so long. They looked like hunks of glossless porcelain.

  I yanked my arm against the clasp of his fingers, but he was too strong. His hands had stiffened to the point that they no longer felt like human flesh against my skin but something solid and dense and inflexible.

  I stopped fighting and looked upon him. My chest heaved, but his did not. He didn’t move at all now except for those black nothing eyeballs swiveling to stay latched onto me.

  I tried to jerk away one more time, and he pulled me closer still, and those dried out teeth opened up in slow motion until his maw gaped before me, a ropey string of saliva stretching between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Then I woke up.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  140 days after

  I still shudder when I remember the dream. Something about the series of images almost disturbs me more than actually witnessing Doyle’s death, but I’ve had no nightmares since then. No dreams at all that I’ve recalled.

  I’m burning through my wood faster than ever, but all I want to do is sleep and stare into the fire and forget it all. Forget who I am and all I’ve done.

  Whenever I lose focus, my gaze drifts to those blackened lines on the back of my hand. My eyes fix themselves upon the X like it’s an opening and they’ll see something through the cracks. Something important.

  The snow piles at the doors again. The flurries come off and on to stack more white on the ground, and the wind whips it around like it always does, sheets undulating and billowing in the air like white capes. I don’t think we’ve had this much accumulation before Christmas in years. Maybe ever. And it’s all for me, I guess.

  I realize now that Doyle wasn’t the antichrist. He couldn’t be.

  Because I am.

  The black on my hand is my mark finally coming clear to me, revealing my core truth. The poisoning all but proves it, doesn’t it?

  Even after all that’s come to pass, all the warnings I’d been given, I had my choice, my final chance to trust humanity, to trust Doyle, and I threw it away. I killed an innocent being, a man who had done nothing but help me.

  I’m not human. Not all the way. Some piece is missing. I can see that in a way, see how it was always so, see how I chose the path to cement it.

  I beg God to forgive me, but I know he can’t.

  Marissa

  Hialeah, Florida

  88 days before

  Candice and I stood in the waiting area, hospital workers bustling around us. I’d called my supervisor somewhere in there to tell him I was dealing with an emergency, though I don’t actually remember talking to him. It was a huge building, and we were several floors from where I worked. So strange to feel like foreigner, like a tourist in the same building in which I spent the bulk of my waking time.

  A game show flashed on the TV, a screaming girl trying to win a Hyundai Sonata, but I couldn’t pay attention, couldn’t even sit down without the jitters creeping into my legs and standing me back up involuntarily. So I stood, and I shifted my weight from foot to foot to satisfy that restless part of me that couldn’t keep still.

  A man in the waiting area with a white mustache flecked with black watched us, his eyes just barely visible through the glare on his glasses. Maybe I was just paranoid, but it felt like the other people waiting in this area were staring at us, too.

  I went to drum my fingers against my lips, another restless habit, I guess, but I stopped my hand just shy of making contact, remembering all of the blood just in time. Maybe that’s why they were staring. I leaned over to Candice and whispered.

  “Maybe we should wash up.”

  She looked down at her hands, nodded.

  We walked around the corner to the ladies’ room. The light was different in there, brighter and harsher, reflecting off of glossy tiles the off-white shade of a smoker’s teeth. The fluorescent bulbs buzzed above us as well, fizzy sounds like insects. I stood in front of the sink and watched the pink swirl off of my hands and spiral down the drain, the warm water something of a shock on my icy hands. It prickled at first, but then it felt good.

  I left them under the water even after the pink swirls were gone. I let my consciousness filter down to just the feeling of that warmth in my fingers, as much as I could, anyway. My eyes went half out of focus so every edge softened and smeared into everything else. My mind wandered over the thought that the temperature in human hands drops rapidly when adrenaline enters the bloodstream, that this was surely why my hands were so cold.

  A man’s throat cleared behind me, and my vision’s focus sharpened. I turned, the sound of the water slapping the porcelain ringing out behind me.

  I didn’t think much of it at first that the doctor standing there was wearing a mask, and I didn’t realize until later that he was keeping his distance on purpose, hovering in the doorway to the ladies’ room. He locked eyes with me, and I waited for him to say something, anything, to expound upon Tony’s condition, to give some clue as to what we were dealing with. Instead he jerked a thumb at Candice and me, and a group of people in Hazmat suits filed into the restroom to grab us.

  I held his gaze, though, even as the gloved hands closed around my triceps and latched onto that flap of flesh in each of my armpits.

  “What about my son? Is he OK?”

  I could see a puff of breath ripple along the surface of his mask.

  “The boy was dead by the time they wheeled him through the front door.”

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  142 days after

  I can’t sleep anymore. I lie here and stare into the fire. There is nothing else left.

  I will be out of wood in two days. Maybe three. I will not gather more. I will let go, let the cold do with me what it will.

  I think the spot on my hand is growing, bigger and blacker. I wonder sometimes if it will spread over my skin like burn marks, the flesh cracking to reveal the molten orange of hell inside me, the magma coursing all through me.

  I beg God to give me a sign, to give me any reason to carry on. I know it’s too late, that I am a wretched thing beyond redemption, but I beg anyway because there’s nothing else.

  What if this is hell? What if hell is an eternity alone in an empty world? The place where you dwell on your mistakes, your flaws, forever.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  144 days after

  The heavens opened, and the rains poured down, fat droplets rapping at the windows and beating on the roof. When the wind blew, raindrops angled onto the porch, the water exploding on impact, spraying everywhere.

  The temperature crept up and up, the snow sh
rinking away from the doors, the rain pummeling it, melting it one drop at a time. Steam rose off of the ground after a while, a fog that thickened like a wet blanket strung up in the air.

  The downpour stretched on for hours and hours, swelling at times and waning at others but never stopping entirely. It was hard to believe that the snow pile could shrink so much. Within a day, oblong patches of the asphalt and concrete had become visible. It could all be gone as early as tomorrow. It had never melted that quickly before that I could remember.

  I was glad, I realized, that none of my windows faced the woods. Where he lay, I mean. I could only imagine what the water and warmth would do to the corpse, the skin and muscle going pale gray and then liquefying and oozing away.

  Anyway, I didn’t take this mini-heat wave as a sign from God, exactly. Still, it would at least mean I wouldn’t freeze to death when the wood ran out. Not right away, anyhow.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  145 days after

  It’s gone. No more snow. The soggy grass lies flat, mashed to the ground by snow and rain and held down by the mud. A stream of runoff flows down the street still. I imagine the low lying areas toward town are flooded, though I have no plans to verify this theory.

  I sit and look out at the flattened grass now mostly beige, and I feel a pinch, a pull, a desire to move toward some conclusion. What will I do if no sign from God comes soon? Before I assumed that I would freeze within a few days, but the change in weather seems to have granted me a little more time. I’m not sure how to use it. I’m never sure what anything means anymore.

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  147 days after

  What if I’m just a sick animal? A creature shuffled into existence here by the random whims of evolution. Nothing more. An existence totally without inherent meaning, totally without purpose.

  What if there’s no antichrist? No God? What if it was all a lie that led me to this?

  What if I just pulled apart from reality at some point? A broken brain. Not right in the head. Even before the poisoning, maybe.

  The kind of person who wants to smother someone’s face during sex? Sounds like something an ape would do, doesn’t it? Like a lady praying mantis decapitating her mate. Sounds like an animal satisfying irrational impulses. Is that all there is? And what if those impulses are the normal part of me? The animal part of me that wants to survive and reproduce. Is that what the humanity in me is, with this consciousness serving as the intruder, the perversion? Certainly those impulses will carry on long after my stream of thoughts is extinguished. Whatever people that are left, they will eat and fight and fuck for as long as they can hang in there. They will serve those animal impulses until the end, while all of the individual selves die off, ultimately meaningless.

  Maybe the animal part is humanity and all of the rest is fluff, some high-minded delusion.

  I look at the black X on my hand. Is it some supernatural symbol? Or is it just a dark scabbed up patch of human flesh from getting wet and chapped out in the cold that happens to look a little strange? Which is more reasonable? Which do I even want to believe?

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  150 days after

  The cold returns, more bitter than before. More cruel. The winter cares not for the lives it takes, the baby mice and squirrels and raccoons that all go rigid by its hand. It thinks nothing of these things. It has no feelings. None at all.

  Frost lines every window, a smudged layer of ice on the inside, fogging up my view. I press my hand against the pane of glass to clear an area to look through, frigid drops of water rolling down the lengths of my fingers. The rectangles I open re-frost within an hour or so, though. I don’t think I’ll bother anymore.

  It must be below zero out there now, and it’ll be that much worse after dark. It seems colder without the snow, like the layer of white provides a little insulation. A blanket laid out on the ground to keep it a little warm, at least. The soil that was soggy yesterday now looks dry and cracked, white layers of frost cover every blade of grass. The texture of the white almost looks like fur or fuzz or mold. I crunch through it on my way to the well, and the cold makes my nostrils sting and itch like crazy the second I step into it. I spat to test it, and my spittle froze upon hitting the cement stoop by the back door.

  I’m down to my last two loads of wood, perhaps a few hours worth, and I can see my breath in here already, feel the sting of the cold in the tip of my nose.

  I could walk to Doyle’s, of course. He has a pile of wood, enough to get through the winter. I could either wheel some back here or just stay there.

  But I won’t do either of these things. I will stay the course here, wrap myself in blankets and see whether or not I survive the long, black night.

  Marissa

  Hialeah, Florida

  88 days before

  I guess that’s the end of the story, for the most part.

  I sat in isolation for a couple of hours before anyone would talk to me. I knew based on the ventilation system in my room that they feared the worst. Some airborne Ebola-type nightmare.

  I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the TV or touch the bottle of water they’d left for me on the nightstand. I sat on the edge of the hospital bed, that groggy feeling coming over me again like standing under a too-hot shower. And I think I spent much of that time thinking that it was all a mistake, thinking that I wouldn’t believe Tony was gone until I saw it for myself.

  But when one of the doctors that came by in a Hazmat suit and told me that Candice was sick, I knew it was real. It was all real. A couple of the nursing assistants that had wheeled Tony in were the next to fall ill, and the cop that helped us wasn’t long after. I’m sure there were more that they didn’t tell me about, maybe more that they didn’t even know of.

  All of these people died within 36 hours.

  I’m still here, though I don’t know why.

  They let me out of quarantine after four days. I think they needed the room for someone who was actually sick by then. They told me the CDC would be in touch since I seem to be immune, but so far that has just involved a physical and all these mandatory meetings with a shrink. No real medical tests. Nothing that seems to matter. Classic government bullshit, right?

  I never did see my boy again, either. They said his body was in quarantine at an undisclosed location for further study. The last time I saw him, strangers wheeled him away from me, and the hospital door swallowed him up.

  So yeah. That’s it, I think.

  How I feel in this moment: Some things are for no one to know. Just me. Is that OK? Or does the doctor really need me to parse the loss of my child even further?

  Fiona

  Beckley, WV

  151 days after

  The fire died just before dusk. I threw a few more balls of phone book paper in once the wood was down to glowing coals, watched them open like blooming flowers and burst into flames, but I figured it was a little pointless to burn paper just to keep that flicker of light going for a few more minutes. It produced very little heat, flaming out quickly. It was visually stimulating, sure, but it offered no real substance.

  The orange faded to black, and the little cracks and pops slowed and then stopped. No more smoke twirled up the chimney. No more light shined in the mouth of the stove. Not even a glimmer. The heat coming off of the metal faded to lukewarm.

  With the fire gone, I blew out the candles to let the dark close in. I don’t know why. To get it over with, maybe.

  Black obliged that wish, descending to vanquish the day. I watched through the window as the darkest shade swallowed up the gray, eliminating all light, outside and in. It was so much darker without that shimmery layer of snow like a giant mirror reflecting light everywhere.

  The cold followed the dark’s lead, though it came on slowly. The frost on the windows thickened, crystal shapes forming on the glass so it looked like a sheet of strange snowflakes growing there, or maybe like that fr
osty layer that forms on top of ice cream if it sits in the freezer too long.

  I pulled the blankets up to my neck and let my head nestle back into my pillows. My face remained in the open, however, exposed. I needed, somehow, to stare into the dark, as pointless as that may seem. I did so, open eyes gazing up into nothing, blinking every once in a while just to remind myself that I was real.

  I lied awake for what felt like a long time before the heaviness tugged at my eyelids. The temperature dropped in the room all the while. I could feel it on my ears and on the tip of my nose. I doubted it was even that late since the nights were so long now, but I wasn’t sure.

  Sleep settled upon me in time. Fitful sleep disturbed often by the cold. Not enough to draw me into a truly alert state, just a consistent disruption, a little shake that would pull me up to the surface, half-confused. I shivered all through the night, falling in and out of black dreams. The cold cinched around me, its grip crawling from my feet up into my legs and from my head down into the trunk of my body.

  I woke up in the black, my hands and face mostly numb, my legs lacking feeling from the toe to halfway up the calf. My torso was more cool than cold, but it was getting there, little by little.

  I fumbled in the dark for matches and lit a candle, a feat with numb fingers. It took more than a few tries. I had to trust the scrape of the match against the striking strip more than the feel, using my ears more than my hands or eyes.

  And now I sit here in the candle’s glow and write. The light flickers over the page, swelling and ebbing and changing its angle. The shadow from my pen shrinks and grows in unison with the flicker.

  Steam coils from my mouth if I direct my head toward the glow of the candlelight, almost seeming to congeal in the air. I imagine my breath freezing into those frosty crystals from the window, and then I imagine those pointed ice formations trailing from my mouth down my throat and into my lungs, all of the wet places, the mucus membranes, frosted over just like the glass.