The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (6 page)

In one apartment, I took one of those expensive bikes and a pair of shoes that were my size. They weren’t still in the box, but still, they look like they were never worn. Jackpot, dude.

Today I realized that I will spend the rest of my life looking for shoes my size. They won’t manufacture them any time soon, I figure, nor will the ones I’m wearing last forever. So if and when I happen upon them, it will be a big deal.

I bet there are other such items that I am still taking for granted even now, things that haven’t occurred to me yet, things that I won’t appreciate until they’re dead and gone and can’t come back.

22 days after

Today is the day. I will leave this apartment building for the first time since the EMP, since society fell to tattered pieces in the dirt. I will push through the front door and walk out to the sidewalk, to the place where the bodies sprawl and shrivel on the concrete. My machete will dangle at the end of my arm, its blade freshly sharpened. The key to my storage unit will hang from a string at my neck. I know I won’t get out that way until I find a car, but I want to have the key with me just in case.

I’ll be heading out at dusk, figuring it best to travel in the open when the light diminishes and the shadows get longer, at least for now. For today, I think I’ll just have a look around, maybe walk down a few blocks and back. But looking ahead, I’ll need to either find a water source or some kind of transportation that can take me to water. To a new home, most likely, where water is abundant.

I guess imminent death was that push I needed to finally make the move from my crappy studio apartment to a house. Who knew?

22 days after

I can’t sleep. Totally wired from walking around out there. There’s something crazy about having a whole city to yourself. It’s lonely on a level that becomes stimulating, mentally and physically. My mind races from thought to thought even now, and I got this tingling in my gut to the point of nausea while I was out there, a feeling that is only now beginning to fade.

I’m sure other people are out there somewhere, tucked away in hiding places like my own. I mean, they must be. But walking around town, it feels like running into them would be about as likely as running into a bear in the woods. Not impossible, but not too likely, either.

My footsteps clattered on the sidewalk and echoed all around me, a scuff and slap rhythm that repeated itself in the off beats. More bodies sprawled here and there. I didn’t want to look. I figured I’d seen enough of that. I just gave them as wide of a berth as I could and pressed on.

There were other signs of destruction, too, though. I walked past a liquor store with the windows smashed out and an empty diner that looked like it’d been partially burned. I decided not to investigate anything too thoroughly for now, just a little walk. I imagine that once I work up to it, I’ll be able to pick some good stuff from the wreckage pile.

When it started to get dark I turned back. It was full on night as I arrived, and I got this uncontrollable urge to lie down on the street, so I did that in front of my building.

The cool of the asphalt reached through my shirt and pressed itself into my skin. I stayed there for a long time, the chill creeping deeper and deeper into my flesh.

The buildings stretched up away from me, appearing bigger than ever, becoming shapeless in the lack of light, and I looked past them into the stars. The night was especially clear, and there seemed more stars than ever. Maybe because all of the streetlights and fast food signs weren’t competing with them anymore. Either way, a million little pin pricks of light shone in the sky, the same stars that hung up there all the while. Everyone I’d ever known and everyone they’d ever known and so on throughout all of human history had gazed upon these same stars. Something about that seemed strange. Everyone dies, and the stars never even blink.

23 days after

I walked through the city during full daylight for the first time. After so long looking down from my window, it felt weird to be on the ground looking up. The buildings stood so tall, made me feel so small and vulnerable. Insignificant. I think the emptiness, the quiet, enhanced the effect. The ever present smell of smoke didn’t help the uneasy atmosphere, either, especially since that was something new, and I couldn’t figure out where the hell it was coming from.

The sun wasn’t quite up when I set out, though. I walked the streets in that gray stage just before the dawn makes its appearance, retracing my path from last night. Thick air filled my lungs, cooler and more humid than it’d been the night before. It almost felt wet where it touched my skin. The quiet seemed different, too. More intense. More dead.

I poked my head into the big broken window at the liquor store, finding its shelves picked clean entirely aside from a display of air fresheners shaped like pine trees and a bunch of tattered beer posters scattered around on the floor. I suppose there were a lot of broken bottles around, too, intermingled with the bits from the windows.

I grabbed a handful of the air fresheners. With all of these rotting bodies around, I thought maybe they could be useful, though I don’t love the odor of them to be honest. In fact, I wound up leaving them in the hall rather than bringing them in to stink up my apartment with fake pine smell.

The diner matched the starkness of the liquor store with the added strangeness of everything around the front door being melted and blackened. The wood on one side of the checkout counter had burned out and collapsed so the whole thing sloped on a ridiculous angle with the cash register and credit card machine having slid down into the fire, the plastic weeping and re-hardening into deformed versions of the originals, both covered in soot.

I reached the end of the route I’d walked last night and decided to keep going. It felt so strange to be in the open, to feel the air move against my nose and cheeks.

I could feel the silence quivering in the center of my chest. It felt like when loud music rattles your sternum, somehow the lack of sound achieving the same effect, though I suppose the cause was mental, not physical. Either way, it’s an overwhelming sensation. A thing shaking the core of your body, making you feel flimsy and small.

I came to the edge of a hill, and the view opened up to show the road sloping down into the valley where the rest of the city resided. It felt like I could see forever, rows of houses and chain restaurants and the bigger office buildings downtown.

I stopped and watched for a long time as the day grew brighter and brighter, as the sun came out and drained the gray out of everything, bringing it all back to full color little by little.

Every breath felt cool in my throat, and my heart sped up, and my eyes shifted to take in every nook and cranny along the horizon.

Nothing moved. Nothing. The cars stood still, and the bodies held still, and no smoke twirled at the chimneys, no lights shone in the windows.

The walk home was lonesome as hell.

27 days after

I find that when I’m home I have a hard time sitting still. I pace and twitch and play with the storage unit key dangling at my neck. My mind won’t rest. It wants to go back out and walk around. It wants to feel the open air against my flesh, feel the asphalt just faintly give beneath my feet.

More than anything, it craves the images out there. New images. New material. New vantage points. It craves fresh rows of still cars and new rotting bodies splayed on the ground. It craves that glimpse of buildings rising up above me, ones that I’ve yet to pass by.

I wonder if maybe we all crave new images and always have. Before all of this, we could watch a movie to see something new, some picture we’d never seen before. And we’d line up around the block at the theatre to do that together. Before movies, we could view art. Paintings and sculptures that took pictures out of the artist’s head and manifested them before us in precise color and shape and texture. Going tens of thousands of years back, we could draw and look upon cave paintings or those first crude sculptures of large breasted women.

So yeah, I think that desire for new images is some core piece of who we are. Some primal human urge.

But now I have little new to look upon. I see my city dead. That is the only new image available to me. Gore. Decay. Everything I’ve ever known crumbling away, the broken pieces drying out on the side of the road.

28 days after

Please help me find someone. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to be alone forever.

30 days after

I walked in the rain, the water pelting my forehead, trickling down the back of my neck. Black clouds blocked the pre-dusk sun, casting thick shade in its place. But the lightning flashed to break up the endless shadow, and the thunder cracked and rolled down the street toward me like a gigantic invisible bowling ball.

I knew that I should be looking for something specific – a water source or a functioning car that I could use to get to my storage unit or perhaps a gun to upgrade my weaponry -- but I made no effort in these regards. I wandered. I looked at the city, soaking in the sights and sounds and smells. It was all I could think about, all I could do.

I could feel how wide open my eyes were, could feel my feet shuffling beneath me, taking choppy steps that slid the soles of my shoes over the wet asphalt with a scuffing sound. I guess I was too distracted by the new terrain around me to pay attention to my walking.

I watched the lightning flicker on the stone facade of the apartment building above me. One second everything looked dark gray, swathed in the gloom. The next, the lightning flashed, and I saw the shade of the sandy brown stone, little flickering flashes and shadows dancing everywhere upon it.

As I moved into downtown, the apartments thinned out, and the corporate office buildings rose up above everything, a bunch of phallic symbols reaching their shafts toward the sky. Most of the skyscrapers in downtown Pittsburgh look like they were built in the eighties to me. They have those shimmering mirror-like sides, like you could flip the whole thing sideways and snort coke off of it in a pinch. I’m not even certain what that building material is, the reflective facade, but it looks like something that Donald Trump would have called “tremendous.”

Even if they weren’t my taste architecturally, there was something awe-inspiring about watching the lightning reflect off these shiny towers. I craned my neck to look upon the rippling electric flashes as they shot down the giant mirror to my left, an intense burst of light and speed, and the thunder followed close behind, throttling me, and the hair follicles tingled all over my body, and I felt like a tiny thing at nature’s whim entirely.

33 days after

I finally saw a living being today. If you don’t count bugs and birds, it was the first in I-don’t-know-how-many days, but quite a few. Too many for my sanity, I think.

It was wet again, the ground slicked with rain and every pothole turned into a mouth full of water. My feet kicked up strings of spatter with each step, flinging wet off of the toes of my shoes so a constant spray moved along in front of me.

I follow my whims when I walk now, never choosing a destination, never possessing a particular goal, just wandering. I veered off of the street to walk down an alleyway running behind some big, older looking houses. Fancy places, most of them. The whole neighborhood seemed to have an interesting dark palette in terms of paint color, too. Phthalo blue and sangria red and butterscotch yellow.

I walked along a while, looking at the houses, thinking this might be the kind of place I’d like to live in if I could find a well or some other reliable source of groundwater.

And then something dark flitted along the ground to my left. I stopped and squared my shoulders that way. Waiting. Watching. A covered pergola shaded one section of a backyard with oversized ferns flapping around it when the breeze blew. The movement seemed to have come from that direction, so I walked toward it, taking slow, careful steps. The grass wet the bottom of my pant legs right away, the moist flaps of denim clinging to the backs of my ankles. I hate being wet, so I grabbed a handful of pant on each side and hoisted them as I moved toward the ferns, keeping them out of the grass and away from my skin.

The leaves rustled, and the dark thing skittered out into the open, traveling away from me. It was a cat. A kitten. Maybe 2 or 3 months old. Just a tiny brown and black thing. It bounded closer to the house where it turned to hop along the perimeter of the concrete foundation and then the fence, finding no escape. I read a bit of panic in its body language, but not the panic that a feral adult cat would display. It was scared, but I think it was too young to even recognize real danger and real fear.

I stood still and watched it trot along the fence and then circle back, snout poking at the openings between the chain links. I noticed that it never looked at me directly, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

I squatted then. I don’t know why. I released my grip on my pant legs and crouched in the center of the cement slab with the pergola overhead. I rested my hands on my knees with my palms up. I guess, looking back, it came without thought to pose myself in a non-threatening way.