Free The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series by Tim McBain, L.T. Vargus

daze, he directed them to brush their teeth and then hovered in the kitchen as they ate their cereal. The boys were quiet, mostly. They usually were when they just woke up.
    He paced slowly over the linoleum while spoons dinged against cereal bowls and Frosted Flakes crunched and milk slurped. He watched the circle of light reflect on the floor, watched the lit-up spot seem to move as he walked like it was also pacing, also jittery, also had a lot on its mind.
    While he worked his way through the phases of the morning, his mind remained on the being in his basement tied to a chair. It occurred to him that he hadn’t once considered how he would proceed with this problem, that he and Janice never got into what specific steps he would take. They didn’t own a gun. What would he do, then? Would he stab the thing that used to be his wife? Bludgeon it?
    He tried to picture it, some lead pipe bashing his wife’s head in, her skull all caved in with red seeping out of the cracks.
    Christ on a crutch.
    He shuffled out by the front door, got the boys into their jackets. He tried to smooth Kevin’s hair down a little with his hand, but the cowlick bounced back up.
    “Where’s mom?” the boy said.
    “She had to visit grandma and grandpa,” he said.
    The ease with which the lie formed on his lips surprised him. He sounded so normal.
    “Are they OK?”
    “They’re fine,” he said. “Why do you ask that?”
    “Oh,” the boy said. “Just you said she ‘had to’ visit them. Sounded like something bad happened.”
    “No,” he said. “Nothing bad.”
    He gave them lunch money and sent them out to wait for the bus. It seemed crazy to be sending them away considering the circumstances. It made him feel sick to watch them walk out the door and down the front steps, turning onto the sidewalk and moving toward the corner. It made his stomach churn in turbo speed like it was trying to eat itself, but he needed them out of the house for a bit anyway. He probably wouldn’t be sending them back to school tomorrow, but for today it was necessary. He promised Janice the kids wouldn’t see her this way. So they wouldn’t.
    Once the kids were gone, he poured himself a huge coffee, dumped a ton of sugar and cream into it and sat down at the kitchen table. The coffee was a little too hot to chug, so he blew steam off of the top of it between sips.
    A quiet fell over the house, a calm. He found his thoughts growing clearer. He wasn’t sure if that was due to the caffeine or the silence. Maybe a bit of both. His chair faced the window, so he looked through it, looking at the neighbor’s yard without actually seeing it while his mind tumbled rocks around.
    So how would he actually do this? He needed to brain the thing downstairs, so he would need to select a weapon. He figured that had to be step one. His eyes swung to the counter, danced over the block with all of the knife handles sticking out of it. He supposed he could make it work, but a butcher knife would be kind of a brutal way to do it. Close range. Violent in a way that required a lot of aggression. Messy, too. There must be better options.
    Red movement caught his eye out the window and made his vision come back into focus. A cardinal landed on the neighbor’s fence, twitched its tail a few times and flew on.
    Damn it. If only they had a gun. He had considered buying one, a few times pretty seriously. When the house two doors down got burglarized four years back, he wanted to get a handgun or possibly even a shotgun he could rack in the dead of the night to scare intruders away. He looked into the pricing and everything. Janice didn’t believe in it, though. She said she’d feel like Ted Nugent or something. She said she didn’t want to give in to the culture of fear, didn’t want to live a life of paranoia.
    Sure would be handy right now. Christ. Could he really bash his wife’s brains in? Bury an ax in her forehead?
    He picked the mug up, sipped, the coffee tingling