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

tabletop just to feel something solid, took the last sip of coffee, lukewarm now.
    Weapon. He needed a weapon. At some point they had inherited an ax, but the handle snapped years ago, and he never got around to replacing it or repairing it. Still, he could probably still use the half-handled ax like a hatchet. With the reduced leverage of the short handle, he might have to hack at it a few times to finish the job, an opportunity he didn’t relish.
    The other option was a sledgehammer that had been in their shed when they moved in, abandoned by the previous owners. It had hardly moved in seven and a half years. That would probably cut down on the time necessary to do the deed, pare it down to a single stroke of the hammer. On the other hand, it was heavy to the point of diminishing its mobility, making it a lot more awkward to administer than the ax, especially if the thing was moving at all.
    So the same basic question remained: Chop it or bludgeon it? How could he decide something like that? How could anyone?
    He fished a hand into his pocket, fingers riffling through keys until he found what he was looking for. A quarter. Fortune would decide. Heads for ax, tails for hammer.
    He flicked his thumb and the coin tumbled in the air, paused a moment at the apex of its arc and spiraled down. It slapped the table, bounced three times and then gyrated a while before it finally settled down enough that he could see the face of it.
    Tails.
    So it was decided.
    He stood, his knees creaking, his mouth dry. He moved to the back door. An odd awareness of his surroundings came over him, like he would remember this moment, this walk out to the shed, forever. The way the morning sunlight slanted into the windows, looking bright but not quite all the way warm yet. The sound of his footsteps, the clap of the impact followed by the floorboards faintly squealing from somewhere below. The cool of the door knob against the palm of his hand.
    He pushed the screen door and passed through the doorway, the chilly air surrounding him now. He inhaled, and the cold shocked the flesh inside his nostrils, stinging. He opened his mouth, and his gasp and ensuing breath coiled into swirls of steam in the air in front of him. Too damn cold, especially for May.
    He shuffled toward the shed. His feet crunched on the grass. The sun sat just above the treeline in the distance, the ball of light unable to muster enough warmth to keep the chill at bay.
    His fingers undid the latch and he gave the shed door three tugs before it screeched and came unstuck from the frame. He stepped into the building. It took his eyes a second to adjust to the the lack of light. Once they did, he could make out the handle protruding from the pile of things in the rear left corner. The hammer was where it was supposed to be. He picked his way past a lawnmower and snowblower, and he shifted a few boxes out of the way. There. He gripped the handle, lifted it, felt the heft of it in his mitts.
    He tried to imagine the swing. He could muster a sense of how it would feel in his hands, the strain in his arms reaching the pinnacle of the swing and then the power of the downward stroke as gravity chipped in to hurry its descent. He couldn’t picture it, though, couldn’t picture her as the object of his aggression... or the thing that used to be her. In his mind, he could only imagine a pumpkin on the other end. A jack-o’-lantern bursting into a mushy orange spray.
    He stood there for a long moment with the head of the hammer hovering at ankle height. His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel the throb of the blood in his ears. He felt a tingle in his eyelids, an almost electric sting along the perimeter of his vision that made it seem like he needed to turn the brightness of reality down. His mind was blank. Empty.
    Finally, he shook his head, turned and walked back over the grass through the back door and into the kitchen. He carried the hammer in front of him, holding it out