Free The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) by Tim McBain, L.T. Vargus

something to eat, I guess, or force down a piece of jerky. Maybe it’d help, but I don’t have the energy for it.
     
    In my dreams I am powerless. Paralyzed. I lie motionless while dark figures flit about the edges of my field of vision. Shadows hover over me. Voices speak words I can’t understand.

 
     
     
    46 days after
     
    Seventy-two hours later, and I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about the men in the trucks, replaying every tiny detail over and over in my head. The sound of the glass against the blacktop, the way the sides of the kneeling man’s head were shaved, my pulse hammering in my ears, the gurgle of the gasoline in the hose. And then the thump on the back of the head, and the sunlight and the sky and the sound of their laughs flickering in and out.
    For what seemed a long time before that, I felt like the world belonged to me, like an empty kingdom for me to rule, but a new predator came along and made me feel small. Powerless. Pathetic. In some ways it reminded me of how I felt all of the time before, frightened to be around people, awkward and anxious and apart.
    I don’t want to feel that way anymore.
    But I’ve seen how things can change, how they must change, how all things must come to ash, how the old ways can die out and become something new. And I know I can change. I can transform.
    And so I will.

 
     
     
    47 days after
     
    I heard engines again this morning. I crouched under the pergola, and the sound rose in the distance. I could have believed I was imagining it, but that pitch shift when the gears changed tipped it off. It was far enough out to make it hard to tell if it was that pair of diesels again or something else. It shook me up a little bit, the hair standing straight up on my arms, but the cat didn’t even look up from his meat, which somehow lowered my alarm.
    Actually, I should say cats. My brown tabby friend brought along a dinner partner, a small gray cat about his same size, so I put meat out for both of them. The gray kitten seems less timid about humans. I mean, he keeps his distance, but he looks at me and everything. Makes eye contact. Seems curious. The brown cat is off in his own world, I think.
    Feels a little weird to refer to them by their color here, but I don’t want to name them for whatever reason. It just feels like it’s not my place. The world is theirs as much as it is mine now.
     
    Behold the loneliness. The only thing that’s left. The only thing that was ever real if you stripped away the novelties and distractions, maybe.
    My window still frames the same picture as always. The dead bodies, looking more skeletal than ever, with the almost leathery bits of remaining flesh stretched over the bones that look more and more like the beef jerky I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s a rerun, though. I’ve seen it all before. The earlier seasons were good, but the window show is boring now. I don’t get it anyway. What’s the lesson of this supposed to be? What’s the moral of the story that I’m supposed to take away?
    I pace the floor, and a fever comes upon me, and my thoughts shoot down new arteries and capillaries, pumping hot and red all through me, and somehow spreading wider and wider, their scale ever expanding, and strange melodies come to me from nowhere, flowing songs that compose themselves in my head while I walk, changing keys and modes on whims, changing arrangements and instrumentation and genre seamlessly. My heart bangs out a backbeat, and I feel my pulse throb in my neck. My skin tingles with that half anxious, half excited feeling all along my torso. It’s almost a medicinal sensation, like what I always imagined dandruff shampoo would feel like on my scalp, except all along my chest and back and belly instead.
    I try to envision a future, my future, but it’s difficult in the dark. Maybe impossible. I don’t know where I’ll go or who else might be there. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to want? Who