The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Series Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pills, pills, pills. Yes. Everything was still here. It was all his.
    He plopped two duffle bags on the floor and went to work filling them up.
     
    Back at home, he stood in the kitchen, mixed himself another drink. More Long Island iced tea. The drink of the day. Wait. Great Lakes iced tea?
    No. That was lame.
    It was getting dark now. He looked out the window into the yard, his vision doubling for a split second as he watched the dusk give way to night. The wood fence that separated the yard from the alley turned a muted purple like the whole thing was bruised. The two mounds of dirt in front of it were the only things that had gone fully black. His eyes flicked away from them right away.
    He reached into his pocket, touched it. Now it was a blister pack of pills he couldn’t keep his hands off of, his finger running along the foil, along the bubbled domes of plastic. So many pills. He kept this pack of pills close, a symbol of all of the others he’d stashed away with the booze and the weed and the mountain of cigarette cartons. He locked all of them in the bedroom, in his parents’ bedroom. Not like they were using it anymore.
    He was finally starting a family of his own, maybe: alcohol and nicotine and oxycodone and the rest. His kids. He loved all of his children, but he had a favorite. The new addition. The pills. So much pain would be killed. So much anxiety would be Xanaxed and Valiumed and Klonopined away into nothing, into bliss, into painlessness without end.
    He had to wait. Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a pill day. He had a rotation.
    He chugged down the rest of his drink and took a step forward on the ceramic tile, his legs going a little wobbly underneath him. He smiled. This was all he wanted. He felt numb, and tomorrow he would feel number still. That was the game plan. From now until oblivion.
    He walked into the living room and sat down, pulled a pack of Parliaments from his pocket. Cigarettes had been his first stop, before food even, and he had a ton: Marlboros, Camels, Winstons, Pall Malls, Newports, Basics, Kents, and on and on. Brands he’d never even heard of. He had counted the cartons up, but he couldn’t remember the number now. 226 or something like that. A lot. If he smoked a pack a day, he had enough for over six years. He kind of figured he’d cut back to half a pack a day toward the end to stretch them out for another year or two.
    He knew he was all the way drunk, because he couldn’t read the writing on the back of the blister pack of pills when he held it up in the candlelight. Not a single letter was discernible, no matter how much he squinted or tilted his head. It was all just blurry lines that ran together and wouldn’t quite hold still. He used to be able to feel when he was really drunk, some change in his thinking or sense of awareness. Now he wasn’t sure until he tried to read. He didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t care.
    He remembered the cigarette in his hand just then, lit it, rested the filter in his lips, watched the smoldering tube of tobacco hover at the bottom of his vision. He exhaled smoke, and it fluttered through the area of illumination above the candle on the end table.
    He hit the tobacco shop the day the power went out. He was proud of that. Not proud to be a thief, proud that he was smart enough to know that this was the end of how everything was, perceptive enough to realize that manufactured supplies were scarce and everyone would be fighting for themselves. He put a brick through the front window and had his pick, all alone in the building. It was like a dream.
    Within days groups of raiders would form, riding from town to town to work at organized looting, but he beat them to it, at least here in Hillsboro. He was set for years based on nothing more than his intellect. Maybe intellect was the wrong word. He was a community college dropout after all. Maybe it was more like street smarts or instincts or something like that.
    The day after the