Mountain Man - 01 (2 page)

Before
they
found him.

Hunched over the steering wheel, he looked at the road and sighed again. The rum had taken off some of the edge, but only a little. Well, fuck. He’d have to drink
more
in the future. His system was building up a tolerance. The thought of no longer being a cheap drunk bothered him. Booze had become his mental armor, but there was only so much booze left in the world.

Placing the van into
Reverse
, which was really
Drive
for the old war wagon, he eased the van down the winding snake of a dirt road. Tall elms leaned in overheard, fragmenting the dim light. He arrived at a wooden lattice concealing the road from the highway. That was his first defense. With a grunt and quick rub of his hip, he got out and shoved the wall back, noticing how the creepers and vines were turning yellow. It wasn’t much concealment anymore, and he wondered how he could hide the side road come winter.

Or maybe he just wouldn’t.

He drove the van through and replaced the lattice, yanking it across the dirt road. Standing back, he could easily discern the road behind it, but that was a problem for another day. He just wanted to get into town and get out before nightfall. Pausing at the driver’s side door, he looked down one strip of the main road, leading into the city of Annapolis, population just shy of a hundred thousand.

You don’t have to go there. This is stupid. You’re still
hung over
, for Christ’s sake.

Gus belched again and felt the burn rise over his gizzard.

He jumped aboard his van. He cranked the stick into
Reverse
again and barrelled down the highway like a meteor skidding across the atmosphere. He drove for several minutes, not appreciating the brightening day or the fence of trees on either side. Every once in a while, his eyes would flick to the left or right for quick scans of the thinning brush, and then a few houses that appeared along the way. An emptiness opened inside him and made him feel abysmally alone. Back when there were people around, he’d been something of a loner, only able to take socializing for so long before wanting to just shut himself away in his apartment. Lately, he sometimes wished for those crowds.

The gas tank was half full, and Gus figured he would get to where he was going and back again without running out, as long as he didn’t have any trouble. It was still another chance he was taking, though. He hadn’t been like that before. Only recently did the sense of
fuck it
seep into him, like that odorless, colorless gas that roughnecks encountered when drilling for oil. The same gas that would kill a person without them knowing it. He was doing stupid things. Pushing it. And God help him, he was tired of caring.

Cars dotted the sides of the road, deserted and picked over. A scorched black skeleton of a truck loomed ahead. A semi lay dead just past that, driven through a roadside billboard, its empty trailer busted open and scoured clean of whatever it had contained. A motorcycle was on its side with the seat gutted, yellow foam fluttering. Skid marks and dark stains covered the pavement while occasional flicks of white gleamed. More cars littered the highway, and though Gus had already cleared a path through the worst over the past year, seeing the dead things still made him feel even more empty. And grim.

Doors hung off their frames. Windshields were smashed in. A roadside collage of broken glass, bent steel, and bruised fiberglass, all under an October sky of blah.

But no people.

For that alone, Gus felt a pang of relief. The booze coursed through his head, softening the bludgeon of the wrecks he passed. He lifted his hand and saw that it trembled. It shook often these days. He made a fist. His father once had the same problem, and Gus had sworn never to be like
that
. There was no cure for him until the booze finally ran out, and he wondered what would happen when that time came. There was never a doctor around when he needed one. But then, he had avoided hospitals since the last one. Since Alice.

The houses thickened on both sides, and suburbia bloomed with rotten magnificence. Bones picked clean dressed some front lawns, laid out before garden gnomes with their heads bitten off at their ceramic grin. Some cars and trucks stayed in the driveways, and he figured there had been a second vehicle to take the residents to safety. Maybe. He scowled as he slowed, driving a comfortable forty kilometers per hour through the residential area gutted by flame and mobs of flesh. He came to an intersection and, while scratching his balls again, turned right, not bothering to signal in the somber dawn. More houses. Big ones, with pools in back no doubt. They were slapped together so close he had to wonder what the city planners had been thinking, or expecting.

Ahead, a pedestrian staggered onto the road. Gus shook his head. The bastard could
not
have timed it better. He would reach the center of the lane at the same time as the van. The figure lurched on, its features as smoky as the clouds above. White hair hung off its head like a half-eaten wreath. The thing slowed to a stop, right in the middle of the street, skull cocking at the sound of the approaching vehicle.

Gus exhaled and flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. He glanced at his speed. Forty all the way. He gripped the wheel harder.
Full ahead, Mr. Robinson, full ahead
.

The figure in the road turned to face the van, arms rising as if in worship.

Gus’s attention flicked from the pedestrian to his grill guard, then back.

“Unlucky fuck,” he growled.

He caught a glimpse of empty eye sockets and a widening mouth with cheeks that had been chewed through by shards of teeth. The arms went up higher, and a moan wasn’t far behind, a sound that would issue from shrivelled lungs that did not breathe.

The grill guard smashed into the figure dead on, splashing the front of the van in a cloudburst of grime and sludge that might have been blood at one time, something Gus didn’t want to think about. Arms buckled, flopped, and flattened against the front of the van, all in a split second. The head whipped forward and cracked open on the grill. White brain matter spurted like bad jam from an expired jar. Gus couldn’t see the face—pulverized upon impact––but gravity eventually did its job. One of the legs of the thing got caught underneath the right tire and pulled the body down. The van bumped once, twice, and continued smoothly.

The needle stayed at forty.

Gus let out his breath and started breathing again. He blinked. He had just run down a pedestrian. Probably would get a ticket for that one. He felt the subtle smirk on his face. He knew what he’d just run down.

He’d killed enough of them.

The van plunged deeper into a desolate suburbia where the only color to the world seemed to be the skid marks left by tires on the asphalt. Gus slowed to thirty, hunched over the wheel and attentive, watching the empty sidewalks and yellowing front lawns, the grass grown high enough to resemble wheat. He’d seen it yesterday when he was housing-picking in this part of the city where he hadn’t been before. A red and blue mailbox looking as if it had had the living shit kicked out of it leaned against a street lamp on the corner of another intersection. Place could be like a goddamn maze, and Gus had lived there for almost forty years.

Movement in his peripheral vision made him jerk his head to his left, but he didn’t see anything. He took a breath and concentrated on the road and the landmarks. It was there, somewhere.

There.

A mini-mart. Part of the
Needs
chain. The glass of the shop’s front dull in the daylight.

Clenching his jaw, Gus fumbled as he fastened his seatbelt and increased his speed to sixty. The shop lay across a T-intersection, welcoming him like a steel-tipped torpedo leaping from a concrete surf.

In his experience, it was always better to drive
through
than walk in, whenever possible.

The van crunched through the glass storefront, accordionizing at least one shelf, the counter, and the zombified clerk standing at attention behind it. The grill guard rammed into the clerk’s shoulder, shoving it and its head into the wall beyond. On impact, the engine fumed, shuddered, and raged like the beast it was. Gus cranked it into
Drive
and reversed out of the store. Glass and metal debris tinkled to the ground. He did a three-point turn, and shoved the van’s respectable ass up to the hole it had just made. The engine died with a gasp, and the length of the van trembled and shook on its chassis, as if its guts struggled to get something out of its hide. He opened the rear doors and hopped to the ground with a clatter of motorcycle boots on pavement.

With his short-barrel twelve-gauge primed and ready, Gus stepped inside the
Needs
shop. He had slung an aluminum bat across his back, samurai style. He looked right, then left. Seeing the coast was clear, he advanced.

The gimp behind the demolished counter moved and hissed. Gus examined the not-yet-dead undead and pointed the barrel of the shotgun at the creature’s head. The weapon hung in the air, wavered, and dropped.

His boot heel crushed the skull on the first kick, but Gus stomped twice more on the thing just to be sure. When it stopped moving, he grimaced and wiped his boot on the dust-coated shirt of the once-employee. As protected as he was in leather and hard plastic, he was still vulnerable to the stink of the things.

Leaving the gimp where it lay, he quickly went back into combat mode. He slapped his visor up and raised the shotgun. He edged out from behind the wrecked counter, watching his step, and moved like he remembered seeing U.S. Marines doing in action movies. He sidestepped from one aisle to the next, noting the shelves were ransacked. Upon reaching the last, he quickly walked up its length and checked the rear. Marking it all as clear, he went to the storage door at the back of the shop. It swung both ways, and he took a deep breath before opening it. Anything could be behind that door, and the risk increased if it was dark on the other side. Keeping the butt of his weapon planted firmly against his shoulder, he kicked open the door.

A memory popped into his head, of once surprising his girlfriend in a similar shop while she was doing the tedious task of taking inventory. Tammy’s startled face had made him laugh, and when he’d tried tickling her, she’d gotten furious. He’d apologized and cooked for her later that night, which softened her up and won her back. He’d never done such a thing to her again, remembering her angry face.

Gus forced the image from his mind and returned to the present.

Inky shadows. More aisles and shelves full of canned goods and dry foodstuffs. A veritable gold mine in goods. He shifted his back to a wall, made certain the line he was going to proceed in was clear, and advanced. He snaked in and around the aisles, eyeing the corners and whirling left and right when reaching them.

All clear.

Gus relaxed, but only a little. He spotted a washroom. He moved to the door, noting the pile of toilet paper stacked on the concrete floor and smiling in spite of himself.
Gold
. His ass felt happy already. Who would’ve thought that the second most important thing in the world after the fall would be ass wipe. He paused before smashing through the door, and exhaled when he found the room empty. He went back out front and briefly sized up the neighbourhood through the remaining glass windows.

Nothing. No activity.
Yet
. There would be soon.

Gus stood by a row of freezers full of a sludge of melted ice cream, water, and rotting containers. He placed his shotgun on the glass top of a freezer and grabbed two of the wire baskets from a nearby stack. He rushed back to the small hill of toilet paper and began scooping up the rolls, stacking them in the basket as rapidly as possible. He returned to the back of his van and dumped the basket into one of three gray plastic storage bins he had appropriated from the docks so very long ago. Hunched over, he glanced out the windshield. The coast was still clear.

He made two more runs to the storeroom for toilet paper. Each time he boarded the van, he peered out the front and glanced around before going back inside for further pickings. Once all of the toilet paper was safely aboard, Gus began going through the back shelves, taking boxes of unopened canned food, as well as bags of snacks. He found some cases of soda and struggled back to the van with them.

On the fourth aching armload of soda, he spotted a figure emerging from between two houses. It slowly banked in his direction. Gus froze on the threshold between the store and the van, watching the thing do a drunk man’s shuffle down the street. He still wasn’t sure if they saw or smelled or heard, but they sure as fuck ate––ate like his uncle Leo at an all-you-can Chinese food buffet. The features were indistinct in the distance, but the way it moved told him it was a gimp.

A zombie.

And where there was one…

A sense of urgency cut through the haze of booze in his system, and he sped up his packing. He stacked the soda inside the van and ran back into the store, knowing other boxes of goods waited: cleaning products, batteries, even porn magazines still in their plastic wrappers. He scooped up a box of beef stew and speed-walked back to the beast, dumping it into the back. The gimp shambled toward the store, still a good hundred meters away, but closing. Worse still, through the front windshield, he spotted three more dark forms, which froze him to the spot. They approached the van with ungainly steps, spread apart like three gunslingers looking to drive the black-garbed stranger from their town, else they reckoned shit would happen. Ayup.