Mountain Man - 01 (6 page)

Shambling forward, the mob hissed.

“Yeah, thought so.”

He swung the bat, almost taking the head clean off the nearest decomposing gentleman. The impact of bat hitting skull rang briefly in the air, but damn if it didn’t feel
good
. He glanced to his right to confirm the position of a large female zombie closing in from that direction, then he tore into the others with vicious strikes. He killed two almost immediately before he heard the clatter of shoes on asphalt. An alarm klaxon went off in his skull an instant before the fat zombie plowed into him from behind.

Runner!
His mind shrieked as about two hundred pounds of dead flesh bowled him over. The freshly dead could actually move when they wanted to, unlike the older ones. His helmet protected his head as he bounced off the sparkling road, saving him from an otherwise serious gash. Gus felt the woman on his legs. He sat up just in time to see her mouth, gray and speckled with black sores, open wide and gnaw on his shin protectors. Hands clamped down on his shoulders and helmet, and panic rose in his chest.

They swarmed.

Something grabbed his arm, and he felt fingers gouging into the leather of his gloves, gloves that had no protection on his fingers. Another embraced his head with both arms. Yet another thumped down on his midsection, flattening him. Clawed fingers raked across the leather protecting his guts, pulling on it, attempting to dig through to the tender bits underneath. Teeth snapped furiously over his helmet, and another set of teeth squeaked-smeared across his visor. The owner bit too hard, and some of its black teeth came free of its gums upon connection. They stretched him out, and he saw it then, like he had seen in countless movies where the zombies swarmed their victim by sheer volume, searching with their mouths alone and biting and biting and
biting
until they found flesh. He pulled in a quick breath when something crashed into his balls, robbing him of strength. His limbs suddenly felt as if he were struggling beneath twenty feet of water. He felt invasive fingers twisting at his helmet, trying to solve its riddle. On the other side of the visor, an angry mouth gnawed, giving him a graphic display in a torturous slow motion that part of him
knew
he should do something about, but the agony of his balls held him.

He felt the zipper on his leather jacket give.

Felt the fingers on the hockey vest underneath. More scrabbling on his helmet and inside his thighs.

And he lost it.

Gus bucked, twisted, and turned. He snapped out a boot, breaking the face of the thing on his legs. He yanked his fists from the grips of the dead and punched. He grabbed and snapped the wrists of the man clawing through his leather. He brought his knees up and under him and reached out and placed his hands on the cold asphalt, in between the shoes and boots of the dead. They clawed at his back and his helmet, their hissing and moaning loud in his ears. Dead fingers worn down to bones dragged down his spine. Fists pounded his back.

Propelling himself with both legs, Gus shot upward and through the mob like a supercharged linebacker. He broke free and circled around them, their dead faces tracking him as the ones he’d knocked down climbed to their feet. Fear and rage coursed through his system. His leather coat hung open, the zipper torn apart, and his protective vest bore the scratches of the throng. He ran back to his van, hearing the pursuing
clop clop clop
of the shoe-wearing bitch that had tried to bite off his legs. He jumped in the open rear of the van.

Don’t be stupid
.

He slammed the doors.

Don’t be stupid
.

He got the shotgun and groped for a fistful of shells.
Things almost had me. Fucking
runner
took me down
.

Don’t be stupid
, countered his inner voice.

Something pounded on the rear doors. The inner voice
pleaded
with him to get behind the wheel, not to go back out there. He wasn’t prepared for that kind of fight. He was on bad ground. He should just get behind the wheel and drive away before things
really
got out of hand.

That thought brought on a savage grin. Things were
already
out of hand. And two years’ worth of running, hiding behind a very big wall, and eating canned slop well past its expiration date suddenly came to a boil.

He threw open the rear doors and blew the head off the runner. He cocked the gun, ejecting a spent red plastic casing, and blasted a meaty hole in the chest of another, flinging it back. Another pump of the shotgun, and another head exploded in a chunky spray. He shot a fourth and fifth, the skulls bursting in the roar of the shotgun. Finally, he hauled the doors closed again, placed his back against the wall, and reloaded.

Fuckers wanted to play.

He was all up for playing this particular day. He was
all
up for it.

“All right.” He went to the front of the van and looked through the side window. His bat was out there, and he wanted it. Badly. He filled his pockets with more red shells, his fury escalating into something terrible. Kicking open the driver’s door, he got out and turned to the rear of the van. He finished off the zombie with the hole in its chest, blowing its head away as it struggled to get up. Placing the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder, he took a wide stance and fired four more shots, punishing the mob collected at the rear of the beast. He placed his back to the van and reloaded, his mouth a tight line of concentration as he jammed red shells into the breach. Gimps walked toward him. He chambered a round, placed the butt firmly to his shoulder, and blasted the face from a zombie reaching for him. He moved to the side, pumping and firing. It was impossible to miss his targets at such close range. He entered the street and focused on reloading as well as retrieving his bat.

Right in the middle of the street?
his inner voice screamed.
You’re in the middle of the fucking street!

Four gimps closed in on him. Four craniums were blasted open. He reloaded and fired more rounds into the approaching gimps.
More
were coming from the houses, drawn to the noise of battle. Through the gathering mass, another runner charged, barrelling through on legs not yet stiffened by the elements. Its arms rose, and it got within five strides of Gus before he fired, taking away half of its skull with one blast. He inhaled the smell of gunpowder, and that odor brought him back to his senses. He jammed his last shells into the smoking shotgun. The bat lay at his feet, and he scooped it up in a motion that his hips would remind him of later, when the adrenalin left town.

The dead closed in.

Gus grunted furiously, fighting down panic as he retreated. He shrugged aside hands reaching for him and made a run for the van. He reached the driver’s door and threw the bat inside. Taking aim, Gus destroyed three more monsters before he emptied the gun, and
again,
he felt a surge of longing to take the butt of the shotgun to the rest of the advancing corpses and bash in as many heads as he could.

Instead, he whirled and climbed aboard the beast. He started the van and rammed four gimps standing in front of it, their forms mashing against the grill guard for an instant before rolling under the wheels. The beast bucked and bounced over the bodies as if they were logs. More zombies came into view, oozing from the sun-bright, yet sepulchre houses, and a chill descended over him.

That was the horror of the things. They simply kept on coming. Not stopping, no matter how bad a shit-kicking they got. It was impossible to throw the fear of God into them. The things had no fear whatsoever. Gus remembered the expression from way back.
No fear
. Nothing. Just a form with teeth and a driving hunger.

His foot hit the gas, and the beast shot across the street. The van swung to the right and narrowly missed a fire hydrant. The near impact reminded him of the almost collision a month ago, and he swore at the red stump of metal. Little fuckers were as ubiquitous as ATMs. The front right tire crashed up and over the flower beds of an overgrown lawn, then roared across driveways until Gus edged it back onto pavement. The right corner of the beast clipped two zombies and sent them flying into a knot of the creatures, bowling the works over like moldy tenpins. Still more filled the road, arms wide as if attempting to corral their dinner.

Gus gave the beast another shot of gas and drove through them.

The van whumped and jumped at each body going under it. Arms and heads careened off the grill guard. One head exploded on contact like a rotten melon, its fragments plastering the windshield. An arm struck the tempered glass almost hard enough to split it. The zombies battered the ribs of the beast as it passed. Gus held on tight to the wheel as he didn’t have time to buckle his seat belt. Heads
pick-packed
off the van’s metal face and dropped out of sight. More gore dappled the glass, and he had to crane his neck to see where he was driving. He slammed over another wave of dead, jumping in his seat with the multiple impacts as the knot of bodies went under the beast. He felt the wheels spin for a brief, colon-blowing second before finding traction and plunging onward.

More undead blocked the way.

Drawn to the noise
, Gus thought, and turned left. The van flew up a driveway and toward a high fence. He stretched his neck to see if he could see anything beyond the barrier and made his decision a second before the van smashed through it. Wood fragments flew as if in a tempest, and the beast crashed into another backyard. The right front tire crushed a plastic fire truck big enough for a toddler. Gus steered the van beside the house, down the driveway, and onto another road. He turned left, thinking he knew how to get out of the area. Ahead, he saw a thick stream of zombies lurching down the street he had just escaped from. He swerved to the right, and the beast ran over only a handful of gimps as it broke through, smacking into one after the other fast enough that the noise sounded like gunfire. The van burst through the last zombie, snap-pirouetting it until it fell and was gone.

Gus drove on, the beast roaring in elated victory as he accelerated. When he reached the city limits, he slowed a bit, holding a hand up in front of his face to check. The thing shook as if he were being cattle-prodded anally. He gripped the wheel and didn’t let go until he reached the poorly camouflaged gate of the road leading home.

When he parked the van in the garage, much of the fright had left his system, or so he thought. He didn’t bother with unpacking the scant supplies. Going inside his home and locking the door behind him, he went into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Captain Morgan, and held it up to the light. The foppish officer on the label smiled at him, coaxing him to do what Gus needed no coaxing for. He took three burning swallows of the rum before taking a breath. The rum bungee-jumped down his throat and poisoned his belly. He bared teeth at the impact, but he didn’t put the bottle down and kept those first shots inside.

He moved out the back door and onto the deck, taking violent sips from the bottle. He marched over to the edge, eyes narrowed in anger and frustration and residual fright. He took two more swallows, grimacing at the shots to his body as solid as any fists, and stared murderously at the still bright, indifferent husk that was Annapolis.

Today had been close.

Too goddamn close.

Replaying the events in his head, he swooned at the stupidity of his actions. A fucking bat! He had a spare one in the van, for Christ’s sake. The memory of being hit from behind by the runner gimp made him take another furious swig from the bottle. The Captain seemed to wink at him. Gus recalled the opening mouth of a zombie on his visor, so close he couldn’t focus on it. The force on his jacket. His jacket! He glanced down, spread apart the flaps where the zipper broke, and felt the vest that had kept the gimps out of his guts. He had never been swarmed before, never come so close to dying, so close to being ripped open.

So close to being eaten. Alive.

Gus screamed, a short powerful blast straight from the gut. With a bark of outrage and spent adrenalin, he flung the Captain out over the railing at the city. Rum fluttered in the sunlight like a lady’s dark handkerchief as it spilled from the bottle, then the bottle broke somewhere below. The soft tinkle of breaking glass served as a hypnotist’s bell, waking a subject from a deep sleep. Gus didn’t feel restful, however, so he plopped his ass down on the nearby lawn chair while holding his bald head in his trembling hands.

The rum did its work after a few minutes, charging into his brain and dousing his anxiety. He lay back on the chair, eyeing the city under bushy brows, waiting for it to make a move. It didn’t. Not even a sound. He palm-wiped his face and took a deep breath. He couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t go on like that. He just couldn’t.

He stayed like that for a while, feeling the booze soak into his consciousness like a deep penetrating anesthesia. The sun fell and clawed the sky red. He relaxed, the alcohol calming him, making him forget the error of his day. Gnawing on his lower lip, he knew he would have to go back down there. Perhaps the sooner the better. No better way to face the mistakes than to get up and do it again. But not tonight. And not tomorrow. Tomorrow, he expected to be too hung over to move.

Hell, tomorrow he’d be surprised if he rose at all.

With that thought, he got to his feet and went to get a bottle of anything with alcohol in it.