Safari - 02 (10 page)

No gimps approached, making Gus feel both disappointed and relieved. He had to admit, some mornings just seemed to start better by blowing away a zombie.

Using ladders to get over the wall, he shoveled snow on the other side, taking frequent rests and refraining from overexerting himself. His ribs were healing. He could take slightly deeper breaths without feeling that stretch of paralyzing agony.

His nose had healed up, but remained somewhat off kilter. Not that it bothered him too much. The pain was gone, but he had something of a whistle, especially at night when he breathed through his nose. His unruly beard framed his toothless grin and grillwork scars like black and silver moss. The hair on the sides of his head was growing out, too, but he couldn’t be bothering with cutting it.

It gives you character
, the captain told him.

“Fuck off,” Gus flatly informed the old sailor.

For the month of February, the Christmas tree stayed up and made merry. He didn’t want to take the thing down, and since he was the only guy around––no offense to the captain, he pointed out––he left the tree where it was, casting that part of the living room in a soft multi-colored glow just right for getting sloshed.

When he went outside, he kept the solar panels cleared, shoveling snow when he could. He continued to heal. His face and mouth no longer stung when he ate, and toward the end of the month, he found that he could take deep breaths and twist his upper body to the left and right without crumpling to his knees. He worked a little longer each day. He opened the gates and dug his way through the packed snow, creating a single corridor just wide enough to get the truck through. It took him three days to dig himself out, creating trenches in the snow.

And every so often, he would stand on his deck and take in the silent husk of the city.

One late evening, Gus bent over the kitchen island with the Benelli’s and Ruger’s guts exposed. After several attempts of trial and error and puzzling over the slide and takedown levers, he managed to take the pistol apart, brush it clean, apply a little lube, and reassemble the weapon. He squeezed the trigger in a dry fire test and was rewarded with a satisfying click. He worked the slide a couple of times more, squeezing the trigger until he was confident the gun was in working order. Then, he went to work on the Benelli.

You seem to really enjoy fingering those guns
, the captain commented.

“Fuck off.”

The old sailor lapsed into silence.

When he finished his weapons and magazines, Gus left them on the island and wandered into his living room, carrying the captain by his neck. Beyond the window, the valley appeared as a black void framed in the dark material of the curtains. Gus left the curtains open most days, as if daring anything down in the city to do something about it. Nothing did. He suspected that the corpses down there were probably too frozen to do anything.

And he liked that.

“You know what day tomorrow is?” he asked the captain.

Don’t know. What?

Gus thought about the last few weeks, the building pressure he wasn’t sure was an acute case of cabin fever, along with all the other stuff he was feeling. Sure, he was having conversations with an empty, duct-taped booze bottle, but he was pretty much healed physically, healed enough to feel confident about doing something he badly wanted… no,
needed
to do.

“Start of fuckin’ hunting season,” he said.

The old sailor didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, Gus could have sworn the smile on the old officer stretched just a little wider.

The captain approved.

*

The next morning, Gus opened his locker and took three swallows of Canadian Club. Then, he suited up for safari.

He pulled on the Nomex pants and coat and slapped the hard plastic elbow pads and knee pads into place. He got into his neck brace and pulled on his ninja mask and motorcycle helmet without any pain. Viewing the world through the black visor relaxed him to no end. Nothing felt so very
right
at that moment than wearing his armor.

He tucked away his weapons and opened the garage door. A blast of frigid air filled the garage, and Gus basked in the pearly glare of the morning. The sun greeted him, finally showing its face after what seemed a very long time. The path he had cleared to the gate beckoned. Gus paused, thinking. He considered the beast and the truck parked next to it. The beast was out of the question. The truck with its four-wheel drive would be better suited.

However…

Gus studied the snowmobile and felt the smirk on his face spread.

*

The sheath for his bat had enough room for the Benelli, and he had placed four boxes of shells in one of the snowmobile’s saddlebags. A filled bandolier crossed the sheath’s strap, making an X on his chest. He even packed a lunch––a can of spaghetti with a bottle of water and a bottle of rum. Once all was in place, he got aboard the machine, inserted the key, and pushed the electric start. The machine grumbled to life, green and silver lighting up a speedometer and other instrument dials. Gus studied the illuminated panel and got a whiff of exhaust from the red creature. It smelled nice. Old fashioned somehow.

“You and me,” Gus spoke to it, “are gonna have a lot of fun.”

The snowmobile growled back.

“Fuckin’ A.” Gus squeezed the throttle.

The machine jumped from the garage, and he immediately had to brake. The controls were simple, but getting used to controlling the vehicle was another matter. Gus didn’t worry about it. After being holed up in his house for almost two months, he just wanted to get out there and
do
something other than watch movies, read, and shovel snow. The machine roared through the gates, jostling him in the seat even though the shocks absorbed most of the impact. Gus could tell Russell had paid top dollar for the rig. As the snowmobile rumbled over the buried road, he knew he had chosen correctly in taking the smaller vehicle. Snow smothered the mountain road and bordered the edges all the way down to the highway.

Gus slowed and turned onto the main road, looking around, awed at the extent of what the winter storms had done. Snow covered everything in a knobby white blanket that sparkled in the sun. He weaved in and around cars with only the upper parts of their roofs visible. Sahara-like dunes rose like finely sculpted waves about to crash. In places, he rode high before dropping into dangerous dips. The road was too bumpy for a smooth ride, and it would take a few runs to flatten everything. Or another snowfall to fill in the hollows.

It took him an hour to get into town. He felt the cold in his limbs. He also had a slight ache in his arms from steering and in his lower back from riding out the dunes. On the main street, storefronts and houses had been buried to the point that Gus felt he was driving down a ceramic half-pipe.

He continued until he came to one of the parking lots of the shopping mall in New Minas. Once there, he moved off the road and circled the area several times before coming to a stop on a bed of snow perhaps three feet deep. He stood up on the machine and gazed around, spotting the tops of several trucks and SUVs. The sun reflected off some of the roofs that weren’t covered.

Gus killed the engine and dismounted.

He pulled the aluminum bat from its sheath and flexed his fingers over it.

“I’m back, fuckers.” He waded through the snow and smashed out the windshield of a nearby truck. The sound echoed over the desolate expanse, but attracted no attention. He laid into it again, his knees level with the hood of the truck as he punished the body of the vehicle, making considerable noise.

After a minute he stopped, quietly admitting that he needed to get back into shape.

He took off his helmet and screamed, roaring obscenities every bit as cold as the air on his gloveless fingers, until he could shout no more.

“They’ve fuckin’ gone deaf,” Gus said. He climbed onto the roof of the pickup and looked about.

There.

Crawling from the entranceway of the mall, a single figure came his way. It struggled in the snow, fell over, got back to its feet, and continued.

Gus almost felt bad for the thing.

Four more followed it. Apparently, the front door to the building was either smashed out or somehow wedged open. They walked unsteadily across the parking lot, black on glittering white, totally out of place in the daylight. He could hear them as they got closer. They came at him with hissing glee.

Then, he could smell them. Foul, decomposing juices, ripe and half frozen, percolated throughout the dead flesh, emanating a putrid odor that only got stronger. Before the world went into hell’s handbasket, the smell reminded him of old, raw waste disposal sites, open and festering like rotting meat in the sun. Even in the frigid open air, the smell assaulted his nose and eyes, repulsing him to the point where he took one deep breath and held it.

Like long-lost relatives wanting a hug, they shambled toward Gus. Some of them kicked up snow with bare feet. He thought about the shotgun for a moment, but eventually settled on simply bashing in their faces.

The lead zombie got to within ten feet of him, moving much slower in the cold. It was a mall janitor wearing a white T-shirt under an orange vest. It looked like an ordinary dead person, except the thing’s eyes appeared to have been plucked from its head. Gus felt a pang of sympathy and revulsion as it got closer. How he’d ever been scared of the things for so long was beyond him.

Winding up, he bashed in the monster’s face. The clayish crack of its skull speared the air, and the deadhead fell over onto its back, shivering as if finally realizing how frightfully cold it was outside. Gus smashed it twice more before it stopped moving. Black blood spurted. He finished the job in time to meet the next one.

A teenage boy dressed in blue jeans and a brown wreck of a leather coat reached for him. Gus pivoted at the hips when he swung, taking off the zombie’s head and startling the hell out of himself. The body collapsed to the ground, and Gus smashed the nearby head. Crushing a head in snow, Gus discovered, was a lot harder than he would have thought. The rotten skull sank when hit, requiring a few strikes before he could finally finish the job.

“Two,” Gus counted, preparing for the next Dee coming within range. With a huff, he cracked the bat across a salesman’s jaw, driving it to the right and causing it to sag to its knees. An over-the-head strike killed it. Then came a restaurant server. It hissed, exposing a black cave of a mouth. The bat took the thing across the face and sent it stumbling to the left. He casually evaded the final zombie until he dispatched the server with another over-the-top swing.

With only one remaining, Gus faced the final corpse.

It had been a woman, dressed for the summer in short shorts and a tank top with the frilly edges of a soiled bra peeking out. The dark hair was stringy and black, as if washed in motor oil, while its sloughed midriff sported a puncture wound that looked big and ghastly enough to stick his hand into. The creature shuffled toward him, its features hanging and pitiful, dead marble eyes hinting at an agony endured with each step.

Gus changed targets at the last second and smashed out the creature’s knee.

The zombie felt over, bone punching through the decomposed skin. Its hissing face came up from the snow. Gus killed it with one heavy blow. Breathing hard, he pulled the bat out of the dead thing’s head and grimaced at the crater he’d made. Brains. He could see the off-white brains. Movement caught his attention, and he leaned over to look closer. Horror bloomed in him as he spied the little things that moved within the brain matter.

Worms.

That image straightened him up and made him look away. That was the last thing he needed to see, but he saw it nonetheless, and he knew he’d be drinking later to cleanse his memory and to ward off nightmares. Gus stepped to the snowmobile and threw open the saddle bag containing the booze. Rum. He needed rum. His hands shivered, and he hoped it was because of the cold. Just a swallow. He snapped up his visor and clawed at the saddlebag’s contents. He opened the bottle and took four mouthfuls, snarling at the last shot and realizing darkly he hadn’t meant to drink so much. But it tasted so good.

Standing on the bright expanse of the parking lot, Gus took a moment to gaze around, swirling his bottle and making the amber liquid within slosh. Five. He’d put down five undead. A good start, but he wanted more.

He started the snowmobile and drove deeper into Annapolis, hunting for the dead that had hunted him for the last two years. He scoured the streets filled with snow. Noise attracted the dead shits, so he burned through the avenues and side streets three or four times, hoping the roar of the machine would bring them into the open. He sped through the main drags, weaving in and around abandoned cars and trucks, the engine growling loud enough to wake… well, the dead. If he reached an area too choked with vehicles, he turned around and retraced his path, moving even faster, laughing out loud and feeling good for the first time in a long time.

Nothing came for him. Nothing attacked.

The sun approached its zenith overhead, and Gus grew impatient. An idea popped into his head, and he quickly altered course, heading back to the Home Hardware superstore where he had picked up the building supplies and the Christmas lights. After having driven for a couple of hours and getting a feel for the handling, Gus felt confident enough to whip the machine around in a doughnut, stopping only a dozen strides from the opening of the store.

Swearing loudly and hooting, he got off the machine and adjusted his gear. All set, he marched into the store with bat at the ready. He rooted around in the dark aisles, wishing he’d had the foresight to bring a flashlight until he finally located one with a working battery. It was a long watchman’s light coated in rubber, the kind that could also double as a club if needed. Gus thumbed it on and continued his search.

Noise. He wanted to be noisy.

He found what he wanted.