Safari - 02 (14 page)

Just his luck, he fumed.

Finding a bag of unopened chocolate chip cookies and not worrying in the least about expiration dates, he retreated to the attic again, but left the stairs down. It was easier to get to the bathroom, and since nothing had breached the house, he felt somewhat safe.

He spent the day on the bed, reading paperbacks, napping when he could, and munching on chocolate chip cookies that had to have been pumped full of preservatives to taste so good. Rain beat against the skylight, running down the glass in rivulets that warped the day.

The day had been a little warmer, but the temperature dropped again at night, while the rain also continued. The dead had milled about below for the entire day, and Gus believed they were even moving faster, as if warmth had somehow seeped into their limbs. Some moaned constantly, soft pitiful sounds that seemingly begged for a bullet, while others let loose much more dramatically. One in particular moaned loud enough for Gus to hear above the rest in the attic––and kept crying out, which prompted Gus to bury his head in a pillow.

Just after the daylight retreated from the room, Gus got up and looked outside, opening the skylight just a crack. Zombies still walked about aimlessly, dark lumps against the greater dark, but fewer in number. It appeared the mob had drifted on again for whatever reasons, and a feeling of good fortune swept through him. It was almost enough to help him forget about his trembling hands or his tormenting thirst that sugared water simply would not quench.

He went back to bed, but sleep didn’t come easily.

His very being wanted booze.

The next day, Gus looked out the window again and saw that the zombies had dispersed even more and the snow had melted somewhat. He studied the lay of the land while eating a tin of meatballs and gravy. On impulse, he opened the window so he could listen to the dripping of melting snow. Around early afternoon, the sun eased out from behind a cloud. Snow levels dropped more, and zombies moved even more freely.

By late afternoon, he had become aware of another problem. The stench of the deadheads below had risen to the attic. Gus pulled his boots back on, racked the slide of the Ruger, and jammed it inside one boot. Thus ready, he descended into the upper floor of the house. Plenty of blankets covered the beds, and he thought about taking some and dropping them on the newly deceased. A second thought stopped him—giving the house another look over for booze. That took precedence over the blankets and rotting smell. He crept down the steps to the front door and peeled back the corner of the curtain.

A zombie stood not ten feet from the front door.

Seeing the dead thing startled Gus, and he released the curtain. The material dropped back into place, and he cringed at the sudden movement. He raised his Ruger and took a breath.

Nothing. Had the thing even seen him?

Carefully avoiding the glass on the floor, he stepped in front of the curtains and placed the barrel of the weapon on the broken window sill. Leaning over, he tried spotting the gimp through the crack of cloth. He didn’t think he had much time. He inched the curtain up until he spied the monster through the barest of openings. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have said the thing was actually mulling over if what it had seen was worth investigating. The zombie was an apple-shaped male wearing a T-shirt and track pants that were soaked to his body in grotesque fashion. A mop of soaked black hair topped off the creature’s head.

Gus wouldn’t wait for the monster’s cry. One squeeze of the Ruger’s trigger and a bullet hole appeared just above the zombie’s left eyebrow. With a little jump and without a sound, the dead thing fell over backward to land in a soft squish of wet snow.

Gus let the curtain fall back into place and booted up the stairs, forgetting about all else, hearing battle klaxons sound in his head. He climbed the ladder to the attic and hauled it behind him, panting and waiting for the crush of bodies he knew would slam into the house at any time.

Only they didn’t.

Puzzled but wary, he peeked out of the skylight and peered down. The unmoving body of the fallen creature lay right where he had dropped it. Other dead things shambled closer and moved around the fallen corpse, but none moved to investigate or approach the house. He’d gotten away with it.

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Gus whispered and collapsed on the bed. That was the closest he’d come to shitting himself since going on the offensive.

Having had his fill of chance-taking, he remained in the attic for the rest of the day. With the steps raised and a quilt stretched over the trapdoor, the rising smell was somewhat suppressed. Boredom and the need for whiskey or rum or anything containing alcohol did a cruel double team on his senses. He couldn’t rest. His hands trembled badly at times, frightening him enough to make fists and clench them until he tired himself out. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead and in his armpits. Reading didn’t satisfy him anymore, so he burned time by looking out of the skylight at the street below. The one zombie lay still in the snow, an ugly angel that made him hope for a cold front. The snow continued to melt, and in places, pavement could be seen glistening darkly. Other corpses dragged themselves through the street, and at times, there seemed to be more than others, which kept him stationary for fear of simply not being able to see where the majority of the mob lurked.

He drank water and ventured down to piss in the upstairs bathroom, which was becoming quite rank from his recent visits. He wished he had a drink, wished he’d saved the scant bottle he’d brought on his hunting trip, wished he’d brought
more
. The notion of going to a liquor store entered his mind. It was only a thirty or forty minute walk away, but upon looking out the window again, he decided against it. Gus kept looking outside, contemplating his next move.

Evening became night, and Gus still stood at the skylight. The clouds had rolled away completely, and the moon rose over the mountains. He gazed below and saw that the streets had cleared of dead things. The only corpse down there was the one he’d shot earlier and deposited in a frame of white. The snow gleamed in the moonlight, and the houses with white paint shone. Gus thought again about the liquor store. He could make it. Every pore of his body was telling him he could make it. Make it
easily
and goddamn it, it was
worth
the risk. Gus rubbed his face. He peered up one end of the street and then down the other.

The street was empty. Even the constant dripping off the eaves had stopped.

Then, a noise came from street level.

He barely heard it, yet caught enough that it hooked his alcohol-deprived senses and opened his ears for more. Leaning toward the skylight, he strained to listen.

A rustling.

Gus scanned the road in front of the house, but saw only the ghostly gleam of melting snow and patches of black pavement. Wilting drifts still covered most things, and he would have no problem spotting a deadhead if one were in the street.

Then, he spotted something.

Tracing the lip of the curb was a small dark mound of…
something
. It slipped along the length of the road, pausing every few feet, before continuing. The thing crept along, brushing aside some uncovered debris and giving another barely heard
bump
to the picture.

More of the things came into view, moving soundlessly over the snow and easily visible in broad sweeping swards of moonlight. Gus swallowed, a dry click that sounded painfully loud in his ears. He realized what they were, even as more of the things filled the streets. A dark stream poured into the road, filling it in a lumpy, rustling river of darkness. The mass gradually thickened, moving beyond the rim of the curb and coming up onto the front lawn until the white was swallowed by the tide of teeming night. A growing sound reached his ears, more than the rustling he’d heard earlier, a long, continuous brushing noise that forced him to keep his eyes on the gathering mass below, even though he could scarcely believe it.

Rats.

The street was filled with rats.

Then, a rat found the body he’d shot earlier that day. It fluttered up over the neckline of the fallen zombie, moving in a herky-jerky way that suggested all wasn’t well with the creature, and disappeared for a moment. When it came back into view, it perched on the chest, near the chin. More followed the first, milling around the body as if conducting their own investigation, until the zombie was covered in a lumpy mattress of rat hair.

Gus heard the gnashing of rodent teeth and the gentle grind of tooth on bone from two and half floors up. A minute later, an arm raced feet away from the body. A leg went in the opposite direction. Both limbs were halted and swallowed up by more rats arriving on the scene, drawn to the smell of raw carrion. And they ate. The snow became black with rats, infested with the things.

Holy shit
, some horrified part of his brain whispered. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the rising flood of rodents moving with the sound of coarse hair rubbing incessantly against each other, as softly as a meadow full of crickets. Dogs. He’d originally thought dogs were taking away the zombies he and Scott put down. But the gloomy vermin of the earth had risen up from wherever they had hidden in the absence of humanity, and found that a veritable all-you-can-eat
buffet
waited for them on the surface. Dead flesh. They were feeding on dead flesh. Had perhaps been feeding on it for years.

The invisible grips of fear around Gus’s junk, heart, and
mind
squeezed harder.

What the hell did the virus––or poison or whatever it was that turned folks into starving undead things––do to
rats
?

Gus continued watching as the level of bodies swarmed, covering the street. The numbers seemed impossible, but hadn’t he seen hundreds of zombies in the street only a day ago? So why was it so difficult for him to fathom
millions
of silent flesh hunting rodents doing the same thing?

Millions
.

The front lawns of the neighborhood slowly winked out of existence in the rising gush of rats. The cacophony rose until it sounded like the low powerful hum of a power station at midnight. The rats crawled over each other to get to the meat they no doubt smelled, becoming almost knee high and rising. Some were big, but others were huge, perhaps the size of puppies.

What frightened Gus most was the scratching he heard at the front door.

11

Blood pounding, Gus hauled back the blanket covering the trapdoor and dropped the steps. He descended and crept down the hall toward the stairs, before reaching the landing, where he stopped and stared.

The front door trembled in its frame while the sounds of scratching on the wood caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise. Except, it wasn’t scratching at all that he heard. It was chewing.

“Holy fuck,” Gus let out, his jaw dropping. “Holy sweet fuck almighty.”

He clapped his hands over his mouth to stop the scream. They’d hear him. The rats
and
the zombies. That thought stuck in his head. The zombies were probably long gone, maybe sensing the invasion of the rats like dogs with earthquakes.
Dogs!
Gus shook his head. It was vermin all the time, perhaps the only living thing besides the cockroaches that would survive a nuclear blast. Horrified,
terrified
, he gripped the bannister and took a few steps down toward the foyer.

In the dim moonlight, the door trembled with increasing violence. Gus shook his head in wonder. Why did they want inside? Then, he remembered the dead lying inside the house. All that decomposing meat, just lying there. He frantically considered heaving the bodies out the window.

Gus focused on the door—wood, perhaps some metal, but not enough to stop the new plague. He came halfway down the steps, feeling incredibly brave to face down his fears in doing so, but incredibly stupid for not getting the hell away.

A shard of wood buckled inward at the base of the door. Gus tensed, ready to bolt. The sliver bent and shivered, and he could see something dark poking through the breach. Teeth flashed, gnawing at the edge of the opening. Furious movement in the dark, more flashes of teeth.

Don’t be stupid
, his mind told him.

The wood shuddered and finally popped. A dark protrusion poked through, shook, then retreated.

Gus couldn’t just stand there doing nothing. He hurried down the steps, crouched at the base, and pulled out his Bowie knife. When the rat’s head emerged again, he chopped it off like a knuckle of meat on a cutting board. Blackness spurted onto the floor, like a gob from a squished ketchup packet, marking his first kill of this new enemy. First blood was his.

The rats outside seemed to gnash at the wood with greater enthusiasm. More fragments bulged and split inward, the cracking of the wood dulled by the hum of the creatures on the other side. Multiple snoots speared through in various places, and Gus stabbed back. He heard squeaks of pain and blinked in raw wonder when another rat poked its head through the first hole. Gus stabbed it through the skull.

The door rattled in its frame as if possessed. The Bowie knife flashed and stabbed, but the crackling grew louder. More teeth pulled wood fragments backward, and not just at the base. Points in the wood halfway up the door started weakening. A rat squirmed through a new hole inches above the floor. Gus hacked the thing through the middle; the forward half dropped to the floor. The half-rat thrashed, oozing guts and blood. Gus froze, aghast, and flung himself backward when the rat came toward him, clawing its upper half along in hitching jerks.

He clambered to his feet and stomped on the thing, crushing it beneath his steel-toed boot. The rat didn’t move after that, and he felt a burst of relief. The rats were still only small rodents, and took little effort to kill. The problem was simply that there were just too many.

Another rat squeaked into the house. Gus stomped on it, squashing the lower half of the thing. A second boot crushed the remainder. Two more rats got through. He stomped on one and got the tail. The other bolted past him, heading to the hallway. Two more forced their way into the house, and Gus did a heavy dance, killing one with a stomp on its head, but missing the other. More cracking of wood. More squeaks. The rustling swelled, and something made the curtain flutter. He nudged the curtain aside for a peek.