Safari - 02 (16 page)

Ten minutes later, they came.

Only a few showed at first, but then the ones and twos became a stream around the house across the way. The stream became two and grew into great black rivers that threatened to sweep everything away. The rats pooled into the road and swarmed over the zombies he’d shot, hiding the corpses from sight.

He thought about the house. There were no broken windows and more importantly, no freshly killed undead lying inside. If all went well, he should be fine. He took a step back from the window, just because it seemed safer to watch from the shadows. The moonlight gave him a clear view. The rats crawled over each other as they feasted. Tendrils of rodents looped away and outward as if in search of more food, only to be absorbed by even greater numbers arriving over the backs of others, the mass thickening and growing impossibly deeper. In places, limbs pointed up into the air as the feeders ripped and tore them apart. Hands pointed to the night sky for short moments before some famished undercurrent pulled it below the surface and out of sight once more. Gus watched in horrified amazement. What did Discovery Channel once say about piranha and the speed it took a school of a certain species to eat a cow to the bloody bone?

It couldn’t have been faster than the rats.

Once the flesh was consumed, the swarm elongated in all directions, even moving around the foundation of the house he hid inside. The dozen zombies in the road that he had put down were utterly gone. Even the bones had been eaten. Gus supposed that if the things were capable of chewing their way through wood, a few stubborn bones shouldn’t be too much of a problem, especially when he factored in the numbers of the rats. He backed away from the window and looked at the open doorway of the bedroom. Pulling off the helmet, he strained to listen for anything gnawing at the front door. It wasn’t deadheads that frightened him anymore. It was the sound of jaws grinding through wood.

After a few moments of silence, he relaxed a little.

He backed up, keeping his eyes on the floor as if he were on a ship instead of inside a house, wary of springing leaks. His legs bumped against the edge of a bed covered in pink blankets, and he realized he stood in a little girl’s room. Stuffed animals adorned the walls, some on shelves with what appeared to be shadowy kingdoms fashioned out of stone.

With a deep breath, he lowered himself onto the mattress and unslung his weapons. He examined his gloves for the first time, shocked to discover the outer layers were shredded. The scarf he had tied around his waist was likewise in ribbons and nearly useless. He removed his neck brace and shook his head at the little holes made in the outer cloth. Simply incredible. Gus stretched out on the bed.    .

He kept one hand on his shotgun, closed his eyes, and listened. His mind replayed the gruesome work of the night, especially the parts with the rats, his mystery revealed at last.

Sleep took a long time to find him.

12

Morning found him clutching a teddy bear to his chest. He cracked open his eyes and drew back a little, but when he recognized the thing for what it was, he sighed, and settled down to listen to the buzz of silence. The thought of how the thing had gotten into his arms crossed his mind, but he left it unanswered. Stuffed bears he could handle. And they were kind of cozy as well.

He sat up, placed the bear to one side, and stretched until he felt his back crack. Rubbing at his face, he moved to the window and looked outside. Tendrils of smoke rose lazily over the house across the way, and the sun had decided to make an appearance. It shone down on a street empty of rats and zombies. All gone, devoured right down to the last scrap. Gus shook his head in pure amazement, reflecting on the night of horror. The pavement was clear of everything, and Gus wondered if it was safe to go down there.

In the end, he went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat in the cupboards. The wish for whisky or rum or something entered his mind, making him swallow dryly. He thought of the snow outside and melting it to drink, but he scratched that idea, remembering the rats scurrying over it.

He used the toilet, once again grateful for a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, then went back to the girl’s bedroom. Gathering his weapons, outer gear, and placing the motorcycle helmet on his head, he left the house with bat in hand. The air was chilly, but nowhere near the freezing temperatures of the past months, and he was very much aware that winter usually held one final storm for March, like one last boot to the balls. Looking up and down the road, Gus stepped out into the middle and studied the surface. He saw nothing to mark the events of the night before, except the disappearance of the zombie corpses.

The question of where the hell the rats had gone came into his mind, and he answered it straight away. There, on the side of the curb, was a storm drain.

He cautiously moved toward the drain and hesitantly got down on his hands and knees. At the edges of the concrete, he spotted hair––rats’ hair, pulled from their bodies as they were cramming below, escaping the daylight.

“Jesus Christ,” Gus whispered, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.

They were right below him, beneath the city the whole time, surfacing when the sun went down and scampering back at sunrise. Never staying in the city after dark, he would never have seen them. But why hadn’t he and Scott seen any rats when they had been stranded in the attic? Gus thought about it. He had been out of his mind then, but even when his senses returned, he’d never really looked out of that one small window in the attic. And the rats moved. Perhaps they never took the zombies straight on, when they were clumped into a mob. Or perhaps they were tidal like the zombies and just hadn’t surfaced in that area. The more Gus thought on it, the more possibilities came up. Perhaps the things were getting bolder by the day, staying out longer?

How long before they finally began braving the sun?

That thought did nothing for Gus’s morale. Two-legged, man-sized deadheads he could handle. Rodents were something else entirely. How the hell was he supposed to deal with a swarm of undead rats?

“Christ,” he muttered and got to his feet.

He needed to get out of Annapolis. He needed to get back home.

With that thought, he started walking, staying in the center of the road. He had no fear of single corpses anymore or even small groups. He feared what lurked beneath. The sewer system ran for kilometers in all directions. Who knew how much space they had down there? And from what he’d witnessed from the night before, he dreaded to think there could actually be enough rats to fill the underground pipelines. That thought alone made his heart freeze and sink.

Home. He had to get home.

Cars, pick-ups, and SUVs dotted the road. Most were smashed into each other or into massive tree trunks. He checked the vehicles that were intact, searching for keys. The ones that did have keys had had their gas tanks drained, or the batteries were dead, or they were trapped between other vehicles. He needed a ride like he needed a drink. A drink! The very word set his tongue to tingling. Reaching an intersection, he realized where he was, and how far he was from the liquor corporation. He smelled the dampness on the air and noticed how the pavement had become dark from the melting snow.

Warmer weather meant more dead things thawing.

He checked vehicles as he marched toward the liquor store, hoping he’d find something capable of running. Two more cars contained keys, but the engines refused to turn over for reasons beyond him. He met six zombies and executed each of them with well-placed shots from the silenced Ruger. He left the bodies in the road with the mental message of “
Lunch is on me.
”

Around early afternoon, he reached the liquor corporation and practically ran into the dark cave of the entrance. Stopping just past the threshold, he took out his pistol and held it at his shoulder as if about to enter a duel. Shadows coated the interior, punctured in places by single white glares of light stabbing from small windows. As bad as he wanted a drink, Gus held himself in check. It was not the time to get sloppy.

“Anyone in here?” Seconds dragged before he decided all was well with the store. Moving down a dark aisle, Gus noticed that some of the shelves had been smashed. Becoming wary, he crept around the store, looking for signs of what might have caused the damage. No clues could be found, but when he opened the door to the storage area, he knew what the problem was.

Someone else had found the place.

Cases of gin, vodka, lesser quality whiskey—in his opinion, anyway—and other brands had gone missing. Boxes he knew he had left unopened were ripped wide, the flaps left hanging as if someone had been too impatient to use a knife. Gus quietly moved through the storeroom, checking things out and finally deciding the place was empty. Someone had been there, though; that much he was sure of. Someone just as thirsty as he was. The three men who had ambushed him in the street came to mind. They probably had a place somewhere in the city, perhaps even near the cul de sac. Gus thought of the young teenager he’d left to the undead and felt a stab of guilt. Did anyone deserve that? Even three bandits who were probably going to kill him? The thing that bothered him the most was that he hadn’t even stopped to think about killing two of the attackers. He had simply reacted, stabbing one and shooting the other in the back. He rubbed his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. It had been pretty damn easy to kill the three of them, even the kid he’d left to be eaten. Gus realized he hadn’t even been drunk at the time. They’d tried to take him down, and he had killed them, plain and simple.

No thunderbolt came out of the heavens to strike him dead. Gus didn’t like the moral grayness he felt himself passing through, or perhaps he was already through it. If anyone came at him with bad intentions, he’d kill them. The coldness of that vow was noted, but it didn’t change how he felt.

Gus found a bottle of vodka and opened it with a twist. He took a sip and savored the burn. Lord above, it tasted sweet. He took another shot and sighed, glancing around the dark room and listening to the buzz in his ears.

Times had just become a little more dangerous. He drank vodka until he felt pleasant again, and his black mood had lightened. If there were other folks about, he’d deal with them sooner or later, if the rats or deadheads didn’t catch up with them first.

Leaving the bottle he’d opened and stuffing two fresh ones into his coat, Gus stepped back out into the light. He’d pick through houses until he found something to eat, but the trouble was, he’d already been through this strip of the city. Deviating from the current path meant going into another residential area, and without any wheels with him, he felt oddly put off by the task. Home called, along with the protection it offered. Slapping his visor back down, Gus got to walking.

For the rest of the day, he walked perhaps twelve kilometers, killing about a dozen zombies and dodging groups too large for him to confront. He emptied one magazine and made a dent in a fresh one. None of the cars he came across would start, and some of them, he realized, had holes punched in the tanks for their fuel––done by his own hand. The idea that he’d be stranded in town without a vehicle had never occurred to him at that time, but it was certainly biting him in the ass.

He crossed over what was once the New Minas-Wolfville neighborhood border. With the sun sliding off the arc of the sky, he stopped for the night just off the main road, in a two-story house he remembered clearing out months ago. The door was still unlocked, and the windows intact. He went through it upstairs and down, minding the corners and wary of rats. The house remained uninhabited, and he locked and braced the doors and checked the windows. After that, he retired upstairs and stripped the blankets from three beds, heaping them onto a queen-sized delight that would be his sleeping quarters.

As night came on, Gus lay in bed and sipped on vodka. The alcohol filled his stomach and calmed him. A single window with red curtains faced east. Wallpaper, dark with pink roses, plastered the four walls and left him thinking old folks must have once lived there. In the gathering silence, he listened for the moans of the dead or, even worse, the rustling of untold millions of coarse-haired bodies rubbing against each other while searching for something,
anything
, to eat.

13

Sunlight crept across the floor, scaled the bed, and touched his face. Smacking his lips, he considered the bottle of vodka on the night table. He threw the blankets off and winced, weak from hunger and dehydration. He shrugged out of his Nomex coat and went to the bathroom. He peed a few drops, and that was that. The throbbing of a headache started around his eyes as he rumbled through the house, smelling its stale air. The living room had a dark set of furniture, worn but comfortable looking, placed around a white rug of thick, imitation fur. He stopped in front of the picture window and looked out while scratching his nuts. Nice day out there. Good day for walking. The ache around his eyes seemed to intensify, ruining an otherwise peaceful morning.

Despite the good weather, he discovered he was reluctant to leave the house. Perhaps it was the headache or the lack of water in his system, but he had to force himself to get moving. He suited up and stepped outside, taking in a great gulp of cold air and holding it, as if it might give some nourishment. Melting snow blanketed the area. He considered it and shrugged. Rats or no rats crawling over it, he needed something in him. One shrivelled drift appeared cleaner than the others, so he dropped to his knees, landing harder than he intended, and scooped up a handful. The drift lay in the shadow of a large elm whose scratchy bark calmed him for some reason. The touch of snow on his tongue made him close his eyes for a moment, just savoring the water seeping into his parched throat. He got to his feet and munched on a handful as he walked. He had a ways to go. Somehow he had to get through town, sneak by the hospital, the university, and about three residential areas. There was a golf course, as well, and he briefly thought about stopping in to play a few rounds.