Safari - 02 (8 page)

Gus crept further down the hall until he came to a beige doorway. He cracked it open and saw shelves of books draped in near blackness. A whiff of aging paper accosted him. Turning his attention back to the hall, he proceeded to a stairwell that went down another level as well as up several. Leaning over the metal railing, Gus saw a rash of daylight from above. Pointing his shotgun ahead, he moved toward it.

He stopped at what he remembered to be the main floor. He edged out of the stairwell into a room with sparse lighting coming from the far wall of windows. Long bookshelves divided the level into aisles, while in some of the more open sections, broad tables with books still on their surfaces cluttered the floor. Chairs covered in cheap vinyl faced the wall of windows, giving students a beautiful view of the university grounds. Gus stopped and stared out the window for a moment, seeing his truck two stories below. Beyond that, snowy trees lined the main road. The scene looked like a frozen oil painting. He listened, but heard nothing. The place seemed deserted.

It would be easy to find out if it wasn’t. One yell was all it took to bring the dead out to investigate. However, he wasn’t ready for a full-blown hunt. Not yet. But soon.

Pulling back from the window, Gus skulked toward where he remembered seeing encyclopaedias. Whether he could find anything of use in those books, he didn’t know, but they were a good place to start. Moving past empty tables and chairs and feeling as if ghosts might inhabit the place, Gus entered the main entryway to the library and the front checkout desks. Offices were behind a long brown counter cut with slots for designated book drop sites. A dead elevator lay to his right, as well as another bank of computer terminals, but then he found the books he wanted.

He went looking for the volume with the letter ‘P’ on it. He pulled it from the shelf and took it to a nearby table. The paper smelled old, the scent hitting him in the face as he went through the pages.

Painkillers. Also known as
analgesics.
Gus smiled. Was it time for him to have some luck after all? He started reading the entry and soon found opiates, as well as an explanation for codeine. Codeine, Percocet, and Tramadol jumped out at him. Those names were enough for him. Gus regarded the heavy, cumbersome book. He tore out the page, the ripping noise cutting through the silence of the library loud enough to make him freeze. Tension-filled seconds passed while he waited to see if anything would appear, but nothing did. Not wanting to waste any more time, he stuffed the paper inside his coat and left the book open on the table.

Mission completed
. He’d be lucky indeed if that drugstore he’d seen on the way in had any of what was on the page.

He moved past the front checkout counters and back into the main area.

He heard a squeak.

Gus brought up the Benelli and looked around, searching the spaces between the shelves.

Another squeak. Longer this time. Definitely movement.

And unquestionably behind him.

Gus turned around and looked at the doorway he’d just come through. The squeaking came from beyond, like a wheel that had grown cranky with rust.

When the cause of the noise came into view, Gus’s jaw dropped.

6

The guy had died in perhaps the strangest position. The zombie, dressed in a shirt and pants, had crawled into the lower part of a book cart. Its legs trailed behind, at least, the ribbons of its pants legs did, shredded and dragging like filthy streamers. It pulled itself along in the cart, no more than three inches off the floor, black fingers clawing into anything that would give enough purchase. The eyes of the deadhead were milky cataracts, and its lips drew back in a permanent grimace. The thing reminded Gus of an ancient sea turtle, flippers working to pull its weight forward.

The squeaking continued, shrill and grating, like an old man whistling through ill-fitting dentures. It rolled toward Gus, keeping its eyes on him as if to mesmerize him. Gus wondered for a moment how to dispatch the thing coming for him. He could see the opaque knobs of the corpse’s missing legs as they wobbled behind the cart. Poor bastard had to have been escaping something and crawled up into the lower shelf of the cart, then died there while something chewed off his legs. Or maybe it happened differently; Gus could think of a couple of ways things might’ve gone down for the man.

Gus placed his shotgun on a nearby table, drew the silenced Ruger, and took aim.

The dead fucker had closed the distance to where its black-tipped fingernails were only an inch from the toes of Gus’s boots.

He shot the thing through the top of the head, stopping it dead on its wheels. The spent cartridge bounced with a tinkle on the tiles. The thing’s arms flopped to the floor, and for a moment, Gus simply stood and studied the zombie. He’d seen so many of the dead come back to life that they all seemed mundane, but this zombie was something new. That it had managed to worm itself onto the cart made it different.

The sound of the shot hung on the air for just a second and he waited, listening. Nothing else approached, so he shoved the gun back down his boot and picked up the shotgun.

Then he heard it.

Moaning came from the direction of the stairwell, ghostly and ringing in the shaft like macabre dinner bells. Somewhere in the aisles, books crashed to the floor, startling him. He started for the stairwell, hunched over so that he could peer between the shelves. Shadows lurched over the uneven tops of books, making him wonder from which direction the corpses would emerge.

He rushed into the stairwell, all thoughts of stealth gone as the cries of the dead rang down from above. Leaning out over the railing and hazarding a peek upward, he glimpsed a collection of heads, shoulders, and torsos hanging over the railing. Zombies walked and stumbled down the stairs as if having one massive party. One hung precariously out over the railing and spotted Gus. Its hands came up, clutching, and its hiss of delighted discovery speared Gus’s heart. He bolted.

He took the steps two and three at a time, each impact making his knees sing out in pain. He reached the bottom of the well just as the zombie crashed to the floor and exploded on the concrete in front of him. Gus threw himself backwards and turned his head in pure reflex, but that vase-like shattering of a skull was hard to get out of his mind’s eye. He edged around the flopping form of the female corpse, squeamishly peeking at broken limbs in a widening pool of black.

Gus ran into the hall, hungry echoes tailing his boot heels.

The beige door he’d opened earlier thrummed with savage energy as he passed, shooting more adrenalin into his already overloaded system. The door stayed closed, but Gus increased his speed anyway. Beyond the glass wall of the computer lab, wraiths emerged from behind the dark lines of empty terminals, rising from their internet graves.

Gus turned into the home stretch.

He exploded through the outer door, letting it rebound hard on its hinges. He jumped down off the loading platform and raced to his truck. In seconds, he was behind the wheel. An instant later, the library shrank in his rearview mirror as he drove away. It disappeared when he made the turn onto the main road.

Lucky, he thought. So very lucky. And not a zombie on the road ahead.

Still too cold. Much too cold for the dead fucks
.

Catching his breath, he focused on the next task on hand—checking out the drugstore. He hoped there weren’t any surprises waiting for him there. He doubted his nerves could take it.

A minute later, he parked in the middle of the street, right in front of the drugstore. Two quick swallows of Uncle Jack steadied his hands and rattled nerves. Studying the ravaged store front, Gus shook his head. It looked as if people had gutted this one, searching for goods. Still, luck was potentially on his side, so he got out, determined to take a look. The shop contained five aisles, all running perpendicular to the entrance. Gus walked along the front, checking each aisle. Most of the useful items had been taken from the shelves. He’d already been in the store about a year and a half ago, and hadn’t found much then either. Even the toothbrushes had been snatched. In the rear, a raised counter for prescription drugs lay partially obscured by darkness. The weaker drugs had been taken, but the stronger stuff––prescription-grade medications—might still be behind that counter. Debris covered the floor—torn paper, packaging, and various other half-crushed items. The smell of sour milk and something else he couldn’t quite place lingered on the air, despite the smashed window.

“Hey,” he called. “Any dead bastards in here?”

No answer.

He kicked at some garbage littering the floor and wished for a flashlight. Confident the place was indeed empty, he moved down an aisle, spotting shredded magazines, empty pop bottles, candy wrappers, and other items that made him think that whoever the hell had been through could’ve used more goddamn sense when shopping.

He found the waist-high gate to the prescription drug area and eased it open. The hinges squealed, making him pause. When no zombies popped out, he went behind the counter and let his breath out in a hiss.

“Can’t see shit.” He started sifting through the boxes and bottles still on the shelves. He brought several containers up to his eyes, reading what he could off the label in the scant light, and put them back. Most of them had words on them he could barely pronounce. The search stretched into the better part of an hour, the chill stiffening his fingers and face. The wind picked up, the sound of it as chilling as any dead thing at times, and blew across the front of the drugstore, sending up cauls of white and slowly coating the pickup. Gus stopped every once and a while to peer out toward the street, ensuring nothing else was in the store but him.

He finally came across ten small boxes of a drug called Tramacet. Taking them all, he went back to the pickup and inspected the little boxes, comparing the information to the page he’d taken from the library. Each Tramacet tablet contained thirty-seven milligrams of tramadol hydrochloride as well as three hundred and thirty-five milligrams of acetaminophen. He read the usual dosage amount and consulted the page. All of the drugs seemed to have some sort of derivative of the original, and a good feeling about what he had blossomed inside of him.

Gus threw the first boxes into the truck and went back to scrounge for more. He found a total of twenty-two and, after loading them, celebrated the discovery by taking three more mouthfuls of whiskey. He turned so that his back took the brunt of the wind and took in the empty Main Street of Wolfville. If he thought hard enough, he could envision the place before the fall, with students populating the sidewalks and a long pulse of cars moving on the road.

Then, he remembered he was close to his old apartment. Just behind the main drag lay Front Street, where he had rented a small two-bedroom apartment. He studied the afternoon sky and figured he had time for a little nostalgia. He drove to a side road and made the turn toward the bay. He made another turn and proceeded slowly until he stopped alongside his old apartment, which was on the bottom floor of a two-story house. The building didn’t look any better than when he had lived there. Sky-blue paint colored the house, and a satiny green lined the trim. The front door going into his place was wide open, only kept in place by a small dune of snow. He could see directly inside so didn’t feel a need to enter. Pleasant memories formed in his mind, of apartment parties raging out of hand and cheap, all-night poker matches where the pots never got any higher than ten dollars. He even remembered a time when he’d held Tammy’s head up by her ponytail while she puked into a garbage can outside of the apartment.

Gus’s attention centered on the nearby shed. The lock was busted. A snowmobile had been stowed there at one point in time, owned by Chris Russell, his landlord.

Putting the truck in gear, he inched the truck ahead and turned it around until its rear faced the shed doors. Gus got out with his shotgun, looking down the street for any zombies, and went to the shed. He widened the crack of the doors and peeked into the gloom.

The snow machine was still there.

Gus wasn’t much for snowmobiles, as he had never been able to afford to maintain one. But things were different. In fact, a machine like the one before him was just what he needed. It was a Yamaha, a large red monster built for racing. A high fiberglass windshield provided protection for the driver, and saddle bags hung from a heavily padded backrest that gave support for an extra passenger. A set of red handlebar muffs were fastened to the handlebars, to keep the driver’s hands warm while steering the machine. He stood there for a moment, simply admiring the vehicle for what it was. A moment later he spotted two planks that would allow him to drive the machine right up into the rear of the truck, so transporting it back to the house wouldn’t be a problem.

He liked the idea, but felt a moment’s disappointment when he couldn’t find the keys. Russell’s apartment was just above his own, and Gus remembered a key rack hanging just inside the doorway. Glancing around, he crossed the yard and climbed the steps to the second-story apartment. He hesitated at the closed door before trying the knob. The door opened with a tug and a frosty crack.

Stepping into the entry area and kitchen of Russell’s place, Gus saw that no one had been living there for a long time. Hanging on a peg beside the stove was a set of keys. It was almost too good to be true. A smile spread across his face as he took the keys. Something bad was going to happen. Had to. The morning was going too well. He left the apartment and closed the door behind. Returning to the snowmobile, he inserted the key and pushed the electric start button. He hoped the motor would start. Battery longevity in all machines had been greatly improved up over the years, engineered to start under the most extreme conditions or after years of inactivity. Fuel quality had also been improved upon, and gas was laced with a chemical additive that maintained octane levels for extraordinarily long periods. Still, despite advancements in engine and fuel technology, some engines refused to start.