“Someone might be still in there.”
Gus grunted and got back out of the van. That might be the case, he thought as he closed the doors, but then he remembered the untended garden in the back, and his mood soured even more.
He carefully climbed in through the window and landed off balance. He righted himself and noted the shotgun’s short barrel pointed at his foot. Gus felt more bad juju. He got those feelings at times and had learned to pay attention to the foreshadowing. It wasn’t only fear building through him, though. It was irritation. If he got filled enough with it, he knew the shit would turn into anger.
His mouth becoming a tight line, Gus channelled that irritation into applying the crowbar and ripping out the brace. He turned the knob and let the door swing inward with an almost embarrassed squeal.
Yeah, that’s right, fucker
.
I chopped down your mother, too.
Moving toward a closed door, Gus leaned over the stair railing and glanced upward to the second floor. Eggshell paint covered the hallway, and the heavy stale air and something else filled his senses, like old smoke from rotten lungs. He turned the knob on the door and found it also locked. Placing his shotgun down, he tore into the door with the crowbar, inserting one end into the crack and wrenching it back. As if he had pulled back the lips on a dead dog, the wood around the bolt snarled and splintered. Gus pried the door open, destroying the old lock, and swung open the door.
That familiar smell assaulted his senses, making him wish he had an air filter of some sort. Or that ninja mask he had gotten from the fire station. The stench backed his head up on his shoulders, and he dropped the crowbar in favor of the shotgun. Taking a breath, he steadied himself, while the fresh air from the door circulated inside. The entry area still stank to low hell.
All right
, Gus thought, placing the butt of the weapon to his shoulder.
Where are you?
Edging into what he assumed to be a lower apartment, he turned and faced a faded kitchen. Light oozed from boarded-up windows. Then, he heard it.
Squeaking. A gum-aching sound repeating again and again to a slow, but persistent beat.
His fingers flexed on the trigger guard and the pump of his weapon. He slid up his visor and took a step into the kitchen, walking on stained linoleum. Blood, he figured. The smell of dead flesh almost overpowered him, but he pressed on. Ignoring the counter on his right and the small table on his left, both covered in tarnished kitchen utensils, he faced the room ahead, a living room, one wall filled with a brown sofa covered in patches of piss-stained newspaper. The room appeared gloomy and cloaked in shadows, as the large picture window had been boarded up from the outside, allowing only narrow slivers of daylight to enter. He took two more steps; a toaster’s side reflected his swelling reflection.
Squeaaak… Squeaaak
. Like an old swing swaying from log rafters.
Squeaaak. Squeaaak
.
Thump.
Gus froze in his tracks and looked at the ceiling. A spider’s web of cracks spread across its painted surface, as if something had thrown itself at the floor above in an effort to break through.
Squeaaaak. Squeaaa…
Irritation got the fuck out of Dodge, replaced with incoming fright. Gus blinked, divided between the nerve-grating noise ahead, and the––
Thump.
Accompanied by the sound of a short drag of something heavy across the floor above.
Squeeeeee.
Gus looked back to the eerie living room, the greater part of it shielded from his vision. He haltingly took another step forward.
Thump.
From above, right over his head.
He took another step forward, his mind screaming at him to
get the fuck out of the apartment.
Get the fuck out
. He wasn’t being stupid; he was well over the border of squirrel shit crazy for inching to his left, expanding his field of vision until he saw the tip of a black boot come into sight, the toe moving back and forth.
Squeak… squueeeee.
Thump,
and that raspy dead weight drag of something unwilling, moving over Gus’s head, and back the way he had come… in the direction of the stairs. Fright quickened his breath, and he glanced back at the moving black boot. He moved another step forward, fingers flexing on the trigger guard.
Squeeak
. The boot rose up to a white pants cuff, splashed with black.
Thump thump thump
. Gus whirled at the noise, pointing the barrel at the ceiling and waiting to see if the way he had come would fill with the dead. The grim light softening the threshold and open doorway was momentarily fluttered by darkness. Something was coming. Something was coming for
him
.
Squeak
.
Gus knew he was cut off. He looked ahead and back, wondering where the first corpse would appear. He angled further to his left. He saw the boot place itself, very precisely, onto the floor. There was no other leg. The pants cuff rose to a knee and a gray hand came into view, its last two fingers missing and meaty stumps bare and white. The remaining fingers flexed like a spider’s legs. Gus heard something come around the hallway behind him, dragging itself along the wall. A groan of wood perked his attention, and he moved further in to see dark splashes over a white-shirted torso. The black flesh of one side of a face came into view, the lips eroded over black gums housing the dull gleam of gold. The robin’s egg of a single eye turned in Gus’s direction and, as he watched in mounting terror, the thing in the rocking chair
pushed
itself up and stood on one leg, the empty pant leg rolling off the seat like a bloated ribbon of dead skin. Breath hissed from a chest that did not move, and that gold-toothed mouth actually
clicked
open.
It released its hands from the armrests of the rocker and collapsed to the stained carpet with a clatter. The noise distracted Gus from the two runners bursting into the apartment behind him. He heard the patter of their shoeless feet and turned in time to see jaws opening and black orbs rolling in their eye sockets. Gus fired and punched a toaster-sized hole in the first zombie, throwing it back against the kitchen sink. The second undead crashed into him and bit into his visor. The putrid smell of the decomposing flesh swamped Gus and almost made him swoon. His shotgun pinned against his chest, he angled it under the zombie’s working jaw and exploded the top of the dead fucker’s head, flowering the ceiling in a nasty soup of decayed gore and brain matter. Particles freckled Gus’s visor, and the touch of it sent a
Shit
through his mind. The blast knocked him backward, and he careened off the doorframe, landing flat on his back––the aluminum bat nearly breaking his spine––halfway in the living room. The wind flew from his lungs. Gus wheezed, desperately clawing oxygen back into his body while the black hand of the one-legged gentleman with the gold-toothed grin reached for him with two missing fingers. The hand closed in on Gus’s visor and gave him the rare treat of seeing how the splintered stumps bled dry over time. Shards of dead skin hung from the bitten-off bones, and just beyond, the white-eyed fucker’s teeth
clicked
open another degree.
Gus felt as if he were in a vacuum, sucking in air moving in the other direction and not filling his begging lungs, but possibly drawing in the mess splashed on his visor and the horror of that made him roll away from the hand. He felt fingers graze his shoulders, pointed things like old spikes, and he swung an arm, hitting something, but not knowing what. His ears exploded with the
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP
from somewhere above. He looked up from where he lay on his stomach and saw that his fist had taken the gold-toothed jaw off the old bastard’s face, but
still
it crawled toward him.
Air finally went back into Gus’s aching lungs. He coughed, felt his eyes water, and pistoned his boot heel out and into the face of the zombie slinking toward him. Then, fingers gripped his helmet and hooked the thing up over his eyes, blinding him.
A train whistle of a howl blasted his ears, and Gus ripped the helmet from his head. A corpse with a huge hole in its stomach attacked, wasted guts jiggling like old rubber from the edges of its wound. Gus flailed out with both arms and knocked the thing away to land on top of the old man. Coughing as though he’d just infected himself with a super strain of influenza, Gus found his boomstick on the threshold of the doorway. He snatched it up as more shadows appeared in the kitchen, a woman chained to a chair, dragging it toward him with an expression of dead glee on her frightening features. Gus whirled and roared as he pumped the shotgun and blew off the heads of the two creatures at his feet with one shell. A ridge of gold teeth jumped onto the carpet. He pumped another shell into the chamber, the ejector of his shotgun spitting out an empty red piece of plastic. In one fluid movement, where the mind and body act as a single instrument, he brought up the barrel and unleashed a blast square into the ghoulish white smile of the dead woman behind him, disintegrating her skull from the chin up.
He fell back against the doorway, breathing hard and suddenly buckling over and throwing up. He heaved twice more, retching as if his eyes would fucking explode onto the carpet before him. Shotgun blasts rocked his world then, sounding days away and yet right in his eardrums. He wanted to get clean. He wanted dearly to scrub his face and any other body part that had come into contact with the dead things. He didn’t know if he’d swallowed anything or not. His eyes filled with water, and he didn’t know if it was from the force of his voiding or if something had entered them. His hands shook as if holding on to train tracks while a locomotive thundered down upon him. He wept. He heaved again and blew snot out of his nose, knowing the complete experience that had just occurred in a fish bowl of seconds had broken his mind and yanked on his nerves. A shadow rushed him, and he tried to raise his shotgun, but his fingers felt boneless. He blinked and saw only a black thing bearing down on him.
And then blackness swallowed him.
Tenner had come across the man in a small nameless town on the road to Halifax. He had pulled over to inspect another service station, an Esso, when he heard a clatter from the roof and a human voice yell out to him. Pleasantries were exchanged, and Tenner informed the man that he was on his way to Halifax, and by all
means
, he was more than welcome to join him.
Five minutes later, the guy–– in his fifties, bald-headed, and with a huge overbite––ran from the station, dressed in faded denims and a dark winter coat that puffed him up. The old guy practically cried at seeing another human being. The man couldn’t believe Tenner drove a hybrid SUV, and overall damn near pissed himself with joy.
His name was Lou, he informed Tenner with a broad smile missing two front teeth. He was a mechanic.
The fact that he was a mechanic saved his ass for a day. Tenner had him inspect the Pathfinder and give it the thumbs up, and even let him cook dinner in the back of the service station. Old Lou was sampling the soup he had cooked when Tenner grabbed him in a chokehold from behind and squeezed all consciousness from him. Old Lou had woken up bound and gagged. Tenner had been more than happy to have a new toy, even if it would only be for a little while.
Tenner stood on the roof of the service station and gazed through telescopic sights down at the rusty drum filled with rocks to keep it in place. Rough rope bound old Lou to the drum, looping around his bare upper chest. Cement blocks lashed to his legs kept them stretched out before him, and in old Lou’s weakened condition, he was helpless––the poor bastard had been on the cusp of starvation and eating roots when Tenner found him. Tenner zeroed in on Lou’s hands, inspecting the spikes he had driven through the backs of each, nailing him to the drum. The wounds still dribbled blood.
That was just great
, Tenner thought. More sauce for the goose. Or geese. Or whatever the fuck might happen along. He wasn’t picky. He simply wanted something to shoot.
Old Lou’s pain-wracked wails came from where he sat square in the middle of the highway, three-quarters of a kilometer away from the service station. The distance had been a bastard to figure on because Tenner just wasn’t certain of the range of his weapon. He hefted the rifle to his shoulder again and moved its bipod-mounted barrel onto the ledge of the roof. Tenner peeked through the scope once more, smirking as he looked over old Lou’s screaming form.
Nothing thus far.
Tenner sighed, folded his arms, and dropped his head onto them. Minutes later, old Lou stopped screaming. Tenner checked and saw that the highway remained empty. A few houses were far up one end, but if there were any undead around, old Lou’s blood would certainly bring them around. He glanced down at the ten magazines of twenty shots apiece and smiled contentedly. He had to thank dear old Dad again. A rush of wind grazed his back, chilling him despite the thick black winter coat he wore with a fur-lined hood. His ponytail pulled a little when he moved his head. Tenner studied his gloves for a moment, thinking about the stitches in the material, when Lou screamed again.
Tenner pulled the bipod and rifle back and squinted through the scope. A zombie moved up the highway, walking as if it wore a bloated colostomy bag. Tenner got into position and placed the targeting lines of the scope right on the approaching zombie’s right arm. He scrunched his brow in concentration. Old Lou’s pleading for help––only just heard to begin with––was periodically drowned out by the wind.
Wind
… he’d have to figure that into the shot and adjust accordingly.