Gus filled up the cart with boxes of Bacardi amber and white rum before returning to the van.
“Holy shit,” Scott said as Gus loaded the booze into the beast. “That’s a lot of liquor.”
“They got wine in there, too. You want any?”
“Nah, I don’t know anything about wine.”
“I feel the same way. But I do like the sweet stuff.” Gus reached to the side of one bin and pulled out a rechargeable flashlight. “Everything clear?”
“Thus far.”
“Be right back, then,” Gus announced and returned to the dark cave of the liquor corporation.
“Hey, get me some cider if they have it,” Scott called after him.
Gus stopped at the mouth of the store and raised his hand, but then he tensed.
A scream from beyond the lot. A woman’s scream.
Scott stuck his head out his window and looked back at Gus. They froze, waiting for more.
“Whaddya want to do?” Scott asked.
“Follow me.” Gus bolted around the van. He jogged across the lot with pistol in hand and visor up, moving in and around the derelict vehicles. Upon reaching the edge of the pavement, he listened once more. Behind him, the van crept up to his position.
Looking left and right, Gus couldn’t see or hear anything. In front of him, there was a ditch filled with rotting debris. Beyond that was the broad side of a Chinese restaurant, along with an alleyway and fencing fringed with crumpled yellow grass. The fencing was part of a nearby subdivision.
“Well, shit.” Gus headed down the embankment. He sprinted through the back alley behind the Chinese restaurant, hearing his boots click on the pavement as he ran.
“Let me go!”
came from ahead, prompting him to run faster. He held the pistol out with his finger on the guard. He ran past one long side alley filled with dumpsters, then another, until he heard a clanging noise. That made him worried. If he could hear the noise through his helmet, so could
they
.
Slowing at a corner of a white building which had a half-hanging sign reading, “––son’s Electronics,” Gus took a breath and peeked around it.
There, between two dumpsters and only visible from the chest up, was a tall man, dressed in a winter coat and wearing a red toque. He held a woman by the throat, her dirty blond hair splayed out over her shoulders, topped off with a white toque. Raising the Ruger, Gus eased around the corner. With the sound suppressor, he had no qualms about shooting.
“Let me––” The woman’s words mushed into a breathless growl, and Gus saw the man bring a knife to her throat.
“Whattaya think you could do? Hmm? Whattaya think you could do? I gotcha now, and I think you need to be punished. Whattaya say to that? Hmm? You just be good to me, okay?” the knife wielder said, gazing at the woman as she grunted and squirmed in his grasp. “You just be good this
one time
. Don’t make another peep, and I’ll––”
“Hey.”
The knifeman whipped around and stared at Gus, blinking in astonishment. Pale-faced with thick lips and a shitload of dirty stubble, he switched back and forth from Gus to the woman, whose eyes flicked white trying to see the owner of the new voice.
Gus aimed his gun at the knifeman. “Let her go.”
“D’fuck you come from?” the knifeman demanded, flashing a mouth full of yellow teeth.
“I said…” Gus held the pistol in a shooter’s stance he’d seen in the movies. “Let her go.”
“I’ll cut her.” The guy brought his knife, which looked to be nothing more than a kitchen blade, up to the right side of the woman’s face. “You shoot me, and I’ll slice her open.”
“You cut her,” Gus said slowly. “And I’ll fuck you up twice.”
“Uhhh, uhhh,” Knifeman half-wailed, half-grunted.
“I’ll cut her!”
Gus didn’t bother answering. He kept the gun steady. Steady was the key. He took two steps toward the couple, aiming for Knifeman’s head.
“
You stay back!
” the man shouted. It became obvious to Gus that Knifeman hadn’t expected any trouble beyond deadheads, which was idiotic. No, Gus decided, he was dealing with a fucking moron caught in the act of probably getting around to a rape. That thought made him scowl.
“Stay back, fucker!
Stay back
! I mean it!” Knifeman bawled, his eyes wide with fright.
In response, Gus took another step, closing the gap to about three meters. He felt oddly distant, staring down the barrel of the Ruger. He’d wondered if he had the guts to shoot a
person
. He’d had plenty of practice on dead folks, and as terrifying as they were, there was a guiltless freedom in shooting them. They were
dead
, for Christ’s sake, and putting them down and thus returning them to the grave could even be considered a
good
thing. Even if they were living and infected, Gus believed there was a place for mercy killing the doomed. Putting down a living person, however, even one as possibly deserving as the piece of moronic shit standing before him, was something altogether different. He wasn’t certain he could do it.
Then, it occurred to Gus that
fuckchops
didn’t know his thoughts. With dramatic flair, he squeezed one eye closed, as if aiming.
That, apparently, was enough for Knifeman.
“You fucker!” He released the woman in a near hysterical huff. “You fucker, you fucker, you
fucker
!”
Knifeman jerked himself out from between the dumpsters and bounced off the opposite wall. Intent on giving Gus as difficult a target as possible, he zigzagged in one direction, then the other, abruptly changing paths again and again, ricocheting off the close confines while scrambling out the front of the alley. Gus felt both impressed and relieved. He didn’t have to kill a living person, and he got to see a man-shaped super springy ball in action.
“You fucker!” Knifeman bawled one more time as he disappeared around a corner.
Gus ran to the end of the alley, sparing only a glance at the woman, who was holding her throat. Looking around the corner, he saw Knifeman in full retreat, still screaming,
“You fucker!”
at the top of his lungs. Gus shook his head. The way he’d been brought up, he learned that the meek were supposed to inherit the earth, not the fucked-in-the-head. Knifeman bounded across the street and vanished up another alleyway.
Gus turned to face the woman. She stood between the dumpsters, regarding him with a red face while massaging her cheeks. Her teeth weren’t as white as what they might have been, but Gus was close enough to see that she still had most of them. Fancy that. He hadn’t seen a woman in damn near two years, he figured. A dirty white coat kept her warm, and she wore a pair of black jeans and brown hiking boots. Then, something else struck him that wasn’t so funny. Back at the house, he had an extensive movie collection, which he had had plenty of time to watch. One of the flicks he enjoyed was one of the remakes for Tarzan, starring a simply stunning woman by the name of Bo Derek.
The woman looked like her, except slimmer. A little more grit…
“You gonna fuckin’ take your shot now?” she grated, taking in deep breaths.
“Huh?” was all a startled Gus could get out.
“You heard me, fuckwad fireman.” She pulled a gun out of her pocket and pointed it at him. The barrel of the weapon seemed big enough to launch a torpedo.
“Hey, now.” Gus lifted his own gun skyward in a gesture of peace. “I just saved your ass.”
“Yeah, saved it for yourself, I bet.” She crept to the edge of the dumpster while keeping the gun on him. Positioned as she was, the corner of the trash unit gave her exceptional cover. “I should shoot you right now.” She sniffed and rubbed one cheek.
“Wait.
Listen
. I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“Yeah, right.”
That took Gus back. “Look––”
“Shut up!” She caught herself, and quickly regained composure. “Listen.”
Gus obeyed. His mouth opened slightly behind his helmet. Moaning, coming from the street.
“Hey.” Scott, poised with his shotgun, entered the alley behind her. Gus breathed a sigh of relief then, but the woman just glanced over her shoulder and didn’t drop the gun.
“You shoot me, and I’ll drop him. I swear to Christ.”
“You drop him. I drop you,” Scott informed her with a coldness that struck Gus as downright
hard
.
She looked from one man to the other. The moaning got louder and, for whatever weird reason, Gus thought he heard a distant “
You fucker!
” rolling over the concrete.
Trembling, she dropped her handheld rocket launcher.
“All right.” Gus moved past her toward Scott. “This way.”
“What?” Bo asked.
“They’re coming.”
Bo looked to the alley mouth. “Oh, sunny Jesus.”
“Come on!” Gus shouted, following a retreating Scott.
She finally ran, and the three of them beat their way back to the beast, waiting atop the parking lot rise. Overhead, the clouds seemed to darken even more.
“You go around to the back,” Gus shouted at her. He climbed into the passenger side as Scott clicked his seatbelt into place.
“We takin’ her with us?”
“Can’t leave her here.”
“Why not?”
Gus stared at him incredulously. “I didn’t leave you.” Not waiting for a comeback, Gus made his way to the back of the van. He unlocked and opened the door, and there she stood, red-barrel bazooka dangling in her hand.
“Where’re you goin’?” she asked.
Gus blinked at her. “You’re fuckin’ jokin’ now, right? You want to be left behind or what? You hear what’s out there?”
She looked back at the main road, confusion clouding her features.
“Get your ass in here,” Gus commanded.
Appearing not to like it at all, she climbed into the van, shooing away his offer of assistance. Gus let her be and went back to the front.
“Holy shit,” she said.
Gus looked back at her while he fastened his seatbelt. Scott started the van and put it into reverse.
“You guys been shoppin’, eh?” She stared at the goods in the back. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Liquor corporation,” Gus said. “Now hold on to something.”
“To what? You got nothin’ back––”
The sudden lurch of the van cut her off and sent her squatting on the floor. She gripped the bins for support.
“Home then?” Scott asked.
“Yep.” Gus turned to the woman. “Anyplace we can drop you off?”
“No,” she said after a few moments.
“You okay to come back with us?”
“Where?”
“Out of town.”
“You better not rape me.”
Gus looked at the ceiling, thought of a reply, but shook his head. Scott steered the van onto the main road, keeping clear of the dozen or so dead staggering into the daylight.
“Go that way.” Gus pointed to the left, realizing he still had a hand on his pistol. Then, a bolt of horrible realization struck him. The woman was in the back.
With the weapons.
He looked back at her then, between the seats, and watched her study the goods they had taken from the houses. She glanced up at the shotguns, including the Benelli, but then looked back in the bins.
“You’ve got cans of fruit cocktail back here,” she said.
“Yeah, got them today.”
Her lips parted as she continued staring. “You’ve got lots.”
Gus didn’t say anything.
“Can I have some?” she asked.
That one simple question affected Gus more than he cared to let on. “Uh, it’ll be messy to open that in the van. Can you wait until we’re back?”
She thought about it. “How long will that be?”
“What’s your name?” Gus asked so he could dispense with the Bo Derek imagery going through his head.
“Huh?”
“Your name?”
“Roxanne,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“I’m Gus. This is Scott.”
“Hello,” Scott said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Okay. So anyway, it’ll take about thirty minutes or so, depending on traffic.”
That space between her eyebrows crinkled up. “Traffic? What traffic?”
“The dead kind.”
“Oh.”
“Who was that guy back there?” Gus asked.
“I thought he was a friend, right up to then, anyway. We––” she fumed for a moment. “We were coming in from New Brunswick. Making our way to Halifax. He’s just a guy I paired up with. Strength in numbers, right?”
“He have a motorcycle?”
“Yeah. A loud one. Stupid prick. I kept tellin’ him about it, but he doesn’t know how to fix it.”
Gus exchanged looks with Scott. “We heard him the other day.”
“Yeah, well. He can go on and get killed now for all I care. I’ve taken care of myself before.”
Gus supposed she just could. She struck him as being full of fight. “Roxanne?”
“Yeah?”