The first zombie, grinning malevolently at Gus, dug itself out enough so that its upper body was visible. What was worse, however, was that three more heads appeared around the fractured snow of the zombie, sifting through it like creamy quicksand.
Christ almighty
, Gus thought, as a fresh sliver of fear rammed through his core.
They’re lying on each other under the snow
.
Right below him.
Gus stabbed at the starter button of the snowmobile. He pulled the machine hard to the right, spinning out a circle and sending snow flying in his wake, running over lumps he knew weren’t snow. More zombies appeared in his tracks, coated in particles of ice and writhing stupidly. Some reached for him. One broke through the surface directly in front of the machine, and Gus bounced in the seat as he rolled over it, the bladed treads raking the flesh from the dead thing’s face in an instant and crushing the weakened skull a split second later. Gus held on, keeping control of the snowmobile, and charged for the throat of the cul de sac. All around him, zombies rose, moving like automatons in need of grease.
Gus gunned the engine, blasting for the entrance to the cul de sac. Limbs reached and flailed at him, but were bashed aside by the fiberglass snout of the machine. Wasted fingers slapped the windshield before spinning away behind him. Decomposed faces flashed by, all seeming so glad, so
very
glad, he had taken the time to find them. More figures stood on the edges of his vision, but Gus plowed through the mob, thinking only of escape.
With a high-pitched roar, the snowmobile shot up and over a low rise, escaping the cul de sac and speeding toward less zombie-populated areas. The idea of stopping and flinging a few Molotovs back at the mob occurred to him, but Gus decided against it. The firebombs needed a hard surface to break against, and the snow wouldn’t do it. Thick elms zipped by in his peripheral vision as he focused on the intersection ahead. It would be better to retreat a bit and watch––
A rope snapped up before him, pulled taut and dripping snow. Gus clenched the brake in reflex. He couldn’t stop in time. The rope snapped against and over the windshield and took him across the upper chest, yanking him from the seat. He landed explosively on his ass and the weapons strapped across his back. His head whipped back, but the helmet and hockey vest underneath the Nomex coat absorbed much of the impact. It did nothing to alleviate the burn across his upper biceps.
He heard the snowmobile crash into something, while the sounds of running feet punching through the icy surface of the snow grew louder.
Voices.
Then, someone was on him. Weight pinned his shoulders.
“Whooowheee gotcha you fucker!” a wild face preened in mad delight. Hands gripped him by the shoulders. “Gotcha. Ain’t no one told you this is a quiet neighbourhood? Huh? You stun sumabitch! Been listenin’ to your ass buzz all over town for the last couple of—”
While the man prattled on, no doubt believing his prey effectively stunned by the rope, Gus lifted his left leg and extracted his Bowie knife. Just as the word “of” left his lips, Gus stabbed him with whatever power he could summon. He curled his arm and stuck the knife into his attacker’s lower back, through the man’s parka, deep enough to take the wind out of his rant. The rough face morphed from joy to agonized shock. The would-be trapper rolled off, wrenching the steel from Gus’s grasp.
Gus got to his knees. He looked to his left and saw another attacker—a big brute armed with a bat. The new guy balked––no doubt every bit as surprised as the first trapper.
“You fucker!” the brute snarled.
Gus yanked his Ruger from his other boot. The appearance of the weapon made the bat wielder turn to run. Gus readied the weapon and shot the guy in the back, knocking the man forward in the snow. Gus got to his feet, and a split second later, someone else crashed into him from behind, driving him face forward into the snow. The pistol flew from his grasp. He rolled over, and a fist hammered the forehead of his helmet. Furious grunts punctured the air. Two fists crunched into Gus’s midsection, the impact dulled by the Nomex coat and hockey vest. He punched back, grazing a forehead hard enough to give his attacker pause, then bucked, throwing the man off of him. Gus scrambled to his feet, while his latest attacker did the same.
The young man, no more than twenty if a day out of his teens, was broad across the shoulders and dressed in dirty winter outer clothing. A ragged white parka hung off his frame, and his hands were gloveless. A fringe of red hair stuck out from under a black toque, giving him a Special Forces kind of look. The guy hunched over, holding the right side of his brow while bright blood made a stark contrast against the backdrop of snow.
“You cut me, you fucker,” the boy whined. “I’ll kill you.”
In answer, Gus groped for and hauled out his bat.
The youth’s eyes went wide.
To one side, the man Gus had knifed moaned, his life’s blood spurting out in alarming jets and slashing the snow. “Git him, Wilbur.”
Wilbur?
Gus almost burst out laughing. He stepped back, mindful of the man he’d shot, who still lay face down in the snow. He didn’t see any others.
“I’ll git ’im!” Wilbur bared his teeth. “I’ll git ’im.”
He stalked Gus, mindful of the bat, and having nothing except his size going for him. That, and being pissed off. Gus knew from experience that being pissed off counted for a lot. Wilbur appeared as if nothing short of breaking his neck would satisfy him.
“Gonna fuck you up ’til Tuesday,” Wilbur seethed, hands flexing, ready to grab at an opening. Blood seeped down one side of his face like war paint.
Gus raised the bat over his head like a sword. Wilbur watched it go up.
“Git ’immm…” The man in the snow moaned, fainter now.
“I’ll git ’im!” Wilbur promised.
Cletus
, Gus’s mind added and giggles rumbled his frame.
But then Wilbur looked to his right, back the way Gus had come. Though he knew better, Gus made the same mistake.
The dead.
The dead were coming. Some shambled, and some crawled, all partially frozen, yet willing their bodies onward, toward the combat, where hot meat battled. They rose up from the distant dip in the road, like a gray tsunami of swinging, twisting limbs where no one shape was distinct from the other. A hissing, moaning,
starving
mob.
A mob that only wanted to bite.
“Jesus,” Wilbur hissed.
“Wilburrrr…” the stabbed man wailed, the words swallowed by the wind.
While Wilbur’s attention was on the approaching mob of dead things, Gus stepped forward and clobbered him across the shoulder. Wilbur somehow sensed the attack at the last possible moment and got his head out of the way. Still, the bat clipped the guy’s shoulder, and Wilbur yelped in pain. The boy jerked back, and Gus swung again. Missed. Screaming and holding his shoulder, Wilbur stumbled backward, and Gus whipped his bat across the boy’s knee, shattering it.
Wilbur dropped into the snow, screaming as if his testicles had been shorn off with a sander. Like Gus gave a shit. He kicked him across the jaw and hovered over the broken form of the youngster. He heard moans and wasn’t exactly certain if they came from Wilbur, the prick he had stabbed, or the advancing deadheads. The Dees were closer, easily filling the breadth of the road. Faces shriveled by the cold spotted the living. Dark mouths opened. Limbs reached and hands pointed at him.
Gus stomped over to the stabbed victim and jerked back the man’s head. “Who are you?”
“Whuua…?” The man’s eyes looked glazed.
“Who are you?”
“Uhhhhh.”
Gus ripped his knife out of the man’s lower back. The man sighed when the weapon came out, as if all would be fine. Gus wiped the blade on the back of the guy’s coat, then sheathed it. He turned to look for his snowmobile. Dead. Wrapped around a telephone pole. Gus felt as if he’d lost a friend.
“Christ.” He stomped back to where he’d lost his gun. The snow had been disturbed and his heart sank. He checked on the dead man, then Wilbur, and the one he’d stabbed. All where they should be. Gus moved around, thrusting his bare hands into the snow, hoping beyond hope he’d find the Ruger. He prodded ahead, feeling, touching, swearing at the three hillbillies. His fingers became raw and red with the cold. Gus was sure God was chuckling, probably laughing his holy ass off and lighting up the cosmos in the process.
He glanced up, up to his shoulders in snow.
The creeping dead were perhaps fifty feet away, stumbling, swaying, and heading right for him, swallowing up the space between them. The whispery sounds of their frayed vocal chords made the hair on his neck stand on end as if he’d been zapped.
Dig
! he commanded himself, and he dug, rooting around in the snow and feeling nothing. Then, something… “Shit!” He brought up a crumpled aluminum can. He plunged his hands back into the flattened drifts.
Behind him, he heard a more human moan. Wilbur was coming around.
Gus got up and stomped his way over to the kid waking up in the snow. He took his bat and bashed the boy’s other knee, cracking it twice and making the youngster squeal in pain. Twenty, Gus had guessed Wilbur’s age earlier. He scoffed at the number. Wilbur wasn’t eighteen yet and this time, Gus had the feeling he got it right. He immobilized the youngster’s ass and he went back to looking for his gun. Wilbur’s agonized cries sawing at the air.
Forty feet. The dead seemed to be closing the distance faster.
Gus made fists, willing heat back into his fingers. He scuffed along and felt his toe connect with something under the snow. He dove on the spot and frantically cleared away the white, uncovering the black grip of the Ruger. He snapped up the weapon and pointed the gun at Wilbur—Jesus Christ, the boy probably wasn’t more than
sixteen.
The kid looked over the wrecks of his knees and
begged
Gus to pull the trigger with red eyes and a face smeared in blood. He told Gus to just shoot his ass dead and not to leave him to
that
.
Ignoring the pleas, Gus ran to his dead snowmobile.
“
No, no, Christ almighty,
no,
”
the boy screeched. The kid knew that a bullet, a
precious
bullet, was far superior to the fate bearing down on him.
Gus shook his head in sadness and frustration over the mess of the snowmobile. He flipped open a saddle bag and took out the can opener, the tin of spaghetti, and the boxes of shells. He opened the other bag and grimaced at the mess of glass shards. The bottles had all broken except––he grabbed the neck of the whole one and extracted it. One of the captain’s marines had made it––covered in gasoline, but intact.
“No! No! Sweet Jesus!
Noooo!
”
Gus turned.
Wilbur had dragged himself perhaps ten feet away from where Gus had crippled him. It was twenty feet too short. The zombie at the front of the pack reached out and touched Wilbur, the contact making the boy shriek and thrash like an eight-year-old. Gray hands fastened around Wilbur’s coat, and he turned to fight them off, throwing his fists at the wall standing right over him as if he were having a temper tantrum. Zombies crawled on top of him, and one corpse, with a movement that was utterly slow motion, sank his rack of teeth through the denim covering the boy’s right knee.
Gus thought Wilbur was wailing before. He was sadly mistaken.
Like a stack of cans falling over the shrieking figure, the tide veered and slowly covered the boy. Some bit, some clawed, but
all
got a piece of him. The dead shifted, piling on one another, reaching, clawing, trying for just a
taste
, just a
taste
goddammit, was
that
so much to ask? The moaning was loud enough to drive Gus just a little more insane. The smell of the dead, like rotting meat in the deepest part of a freezer, hit him and made him wince.
He turned away. The tearing of cloth rose over the moaning, followed by a searing screech of the still-living. Wilbur’s voice was muffled by the bodies still piling onto him.
Gus shoved the four boxes of shotgun shells into the inner folds of his coat. He stuffed the spaghetti in there as well. The Benelli was still slung over his back. He looked for the air horn, but didn’t see it. One more search of the machine and he turned to leave after picking up his bat. That nerve-splitting squeal of Wilbur’s turned into a wet, dying gurgle.
Then nothing.
9
Gus bolted for a nearby house, well aware of the mob’s undead tide-line oozing toward him.
Well
, a voice chuckled all shucks-like in his head,
you
wanted
to find them. Didn’t you?
Gus ran up the front steps of the nearest house and tried the door. Locked. He turned and cleared the front porch in one leap, landing in snow up to his knees. He almost lost his bat, but managed to maintain his grip on it. The next house was twenty feet away on the other side of a tall green barrier of evergreens. He pushed through them, snow sprinkling down and boughs clawing at him, and staggered to the front steps of the second house. Another locked door. Rattled the knob a second time.
Sweet monkey fuck!
It wasn’t a sprint, it was a marathon. The dead could only move so fast, and he hadn’t seen any runners. Still, Gus couldn’t quite fight the urge to just
jet
from the scene as fast as humanly possible.
He didn’t have time to test every door. He charged across a front lawn with small trees that probably were some sort of exotic hedge and pounded up the front steps of the third house. He gripped the knob and tried it. Locked.
He looked at the front window and, making a split-second decision, heaved himself through it.
He landed in a living room, flopping over a low bookcase in a glittering shower of glass and a crackling of wood. He stumbled to his feet and looked outside. He couldn’t see the mob, but he could hear it. Whirling, he made his way to the kitchen area, through a short hallway, and into a den, where he spotted a sliding door leading out to the backyard. Gus scrabbled at the lock of the door, almost ripping his fingernails off in his frenzy. He yanked open the door and plunged outside.