Wilbur’s father had been
strong
. But he was dead, as dead as Gus could make him, and he wasn’t being left for the gimps.
Gus absentmindedly cleaned the knife off on the dead man’s denim-covered leg. Putting the blade back down his boot, he stood, stumbled for a moment, and reminded himself that the Ruger was still somewhere inside the liquor corporation.
Gus stooped and picked up his bat. He checked to make certain it was his and not Wilbur Senior’s, because that would be weird. In pain, he made his way around the truck to the driver’s side. He crawled inside and pulled the door closed. The headlights annoyed him, so he switched them off.
Then passed out.
16
Darkness moved, shifted, and seeped whispers that dragged him back to consciousness. He awoke feeling lightheaded and achy. He was distantly aware of something not right. Something bothered him, and it wasn’t the sudden glaring pain in his neck. He groaned and stayed still for a moment. He realized he was staring at the ceiling of the truck. He’d passed out, keeled over, and landed painfully over the automatic gear stick. Groaning again, he pulled himself up onto the seat. He wasn’t dead. Far from it. He looked out the window and saw that the night was moonless. The dark bunker of the liquor store lay in front of the truck like a massive brick and mortar tomb. He wondered if the fires were still burning. He gripped the steering wheel with one hand and leaned forward to look into the blackness beyond the hood of the truck.
Something moved.
Frowning, he started the engine and flicked on the headlights.
The abrupt blaze of light was still enough to surprise the rats and send the writhing mat of them scurrying in all directions. Gus screamed and thrashed in his seat. The headlights cleared the rodents down to the blood-soaked pavement, where Wilbur’s father lay in a half-devoured heap. Stark light bleached bare guts and bone. Gus screamed again. With the position of the body, Gus could see into the exposed ribcage…
And the dark things that rustled within.
Shrieking, Gus slapped the gearshift in reverse and stomped on the gas. The truck lurched in its one-eighty turn, crushing two lines in the coarse carpet of rats. He drew breath to scream yet again when he saw the scope of what the headlights illuminated.
An ocean of the black creatures spanned the empty parking lot, layer upon layer, searching, no doubt, for the bloody corpse of Wilbur’s father. Gus placed the truck into drive. A primal loathing threatened to overcome him, and he gripped the steering wheel an inch from having his knuckles explode from his flesh. The rats struck at the metal chassis, and as Gus drove forward, the truck bucked and jumped over the bodies underneath, fighting for traction and automatically shifting into four-wheel drive. The creatures tried to avoid the oncoming truck, but the wheels mashed droves of them flat before they could get out of the way. There was so goddamn
many
of them. Gus believed that if he stepped out of the truck at that very moment, he would be up to his knees in the squirming things.
The pickup plowed through the masses, as thick and viscous as lumpy oil. He yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, the headlights touching the edge of a road. Rats scurried away from the oncoming machine in that little hop-a-long way they had of moving. The truck burst out onto the street, and Gus gunned the accelerator, spinning the rear tires and sending a mashed spray of meat and bone up into his sight through the rear view mirror. The wheels finally caught pavement, and he shot forward, bumping up over a curb and into a smaller parking lot. He hauled on the steering wheel again, slowing to better take the turn as the vehicle wheeled about. The headlights flashed over the ground, revealing a swarm seemingly bubbling from the night. Gus felt his nerves freeze. Completing a full turn, he thumped violently back onto the main road and pressed on the accelerator once more, crushing a pathway until the ride smoothed out and the wheels were on pure pavement.
He sped for about a block, making sure the rats weren’t following, if such a thing were possible. Realizing he was on the road to home, he decided to go there. He didn’t like driving at night, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to stay anywhere in Annapolis, not with the skin-prickling image of rats crawling over each other in the blaze of headlights.
Dawn hadn’t broken by the time he reached the outer gate of home. The shock had left him, but the memory clung. Once inside the wall, he parked the truck, got out, and closed the gates, then shone a flashlight beam under the frame of the truck. Shredded pieces of fur and flesh hung from the chassis, enough to make him want to throw up. He’d leave the truck outside for the night, as there was no way he was parking it in the garage with the gas-soaked fuses in the back of it.
He entered his house, tired, aching from his fight with Wilbur’s old man, and mentally frayed from the sight of the rats. The climb to his bedroom drained his remaining strength, and he passed out on the bed, not even bothering to remove the Nomex.
*
Dawn found him twisted uncomfortably amongst the numerous blankets, as if he endured nightmare after nightmare during the remainder of the night. He wondered for a brief moment if his fight with Wilbur Senior and escaping the rats had been only a dream. He hoped to God it was, hoped that all was actually well with the world, and that Tammy was waiting for him when he opened his eyes. They could argue about who was going to make breakfast.
He peeked through slitted lids. No Tammy. No smell of bacon wafting through the apartment. He was in a stranger’s house that he had claimed as his own, waking up in a stranger’s bedroom, after killing the father of a boy whom he had murdered in cold blood.
He just kept right on crossing lines.
Shoving back the blankets and kicking his legs free, he rubbed his bare head and combed his fingers through the rug that was his beard. Water. The thought made him smack his lips. Preferably water mixed with some scotch. He wasn’t a scotch drinker, but the combo sounded better than coffee. Peeling off his Nomex coat, he went downstairs. In the living room, he paused and gazed out a window toward the cit.
Coils of black smoke marred an otherwise sunny morning.
“Holy shit,” Gus muttered, blinking. “Thing’s still burning.”
After a rushed breakfast and morning dump, Gus suited up in full gear and walked out to where he had parked the truck. He checked the fuses, his weapons, the captain, and the Molotov cocktails. His Ruger was missing, and he remembered losing it in the liquor store. That brought a brain scratch at the notion of having to return there. He remembered the bottles of white Bacardi he’d left on one of the check-out counters as well. Then, the rats came to mind, along with the half-eaten lump that had once been a man, a man he had personally stabbed through the brain, even though the guy hadn’t been in danger of rising as a deadhead.
Kicking at the ground, he realized he’d have to return to the parking lot. A quick stop. He’d stop no more than a few minutes, just enough time to find the weapon. The gun was too important to leave. Once that was done, he’d blow up the remaining gas stations before setting off the big one.
Going back to the garage for gas for the truck, he wondered how he would save his own ass. Then, he wondered if his ass was even worth saving anymore.
*
Mid-morning, he pulled into the parking lot of the liquor store and let out his breath in a whistle. The crawling sea of rat flesh was gone. The parking lot lay bare, and amazingly, not even the rats he’d crushed under his truck remained. He stopped the truck in front of the main doors of the liquor corporation and slowly eased out from behind the wheel, wary of even putting his feet onto the pavement. The only thing left of the man he’d killed was the aluminum bat. Gus wondered if the damn things had even eaten the man’s clothes and shoes, but that was probably impossible. Things that couldn’t be consumed had probably been dragged off into the night or simply borne away by the sheer numbers, like something caught in a riptide. He avoided the bat, not needing a second one and thinking it bad luck to take it.
A gust of cold wind blew past him, reminding him he was relatively sober. That was something he fully intended to correct. He went to the doorway of the store and unsheathed his bat, swinging it ever so slightly at his hip. Wary of the dark interior, he saw the three bottles of white rum on the checkout counter and smiled. How could it be bad when it was the easiest thing to find.
“Anyone here?”
When no answer came, he wondered how much time there would be before the temperature started to rise and the dead were no longer half-frozen slabs of meat. He stepped around the counters to the area where the bat had knocked the Ruger from his grip, searching just beyond the rays of sunlight. He shone his flashlight across a white tiled floor marked with thousands of scratches and tufts of hair. Rats. They had come inside, no doubt looking for food. Just the thought of them crawling around sent a shiver through him, and he was suddenly thankful for the Nomex. He wore his old fingerless gloves, however, and shook his head in distaste at the notion of touching anything in there.
After mucking about in the shadows for a few long moments, he spotted the butt of his Ruger lying underneath a shelf. His knees cracked when he dropped down, and just as he was about to touch the grip of the weapon, he paused, envisioning undead rats running over it. Gingerly, he scooted the thing out from underneath the shelving unit with his covered wrist and studied the thing in the gloom. There didn’t
seem
to be anything wrong with it, and that thought almost made him smile. The five-second rule didn’t apply to firearms, he reckoned, nor germs or viruses that could reanimate the dead, but he didn’t want to be holding a gun that had had millions of undead rodents crawling over it either.
Gus returned to the truck. Taking the Bowie, he sliced a shred off one of the cotton sheet fuses and returned to pick the gun up off the floor with it. As he walked past the checkout, the three bottles of rum caught his attention as surely as a woman baring a shapely leg.
“Answer’s all around me.” Gus grabbed a bottle of one of the brands of whiskey he didn’t usually drink. The label on the forty-ouncer read
Red Rye
, complete with a blooming rose.
“Red… rye,” he said in a creaking voice, imitating the kid from
The Shining
. “Red… rye. Red… rye. Red rye. Redrye.”
He studied the label at arm’s length, not caring what it was called as long as the alcohol content was forty percent. Cracking open the bottle, he quickly washed his hands in the whiskey, then dribbled some on the gun and the bottles of rum. He wiped it all down with the rags smelling of gasoline and ethanol. Having hopefully sanitized everything, he carried it all out to the truck. After stashing the rum, he racked the slide of the Ruger and pointed it toward a far-off house. Wilbur’s father had knocked the gun away with a bat. It was all he needed to be in a situation and not know if the gun would misfire.
A tingling in his head stopped him, and from the shotgun seat, the captain piped up.
Didn’t you just wipe the weapon down with a rag soaked in gas?
Gus supposed he had. He decided to just pull the trigger anyway and let God sort things out.
The sound of a suppressed shot punctured the stillness and the tinkle of a casing on the ground sounded as pure as a single piano key. He regarded the gun fondly before jamming it down his boot.
It would be noon shortly, and he had gas stations to explode.
*
Driving deep into the city, Gus avoided contact with any walking corpses and focused on the much more important task ahead. Engaging gimps would only delay the end of the city. So he drove by all the gaunt shadows standing in the road or on the sidewalks.
The second gas station was situated in front of a smaller shopping plaza in the lower end of Kentville. Whoever owned the place had built it on the main road, right in the middle of everything. Gus drove around twice to make certain he got the attention of any deadheads in the area.
He did.
About twenty of them emerged from various nooks, crannies, and doorways, stumbling along as if bullied by Satan himself. Some wore full suits, others the casual clothes of summer. Two were children, a boy and a girl, their ghoulish features made bright by the overhead sun. The little boy horrified Gus when he realized the child’s eyelids and a good chunk of scalp were missing, as if someone had gotten a hold of his head and simply clawed. As the little one stumbled and lurched across the parking lot, reaching for the circling truck, Gus could see the extent of the wound––gristle black on white bone, shining in the sun.
He didn’t get out of the truck to dispatch the zombies. Rather than shooting them, he simply drew them out into the middle of the parking lot and ran them down. He felt nothing as the tires crushed skulls and snapped bones.
After dispatching whatever dead things had lurched onto the open pavement, Gus turned his attention to the station. Ensuring he had an escape route, he found the manhole covering the tank. As before, he stuffed the damp fuses into the access pipe, using a straightened clothes hanger he had thought to bring, and returned to the side of the pickup. Hunkering down and feeling his knees crack, he ignited the ragged length of cloth. It caught fire with the barest of hisses, sending him scrambling back into the truck.
He’d traveled perhaps a hundred meters when the station went up. The muffled explosion jolted him behind the wheel as if he’d been goosed. A quick check showed the rear windshield remained intact. Gus slammed on his brakes, slid to a stop, and opened his door to lean out of the pickup. Behind him, thunderous black smoke punched the sky, rising, curling, and twisting on air currents.
It was all he could do not to just stay and stare. He felt
righteous
detonating the stations, as if he were administering a sweltering blast of concentrated chemo to the city’s cancer. Grabbing a bottle of rum, he got out of the truck. The bottle wasn’t the one he’d already opened, but he didn’t care. Twisting off the top, he guzzled a quarter of the contents, gasping when he lowered the bottle.