Scratching at his neck brace, he decided it was best to get going. He got aboard the truck and drove off, intending to take a side street around the shopping area and head for Western Oil on the other side of Kentville.
The station blew up, and the land shook in fury. Gus cringed behind the wheel, and stole glimpses in the rear view mirror. He couldn’t see the station itself, but fiery chunks of debris rained down on the street.
Another blast split the asphalt open like a flimsy book and enveloped the street behind him in a furious wash of flame. The earth spat black smoke into the air, and for seconds, Gus held onto the steering wheel for dear life. He slowed the truck, twisted around in the driver’s seat, and gawked at the scene from fifty meters away.
A manhole cover shot heavenward with an echoing clatter, and fire erupted from the opening. Gus whipped around in his seat just as another manhole cover exploded upward, a gout of flame spearing up from underneath it.
Pong, Pong.
Two more shot into the sky, the blasts approaching his position. Rocks pelted the windshield, cracking it in places. He sped up, hauling the pickup around a manhole erupting in front of it. Fear grabbed him and squeezed. Ahead, yet another manhole cover zinged up and away, blasted from the ground by a pillar of flame.
“Oh, shit,” Gus muttered. How long had the Western Oil tanks been emptying? Was it possible that the fuel had reached so far into the city?
Weaving through shrinking columns of flame and abandoned cars, he knew it was. The fumes had seeped far enough into the combined storm drain system to reach even where he was. All it had taken was one flaming piece of debris, probably falling and rolling into an open storm drain, to set off a monstrous chain reaction.
A car flew into the air as if God had kicked it, then slammed back down in the street. Gus turned the steering wheel hard one way, then the other, slipping between erupting fires and metallic husks of derelict vehicles. Ahead, more smoke, periodically pierced by lances of fire, filled the main drag and reduced visibility. He hunched over the steering wheel. Burning debris twirled in the air like birds ablaze. A piece of something plastered itself to the passenger side of the windshield, and Gus yelled in surprise. More explosions thundered. The heat rose in the truck as if he were driving over one monstrous skillet swamped with hot grease. Blazing figures appeared out of the escalating smoke, scaring him and then fascinating him when he realized they were deadheads, staggering along, heedless of the destruction consuming them.
He accelerated another fifty meters before stomping on the brakes. Ahead, storm drains roared like old-fashioned ovens, spewing blinding smoke into the air. Open flames licked the upper lips of the curbs. More blurry shadows appeared on the road, lumbering aimlessly, lit up as if someone had poured gasoline directly over their heads and struck a match. The smoke cleared for a moment, and Gus felt as if Annapolis itself had become hell. Pieces of deadheads lay scattered in the street, their clothing on fire. Legs, arms, and headless torsos lay everywhere, and he realized where the zombie mob had been. They had been right in front of his truck when the storm drain system filled with fumes exploded, blowing the unliving shit clean out of them.
A trench of pavement came into view, the edges blown up and out like terrible wound.
“Red Rye!” Gus shouted and stepped on the gas. The truck surged ahead, running over flaming carcasses and bursting through clumps of gimps, spinning them around while fiery particles flew from their bodies. He ran over dozens, enough to make his jaw clatter, as their bodies crumbled under his tires. The grill smashed dozens of zombies standing as if shell shocked. The roar of the truck’s engine filled his ears. What was once a child ran directly at his grill, its small form completely engulfed in fire. Gus wondered if the thing could even see before it was mowed down with a solid
whump
. A flaming head launched itself from the corpse’s torso and bounced up and over the hood, causing a jigsaw of cracks to appear across the windshield. Like a springy meteor, the head bounced up and out of Gus’s line of sight. More sizzling bodies crowded the truck, and Gus abruptly remembered what he carried in the rear.
Propane tanks!
Something inside him plummeted, and he had the vision of seeing his ass blown away in one great blistering explosion. An intersection loomed up out of the smoke and flame, marked by another smouldering hole no doubt once covered by iron. He veered to the right, crashing into more burning zombies and plastering them against the truck for seconds before they fell off. A head consumed in flame smashed into the passenger window, breaking the glass before rebounding away. Gus screamed, laughed, and drove on, while the captain grinned manically and yelled
OHSHITSHITSHITSHIT.
Another lump of fire came through the smashed passenger window and rebounded off the passenger seat, just missing the wicks of the captain’s Molotovs, before landing in the foot well. More corpses blocked the road, and Gus plowed through them all, heaving the truck’s speeding mass into the blazing forms like a two-ton maul.
The truck swung into a section of road that was clear of debris and cars. Gus took his foot off the gas only long enough to stretch out a leg and stomp on the fragment in the passenger foot well. Behind him, the smoke concealed the land in a thick soup, masking the still burning heaps that appeared like receding glows. He heard more explosions, but he had cleared the heart of it. He’d soon reach the highway that would eventually loop back to his home. He looked into the rear view mirror when he could, catching glimpses of the beast he had unleashed to purify the city.
Purify
.
Purify was the word of the day
. The frantic thought blasted through his adrenaline-spiked mind. Scorched the whole damn lot, he did. Western Oil had probably detonated in the seconds it took for the ignited gas to retrace its destructive flow back to the source.
He gasped for air, as if he’d being holding on to it for the last few minutes. When the truck reached high ground, he pulled over and got out, gazing over the burning bowl of Annapolis. Pops sputtered in the air as unknown flammable containers detonated. He stood by his truck, slack-jawed and staring. Smoke ran through the streets and around buildings like a billowing gray flood, concealing much of the devastation. Fires smouldered like distant beacons, and for a moment, Gus wondered if the land itself would split apart.
He clutched a bottle of rum, but didn’t drink it. Taking in the burning buildings below, he believed he would wait until he got home.
19
The city burned.
Like a beast caught in a mighty black cauldron, it thrashed and spat and flickered light and sound. Gus stood on his deck and revelled in what he had created. The fires raged and turned the night sky a frightful orange. Dervishes of heat and wind danced over the rooftops, waving at him with arms of fire. Smoke covered all but the brightest of blazes in a murky, evil gauze.
With one hand on the railing and one on a bottle of Scotch, Gus swayed and stared, red-eyed and perhaps the drunkest he’d ever been. No, scratch that. He was
shit
faced, and his elation at seeing the city burn was every bit as intense as the fires that feasted on Annapolis’s flesh and bones.
“Burn, you fuck!” Gus screamed at the city. He raved at the undead and cursed at the rats beneath the city, branding them a frightening cancer that he had
scorched
from the face of the valley. When he finished his first bottle of scotch, he hurled it into the blackness beyond the deck. He returned to the house and fetched two more. The captain lay on one of the lawn chairs, smiling his foppish grin and obviously just as delighted as Gus was at the ending. At the
victory
.
Gus watched Annapolis burn like some triumphant anarchist, alternating between sitting next to the captain and jumping up to lean dangerously over the railing. He had changed from his Nomex gear into his civilian clothes, just to enjoy the show in comfort. He didn’t feel the cold, and when the wind did blow, as faint as it was, it carried a sheet of warmth from the valley, like steam blown off something superheated.
He drank until he staggered and vomited over the railing. When he felt ready, he loaded his guts with more Scotch. The liquor spilled on his clothes, and in some cases, he would apply his lips to an arm or the front of his sweater and suck alcohol from the cotton. He drank to Scott, wherever the man might be. He drank to the scorched bones at the base of the cliff. He drank to the memory of Tammy. He drank to Roxanne, despite her being a traitorous bitch who had tried to kill him. With the captain watching him pleasantly and appearing just as smashed, Gus toasted the duct-taped bottle, glad that at least someone he knew was around to see it all through with him.
His senses swam, and reality detached itself from him like a sliced retina. His vision freakishly elongated everything before snapping it back into its original form. He plopped down in the lawn chair, felt the base of his head thump against the padding, and stared at the burning city. Drool hung off his lips and soaked into his beard. The night’s cold would chill him at some point, but Gus didn’t care as he downed another long pull of the bottle. Annapolis continued burning, the city he had grown up in, played in as a boy, and worked in as a man. Where he met Tammy, the woman who he thought was the love of his life, but who ultimately wasn’t. The city burned, removing the places he’d worked on with paint brush and roller, removing the places where he and his friends had drank and laughed on the weekends, destroying the house where he and Scott holed up for days while an army of corpses roamed the hallway below them. Fire consumed the place where he had met Roxanne for the first time, and damned if he didn’t even miss her––long for her. Fire devastated the homes of countless people who were already dead and gone,
years
gone, strangers all, yet the very thought of them made his throat constrict, his eyes water, and his sinus cavity fill. Gus’s shoulders heaved, his breath hitched, and he cried in the afterglow of the city. He sobbed until he tenderly––or at least as tenderly as a man in his current condition could do––placed the half-empty bottle of Scotch down on the seat beside the captain because he simply didn’t want to see another thing break. He wept and watched and sniffed until the emotional pressure was spent, leaving nothing but the long, hitching, body-wracking gasps that came after such an outpouring of grief.
Moaning while wiping his nose and his eyes, Gus eventually got control of himself. He reached, hands trembling, to pick up the bottle of Scotch again. He saluted the captain sitting next to him, and the little bastard saluted back.
He regarded the city. There was one last thing to do, he supposed, and that was to finish the Scotch. And then the next bottle. Then the bottle after that, and the one after that, and so on.
And if he was lucky, if he got it right,
and
if God was on his side, he would finally drink himself to death.
20
He awoke to dusky daylight and stared out at the smouldering gray carcass of a city obscured by smoke. He moaned and shook his head—a mistake, as his head felt as if someone had nailed hot spikes into it. He slowly sat up, cringing as he pulled himself forward, with his legs on either side of the chair, and placed his head in his hands.
“God
damnit
..
The city was still there, rooftops barely seen through the thick clouds. Here and there, he spied the orange gleam of flames, still feasting on the bones of Annapolis. He looked over and met the steady, smiling gaze of the captain.
“Little fuckin’…
pygmy
.”
Shaking his head, he realized he didn’t see the last bottle of Scotch. Leaning over, he saw it on the floor, perhaps three swallows left in the bottle. He’d passed out before finishing it. Gus didn’t want any more. He was just glad he hadn’t broken the bottle.
He inspected himself and sighed in disgust. The crotch of his jeans was wet. He doubted he had spilled booze on his junk, so that left only one possibility, especially since he had no urgent need to take a leak.
“Well, shit..
That was all he needed, waking up––fucking alive––to the world on fire, and realizing that his first attempt at suicide had failed miserably, and that he’d pissed himself in the process. “Goddamnit.” He got to his feet, feeling the almost crippling aches in his joints and lower extremities. His stomach lurched, and his senses spun wildly. He collapsed on the deck, cheek to the wood, and gulped air like a dying fish. He pulled himself to the edge of the deck, where his stomach finally rebelled. He started to vomit, but clamped his mouth shut, forcing it back. Trapped between an unflinching sphincter and a closed upper exit, his stomach hurled with even greater force and blasted a stinging gush of puke out his nose. Gus choked, opened his mouth, and vomitus heaved out that way as well, leaving him in a stream of color. Consciousness left him, came back, left him once more, and finally returned. His limbs shook spasmodically, and a weak “god… damn” got lost in the barest of breezes.
He squeezed his eyes shut, content to just lie there, and hoped that he could defy the odds and not shit himself as well.
Somewhere in the next couple of hours, he crawled to the door of the outhouse and pulled himself in, not even bothering to close the door behind him. He stayed there for an hour, collapsed against the wall and defecating at an angle, wondering if he could light a match and blow himself to hell that way.
He somehow made it back into the house and into the kitchen. Panting, sweating cold rivulets, he drank water from a jug. He shuffled into the living room, up the stairs, and into the bathroom. He stripped off his pants and underwear, and splashed water onto his privates, cleaning up as best as he could without taking a bath. He somehow got into fresh jeans and underwear. Not wanting to sleep on the mess that was his bed, he descended the steps again. With a
whuff
, he landed on the sofa as if it were a raised oasis in a desert of aches and pain. Lying there, face pressed into the cushions and one eye squeezed shut, Gus hoped that his innards settled enough at some point so that he might be able to have a comforting drink of rum.