Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
“I’m sorry, Thelm,” his voice rasped. “I’m sorry. At least the birds won’t get you. Or anything else. And… it’s not a bad car. Good stereo system.” He meant every word.
He smiled weakly. “Anyway, you just sleep now. Thanks for the sign. I’ll see if I can find Maggie and the kids. They’re still out there somewhere, and it’s a mighty big province. God willing, I’ll find them, and I’ll bring them back.”
To where?
“Haven’t gotten to that part just yet,” he sighed, shoulders heaving, “but I’ll work on it.”
Emotionally drained, Gus ran a hand over the car roof and gave it a final pat. He returned to his vehicle and strapped himself in, frowning at the road ahead.
Halifax called.
It was absolutely the last place he wanted to go—a hellish maze of urban planning gone bad—but he had to travel there for the sake of Maggie and the kids.
The sun slipped behind a dark cloud as he fired up the engine.
The road thickened with abandoned vehicles the closer Gus got to Halifax. He slowed to a crawl, threading his way through bottlenecks that nearly strangled the roads of Lower Sackville. Cars had become above-ground coffins for their occupants, the highway transformed into a collage of dull metallic roofs and open doors.
“Jeeezus,” Gus hissed in awe.
The main drag in Annapolis had been bad, but the highway to Halifax was horrific. The scary thing was that he wasn’t even in the city yet, let alone downtown. The magnitude of his quest suddenly threatened to overwhelm him.
Anywhere. They could be any-
fucking
-where.
Gus forced the despair down. He was going to find them.
Wrecked gas stations, rows of houses, and a line of ubiquitous chain restaurants rolled by, reminding him he still had a little leftover Kraft Dinner. An exit turned off toward what appeared to be a collection of stores like Walmart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse. A sign advertised indoor-track go-kart racing in front of an enormous three-story box of a building. Downed power lines draped a pickup truck, a black husk of an arm hanging out of its open window, an attached head thrown back in a maniacal chortle.
The deeper Gus drove down that highway of haunts, the more uneasy he became. Any time he went down into Annapolis, he’d made good and certain he drank a certain armoring amount of Grandpa’s special sauce. On the farm, he’d fought down those urges that periodically gripped him. He wasn’t an alcoholic—not in the least.
But the memory of how he
used to
deal with the horrors of the days gone by tempted him.
Made him… want. Wish.
He kept his speed down, driving like the only float in a stalled parade. Daylight waned, and the dash clock said it was a little after four. No way was he driving around that graveyard at night.
The SUV swung onto an off-ramp for Lower Sackville’s residential area and rolled down a road crowded with houses on either side. Front lawns grew wild, some high enough to tickle the bottoms of sills. A few cars filled driveways. A pickup had parked itself uncomfortably over a fallen power transformer. A sign displaying Hallmark Avenue strolled by, and Gus absently thought about birthday cards. Dark bodies in the road brought him back, and his tires rolled over the dead already flattened into the asphalt.
He wanted a house for the night—one as easy to defend as possible.
All he saw were split-level designs. Split-levels and
more
split-levels.
Jesus Christ
. The developer must’ve had a split-level hard-on. Gus snaked his way through the streets until he stopped in a cul-de-sac directly in front of a two-story house with a double garage. It wasn’t his first choice, but then, with the common theme of houses on the street, he probably wasn’t going to find anything better.
He backed into the driveway and stopped before the garage door. Gus still wore his bulky Nomex and left his ride’s nose pointed toward the highway for a quick getaway. A plump propane tank stood at the side of the house and gave him fiery flashbacks to another time.
Bat in hand, he walked to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. Gus stood back and knocked, just in case. While waiting, he sized up the other houses nearby and thought about checking them later.
No one answered, but that didn’t always mean anything.
Gus walked around the back, ignoring the patio stones and the grass fringing each square. He stepped onto a stained deck, studied the glasswork of a sliding door, and smashed the section near the lock. In a second, he entered the home and closed the door behind.
“Anyone home?” he asked, sniffing at the end of the question and adjusting his helmet.
No answer.
Gus strode into a modern kitchen, circled the marble island, and peeked inside the fridge and nearby cupboards. Finding nothing, he wondered if the owners had left in a hurry. He left the kitchen and wandered through a comfortable living room with a gas fireplace and a thick rug that might have cost hundreds of dollars. A small plastic castle lay in one corner. A little dollhouse lay on its side and stared brightly at the ceiling.
Young kids
, Gus figured.
Memories of the hospital and crazy bitch Alice entered his mind.
His balls
still
ached from that encounter. He tapped the castle with a toe and regarded the staircases with a melancholy air. Jesus, he hoped the family reached someplace safe. For some reason, the castle and the toy house upset him more than he thought possible. Perhaps it was the thought that little Becky would enjoy herself there. Or it might be that, after having been around children for the past couple of years, when they were gone—when
anyone’s
children were gone—the space they’d once filled seemed all the more empty and just a little more drab.
Leaving a few toys on the floor might entice the rightful owners to come back.
Gus grunted and stood behind a thin veil of drapes over the picture window. This he liked, a clear view of anyone coming into the cul-de-sac. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and meandered through, searching for deadheads and relieved to find it empty—not even a rat. A chest of drawers in a little girl’s room had been cleaned out, as if someone had left in an awful hurry. The same went for the little boy’s room, mom and dad’s, and the closets.
The garage was also bare.
He wondered where the family had gone.
Wondered how far they got.
Gus retraced his steps to the living room and plopped down on the sofa with a direct line of vision of the cul-de-sac.
Listened.
Heard not a thing, except that drone deep in the ear canal that manifests in the absence of noise.
Gus waited, watched. After his break, he opened the garage and parked the SUV inside, out of sight. The garage had a few gardening tools that he thought about taking, some duct tape, and a peg wall full of useful tools and items, but then he thought of the children’s castle.
No. He wasn’t going to take anything from this place. Breaking the window had already tainted this seemingly content little home. Even though the owners were gone, even though Gus had never hesitated cleaning out a house before, a spirit lingered in that place. Taking something would feel like swiping something from a church.
But, if it was all right—and he hoped it would be—he would stay the night and leave in the morning.
He ate the leftover KD at the kitchen table, his working flashlight sitting nearby if it got too dark. Five packets of dried noodles, the ones with the granulated flavor packs, had been left in a cupboard. Gus took them, hoping whoever owned the place wouldn’t mind that either. Once he’d finished with supper, he explored the other cupboards, finding dishes and boxes of long-dried-out cereal.
The cupboard above a blue bread box held a surprise, however.
Gus opened it and stared slack-jawed at a bottle of Captain Morgan’s amber rum.
The decorative logo was changed somewhat, from the usual figure to an enlarged face of the moustachioed sailor, one corner of his wide-brimmed hat drooping quite dashingly over an eye. The welcoming smile on the old naval officer damn near glowed in the dark of the cupboard, as if Gus was the very person he’d been waiting for.
Well, shit.
Gus’s mind balked.
The pirate’s shrunken head stared right at him.
That wasn’t an entirely bad thing, not in the least. In fact, in that hour of need, he welcomed the officer’s familiar presence.
“Hello, my buddy,” Gus whispered, just standing and staring at the bottle. “Been a long time.”
The Captain didn’t answer.
“That’s okay. That’s fine. Hell, I’d be more worried if’n you
did
start talkin’ back.”
Gus gently extracted the plastic container, studying the label, reading the alcohol content, where it was distilled. All good information to know, and dammit if he wasn’t just a bit tempted to have a chug. The bottle was full, the seal unbroken, and the liquid gold sloshed against the plastic.
Gus wasn’t an alkie. He’d proved that over the time spent on the farm.
Not on the farm anymore
, a voice whispered.
“No,” he said, eyeing the Captain’s merry features. “No, I’m certainly not. Oh my, oh my.”
Gus walked with the seafaring officer to the sofa, sat down heavily, and scratched two of his dearest buddies. He stared at the face in the darkening room. The bottle was only a small quart––three hundred and seventy-five milliliters––or as the Newfoundlanders would say, a flask, but the appearance of the Captain calmed Gus in a way he’d never thought possible. The last time he’d felt so pleasantly surprised was perhaps a Christmas morning with Tammy, discovering Santa had deposited a similar bottle in his red stocking.
Gus sat and stared at the Captain’s grinning features. He ran a thumb over the surface of the bottle, and the liquid trembled ever so slightly.
“What to do?” he whispered, smiling at the question. “What to do…”
“I heard something out there, man.”
Sherman Wayward regarded the starless night before leveling his gaze to the road. A light breeze whisked past his ears, frigging his hearing for a moment, and he was about to say as much to his guard-post companion, Raymond Cole, who was almost shapeless in the dark, when he
did
catch the barest rumble of noise—long and huffing at times, mechanical.
“You hear that?” Raymond asked.
“Yeah,” Sherman said.
“That’s a motor.”
Sherman didn’t respond right away. He kept on listening, leaning over the hood of his car and staring off into the blackness. The rumbling became louder, deepened.
“That’s not one motor,” he muttered as it dawned on him. “Those are motors.”
“Who the hell is it then?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Should I get Pat?”
Patrick Riley was the de facto leader of the little community of forty-four people living just off the 105 in New Brunswick. Over the past few years, they’d been surviving the zombie apocalypse by avoiding the death traps of Saint John, Moncton, and Fredericton and keeping to the outskirts of the smaller communities, hiding at the ends of back roads and becoming seminomadic. At the peak of the zombie plague, they’d driven in trailers from park to park, creating defensive zones with the people and equipment they had and conducting sorties into nearby towns for food and essential goods. Riley had traveled the province over in his scarred Winnebago, keeping to the less-traveled roads, and gathered his little troop of survivors as he drove along. The sound of his home-on-wheels had attracted the remnants of humanity like an ice cream truck.
Eventually, they settled temporarily on a deserted farm just off the 105, situated in the Saint John River Valley—and there they’d stayed for two years, situated on a low plateau, facing the wide Saint John River, which would twinkle like diamonds under full moons. A single dirt lane sloped down from the house and parked trailers to the guard post deemed necessary day and night. A chest-high wooden fence faced the main road, another feature the inhabitants of the farm appreciated.
There had been a few situations with outlaws but nothing the little community couldn’t handle. But tonight… tonight was different. Somber flashes of metal could occasionally be seen through the inky dark, moving along the 105 with the slow-moving grace of a train. As it was November, the night air promised to bite if offered bare skin. Sherman sniffed at times, clearing his sinus cavity of running mucus.
“The fuck is that?” he asked, every bit as perplexed as Raymond beside him. If things got bad, the practiced drill was to reach in through the open window of the parked Accord and sound the horn. Sherman moved to that very station, shaking his head in wonder.
“Maybe it’s someone coming in?” Raymond asked.
“Who the hell’s coming here this time of night?”
“Blow the horn?”
Sherman nodded and reached for the steering wheel, sending a surge of relief through his companion. Sherman was keeping his eyes on whatever was coming up the 105 when he heard a short, indignant gurgle from Raymond, as if a dentist’s drill had slipped and speared the back of his throat. It evaporated into a squeaky puff of breath.
Confusion gripped Sherman, and he glanced over his shoulder to see Raymond slump to the ground. A shadow blurred forward, and Sherman had just enough time to gasp before a length of knife stabbed deep into his right eye, delivering a split second of pain not unlike being zapped with a few thousand volts. He flopped to his knees and got held for a moment before being gently lowered.
Sherman was dead before he touched dirt, his brain scrambled by six inches of razor-sharp steel.
A wraith stood and wistfully regarded the little community on the hill. His companions called him Sick, and his name—as well as his reputation—was rightly earned. Sick could discern no sign of alarm, primarily because of the growing motorized drone in the background. He furtively wiped off the knife on his victim’s clothes and stepped up to the open window of the Accord. Sick looked around, confirming his task had been completed, before laying on the horn: three quick, startling toots.