Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
He grabbed his bat, got out of the vehicle, and closed the door to silence the computer voice before it nagged. For a long, considering moment, Gus stood there in regular clothes and boots and just listened, feeling the cold on his scarred face. Hidden birds chirped around the checkpoint. The door to the guard station hung wide open, and forest debris had blown over the floor, but just behind the station stood a house concealed from the road by an impressive hedge. A rosy brick walkway led to the single-story home, built in a Swiss mountain style, set upon a solid cement foundation reminiscent of ancient Japanese castles. Green paint offered some degree of camouflage in the summertime but not the fall. A gabled roof, wide eaves, and thick redwood beams made the house seem cozy and especially solid, ready for a beating if necessary.
And if the smashed windows were any indication, the house had taken its share right on the chin.
Gus glanced around and approached the guard station. He leaned through the doorway. A single desk rested against a sliding window, giving a clear view of anyone stopping at the gate. He rapped his knuckles on the glass and figured it could stop a bullet. A bank of ultrathin monitors rose from the desk’s surface while an empty gun rack hung from a nearby wall. Gus prodded the power button on a minicomputer for a few seconds before discarding it as dead. A cracked water cooler lay on the floor. A leather sofa filled the back wall as well as a steel cabinet that had been ransacked. Gus inspected the drawers, noting the top one had been forced open. He slid a finger along the jagged twist of metal around a wrecked lock. Not a viable weapon was to be seen, not a single shell left unshot.
Don’t be stupid
, a familiar voice cautioned, one he hadn’t heard in a very long time.
The Swiss house waited.
Leaving the guard station, he walked to the front door, which was also wide open. Twigs and dead branches covered the threshold in a loose mat. He paused there, listening, knowing the dead could be as still as stone. The bat snaked out, and just before he tapped its head against the frame, before he announced his arrival as surely as ringing a Liberty-sized dinner bell, he arrested his swing and considered the silence again.
Then he went inside.
An open main floor reminded him of his own departed home except this one had been redecorated by a drunk tornado. Designer chairs had been smashed, leather sofas gutted, and a kitchen island devastated by a sledgehammer. Most of the windows on the ground level had been shattered, allowing a chilling airflow through the house. Shells, plastic and brass, littered the hardwood floor like hard confetti.
The first body lay at the base of the staircase, its presence halting Gus in his tracks. Black body armor encased a uniformed male corpse. Velcro straps and empty webbing hung off his person. A messy head shot had removed most of the corpse’s face above an exposed horseshoe of teeth and a shattered vase of a skull. Gus winced at the golden shine of deep-set molars. The desiccated skin made it difficult to determine whether the guard had been deadhead or human. A dark plume of organic stain plastered the wall above the body, framed in rivulets of matter caked to the wood’s surface.
Gus exhaled, remembering to breathe, wishing he had a shotgun right about then.
No weapon on the corpse. No other bodies. Just one guy who might’ve taken the easy way out, with no hope to continue but courage enough to use perhaps his last shell on himself.
Gus inspected the wreckage of the first floor and deduced the fight overran the gate then the station and stopped at the house. Perhaps a siege then, either long or short, ended with the last man, his back against the wall, tonguing gunmetal before doing the deed.
Of course, that was just one way it might’ve gone. Gus wiped a hand over his mouth and chin. A wind picked up outside, reminding him of graveyards. That had been the first body he’d seen in months, and he discovered he still wasn’t immune to the gut-twisting
wrongness
of the picture. That unfortunate fucker should have grown old with his wife and kids––not planted on his ass with the top of his skull open and unfit for flowers. He took a steadying breath and concentrated on examining the facts, trying to calm his quickening breath, the steady thrumming in his ears and chest.
A fight had happened there, but where were the bodies?
A healthy dose of fear swelled up behind his sternum, forcing its way into his heart and guts. Perspiration moistened his face. The walls felt closer. Stepping out of the house, he fast-walked back to the SUV, immediately seeing dark stains upon the earth before and around the gate. A deep-rooted grease blemish wasn’t recent, and the elements had failed to remove it over time. Gus stopped at the rear and studied the ground further, feeling his anxiety levels rise and wishing for the calming burn of a drink—a mouthful of any of his old favorites. He hadn’t forgotten about his alcoholic past, although he didn’t consider himself an alcoholic by any stretch. Whiskey, rum, beer—but mostly the hard stuff—had all armored him against the horrors of the day, grounding him, granting buoyancy upon an endless sea of walking putrefaction. In the beginning, he believed there wasn’t any booze on the farm, but there was, stashed away by the various owners, some whose company he enjoyed, some whose he didn’t.
All the while he was on the farm, Gus didn’t partake. He never went on scavenging expeditions either as Talbert held the keys to those horror shows. Staying sober didn’t bother Gus. The farm and its people had not only healed and sheltered him but had also gradually restored his tattered psyche, which the apocalypse had shredded for two whole years.
The place had rejuvenated him, resurrected him.
There hadn’t been a need to numb reality with alcohol.
The world seemed just fine while living on the farm. The farm had been his anchor.
Now, however, he was in harm’s way again.
He licked his dry lips and felt the familiar tremble in his fingers. A quick shot of anything forty proof or better would have been magic for his beating heart. Gus went to the driver’s side of the SUV and eased himself behind the steering wheel. He set his jaw and tongued the gaps of his missing front teeth, seeing Roxanne’s naked form lying right on the hood of the vehicle. The image softened and left him with the road ahead.
Always a road.
Sniffing hard and adjusting his balls for luck, he leaned back in the seat.
Don’t be stupid
.
“Yeeeah,” Gus whispered and got back out of the vehicle. He stopped at the rear and pulled open the hatch. A pile of Nomex gear greeted him—not the original suit he and Scott had taken from the fire station so long before, but a close copy. After he’d been brought to the farm, Adam saw the good sense of wearing the fire gear as body armor and sent Talbert and his minions out to find some. They brought back a load of material, most of which Talbert and his crew dismissed, claiming it was too bulky, among other nit-picking details.
Dumb fucks.
Gus kicked off the cowboy boots Maggie had given him and pulled on his tan overalls, hooking their black straps over his shoulders. The knees had sewn-in padding that would do the job until he could find something better. The steel-toed fire boots went on next, snug and comfortably heavy. Down his right boot went an imitation KA-BAR knife. A firefighter’s protective hood covered his head, and he pulled on it until his face popped through. Then came the heavy coat, which he zipped before patting down the Velcro outer flap. Strips of reflective yellow ringed the ankles, wrists, and chest. The old stuff he’d worn while house picking in Annapolis did the job, but looking back, there were too many pieces. This was a little bulkier but only two parts—five if he counted his helmet (nonregulation but what the hell) and his boots and gloves.
The gloves. They were something else.
They resembled combat gloves with their black leather and articulated knuckle plates. Just making fists made Gus want to try punching out a wall. Durable beyond compare, the gloves fit comfortably, and pull tabs sealed up the wrists, reinforcing the cuffs on the jacket. Adam had given the gloves to him, and Gus had asked where he’d found the brutish things, to which Adam only smirked, as though saying,
Don’t ask where I got
’
em or how I got
’
em, just be
glad
I got
’
em.
Gus was. Getting back into the SUV, he most certainly was. He put his motorcycle helmet on, visor up, and kept the bat handy. A familiar building of energy powered up his limbs, and Gus wished again he had something to drink, just to turn his dials down. He was getting too amped up, the expectation of action becoming too powerful.
He started the engine and eased farther down the road, eyeing the hall of dense foliage on either side. His foot hit the brake at the halfway mark.
“Shit,” Gus hissed and got out of the SUV, taking the bat with him.
On either side of the road were portable armored barriers, the kind Special Forces hunkered down behind while firing upon an enemy. Steel gray with a slash of red paint across the surface, just below open gun ports, the four walls had been pushed off the road.
Talbert had been there, all right.
A parting in the bush drew Gus’s attention, a trail made by four-wheeled quads. Holding the bat at guard, he stalked through the opening and followed the ATV tracks through the forest. Brush snapped and crackled loudly underfoot, making him cringe at times, until he came to an enormous fire pit.
Gus let the bat drop to his waist.
The pit itself might’ve been made by an excavator, but he figured someone got the shitty end of a deal and had to dig it with a really big shovel. He didn’t feel the need to jump down there and measure the depth, but it looked deep enough to stand in with the rim reaching his shoulders or chin. It certainly was deep enough to fry whatever dead things had been piled into it.
And fry someone had.
Ash-flecked bones and teeth filled the crater, dull against the scorched earth. Skulls with their jaws stretched wide sang a hungry dirge while others seemed to howl hysterics at their solitary visitor. Arms and fingers reached for the pit’s edges, a necklace of slivers clawing for escape. Gus couldn’t remember if he had ever seen so many bones in one place before, and the sight made his knees weak. The woods hiding this horrific barbeque remained still, and from his experience, no gimp would be able to creep up on him, not with the dry brush carpeting the ground.
And he hoped to Christ the rats weren’t around.
A drink. Just one to steady his nerves, to take the edge off. S’all he needed—quick and nasty—but the evil part of him, the part that swore he wasn’t an alcoholic, murmured sweetly that it didn’t
have
to be just one. Seriously. What better way to face the day than by kicking back and tying one on? Or in this case, loading several
in
.
He pulled on his nose, erasing an itch, and backed away from the open pit, just in case the bones did something entirely freaky. If they did, Gus would simply bolt for the SUV and damn Talbert and his boys.
Couldn’t find ’em, Adam. Sorry, Maggie.
Matter of fact, that story rang temptingly clear in Gus’s head, but he shook his head in slow acceptance of his purpose.
He’d go a little farther.
See the mystery mansion that had tempted Talbert out there.
Find out what happened to that alpha-male shit stain and his butternut bum buddies and return with a full report.
Gus returned to the SUV and started it up. He stared at the edges of the paved road, his peripheral vision seeing the grins of skeletal faces. Sweat covered his face in a sheen that had nothing to do with heat. His fingers tapped on the curve of the steering wheel before he gripped the leather. Fear. Dread. The old, unwanted friends sat astride his shoulders like chortling goblins realizing all his defenses had been lowered and just amazed to have such persuasive seats. Even better… they smelled doubt as ripe as putrefying compost.
The road took him down a long spidery tunnel, wondrous in any season, with yellow and orange leaves piled up in stiff drifts. He drove along this late-autumn pipeline, the road straightening out like a neck struggling to swallow a bone…
Until it finally opened in eye-popping wonder.
Gus knew, from his days as a house painter, that the older houses often presented the most work. They weren’t armored against age and the elements like the newer models with their candy-shell vinyl siding. Gables, high-peaked fasciae, and wide soffits could make a housepainter’s job tricky at times, and without the safety of a scaffold, the gymnastics performed at the end of a forty-foot ladder to reach those last bare spots rivaled circus acts.
The house before Gus filled the width of the windshield and would’ve taken him and a professional crew
months
to prep and paint.
Mansion
.
Gus tried the word and marveled at the reality. He eased to a stop, brain frozen by the palatial magnificence of Mortimer’s superstructure. Overall, the house was white, with a marked Swiss influence of bare wooden beams and brackets lining and crisscrossing the upper levels. The first level appeared coated in a siding of stone while looming balconies dotted a third level plastered in unblemished weatherboarding. The home looked to be three stories tall at a glance, but rising above the center of the home were a fourth and
fifth
level, marked by a gigantic dome perched on top. Spider legs of black girders creased the structure’s creamy surface. At a guess, Gus figured the whole construction was easily fifty thousand square feet of living space, perhaps even upward of seventy, all under multiple roofs with eaves wide enough to dance on. Gables, intricate carvings, and moldings of dragons and chimera perched almost everywhere—with one serpentine beast fashioned out of copper and drawing attention to a tall chimney—amazed Gus with their size and the sheer creativity necessary to conceive such a design.
Mortimer
had
to have been a billionaire. This “house” rivaled the size of a shopping mall and would eat up millions in yearly upkeep. Black paneling on sections of the roof glared flatly at him, and he recognized solar paneling but doubted even those few installations could keep up with the power demand. He’d be surprised if the damned monster didn’t have elevators in the dome. He’d be even
more
surprised if the place didn’t have its own indoor amusement park.