Mountain Man - 01 (23 page)

A thoughtful silence answered Scott, before he heard an almost embarrassed, “Just sayin’ is all.”

The sound of something falling silenced both men then, and kept them quiet until sleep took Scott away.

Scott dreamed. He dreamed about baking on the midnight shift. Every morning, after he had completed the day’s supply of baked goods, he would ready the day-old cookies and muffins for the garbage. It wasn’t something he enjoyed doing, and when he first took the job, he carried home as much as he could eat. That practice didn’t last long, as he soon grew tired of bringing the food home. His co-workers, mostly university part-timers, were of the same mind. The food was great for the first couple of months, but then the novelty wore off, and no one wanted to touch it thereafter, or until a new worker arrived.

He bagged food to be thrown out and left it in a stout shed out back. Sometimes, the shed would be opened, and the bagged food would be taken and eaten by the homeless. Scott had no problem with that. It was food. They were hungry. No questions asked.

But the manager found out and placed a padlock on the shed.

Scott dreamed in that slipstream of dream cinema, where he was both the viewer and the actor, lugging out a bag of day-old muffins––still fine to eat, but not up to the fresh standards of the company. Scott opened the back door and stepped out, the shed’s front door to his immediate left.

Then, they showed up.

Except in his dream, the homeless had died years ago, their flesh the color of decomposing meat, and their sightless eyes fixing on him. They voiced their need, backing Scott up. He turned to the door only to realize that it had closed on him, and there was no knob on the outside.

The dead closed in, barring any escape. Their clothes reeked from the grave. Fingers, missing and ground to the dirty bones, reached for him, reached for the garbage he held. One finger, its bony tine hooked and sharp, sloughed out in nightmare fashion from the dark and pawed at the plastic bag, cutting it open with barely any contact. The contents spilled forth and splashed the concrete step and Scott’s work sneakers.

He screamed.

The bag wasn’t full of day-old baked goods any longer.

It contained something with more sustenance.

The dead clawed and feasted upon the meaty chunks, chewing on every piece in nauseating detail. Both the scene and smell rooted Scott in place, but there wasn’t anywhere to run, anyway.

And the dead were
famished
.

Stale
, one of the corpses rasped at Scott.
Staaaale
, it complained with a throat full of scum dredged from the bottom of a sea bed and the things that lived and writhed in it still. Scott wanted to run, but the nightmare wouldn’t let him. He knew he was going to scream, he knew he was going to scream loud, and that was the horror of it because he knew he was in a dream, and
to scream in the attic would mean they would hear below
.

As the first of many clawed hands reached for him and hooked into his skin, tearing and stretching lengths of meat that bled in runny gouts, dreamtime Scott opened his mouth and
shrieked
…

Scott woke up. He inhaled, catching a full whiff of the dead’s lingering stench. His mouth possessed an earthy taste. The last image he had from his nightmare was bony fingers reaching into his mouth and trying to fasten onto his tongue. It was still night, and his stomach felt empty.

Stale
. That voice echoed in his brain, like something sinking into the depths of a dark lake.

He didn’t know what time it was, but he relieved Gus from his watch.

They believed the house began emptying sometime on the third day. The sounds and smell began to lessen.

By night, the interior of the house was silent.

They stayed in the attic anyway, just to be safe. Just to give the tide of the dead time enough to completely clear out and, if they were lucky, maybe even leave the cul-de-sac entirely. Cul-de-sac. There was a joke there, somewhere, but they were in no mood to figure out exactly what it might be.

On the morning of the fourth day, Gus woke up and felt no need to pee whatsoever. The day before, he had urinated once, and at that time, he experienced a burning sensation that wasn’t at all pleasant. By the evening, he was pissless. And he wasn’t even scared. He rolled over and listened to the house below, straining and hearing nothing. He listened for a long time, until Scott woke up.

“Hear… anything?” Scott whispered weakly.

“Nah.”

“What… d’you think?”

They suffered from thirst, headaches, and fits of restlessness to weariness. Four fucking days they had been stranded in the near dark, hiding out in fright at first, which bled away into monotonous boredom. In the end, the boredom was their greatest threat, as any momentary lapse in maintaining quiet would have alerted the dead still in the house. It only took one mistake, and their fears of dying from a lack of water or food would be forgotten in the surge of corpses trying to access the attic.

Gus had had enough of attics.

“Get ready,” he said.

“Are… we goin’?” The thirst they both felt raked their throats, and Gus believed that even his tongue was swelling, if such a thing were possible.

“Yeah,” Gus answered in his own parched voice. He swallowed and felt the sinker of his Adam’s apple clink thickly in his throat. “I’m gonna have one huge fuckin’ Mai Tai when I get outta here.”

Taking a breath, Gus slipped his fingers around his shotgun. He reloaded the weapon, hearing the soft clicks and snaps coming from Scott’s side of the attic. They each took an equal share of shells, stuffing a box inside their tucked-in shirts and the remaining shells into their pockets.

“Not gonna… miss this place,” Scott muttered, putting on his lightning bolt helmet.

“Nope,” Gus agreed, doing the same with his helmet. “Ready, Chico?”

“Why do you call me Chico? You don’t hear me calling you anything except your name.”

“Oh, sorry.” Gus got to a sitting position, feeling the aches in his limbs from sitting and lying down for so long. He felt the drag from the lack of food and water.

“You got the keys?” Gus asked.

Scott patted his jeans pocket.

“All right, then…”

Using his feet, Gus pushed down on the door and lowered the steps. When the stairs were extended, he slowly stretched out his legs and, holding onto the door frame, flipped the lower sections down. Springs yawned at the extension. Setting the stairs firmly against the floor, Gus gripped his shotgun, and adjusted the bat on his back.

“Let’s go,” he whispered.

They descended into the upstairs level and, for a moment, marvelled at the destruction to the house. The recent press of bodies against the walls had left them cracked and bowled in. Dark smears of bodily fluids ran in wavy lines the length of the hallway. The reek of the dead hung throughout the house like a popped blood blister. It would have made their eyes water if they had the moisture to spare. The only thing missing from the party, Gus thought, were strands of toilet paper hanging from the ceiling. The rooms he glanced into were empty, in shambles, soiled, and battered by the recent invasion of the dead.

Gus heard a thud behind him and whirled to spot Scott leaning against the wall.

“You okay?” Gus approached the man.

“Yeah, just…” Scott’s eyes squeezed shut and opened a moment later. “Just dizzy is all.”

“Can you move?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m behind you.”

Nodding and hoping Scott was indeed behind him, Gus turned and covered the last of the hallway, peeking around corners to bedrooms and bathrooms to see if any corpses remained. He reached the stairs and placed his back against the wall, his own dizziness suddenly making things swirl. Taking a breath and hating the taste of the air, Gus angled his shotgun to cover the living room. Descending the steps quietly, they faced another wreck of overturned furniture, grotesque markings on the walls like thick streamers, and smashed glass from the destroyed picture window.

Gus edged into the room and peeked around the corner. Empty. He looked toward the driveway. There the beast waited, seemingly untouched. The cul-de-sac appeared deserted.

“All clear,” Gus whispered. “Move it.”

Gus opened the front door and sped to the van with Scott following. They got into the vehicle, checked the interior, stowed their weapons, and buckled themselves in. Scott placed the keys in the ignition and turned it. The engine coughed and started faithfully, and Gus exhaled his relief.

“Would’ve shit right here if it didn’t turn over,” Scott said.

“I would’ve shit out a tumbleweed,” Gus added.

Scott accidently placed the van in reverse before stomping on the brake and getting the right gear.

“Take ‘er easy,” Gus whispered

“Watch the road,” Scott said. “I got lost the last time. That’s how we got here.”

“I gotcha.”

The van rumbled across the asphalt, the daylight hidden behind a thick carpet of clouds. The streets were deserted, and for that, the two men were thankful. Scott drove slowly, and they caught only glimpses of dead, until Gus directed Scott to the main road. Once, Scott had to pull over as a wave of dizziness assaulted him, but only once. Moving a steady speed of thirty, the two weary men reached their mountain home by early afternoon. They barely possessed the strength to move the gates and close them, and by the time they finally parked the van in the garage, both were exhausted.

“Home again, home again, jiggity jig,” Gus said once they were safely inside.

Not bothering to unload the van, they moved into the house, dropping gear as they went, until they got to the kitchen. They sipped water pumped from the well, replenishing their fluids, and Gus got around to heating up a can of Chunky soup. He stopped cooking when it was just lukewarm, and slopped half of it into a bowl for Scott. Standing around the island in the kitchen, they devoured the food, and opened up another can.

“You’re not drinking?” Scott asked him at one point.

“Too thirsty to drink.” Gus grinned. “Don’t you worry. When I’m ready, I got a bottle of Canadian Club with my name on it.”

“You’d probably puke it up if you drank it, anyway,” Scott smirked, eyeing the man over his second bowl of soup.

Gus nodded and got back to eating. “Once this is done, I’m going to take a bath.”

“Thought we couldn’t do that.”

“Today’s an exception. You got one, too, if you want it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Gus spooned another mouthful and paused. His hand shook hard enough that he dropped the spoon.

“You okay?”

Gus studied his fingers for a moment, making a fist and shaking it loose. “Better than ever.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Having eaten and drunk enough water to rehydrate, Gus later went up to the master bedroom and his bath. He made it hot, but not so hot to be unbearable as he usually did. He filled the tub and grabbed a bottle of nearby shampoo and body wash. Steam rose and covered the black-and-white checked tiling. He stripped and slipped into the deep-set old-fashioned tub, submerging himself to his woolly chin. He thumped his head against the side of the tub and relaxed. He held up his hand, watched it shake for a moment, and let it drop back into the water. Shaking or not, he was thankful to be able to see it without an urge to bite it off.

He soaped his head, his beard, and eventually his body, feeling the taut cords of muscle that were previously covered by about a hundred and fifty pounds of fat. He felt the scars around his lower abdomen, from back when he had met crazy Alice in a hospital so long ago. He had sported a beer belly then. It was ironic that the layers of fat there had actually saved him from being disembowelled when, for years, his doctors had told him to lose the gut. He couldn’t remember much about what had happened at the hospital––shock had wiped that particular slate of his mind clean––but he remember what had happened just days ago, and how he thought that he had swallowed a piece of the undead. The pure fright of knowing what might have happened, what
could
have happened, made Gus shudder for a moment.

Then, it all came out.

Not wanting Scott to hear him, Gus plunked his head against the metal of the tub and wept as quietly as possible.

The next day, they decided to take it easy and replenish their strength. Neither of the men wanted to return to Annapolis so soon after escaping it, so they stayed on the mountain, safe behind their wall. They ate breakfast and went out to the van to look over what they had taken from the city.

“Map,” Gus said. “This goes inside. We can hang it somewhere. Look at this.” He unrolled the map and held it up for Scott to see.

“That’s a good one.”

“Everything is on this. Places I didn’t even think of looking.” Gus let one end drop as he scratched at his beard. “This is a prize.”

“Didn’t you have two crowbars?”

“Lost the other at the house.” Gus frowned. Thinking of the old dead guy in the rocker with the gold teeth made him shake his head. It chilled him still.