Bruno’s expression soured at the thought. “Looks tame to me.”
“You think everyone is tame,” Gus said.
The two men went right on watching the dog.
“Saw a TV show once,” Gus started, “about house pets, and how they would be the unspoken victims if something happened to their owners in an apocalypse. If they were inside the house with their owners, well, you can imagine what happened. One of two things. Take a guess at what the first thing was. Now, with the second thing, maybe their owners weren’t around when everything went down the shitter. But they were still left alone inside a house with a closed door. Pets can’t get out. Pets can’t get at any food in the cupboards. If it’s a dog or a cat, it might have water from the toilet bowl, but in the end, the poor creature will die anyway of starvation. Trapped in its home. Some are lucky, though. They get out through a doggie door. Or an open window. Thing is, once they go outside, well, they’re still in a world of shit. After the outbreak, people were trying to kill and eat anything edible. People were trying to eat people, which to those animals was probably just as disturbing. So they ran. Well, the ones with the long legs ran. The ones with the short legs… they didn’t get very far.”
“Jesus,” Bruno muttered.
“Evolution right there,” Gus said, scratching at his belly. “Puts me in a bad mood just thinking of it. The smaller breeds with the stubby little legs? They get killed off pretty quick because they can’t run, not as fast as the bigger ones. They survive. That pooch right there? That’s one that got out. That’s a four-legged Robinson Crusoe. Funny thing. I never did see many animals alive down in Annapolis. Not even when I was house-picking.”
He stopped there, remembering that he did come across one species in abundance.
“He might come over if we toss him something to eat,” Bruno said.
Gus shook his head. “You’re too much of a diplomat.”
“Animals are great for therapy. Post-traumatic shock therapy and all that.”
The man had a point.
Gus studied the dog, watched it watch them. The animal didn’t move for a very long time, and that was kind of eerie. Gus’s eyes strayed to the trees behind the dog. Grass. Weeds. Everywhere. Nature was slowly but surely pushing back, reclaiming the world.
Just along the edge of the pavement, where the grass sprouted in a thick curtain, a pair of twigs caught Gus’s eye. Except they weren’t twigs, not after closer inspection. They were bony fingers, the drooping phalanges crooked and lifeless, as if the owner of those fingers had exhausted himself pulling his own corpse from a grave.
“You see something?” Bruno asked, and Gus knew that Collie’s eyes were on him, wondering just what he was up to. He wasn’t sure himself, but he crossed the pavement anyway.
A hand, connected to a skeletal forearm, not quite picked clean. Then… a torso.
Gus stopped at the pavement’s end, bent over, and parted the grass, uncovering the ravaged and weather-stripped remains of a person. A skull—locked in a scream—stared in the direction of the hotel. Its left arm was missing.
Then Gus saw the rest of the corpse, hidden within the thick vegetation. Dread clutched at his innards and caressed the back of his neck. Behind him, a boot heel clicked on pavement. Someone muttered something about gas. Fluid sloshed heavily in a container, but he didn’t pay attention to any of that.
The other skeletons had his complete attention.
Dismembered and strewn along in clumps, the bones were every bit as dusted and discolored as the hotel behind him. There was no pattern to where they fell, as if Death himself were polishing off a bucket of fried chicken and chucking the bones out the window, letting them fall where they may. Some of the skulls were screaming, some were grinning, but all of them faced him. None of the heads, as far as he could tell, had any bullet holes or any other sort of head trauma.
The dog had not moved; instead, it watched Gus with its ears perked. It dared him to come closer.
“No thanks,” Gus whispered, and backed away. The feeling was evidently mutual as the dog turned and trotted off into the forest. The animal quickly faded into the foliage.
Bruno was beside him then, studying the bone collection.
“Zombies?” he asked.
Gus shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe just… people. I dunno.”
He walked back to the truck, thinking about graves. Open graves.
And the things crawling free of them.
7
After refueling their trucks, Collie gathered the men into a circle.
“All right, boys,” she said, glancing at Bruno and Cory. “Next is Amherst. We’ll have to slow things down, though. The highway will be thick with dead material.”
“Dead material?” a puzzled Bruno asked.
“Cars,” Collie provided. “Trucks. Motorcycles. Delivery vans. Transports. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a goddamn baby buggy somewhere out there. An honest-to-Christ jug fuck of rubber tires, loose springs, and airbags. Might be impassable in places. I’ll worry about that. Just stay three cars back off my bumper, okay? And I say three, in case I have to stomp on the brakes and reverse my tin ass lickety-fuckin’ fast. And keep your weapons ready just in case. We good?”
Bruno lifted a hand.
“Melinda?” Collie asked.
Bruno made a face at that. He glanced at Gus for backup.
Gus refused to make eye contact.
“Jug fuck?” Bruno finally asked.
“What’s that now?” Collie asked back.
“What’s a jug fuck?”
“You can’t guess at the meaning?”
Bruno blinked and didn’t say a word.
“I think it means a shit storm,” Gus put in quietly.
Collie approved with a nod before turning on Bruno. “Any more army piddley shit lingo you need definitions for?”
Bruno shook his head.
“So we’re good?” she asked.
The men nodded.
“Outstanding,” Collie said softly. “Roger Dildo. See you on the other side.”
As they climbed aboard their trucks, Gus glanced over at the operator and asked, “You expecting anything?”
“Prepare for the worst and all that shit,” she replied and started up the engine.
The two trucks cruised through the Amherst city limits. Large buildings rose in the distance, stamping shadows across wide plots of unused farmland. As expected, there were plenty of vehicles on the highway, some dented or scuffed, others wrecked completely. Gruesome knots of glass and metal where vehicles had smashed heads. Metal clipped metal underneath the two trucks, and one frightening clatter made Gus brace for impact, before an exhaust pipe rattled out from underneath.
“Relax,” Collie told him. “It’s not ours.”
A crunch of demolished cars blocked the highway, forcing Collie to slow down and find a route off-road. Gus held on as the truck listed to his side. He saw skeletons. Complete sets littered the shoulders of the road—stretched out or simply flattened. Some intact, some not. Collie ignored them as she maneuvered through and banked hard onto a less cluttered road. Nothing stopped them this time. Stores with bright, tattered signs lined the streets, the windows smashed, glass spilling onto pavement. Parking lots of shopping meccas resembled aging battlefields. A high school came into view with a huge section of its structure collapsed, as if an explosion might’ve been responsible. Nothing raised its head to see where the trucks were going.
No one charged the vehicles.
And, most importantly, no one took a shot at them.
Thirty minutes later, they had rolled through not only Amherst, but neighboring Sackville as well.
“Well, all right,” Collie announced, hugely satisfied with the lack of resistance.
Gus checked his side mirror. Sackville remained a quiet gray place as it shrank in the distance, occasionally blotted out by Cory and Bruno’s truck following close behind.
“That went pretty good,” he said.
&nb
sp; “It did.”
“I was clenching the whole time,” he remarked.
“Just keep watch back there is all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, you never know,” Collie said. “That’s how we got into a fight with those Norse fuckheads. Norsemen. The fuck were they snorting when they came up with that name? Anyway, we were driving through the burbs, minding our business, when suddenly a dozen rigs appeared in our rear-view mirror. It was like we boot-fucked a beehive and left it in the dirt. They were riled up something fierce.”
Gus leaned forward, watching his mirror with greater attention. “Looks clear. For now, anyway.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Around a quarter after one, the group stopped to refuel some fifteen klicks away from Moncton. A road sign informed them that the exit was only seven kilometers away. The wide grassy median dividing the six-lane highway had become a collection of cars that had veered off the road. A transport trailer had stopped on the shoulder, leaning dangerously to the right. Gus kept watch as the others poured ethanol into the gas tanks. He stood a few paces at the front of the pickup, gazing at the horizon.
“Jesus,” Cory hissed. “Ethanol truly sucks ass, don’t it?”
“Great for the environment,” Collie said brightly.
“Yeah, but it seems like we’re constantly gassing up every other hour.”
“It does have pretty shitty mileage,” Bruno added.
“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll luck out and find an engineer,” Collie said. “One who specializes in improving shitty mileage.”
Gus quietly chuckled at that. That was his girl. At least he hoped she would be his girl one day. He ignored the thought by examining the treeline.
“Gus,” Collie said after a few minutes
“Yeah?”
“You drive.”
“You expecting trouble?”
“No more than usual.”
That was enough for Gus. He was getting bored riding shotgun. He started up the rig as Collie climbed aboard. She pulled one of her pistols free and inspected the weapon’s condition.
“You sure you’re not expecting trouble?” Gus asked.
Collie smiled. “Moncton’s a bigger city. Bigger population. Bigger chance of us attracting unwanted attention.”
Gus heard that.
Collie studied his profile. “You’re taking orders really well, you know.”
“Phht. Like I’m not going to. Far as I’m concerned, this is a military thing. And you’re military. I’m just a civvie. I’m fuckin’ glad you’re in charge.”
That sentiment amused the operator.
A minute later, they crossed an overpass. The adjoining exit ramps and roads reminded Gus of a steel spider that had died on its back, with its legs folded in on itself. A dead parade of unmoving vehicles jammed the ramps, bumper-to-bumper, with some of the impatient ones bashed onto shoulders. Moon roofs were opened, windows were lowered, and the wasted occupants barely visible. Grass surrounded it all, creating a tilting flood plain of yellow and green. All under a cloudy sky.
“Take your time,” Collie said, craning her neck one way and then the other. “You’re doing fine. Nice and easy.”
“Too much shit on the highway to go any faster,” Gus said, thankful that the overpass lanes weren’t so clogged.
“Just take your time,” the operator said, peering down beneath the overpass. “See those exits?”
“Yeah.”
“Notice anything?”
“Besides all the cars?”
“That’s right. All those cars. Roads are completely blocked. No one can use those lanes to come up behind us. Not unless they want to bash their way through the guardrails.”
“Places up ahead,” Gus said, pointing to a collection of buildings on either side of the highway.
A minute later, they rolled through Moncton’s outer limits, consisting mostly of truck stops, gas stations, drive-throughs, and abandoned chip trucks. Roadside water amusement parks with bone-dry half-pipes. Motels and multi-level hotels. In between these structures were roads snaking down into shallow valleys, offering fleeting glimpses of empty streets and long-dead neighborhoods of the inner city. Massive shopping complexes came into view, their fronts pointed towards an army of unmoving cars. Lawns, like so many others, had grown to jungle heights.
“The world up and died, Gus,” Collie remarked with just the barest note of remorse, surveying that desolate roadside show. “She up and died.”
“If we’re lucky,” Gus said.
That turned the operator’s head, but only for a few seconds before she zeroed in on a structure on the right.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“Maybe. Just keep on driving, but be ready to stomp on the gas when I say.” Collie held her Sig between her knees.
“What is it?” he asked.
“That hotel.”
The building resembled a ski chalet from the Swiss Alps, reminding Gus of Mortimer’s mansion. Painted white with a striking blue trim, the building had a distinct shape and gentle roof, with a number of pointed dormers on all sides. Several cars were parked outside a fire exit, all lined up and facing the road. The lawn was overgrown, but freshly beaten pathways led from the parking lot to the highway. That must have been what perked up Collie’s nose. Someone had recently driven off the lot and onto the strip, leaving tiger stripes on the pavement.
That worried Gus.
The hotel windows were nothing more than black squares, but there were enough of them overlooking the road. The more Gus looked at the place, the more he thought of old forts positioned atop hills overlooking rivers.
“See anyone?” he asked, driving along three wide lanes that were surprisingly uncluttered of vehicles.
“No.”
“Think someone’s in there?”
“We’ll know in a few seconds.”
The hotel loomed as Gus’s heartrate increased with the growing tension. Any moment, he expected crazies to burst out of the fire escape and rush for their vehicles. There would be a chase. Maybe a firefight. The victor might have to deal with prisoners, and the notion of being captured didn’t sit well in Gus’s mind. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s prisoner ever again.
The hotel drifted by and disappeared behind them, but Collie kept her attention on the site in her side mirror.
Gus’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. He squirmed, stopped, and adjusted himself again. Seconds ticked by, and the distance between them and the hotel grew.
“We clear?” Gus asked.
Collie held up a hand, asking for a few seconds more, then, “I think so. I think we’re good. No shots fired. No one going for the cars.”
“Thank you, Jesus.”
“All jacked up, are you?”
“Yeah. A little.”
“Sorry,” Collie said. “My fault. Those tire tracks in the grass spooked me.”
“Should we be worried about that?”
She shook her head. “I think we’re good.”
Gus nodded and kept on driving, but he didn’t feel any better. He rubbed a hand over his forehead and felt sweat there.
“Don’t you worry, babe,” Collie told him. “Believe you me, on this road, we’re the scary ones.”
8
TransCanada Highway 101. Twenty-three kilometers west of Matheson, Ontario.
“And hurry the fuck up or I swear to sunny Christ I’ll blast your shit brains across the asphalt.”
The threat caused the ‘meat puppet’ to freeze on the spot, tire jack in hand. The poor bastard raised his other hand slowly, as if to ward off the shotgun pointed at his head. O’Leary would do it, he’d blast this fucker’s head clean all over the road on impulse alone. The self-professed surgeon had a very low tolerance for dawdling and would enjoy shooting a few meat puppets. Just to light a fire under the ball sacks of the rest.
“Goddammit O’Leary,” the Jipman barked.
“What?”
“You froze him.”
“Well, fuck it. I can unfreeze him.”
“Yeah, how you gonna do that? By shooting him? Or maybe shooting one of the others?”
“Thinkin’ about it.”
“How many others do we have?” the Jipman demanded.
A pause, during which the meat puppet squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the inevitable blast that would take his life. His breathing had already increased, as did the locomotive thumping of his heart. If O’Leary didn’t shoot him, he just might drop dead of a heart attack anyway. He wondered which would hurt more.
“How many others do we have?” the Jipman repeated.
A deadly silence, then O’Leary replied. “You tryin’ to be smart?”
“Nooo, just tryin’ to get a point across. So how many?”
An uncertain pause. “What? With us?”
“Yeah, with us.”
“The fuck you care?” O’Leary snapped.
“Don’t be like that, dude. Just don’t.”
“Yeah? Or what? You thinkin’ about doin’ something?”
Rocks along the road’s shoulders dug into the meat puppet’s knees. His arms were starting to tremble, betraying his growing aches. The sun was out and smiling, hard enough to make one sweat in October’s late glory, and the meat puppet was already stewing in his own filthy juices. At no time did the puppet think about using the tire jack as a weapon. That thought did not enter the puppet’s head.
O’Leary’s retort noticeably cooled the Jipman’s attitude. “Just sayin’ is all. Just sayin’. Don’t you get any thoughts in your head.”
“Like what?” O’Leary spat. “Like maybe shootin’ you right here? Huh? Like just blastin’ you off the road and leaving you like a spilled chocolate shake? Huh? Like a hundred and fifty pounds of bad meat? Thoughts like that?”
“Ease off, you fuckin’ savage,” the man called Top Gun warned. The meat puppet didn’t know what Top Gun’s real name was. All he knew was O’Leary would shoot Top Gun as quickly as any of them.
“He started it,” O’Leary huffed, sounding very close to going full nuclear.
“He did not start it,” Top Gun said calmly. “You started it. You seem to always start it these days. What’s going on in that caveman skull of yours, huh? You’re getting more and more unpleasant to work with every fucking day.”
Mountain Man (Book 5): Make Me King Page 7
