Mountain Man - 01 (4 page)

In the kitchen, he boiled water on the electric range and unpackaged a bowl of instant noodles. Gus thought about checking the solar panels on the roof, but decided against it. He wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway, beyond clearing them off. There was a wind turbine to supplement the limited power supplied by the solar panels, but it didn’t seem to work. The batteries in the storage shed collected and stored enough power from the panels to keep the house going, as long as he didn’t do anything too heavy. He had no idea how long the power was going to last, and trips to the shed where the batteries were housed gave him no clues. The meters and their numbers meant nothing to him. Any day, he fully expected the things to die on him, and whatever electricity the batteries had stored up to that point would be the last.

He opened the fridge and mixed himself a glass of powdered milk, which he swore curdled as it splashed down onto the contrary pad of his stomach. No dry heaves, which was good. He held out his hand, flat, as if he were about to walk like an Egyptian. It quivered slightly.

Gus grunted. He stared out a mostly boarded-up window that gave him a nice view of his wall out front. Moving to a cabinet, he got out a rare can of Coke, as well as a bottle of rum, and mixed a drink.
Half a smile, Pop
, he thought to his long-gone grandfather. Sighing, he shook out four aspirin from a bottle and palmed them all into his mouth. Raising the drink in a toast to the outer wall, he downed it. With the Coke, the rum tasted sweeter. His grandfather and father had it right after all. It
was
better than milk.

Gus gasped as the mix and medicine went down, then took a deep breath. When the noodles were cool enough, he ate, feeling the revulsion in his guts, but determined to get something in there besides booze. After breakfast, he rinsed the dishes in the sink and dumped the plastic packaging from the noodles into a garbage can. The sofa in the living room called out to him, and he walked to it, half in a daze. Lying down and getting comfortable, he realized that he hadn’t opened the curtains in the last two days. A deep weariness settled over him then, and he knew he wasn’t about to open them now.

Wasn’t it bad to take drugs and booze together?
was his last conscious thought before drifting off.

*

Six hours later, he woke up, still feeling hung over. He lounged about the house, carrying a bottle of rum with him wherever he roamed. He went down into the rec room, opposite the storerooms, and flopped down on the soft sofa there. He lit candles, both for the light and the relaxing effect. There was something pure about candles. Something even Christmasy, if that was a word. Tammy had gotten him into the practice, as she often had rooms illuminated with candles, some scented, most not, as they were the cheap variety. It never bothered her, as they all burned the same.

For the next four hours, Gus watched Disney animated movies, chuckling while drinking water from a four-liter plastic bottle with a chaser of Bacardi White and cola, not thinking about having Tammy snuggled up next to him. After the last movie, he flicked off the screen and covered up on the sofa. Thoughts seeped into his mind like vines forcing their way through the mortar of a brick wall. He lay there in the semi-dark of the basement, basking in the calmness of scented candles, and listened to the house creak above, noting that the sounds were only caused by a hungry October wind. He took another glittery-eyed sip of his rum and Coke. It was a big house, and he remembered when he first found it, how he would get up and investigate every sound he heard. He had stopped doing that perhaps a year ago. Winter was coming to Annapolis. It would be his second on the mountain.

Winter was coming, and its breath made the bones of the house ache.

*

The next day, Gus stayed off the rum and whiskey all morning. Work needed to be done, and he was feeling industrious. The good weather stayed, and he decided to get on the things that both needed to be done, and what he wanted to do.

A book he’d picked up from the library had taken up his reading time when he actually felt like reading. In the book entitled
Medieval Campaigns And How They Were Won,
Gus came across the idea of defenses. He’d gone out and studied the wall about his world, ten feet high and a foot thick. The wall wouldn’t be enough if
they
ever got up there, and he had to count on the day when they would… and what would stop them when they did.

He was only one man, and he could only do so much, but he had
time
aplenty. He lived on the side of a mountain, with the ground on one side still soft. That would change with the colder weather. He had wanted a second wall, but didn’t know where he could find the brick to do it, and he didn’t know how to prepare mortar to stick it all together. But for the month of August, when he started having ideas of improving his defenses, he made the effort to get digging supplies from the warehouses in town. Picks and sharp black-bladed spades, crowbars and long iron bars for leveraging, chainsaws and handsaws for cutting. All of those things and more he loaded into his van and brought to his garage.

Moats were effective in throwing off armies. He didn’t have enough water to fill one, but he would worry about that later. He wanted to
dig
. His wall extended from one side of the mountain, curved around his property, and ended with a forty-foot drop. Some small spruce trees had to be removed, but Gus meant to encircle the entire length of the wall with a deep trench. How deep he would be able to get it, he had no idea. He had already marked the earth with a shallow groove, no more than a couple of inches deep, that ran parallel with the wall.

September was already a write-off. He had gotten very little done, with the exception of cutting down the trees in his way near and on the mountainside. Today, he meant to start digging deeper. With a wheel barrel, he lugged the pick and spade through the crack he had opened in the gate and, counting off five feet from the base of his wall, started hacking out his trench. He took short gouges with the pick to tear up the turf and loosen the topsoil. After ten minutes of picking, he stopped and looked back at his progress. Three feet. Three feet not even cleared of the loose dirt. He sucked at ditch-digging.

“Fuck,” he breathed, feeling the sweat rolling down his face. It would take a year to do what he wanted to do. There was no way he could get an excavator up without drawing the gimps. And the sound of the work would only bring more. It was with the pick and shovel or nothing at all.

Jesus
.

His hands became raw as he worked, reminding him of a time he’d had to quit a construction job because he got too many blisters. He stopped at the top of the hour for a shot of water, wishing it were rum. He was fine with that, though, knowing full well he’d treat himself after the day’s work. He inspected his hands and swore at them for becoming sore so quickly. He returned to the house to fetch some work gloves from the garage. He quickly found a pair next to the skin magazines he’d liberated from the shop. His brow arched in interest, but in the end, he left it.

He stepped outside the house and heard a gunshot.

The sound froze him in place. Another shot rang out, the echo of a
pop
coming from the front of the house. Gus ran to the deck and gripped the railing as he leaned into the wind, listening. The city looked deserted, cold, and while he watched, didn’t make a sound. Gus strained to hear something, anything.

A scream.

It was a long drawn-out thing, full of pain and grating on the nerves. A man’s scream. It continued on for seconds before finally faltering and petering out. Gus strained to hear more, but there wasn’t any more to hear. After a long minute, he half-turned, scanning the city for a sign of some kind. The scream had originated from the center, but that was as much as he knew. The man had taken a long time to die, and he wondered why only the two shots. Perhaps he only had two shots left. Two shots to take on a small city’s populace? If Gus were caught in some situation where he was faced with certain death, he knew what he would do, and how he would use those last two shots. The thought entered his mind to go down there and investigate, but he decided against it. Whatever had happened down there had happened, and that was that. Gus wasn’t about to venture into the city for a stranger.

But he did return to the house for three calming shots of rum.

With the booze in his belly, he went back out to the trench, placing the scream behind him.

*

In the days that followed, Gus learned that it was going to take a long time to complete the moat. He had gotten almost to the end of the wall, and that was only a shallow and narrow cut that widened the initial groove. Expanding it and making it deep would take longer, perhaps even a year, with just him working on it. That thought alone almost made him abandon the project, but after watching a few more zombie movies, the more he felt he needed extra barriers to protect his home. The trench would be the new first defense.

And he rigged a surprise as well, one he was particularly proud of.

On the slope of the mountain, he cleared an area and rolled two plastic drums, capable of holding thirty liters of gasoline, into place. With a hammer, some wood, nails, and caulking, he rigged a pen for the drum, filled it with gasoline, and placed it on an angle on the mountainside, hidden by brush, but positioned above a shallow groove. He stoppered the gas drum with a rubber plug attached to a length of rope knotted to other lengths, making it long enough to run over the wall at the far end. If he yanked on the rope, the gas drum would spill and empty into the groove, running down its length and filling the little trench in front of the wall.

In theory, it looked good. Sounded great.

He even made a few Molotov cocktails for throwing, just for added
oomph
.

Looking at his work, he thought that starting a fire was only a drop in the bucket. With the trees he removed, he could use the brush and wood for fuel. The more he worked on it, the more Gus liked home defense.

When it was time, he dined on noodles, canned stew, meatballs and gravy, and even sardines, though he found them to be quite salty. He drank conservatively while he worked. He had almost gone through a case of Bacardi White, and he thought about the liquor store below with its remaining treasure trove. There wasn’t a need to go yet. Not yet.

In the evenings, he relaxed and watched movies on the television. At night, he read books by the light of a single, environment-friendly bulb in his room, with all windows facing the city curtained. The wind snaked around the house in the late-October evenings, sounding as if it searched for just him. On the evenings when the wind was especially strong, he would simply lay on his bed upstairs in the master bedroom illuminated by candlelight and listen as it struggled. Every sound pricked his ears and made him pause just to see if there was a pattern, above or below. Those nights were spent sipping on straight whiskey or rum––Uncle Jack and Captain Morgan, his favorite companions—as well as the occasional visit by the women pictured in the skin magazines. And memories of Tammy.

There were no other screams from the city. Nor gunfire.

*

At the beginning of November, Gus had begun to dig down into the cold earth, grimacing at his back, which still disliked what he was doing. His hips ached from time to time, forcing him to take some generic painkillers to silence them. At the far end of the wall, he dug down a respectable foot and widened it about the same for about a hundred feet. Only five hundred or so more to go. Then, he would work on the deepening and the widening of the defense.

Smacking woolly lips, he felt he needed to go house picking again to stock up before the snow came in December. He would have to go down to the city soon. The van wore all-seasonals, but he didn’t fully trust them in a full-blown Nova Scotia winter. He didn’t have snow tires, nor did he have any idea how to get them on the beast if he managed to find some. Last winter, he had stayed on his mountain for the duration. It was extreme and monotonous. But safe.

He thought about finding another vehicle. As much as he hated to admit it, he would lose the beast sooner or later. It would be wise to have a replacement on hand, as much as the old war wagon would hate sharing the garage with another machine. The image made him smile.
The beast
. He’d given the van human qualities. With the absence of living companions, the vehicle was a friend, as loyal as any dog, and he would do what he could to keep it running as long as possible. Gus carried those thoughts into the evening, while he stood on the deck and sipped on a hot rum toddy. He studied the shell of the city and made a list of the things he would need. He needed more gas, since he’d used so much for the home defenses. More food, tools, water, toilet paper—his current stock was fine, but he could never have enough in his opinion—and entertainment. Meaning… books. The world had existed on electronic tablets for the most part in the days leading up to the end, but at that time, Gus really hadn’t been much into reading at all. That had changed. The house had come with a huge library of digital movies on the terabyte video unit hooked up to the television, as well as several bookshelves full of hardcovers and paperbacks. He had to admit there was something peaceful in simply lying on a couch or bed and just reading. There were books by Sun Tzu, Charles Dickens, Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Tom Clancy, J.A. Konrath, William Meikle, Steve Vernon, and countless others. Whoever had owned the place enjoyed a lot of military and horror fiction, which was fine with Gus.