Mountain Man - 01 (9 page)

Stepping lightly, Teddy backed up, following the direction of the sound and keeping his eyes on the ceiling. He held his nightstick at the ready. Across from him, Lea did the same, lifting her bat.

Clump.

They froze. Scott divided his attention from the outside to the ceiling. Teddy lifted his shotgun, asking if he should be ready to shoot or not. Scott waved him off. He knew Teddy had an itchy trigger finger. It was better to save the sh––

Clump
.

Then, the soft squeal of planks pressing against each other.

Clump
.

Teddy heard the sound of something being slowly pushed, as if bumped, followed by another
clump,
moving across the ceiling.

Teddy backed up, his eyes fixed upward. He clacked his bat against the wall to get the zombie’s attention.

An answering
clump,
followed two long seconds later by another.

Adjusting his grip on the nightstick, he slipped into the living room and faced the stairway. Lea flanked him with her bat held across her midsection. He pointed to the landing above and the shadow drawing bigger on the wall beyond it. He heard another step. The thing was wearing boots of some sort. It drew closer to the edge of the wall, walking very slowly, and both Ted and Lea held their breaths, waiting to see what the horror was and anticipating the worse.

Once before, they had entered a house where they heard the squeaking of a rocking chair and eventually confronted the undead grandmother, still in her pink house coat. The creature had rocked and grinned at them with white dentures half hanging out of a mouth festered with black sores.

The one above moved slowly, but then a tip of something came into view, at hip level, and withdrew.

“C’mon out, you bastard,” Teddy whispered.

“Excuse me?” a voice said, and a face timidly peeked around the corner.

Lea let out her breath, and Teddy’s relief made him smile.

“Hey,” Teddy said. “Thought you were a zombie, man.”

“Really?” the face came into view, partially in shadows. “I thought
you
guys were zombies. Christ. I think I shit myself.”

Lea giggled.

“What’s happening?” Scotty asked from his position at the door.

“It’s okay, man,” Teddy assured him. “Just another scavenger. Whew.”

“Don’t shoot me, okay? I have a gun, see? My name’s Tenner.” The man moved onto the landing and held up what looked to be an impressive sidearm with something long sticking out of the grip.

“Not gonna shoot you,” Teddy said, watching Tenner come halfway down the steps and look in the direction of Scotty at the sliding door. “Man, I’m just glad––“

With frightening quickness, Tenner shot Scotty in the back, blowing him face first into the glass door. The sound of the shot exploded in the narrow confines of the house, and Teddy was momentarily paralyzed by the scene. More than enough time for Tenner–– who had a wild-looking ponytail––to swing the gun back at Teddy and shoot out his knee. Lea screamed and turned to run. A bullet caught her heel, splitting her boot and separating the pad of hardened flesh from the bone. She fell face first into the sofa.

Teddy groaned in agony and clasped his ruined knee. Tenner stepped over to him and aimed the gun at his face. Teeth clenched and tears streaming from his eyes, Teddy moaned loud enough to cause his attacker to frown.

“You weren’t careful enough, man.” The gun didn’t waver. “Can never be too careful.”

A motorcycle boot broke Teddy’s jaw and knocked him unconscious.

*

The girl screamed. Tenner stood over the first guy’s body long enough to be satisfied that he was out, while keeping his gun on the girl. Finally satisfied, he stepped away from the unmoving man and moved closer to her, levelling the gun at her face.

“Oh, my,” Tenner said. “You’re a sexy one.”

She swung her bat at his knees, but he knew it couldn’t have much power behind it with her stuck sitting on the sofa. He easily hopped away from the blow. “Now, now. Relax. I don’t want to shoot you again.”

“Fuck you!”

“I can do this the hard way or the easy way. It’s your choice.”

“Fuck
you
!” she screamed again.

He shook his head and sprang forward. She swung the bat again, and he caught it with one hand and punched her in the face with the other, once to split her lips, a second to break her jaw, and then a third time to blacken one of her eyes. She didn’t make any noise after the second punch.

Satisfied his guests were subdued, he went back to the one he had shot in the knee and kicked his face, just in case he was napping. He pointed a finger at the woman on the couch and kissed the air as he moved past her and went to the sliding door. The third guy lay in a widening pool of blood. Two out of three, Tenner thought. Not bad for a morning’s work. Rolling up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, he dragged both the woman and the man he’d shot in the leg down into the basement. Tenner had discovered earlier that the previous owner of the house had been something of a carpenter. There were plenty of wooden support beams in the guy’s underground workshop.

In the basement, he put duct tape over their wounds. Then, he used it to tape their ankles and wrists together. He tapped a long spike of a nail into one beam, then turned and put another nail into a second beam. He lifted the man onto the first beam, and then the woman to the other, hooking their taped wrists on the nails. After adding more duct tape to their ankles and wrists, Tenner stood back and admired his work. Both of them looked like offerings one might see in a jungle movie, where the hero or heroine gets tied to a pole by god-fearing natives, facing the jungle where
something
would emerge.

Thinking about old movies, he went out to his SUV and got his knives. They were special ceremonial knives he’d once bought online for top dollar, shiny and curved with skinning edges, molded handles, and spiked metal bands to protect his fingers.

Tenner hadn’t worked on a living person in a while, and he suspected he was somewhat rusty. He wanted to save the woman for later, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands––or his knives––off of her. Shrugging, he gave in. Living people were increasingly hard to come by in the new world, but it was a world where someone like Tenner could hunt without fear of reprisal. The one nice thing was that he didn’t have to rely on chemicals like ether to subdue his victims. He could be brutally direct, provided he could find living people. Before the collapse of the world and the dead rising, Tenner had taken the lives of eleven people across the country. He’d planned to hit Nova Scotia last before taking a ferry from Yarmouth and going down into Maine. Or Boston. Wherever the ferries went. And have a travelling slit show right down to the Mexican border.

He’d read on some very select forums online that a
lot
of fun could be had in Mexico.

The world turning upside down had ended all of that. Not that it mattered. Tenner liked the new world just fine.

The woman woke up as he removed her sweater with a knife. She screamed when he went to work on her bra.

*

Somewhere in his night, Scott heard the screams. He heard Lea cry out repeatedly, and he struggled to wake up. Then he heard Teddy scream, screams like something a dying animal might make. Those sounds stayed with him as the tide pulled him back, deep into unconsciousness, protecting him like a dark cloak being drawn over his head.

*

Scott opened his eyes.

It was dark. His face was on the floor. His back wailed, and he turned his head, feeling something sticky against his cheek. Taking a breath, he lowered his head back to the floor with a grimace and listened. Quiet. Too quiet. His back throbbed. He stayed prone for a while before rolling over, which was a bad idea all-around. When his back hit the floor, a web of pain rippled out from one point, and Scott thought he remembered being hit with a hammer of some sort. That was the last thing he could recall. No, wait… he remembered the screams, those terrible pleading screams that started off as human, but became frayed, like vocal chords under extreme duress, and finally snapping, if such a thing were possible.

Taking in shallow, but steady breaths, he studied the shadows of the ceiling. He strained, but heard only the wind outside, and the occasional creak of the house. No footsteps, no snoring.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself up from the sticky floor, and with his limited night vision, he saw the dark white of the linoleum covered by a messy black circle. Puzzled, he reached around and probed his hurting back. He felt holes and a sting that was more like a stab, and drew away fingers coated in black.
Holy shit
. He’d been shot! He hadn’t been hit by a hammer; he’d been plugged! Blown away!

Groaning, he got both knees under him while grabbing a nearby countertop. With a push, he got to his feet and flopped over the counter, suddenly dizzy. He took deep breaths and listened to the house. Whoever had shot him might very well still be around. He spotted the dark rod of his shotgun at his feet. Gritting his teeth, he bent over and picked up the weapon, all in one slow motion and thanking Christ that he got it right the first time because he knew there was no fucking way of going down there again. Not in his current world of hurt.

He looked into the kitchen area—empty. He looked toward the living room, saw the pale glow of moonlight outside, and shambled over to the stairs. The stairs. The guy had been coming down the steps.

My name’s Tenner
. He’d heard that much before being shot in the back.
Shot in the back
. His train of thought drew him up short. He staggered to the nearby sofa and lay down his shotgun. He unslung the horseman’s pick from his back and brought it up close to his eyes. In the gloom, there was light enough to see where the bullet had hit the metal shaft of the weapon. He dropped the thing onto the sofa and prodded his right side, just under the arm. There was a bloody hole in his coat there, no doubt to match the one in his back. The bullet must have hit the metal shaft, not square on, but enough to deflect it to one side, where it cut through the meat of his back at an angle and popped out the front. He took a breath. It hurt, and he wiped his mouth. Blood covered his palm and gave him a fright. Then, he realized he had been lying in a pool of his own blood for hours. He bent over and wiped his face on the upholstery of the sofa, then coughed into his hand. It hurt, but after a palm wipe and intense study, he knew his lung hadn’t been pierced. He might have broken a rib or two, but he’d broken one of those when he was a kid, and knew there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Retrieving his shotgun, he walked over to the stairs. He shambled upward, leaning heavily against the wall for support. Three quarters of the way up, he decided that either Tenner was stone deaf or wasn’t upstairs any longer. He reached the top and went around to the bedroom, reading area, and bathroom. All empty. That left the basement.

The basement. The very word sent a chill through him. The basement had always been one of those places in houses that scared him, more so than an attic. People were buried in the ground, and Scott believed that existing below the earth, even, he thought with a shudder,
sleeping
in basement bedrooms, somehow violated some mystic rule that only the dead knew, but were more than willing to let the living in on the secret. Still, Teddy and Lea were probably down there, and he owed it to them to save them.

If they were alive, which he didn’t think they were.

Scott eased his way back down, and made his way around to the steps leading to the basement. He couldn’t see anything below.
As black as the grave
, was his clichéd thought, but it still gave him a feeling of dread going down there. He knew it was going to be bad. His heart told him
not
to go down there. Told him they were both dead.

Aiming his shotgun, he took the first step. Then another. Then a third, grimacing at the wood’s squeal.

On the fourth step, his foot became entangled with something, and his feet went out from under him. His head hit the edge of the steps, and the impact yanked his consciousness back from his eyes and plunged him into that same black well.

*

The smell roused him.

Scott opened his eyes to daylight shining in from a window and winced. Realizing he had landed on his back and slid down the steps, he gingerly moved his arms and his legs. His right ankle screamed. It probably wasn’t broken, but it sure as hell wasn’t happy. He looked around the room and gasped at what he saw hanging from the support beams in the basement. His two companions, stripped of clothing and gutted, their flesh as pale as pearl. Bloody innards pooled at their feet like a macabre heap of sausage skins and coffee grounds. He looked away, not wanting to see any further details, not wanting to see their faces. The smell grew more powerful in his nose and mouth, and he tried to limit breathing in air fouled by decomposing tissue, shit, urine, and whatever else. Making a face, he retrieved his shotgun which had, thankfully, not fallen far from him. On the floor in a pool of blood lay Teddy’s nightstick, which Scott thought was most likely what had tripped him. He took a painful breath and hopped onto his one good foot. He got halfway up the steps before having to stop.