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His jaw dropped.

The backyards of the houses in that neighborhood had no fences, and Gus had stumbled directly into the path of the zombie tide. Where he had zagged, hoping to throw them off, the mob had kept going straight, heedless of the houses in their path and moving around them as if they were rocks in a river.

Horrified, Gus turned and ran, snow flicking up from his boots as he tore across the landscape. The voices of the dead sounded like a full congregation in mindless worship. He panted as he pounded through deep drifts. He reached the street and crossed it with a gasp, shoulders heaving. Behind him, an embankment of corpses followed.

Gus forced himself to slow down, reminding himself that even jogging was faster than the frozen pursuit of the dead. Cars and pickups dotted the road and driveways, buried in snow to the point that he could spend hours digging them out. He decelerated to a hurried walk, plowing through the snow, feeling the weight of it grinding him down, wearing him out. How far away was he from his house on the mountain? Fifty kilometers? Forty? A twenty-minute drive at eighty would translate into how long treading through deep snow? A day? Two days? He wouldn’t make it. It would take a day to clear the city at least, and then another day to walk down the highway to his place.

The road arced left, and when he looked over his shoulder, the houses blocked his view of his pursuers, which meant they could no longer see him, either. That was some small relief. The snow drifts were knee high, and even walking in the tracks of the snowmobile didn’t make things easier.

Hide
, his mind screamed at him.
You have to hide. An attic. Find an attic like before
.

It was worth a shot. Out in the cold, he wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace. But how does one escape a wave.

Get above it
, his mind came back at him.

Behind him, the mob seeped into view. The determined ones appeared first, like the first signs of rot around the edges of something good to eat. They pursued at a crawl. He glanced repeatedly over his shoulder as he crossed buried front lawns and popped around corners to hide his trail.

Another house loomed ahead, a two-story old-fashioned deal painted yellow. He ran up to the front door, which had a window set in it, divided into fashionable little squares. As with the previous houses, the door was locked.

He rammed his bat through a pane of the door glass. With a vicious swipe, he cleared away the fragments around the edges, then stuffed his arm inside, felt around, and located the knob. It had one of those locks where he had to press in on the knob to unlock it. He did so and put his shoulder to the door. The door held. Muttering, he punched out another section of glass and stuck his arm inside. There––a dead bolt. He hooked it with his fingers and opened the door with a relieved huff.

Plunging inside and slamming the door behind him, Gus locked it again. He closed the drapes over the front windows, then furtively peeked back out at the street. A hand unconsciously went to his ribs, and he took a deep breath. No problem there, and he thanked God for it.

He looked around the interior of the house. A stairway was set beside a hallway that probably went to the kitchen. The pinewood floor was bare and worn. A living room lay to the right and a small office area to the left. A desiccated corpse sat at the desk in the office, the almost silver face twisted in a rictus of pain, as if the man had suffered greatly. The house was cold, and Gus didn’t know if he was looking at a corpse or a
corpse
.

He raised his bat, watching the figure in the chair. Full head of dead hair, perhaps in his seventies. Gold ring on his finger.

Gus stepped forward, cranking the bat up and letting it fly.

One of the eyes creaked open.

The bat split the zombie’s skull with a pulpy crack. The impact toppled the deadhead, flipping him over in the chair, feet pointing ceiling-ward.

Breathing hard, Gus studied his kill. Satisfied that it was indeed dead, he went to the only window in the office and drew back the curtain. Outside, the pursuing dead filled the road. He dropped the curtain and stepped back. High ground. He had to get to high ground.

He moved toward the stairway, but something made him look in the direction of the kitchen. He wished he hadn’t.

Poised in shadow, a zombie stood. A slow, stuttering hiss issued from the figure, a sound that put Gus’s raw nerves on edge just a fragment more.

Taking a batter’s stance, he debated whether to wait for it to come to him or to charge it.

Three smaller shadows came into view then, just behind the larger one. Hisses broke the air like leaking gas pipes. Gus lowered his bat. The larger form took an unsteady step forward, leaning heavily against the wall. One of the arms came up and into the light, then a bare belly that resembled a deflated medicine ball. The smell of the four crept up on Gus, and his stomach recoiled from the reek.

He pulled out his Ruger.

The androgynous lead zombie took another step forward, the light revealing a mouth without any lips. Gus shot it twice, exploding its head in a dusky blossom. The children came after, porcelain features marred by grotesque splotches of black. Their eyes appeared as smoky marbles.

Gus fired about five rounds and dropped all of them. He listened, waiting for something else to appear, another family member, but heard nothing.

He went up the stairs. Quickly going through four bedrooms, one of which possessed an inviting bunk bed, Gus established that the upper floor was empty. He found a trapdoor in the ceiling, a rope dangling.

Below, something crashed into the front door.

The sound froze Gus for all of a second before he yanked down the trapdoor. A set of stairs came down with a metallic yawn, and Gus was momentarily impressed. It wasn’t the bare wood stairway of the house Scott and he hid out in for days while the dead roamed below; it was something else.

For one thing, there was light in the attic. Two, the stairs, which were painted, slid down rather than unfolded.

Another crash from below got him moving up the steps. In the attic, he was further surprised to discover that the door and steps could be retracted by a rope on a pulley system. Gus pulled on the rope.

More thumps came from below, like multiple forearms and elbows being rammed into the surface of the front door.

Gus saw that the light actually came from a skylight that he hadn’t been able to see from the yard. The window was cut into the ceiling and tinted. The slanted roof made him duck, but the attic had been transformed into a fifth bedroom. A comfortable-looking single bed, along with a matching night table, filled one end, while two bookcases and a low desk stood at the other. Walls with shelving hemmed in the lowest parts of the area, and in one section, Gus saw a small oven-sized hatch where perhaps the real attic was located. He thought he’d had enough of attics from the last time, but the room was actually… nice.

The thumping on the front door intensified and Gus went to the window. He looked down and spied most of the front lawn area, as well as the road beyond. The sight rooted him to the spot. A parade of undead, half-frozen, but swollen with an unholy zest for life, sifted down the street like the chips and shards of a glacial ice flow. The sight of so many ice-crusted zombies chilled Gus’s core, and watching the slow press of the mob severely tested his mental resolve to kill all of the things. He saw
hundreds
, and who knew how many were beyond his field of vision? As he watched, faces lifted skyward, their mouths dark holes, wailing in that eerie, yet pitiful way they had. They were so tightly packed, Gus thought of concert venues in the summertime. Limbs waved above the mass like crooked antennae scanning for any sign of life.

He heard more banging on the front door. A crash of glass made Gus perk his ears, and he cringed at the idea they might have gotten in already. He sized up the skylight and thought about breaking out the glass and going… where? He’d probably slip and slide off the roof, only to land right in the middle of the crowd below, like a singer throwing himself into a savage mosh pit. Turning his back on the glass, he focused on the raised trapdoor.

He’d played the waiting game before and never thought he’d have to do it again. Placing his weapons on the bed, he went to the attic door and opened it. He pulled out cardboard boxes filled with blankets, books, Tupperware receptacles, winter clothing, and trinkets. The trinkets he stuffed back into the nook space of the attic while he hauled the Tupperware and blankets out of their containers. The blankets were thick, red and white quilts made for the winter, just the thing to cozy up under. There were four of them and each one went onto the bed. The Tupperware would be for voiding, and Gus knew he’d be shitting at least once up there, perhaps even twice. He looked over the box containing the plastic containers and figured he had enough for six or seven liters. It hooked a memory.

“We could drink our own urine if it came down to it.”

“What is it with you and this fascination with consuming your own waste?”

Gus smiled, hoping that wherever Scott was, he wasn’t in a similar situation.

Then another thought hit him, sobering him instantly.

He’d just killed three men in cold blood. Two men and a kid, and the kid was the worst. He’d left Wilbur as a wrapped up snack, using him to get away. Three lives he had taken. The realization didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would.

They tried to kill me first
.

But had they really? Sure, they’d knocked him off the snowmobile, but had they been trying to kill him?

Gus wrestled with that notion. No, they weren’t planning on killing him, but he was certain they would’ve warmed to the notion eventually.

You still killed three men
, insisted the voice.
Killed them easy
.

Lying on the bed and keeping a hand on his Benelli, he eyed the trapdoor as the light outside faded. Gus figured it was going to be a long night.

10

The downstairs thumping stopped a few hours after nightfall, but another disturbing noise started… in Gus’s head. It had been a good seven or eight hours since his last drink, and he was parched.
Parched
. Aching for a sip of something with bite. The headache had only begun an hour before, but the steady pulse of pain in his frontal lobe and temples made him grimace. A sip. Just a fucking sip was all he needed. He lay in the bed and tossed and turned. He thought there might be something downstairs, maybe in the kitchen somewhere, and if he could hold off until morning, he could check it out. But, goddammit, he needed a drink, and he didn’t know if he could wait.

Restless, he got up and looked out the window. He could see nothing in the black, moonless night, but he sensed they were still there. The skylight had a latch and could be opened if he wanted, but that might somehow alert the dead.

So he crawled back into bed, still dressed, boots on, and lay on his back. Sleep came in stingy doses, and he always woke with the headache still working its drill into his flesh. Sometime during the night, he heard the patter of rain against the window and shook his head. Nova Scotian winter––winter one hour and summer the next. The rain grew stronger, and the wind picked up, a nasty soulless howl that
knew
Gus was hiding in the attic, moaning in zombie-speak, no doubt trying to communicate with the undead and inform them that the meat was just above their heads. Gus wiggled underneath his mound of blankets and quilts, trying to keep warm and find peace.

Hours later, light streamed through, and he opened his eyes, wishing for a drink. Anything to get the taste out of his mouth. He got up and stumbled to the window. Rain pelted the glass, and the house was still under siege. Gus sighed when he saw the zombies, all pressed together in wet misery, looking for food. He understood them at that moment, recognizing his own need for a shot of booze. With shaky hands, he rubbed his chin and tugged on his bush of a beard, eyes flicking to the trapdoor. The wind still blew outside, periodically pummelling the glass of the skylight, but he didn’t hear anything else below.

Could he risk it?

A sip
.

Gus lowered the stairs as quietly as possible, cringing at a deep sounding groan the springs let loose. He paused before letting the steps slip to the floor. Above all, he had to be careful. He had to use
stealth
. He removed his boots, slipped down to the floor, and listened. Hearing nothing except the hiss of falling rain, he crept forward until he came to the staircase and inched his head out to peer below. All seemed intact.

He backed up and let his breath go. His stomach gurgled, and after a short search for the bathroom, Gus emptied both his bladder and bowels. The toilet seat felt cold enough to freeze his ass, and he wouldn’t be surprised to see flesh stuck there once he stood up. Half a roll of toilet paper lay on the dispenser next to the can, and for that, Gus was grateful. Having finished his business, he carefully descended the steps, then stayed below the window line of the front door, despite the closed curtains. The door remained shut, much to his surprise, although glass and fragments of wood coated the floor. Making a face at the mound of dead he’d shot the day before, he edged around the broken glass and crept into the living room, bathed in darkness. He peeked out at the world once more before padding off to the kitchen. The pantry shelves were full of supplies, and he found several cans of pork sausages, noodles, and other foods. On the top shelf were packets of juice mixes and other sugary flavours, while four liters of bottled water lined the bottom shelf. He didn’t find anything with booze in it, which ignited an irritable slew of soft curses. There wasn’t much he could do about that, so he took an hour to transfer the food and water to the attic. Afterward, he returned to the lower level and rooted around in the den for anything remotely alcoholic. He even searched both bathrooms for mouthwash, but found none.