Mountain Man - 01 Read Online Free PDF

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