Mountain Man - 01 Read Online Free PDF Page B

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