Mountain Man (Book 5): Make Me King

by Blackmore, Keith C.

  The Vulture waited.

  “That shooter—that sniper…” the meat slab managed. “I bet… I bet he’s the same guy. Who shot up my crew. Those grenade blasts? Bet there’s only two. If it’s the same guy, he took them from our trailer. Back at the recharging station. Along with the merch. The trailer had a booby trap. Two grenades. I know. Rigged it myself. I’ll bet… I’ll bet my life it’s the same fuck puppy who chased me off. Same crew, even. Only two grenades on that rig, though. And he used them just now. Bet they got nothing left. Except the rifle.”

  The Vulture waited.

  “Same person,” the meat puppet once known as Top Gun grunted while holding his throat. He steadied himself and considered the Leather surrounding him. “Just wanted to—to tell you. That’s all. That should count for something.”

  The Vulture absorbed the information. It did indeed count for something. He signaled the Leather to pounce on the prisoner. They brutalized the puppet until he collapsed. Continued brutalizing him into silence.

  The Vulture ignored the violence at his back. He looked to the rear, sighted one lesser, and issued commands by hand. The lesser signaled back.

  The bus pulled to one side of the bridge, allowing passage onto the island.

  The air filled with a loud rumble and squeal of a semi-truck. One of two in this war party. The huge machine reversed and angled its load toward the bridge. Several of the Leather marched alongside the approaching trailer doors.

  Doors that were chained shut.

  19

  Collie and Gus pounded over a wide path of crushed stone. They raced deeper into the island’s sub-temperate zone, which resembled a dense rainforest. Fir trees crowded them in, their long branches resembling fish bones. Those boughs quickly hid the shoreline. Velvet green drizzled the larger rocks between the trees, while spicy fir and fresh earth scented the air, except Gus couldn’t smell any of that.

  “Jesus Christ,” he barked, his face puckered in disgust. “I smell like sick donkey piss.”

  “Maybe it is donkey piss,” Collie replied while running and patting down her tactical webbing. “Well shit.”

  “What?”

  “Only two magazines left. That includes the fresh one I slapped home.”

  Gus didn’t like the sound of that. He knew she had only brought five magazines, since their original plan was to restock at Whitecap. The remainder for her rifle was in their pickup, abandoned back at the bridge.

  “I got four spares for mine,” he huffed.

  “The way you shoot, you’ll need them.”

  Gus scowled. That one hurt.

  Mayhem scorched the air back toward the bridge, the combined voices of hundreds of zombies howling at the sun.

  “We don’t have much time,” Collie said.

  The two saw Davis up ahead. He was standing by a directional signpost sprouting a dozen arrows in different directions. “This way,” he said, waving them through as he skipped into a full run.

  “Where’s this ‘Point’?” Gus asked between sharp breaths, hoping to God he didn’t develop a stitch in his side. Or leg cramps.

  Davis pointed. “Up ahead. They killed Garrett.”

  “And everyone else back there,” Gus said.

  “Why are they doing this?”

  “Talk later,” Collie advised the islander. “How far to go?”

  “Ten-minute run,” Davis said. “If you can do it.”

  “Ten minutes?” Gus blurted, suddenly very much aware of the hot buzzing in his foot.

  “Yeah, ten minutes.”

  “Where are your cars?”

  “Back there,” Davis panted as he ran. “But Sarah and Rich had a pickup and a car parked on the other side of the cottages. In case something like this happened. They drove on with the others. I stayed back to get you. In case you got lost.”

  The wild screaming of hundreds cut through the surrounding forest, urging Gus to run faster. Davis and Collie glanced over their shoulders, but Gus did not. He knew what was back there. Just ahead, in the shade of a singular maple, a white boulder with a pink happy face spray-painted upon it came into view. There, the path split off into three directions.

  Davis took the right. Gus and Collie kept pace, their feet pounding over crushed stone.

  The shrieking grew behind them, sounding even more intense in Gus’s ears. The thickening uproar raised the hairs on his neck. They were exposed. Way too exposed, and he felt far too rusty to evade an army of deadheads. The dense forest made it difficult to see the path behind them. Gus really didn’t want to see, but like anyone trying to outrun a flash flood, it was counterintuitive not to look.

  And that ravenous wailing motivated him to red-line it, tapping into whatever speed his nearly fifty-year old carcass could muster.

  Davis and Collie had a good ten-step lead on him—and Collie was carrying the rifle.

  “Run!” she yelled back at him.

  Red-faced and feeling like a boiler about to explode, Gus chugged along, instinct telling him to glance once again over his shoulder. Nothing. No one. But goddamn he could hear them just fine. Just through the trees. And they were closing in from damn near everywhere behind him.

  “Where we going?” Collie asked between breaths.

  “Other side of the island,” Davis said. “Secret escape route.”

  “A road?”

  “Not quite.”

  Not quite? Gus wanted to bark, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. He was trying to keep up while saving a little gas for the inevitable sprint for the finish.

  “Then what is it?” Collie asked. “And don’t say boats.”

  “I won’t,” Davis answered.

  The forest thinned out, revealing a pathway leading to a large dormitory. An open field gradually came into view, where a playground complete with a set of monkey bars, ropes, and slides waited to be used. The crushed stone underfoot became a trail of dried mud. They pushed up over a series of sun-baked mounds that killed Gus’s calves and got him gasping. Sweat left him in sparkling sheets. It wasn’t fair. He’d lost all that weight, all of it, and he was still on the verge of dropping dead. All the while, his foot crackled with its familiar pins and needles.

  “Move, Gus!” Collie shouted.

  “Moving,” he got out. “I’m moving.”

  A single voice released a stream of insane gibberish, startling him badly. With a quick double take, Gus glimpsed a body crashing through the underbrush. One arm reached up before the torso disappeared from sight entirely, as if swallowed up by a sinkhole.

  That was it for him. He forgot about his burning foot and squeezed out a little more speed.

  He then glimpsed more ghostly outlines running through the bushes.

  “Run!” Davis yelled.

  “We almost there?” Collie shouted.

  But Davis wouldn’t answer.

  The mindless cut through the undergrowth—pushing, fighting through as if the forest was some great dastardly webbing. Thick branches clotheslined a pair of zombies, their feet leaving the ground as if caught in a windstorm. Some tripped and fell, toppling others behind them. Despite the natural barrier of the surrounding woods, the undead stampeded forward, heedless of the boughs whipping at their faces, and slowly catching up to the three fleeing runners.

  Collie glanced back at their pursuers, and unless she was exercising on the sly, Gus didn’t think she was operating at the best of her physical ability. And he certainly wasn’t sure if she could fire that automatic cannon while on the run.

  Then it hit him.

  Davis was running along a snaking, curving path that darted in and out of clumps of trees and half-hidden cabins. The mindless, ironically enough, were charging in a straight line. And gaining.

  As if sensing that thought, Davis suddenly yelled, “This way!”

  He turned left, leaped over a hedge, and bounded towards a large building looming beyond the brush. A signpost flashed by, pointing to the dining hall.

  The place didn’t look secure a
t all. Two floors, connected on the outside by a grand set of stairs, that led to an outdoor deck where hot sunlight pooled in the summertime. The walls consisted of nothing but a series of squared cookhouse windows from one corner to the next. Several handcrafted picnic tables and concrete barbeque pits dotted the lawn around the building, eagerly waiting for campers to return.

  “Shortcut!” Davis wheezed and ran past the tables, right up to the main doors. He pulled them open and left them that way for Collie, who was two strides behind him. She halted on the threshold, her frame heaving from the run.

  She glanced back to check on Gus, and he noticed the unchecked shock upon her winded face.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  And wished he hadn’t.

  Mindless.

  Zombies, Moes, deadheads, gimps, and meatbags—names that were all fine and dandy descriptors, but mindless truly described the pursuing mob bursting through the evergreen thickets. Ragged and torn clothing covered their infected hides, and some didn’t have anything on at all. They charged the dining hall in fleshy gushes, resembling jets of skin-colored water punching through a failing dam. Meaty lines of fury, their faces lit up with gluttonous hatred, their hooked fingers swiping at the air. The lead runners reached the outer edges of the picnic tables with ease and jumped over them, but they didn’t descend as gracefully. Some crashed in a painful twist of limbs. Faces clapped wood. One outstretched arm hit the deck all together wrong and a red spear of shattered bone popped free of the skin surrounding it.

  Collie started shooting.

  Light tore into the foremost runners. A chest ripped open in a great explosion of red and white. A head got half sheared away while the body underneath continued to run for a split second. An arm blew off, savagely spinning the creature around before Collie took his skull off with one shot.

  The rest, however, continued to charge.

  And in the face of that fearless onslaught, Gus ran for his life.

  He plunged through the doorway and crashed into a structural post. Collie withdrew, allowing Davis to slam shut the outer doors. The camper then immediately twisted the locks at the base and at the top.

  Outside, the infected wave of bodies rushed the building.

  “This way,” Davis gasped. He rushed through an aisle between two great sections of tables and chairs. Gus labored after him, glimpsing the interior. Vending machines flashed by, grand totem poles of lacquered wood, and a huge stage at the far end. A banner hung over the platform which read, “Camp Red Wolf Welcomes you!”

  The mindless crashed into the door with an explosive bulge of wood and windows—but the frame held. Arms thrust through the glass in spurts of blood and falling shards. A couple of heads slammed into the surface, rattling the barrier. More mindless heaved up behind those initial few, squashing them against the windows and main doors in a steam press of meat and momentum. Hands slapped glass, smashing through the barrier like cheap cymbals.

  And over their screaming heads and jostling shoulders, more mindless were rushing forward.

  Collie backed up a few steps and unleashed a full killing spray across the windows. Sunlight bounced off the flying shards of glass. Heads burst apart in technicolor spurts. Whole torsos slunk from sight as if slurped down by the earth.

  “Come on!” Davis yelled, from the other side of the dining hall.

  Collie ceased firing and ejected the spent magazine. “Just thinning them out.”

  Not that the mindless cared.

  She turned, leaving behind a writhing wave of clawing hands and contorted faces.

  The sight reminded Gus of the early days.

  Zombies climbed through the shattered windows. Some of them hooked themselves on the glass teeth, opening their guts in shocking clumps that spilled forth.

  Davis held Gus’s shoulder and pushed him through another set of doors. “Watch them from the other side of the lake, if you want,” he said.

  Collie exited the building just as Davis slammed the doors shut. “Can’t lock these,” he gasped, his face shining with sweat. “We’re almost there.”

  “Didn’t you say that a few minutes back?” Gus demanded, very much out of breath. He lumbered into a run regardless, through a near-identical setup of tables and chairs. His left foot felt like it was bearing down on an electric buzzer with every step. Collie was behind him, straining with her own exertion.

  “I said that,” Collie corrected him. “Never did. Get an. Answer. And we. Sure as fuck. Better not be heading to. A pier.”

  “No pier,” Davis managed as they put distance between them and the dining hall, bolting through a fine gazebo and a well-maintained garden. “Docks are that way.”

  He flailed in a direction far to the right of where they were going.

  “So where—” Gus started, but Davis, shockingly spry for a man who looked to have the living shit kicked out of him, ran on ahead.

  Leaving Gus and Collie trailing behind.

  Noise of the mindless smashing through the dining hall receded, but to the left, more of the zombies scrambled into view.

  Davis cut off the path and hopped over a hedge, heading back into the woods. Gus and Collie followed, except Gus belly flopped flat onto his face and groaned into the grass.

  By the time Collie flipped him over and hauled him to his feet, Davis had threaded his way up and over an incline, a dark outline traveling through a shade that got Gus thinking about thatched beach umbrellas. He and Collie raced after the islander, over hard-packed dirt generously sprinkled with green and orange needles and other forest debris. Gus hurried at his best speed, which was failing fast. The hill leeched his strength and injected fire into his calves. Sweat stung his eyes and fell in a steady patter.

  He made it to the top of the hill, however, just behind Collie, who didn’t let him lag too far behind. They reached the crest, where Gus lurched to a stop and gawked at Davis. The man was as lithe as a deer, descending the hilltop and darting between thick trunks. The islander sprinted toward a pristine white beach, the sand shimmering in the midday sun. The smell of fresh water cut across Gus’s face, and between the evenly spaced trees, waves sparkled.

  Davis cut left.

  “Come on,” Collie ordered, leaving boot prints as she started down the hill. Gus filled his lungs and hurried after her, letting his momentum do most of the work. Davis bounded along a wet track of shoreline, his frame winking in and out among the last few trees. He waved and pointed toward the open lake.

  Gus saw them.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding,” he croaked.

  There, strung out in a curious zigzag in the middle of the water, were about a dozen islanders. They had already made it more than three-quarters of the way to the far shoreline, their figures clearly visible against the huge backdrop of woodland on the other side. There were no posts, no guide ropes, and nothing to indicate a path from Gus’s vantage point, but of course that couldn’t be right. Still, the summer camp islanders hurried along. Little Monica included, still clinging onto Bruno, easily identified by his pirate cap.

  A few of those faces turned and spotted Davis racing along the beach.

  “This way,” Collie urged Gus, and she bounded after the islander with renewed energy.

  Legs damn near dead, chest close to bursting, and eyes bugging, Gus practically ran into a tree and placed a bearded cheek to its trunk. He gawked at the operator as she cut through that darkened landscape, traversing an angle meant to catch up with the fleeing islanders.

  The voices of the mindless reached him.

  Sucking down another tankful of air, Gus detached himself from the tree and floundered after Collie. He ducked under a low branch and almost fell flat on his chest, but after frantically pinwheeling his arms and screaming “JESUS!”, he somehow managed to remain vertical. Every footfall stung. Every breath stretched and squeezed his ribs like a withered accordion. The smell of water gave him an extra shot of juice, and those scintillating waves were blinding. In short time, he
charged onto the beach and nearly toppled, boots kicking up sand.

  Collie’s improvised path had brought them closer, however. Just ten feet away, the beach became a black mass of rocks that sloped underneath the water.

  Davis stood in the lake, some fifteen feet offshore, waves lapping at his ankles. He urged them to hurry. The other islanders had nearly reached the other side.

  “Stay inside the markers,” Davis ordered as loud as he dared and pointed underfoot. “And watch your step. It gets slippery.”

  Collie was already wading into the lake, her camos soaking to the knee.

  Gus staggered to the rocks, swayed upon them like a drunken Atlas, and couldn’t spare the wind to swear. And he really wanted to swear, to just light up the air around him with a few choice firecrackers of shit-bagged dismay. He couldn’t, however; he was that spent. He was a kettle that had evaporated all his water, while the smoldering fire under his ass threatened to melt him whole.

  The lake would kill him. This he knew inherently.

  Then he saw the rocks.

  Two strings of beach rocks resembling gigantic pearls slipped underneath the water, marking a trail just a little thinner than a sidewalk that vanished in the waves.

  Collie was already strides ahead upon the narrow trail. She halted and half-turned, enough to shoot him a look of move your ass.

  Orders received, Gus sloshed into the lake and stepped onto the flat mantel of rock underfoot. He stayed on course, still amazed at the hidden walkway. No more than two or three feet across, he figured. Considering the size of the surrounding lake, it was like stepping onto a slick tightrope of slate. Outside the submerged markers, the edges dropped away and the water took on that gauzy, forbidding tint of unknown depths.

  The water sloshed at Gus’s ankles. At times, it rose to his knees. The day focused its glare upon the lake surface, the October sun throwing down a feverish heat. The air was cleaner, however, fresher, cutting through the stink of his piss-stained clothing. Just sucking it down rejuvenated Gus a little. He divided his attention between watching where he walked and Collie and Davis forging ahead. The path veered one way and then the other. One wrong step and a person would drop off into watery oblivion. Slogging through the lake, however, was worse than racing through the woods. The grind was harder, and Gus discovered he was moaning.