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with the beast. The beast was a summertime animal. The pickup was his best bet in winter.
    He retreated to the garage and readied his weapons. The aluminum bat got slipped over his shoulder, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. It would probably kill him to swing the thing.
    After getting the ladders back in place, Gus went up and over the wall. His heavy, steel-toed boots squeaked over the snow as he made his way to the road leading up to the gate. He got to the pickup and remembered the suitcases in the back.
    “Might as well…” He got back out and proceeded to haul them from the rear of the truck. Gus opened the stylish blue one first and quickly dismissed it as belonging to a woman and containing only clothes. The two black ones were filled with an assortment of men’s and women’s clothing. He didn’t see anything useful, so he left them in the snow, open and exposed to the elements.
    Grunting, he got aboard the pickup and gave the dangling fuzzy dice a slap for luck. His bat and shotgun went into the passenger seat with a warning of ‘Be good.’ He turned the key, and the engine rumbled to life. The fuel gauge informed him that he had three quarters of a tank, plenty for what he wanted to do.
    As he drove over the snowy road, huge flakes splattered against the windshield. Moments later, the lower gate came into view, and he frowned. Roxanne’s raider friends had smashed through it and left it ruined on warped hinges. That was another job that would have to wait. Shaking his head, he pulled onto the highway and turned in the direction of Annapolis.
    A huge Dodge pickup sat in the middle of the road, snow covered and as dead as the corpses he’d only just burned.
    “What’s…?” Gus slowed and stuck his head out the window. He pulled ahead of the dark truck and saw the driver, a man, splayed out on his back in the road. His torso had been gutted in a fashion that reminded Gus of someone perhaps eating a meat pot pie, face first and leaving only the crust about the edges. The man’s clothes had been shredded. Frost coated the jagged edges of the corpse’s abdominal cavity while a trail of guts snaked from the body, frozen to the asphalt, and congealed into a gruesome lump a few feet beyond. It almost seemed as if a zombie had scooped out a generous dollop of intestinal tract, left the other undead feeders, and dropped it for some unknown reason.
    “Sucks to be you.” But he shifted the truck into park and studied the remains.
    He had to make sure.
    Reaching down and pulling the Ruger from his boot, he switched the safety off the weapon and racked the slide. The cold air gusted in as he opened the door and struggled from the vehicle. Lumbering like a deadhead himself, he reached the side of the devoured corpse and stared down at the ravaged face. Gus felt his stomach turn. They had clawed the eyes from the poor bastard’s head and chewed the flesh from his face, gnawed right to the bloody bone. Distaste smoldered within Gus’s core, and he aimed the pistol, straight-armed, at the forehead of the corpse.
    “Hey,” he said.
    No reaction.
    “I said hey , you stupid rat fuck bastard.”
    Still nothing.
    Gus considered the man’s legs. The thigh and calf muscles had also been gnawed to the bone. The guy wouldn’t be rising even if it could. The undead hadn’t just feasted; they had eaten the man down to nothing.
    The body at his feet moaned.
    From its ruined throat came a hollow sound that startled Gus and caused him to step back. The head turned slowly, shaking as if about to detach itself from the few tendons fastening it in place. The eyeless sockets seemed to track him. The jaw opened, and Gus had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing a gaping hole where the tongue should have been. The corpse continued hissing, and Gus stood away from the new zombie, once again awed by the sinister life force that animated the dead even when nothing was left on the bones. The thought entered his mind that the