Free Safari - 02 by Keith C. Blackmore Page B

turn onto the main road.
    Lucky, he thought. So very lucky. And not a zombie on the road ahead.
    Still too cold. Much too cold for the dead fucks .
    Catching his breath, he focused on the next task on hand—checking out the drugstore. He hoped there weren’t any surprises waiting for him there. He doubted his nerves could take it.
    A minute later, he parked in the middle of the street, right in front of the drugstore. Two quick swallows of Uncle Jack steadied his hands and rattled nerves. Studying the ravaged store front, Gus shook his head. It looked as if people had gutted this one, searching for goods. Still, luck was potentially on his side, so he got out, determined to take a look. The shop contained five aisles, all running perpendicular to the entrance. Gus walked along the front, checking each aisle. Most of the useful items had been taken from the shelves. He’d already been in the store about a year and a half ago, and hadn’t found much then either. Even the toothbrushes had been snatched. In the rear, a raised counter for prescription drugs lay partially obscured by darkness. The weaker drugs had been taken, but the stronger stuff––prescription-grade medications—might still be behind that counter. Debris covered the floor—torn paper, packaging, and various other half-crushed items. The smell of sour milk and something else he couldn’t quite place lingered on the air, despite the smashed window.
    “Hey,” he called. “Any dead bastards in here?”
    No answer.
    He kicked at some garbage littering the floor and wished for a flashlight. Confident the place was indeed empty, he moved down an aisle, spotting shredded magazines, empty pop bottles, candy wrappers, and other items that made him think that whoever the hell had been through could’ve used more goddamn sense when shopping.
    He found the waist-high gate to the prescription drug area and eased it open. The hinges squealed, making him pause. When no zombies popped out, he went behind the counter and let his breath out in a hiss.
    “Can’t see shit.” He started sifting through the boxes and bottles still on the shelves. He brought several containers up to his eyes, reading what he could off the label in the scant light, and put them back. Most of them had words on them he could barely pronounce. The search stretched into the better part of an hour, the chill stiffening his fingers and face. The wind picked up, the sound of it as chilling as any dead thing at times, and blew across the front of the drugstore, sending up cauls of white and slowly coating the pickup. Gus stopped every once and a while to peer out toward the street, ensuring nothing else was in the store but him.
    He finally came across ten small boxes of a drug called Tramacet. Taking them all, he went back to the pickup and inspected the little boxes, comparing the information to the page he’d taken from the library. Each Tramacet tablet contained thirty-seven milligrams of tramadol hydrochloride as well as three hundred and thirty-five milligrams of acetaminophen. He read the usual dosage amount and consulted the page. All of the drugs seemed to have some sort of derivative of the original, and a good feeling about what he had blossomed inside of him.
    Gus threw the first boxes into the truck and went back to scrounge for more. He found a total of twenty-two and, after loading them, celebrated the discovery by taking three more mouthfuls of whiskey. He turned so that his back took the brunt of the wind and took in the empty Main Street of Wolfville. If he thought hard enough, he could envision the place before the fall, with students populating the sidewalks and a long pulse of cars moving on the road.
    Then, he remembered he was close to his old apartment. Just behind the main drag lay Front Street, where he had rented a small two-bedroom apartment. He studied the afternoon sky and figured he had time for a little nostalgia. He drove to a side road and made the turn toward