Hellifax (18 page)

Start over
. The words glowed in his mind’s eye. Start over was oversimplified. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to think about it first.”

Amy stood up. “When you’re finished eating, let’s get moving.”

Scott nodded and dug into the cold leftovers.

“Who you looking for?”

He stopped eating. “A guy who…”

“Who what?”

“Killed some friends of mine.”

Amy remained quiet for moment. “And you think he’s in Halifax.”

“Maybe. Decided this was as good a place to start, anyway.”

“There are bad ones out there. Worse out west, I’ve heard. Road warrior shit happening out there.”

“Yeah, well, I just want to take care of some business.”

“You know this guy’s name?”

“Tenner.”

Amy grunted. “What’s he look like?”

Scott swallowed some ravioli. “Don’t really know. I never saw him. I heard his voice just before he shot me in the back and left me for dead. Then he went to work on my two friends. He got into a basement and cut them up.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Scott said, finishing off his food, which had lost all taste. He left the empty can on the desk. “Well, I know his voice. If I hear it again, I’ll know.”

“Ready for the horror show?” Amy asked him after a moment.

“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound or know for certain. There was only one way to find out, and despite what had happened to him yesterday, Scott was always one for getting back into the saddle. Unless the saddle killed him first.

They finished up their morning routines in separate bathrooms, got dressed, and met in the living room. The bloody outerwear they gathered up and held at arms’ length like old skin shavings. They put on the gear in silence, each thinking of what was to come, and Scott also wondering if he truly was up for walking with the dead. Amy was probably wondering the same, but she said nothing.

“All set?” she asked, her Brian Mulroney mask hiding her identity almost too well.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t shut the door this time,” she warned as she gripped the knob.

Did she have to remind him of that? Scott felt like shit.

She opened the door to reveal a scene from a painting, white ruined with black. The cold air hit them in a gust and paralyzed them for a moment. The road teemed with undead, both walking and slinking along like worms coated in ice particles, moving in that half-frozen way that was so disturbing to watch.

Amy shuffled out the doorway and into the street. Scott followed, his anxiety rising, but not dangerously so. They headed down the slope and back the way they had come, then struck left, between two houses, bypassing the crunch of gimps at the nearing intersection. Scott was glad to see the backyards were small and the color of unspoiled porcelain. Amy moved through drifts, her feet punching through with little winded
pops
, and he did his best to keep up. He struggled through the snow, using the bat for balance and hoping the dead would not detect him. The thought embarrassed him. There weren’t any in sight behind the houses, yet he was still worried.

Amy ambled by three houses painted light green, pink, and white, then she took a right and walked down a driveway, moving slowly around a German-made Jetta buried up to its windows. Scott followed, cheating by placing his feet in the holes she’d already made. Amy paused in the road beyond, and Scott didn’t know if she was waiting for him or simply acting like a dead deer. He stopped beside her and looked ahead.

Halifax Harbour, plugged with ice floes that must have drifted in overnight. Nothing had ever looked colder. Amy started walking again, slower than before, and Scott realized why. They were headed down a hill glazed with snow. Ice slicked the pavement underneath the powder. There were grooves in the surface, and he realized they had been made by Moe trying to walk up over the hill, but slipping and sliding back down to the T-intersection at the base of the hill.

Scott’s breath caught in his throat.

The road looked like a protest march of epic, undead proportions.

And they were walking right for it.

Underneath his hood and visor, Scott bared his teeth at the nearing mob, wondering if Amy truly meant to walk amongst the throngs on the lower road, dreading the notion. The woman had ice in her veins. Moe shambled along to a song of pity and horror, and Scott felt a sudden urge for rum, whiskey,
anything
to take the edge off, anything to armor his insides. Beyond the parade was a factory of some sort, but reaching it seemed impossible.

To his relief, Amy veered to the right, keeping close to a wire fence. A large billboard sign rose up after that, announcing a
SPRING SPECIAL
on carpet cleanings. The red building behind it was a ruined blossom of brick, steel girders, broken glass, and splintered wood. A bus shelter came into view, the glass walls intact, holding seven or eight deadheads in place like a tight fishbowl. One had its face pressed up hard against the glass, smearing the fleshy pulp of one cheek until it gave away like a piece of dry, crumbly cake, coating the glass in black and exposing a decayed rack of molars. The cheek stuck for a split second before dropping.

Scott didn’t need to see any more of that.

Amy pushed past the things jammed into the bus shelter and zombie-walked up a furrow that might have had a sidewalk underneath. Scott walked in her slipstream, aware of the gimps milling about in the street to his left and feeling his armpits flood with sweat. He didn’t falter, however, didn’t break. That confidence galvanized him and made him feel back in control. He hoped his recent lapse was only a one-time thing.

Under an increasingly cloudy sky, they ambled past what Scott believed to be thousands of undead. Moe was everywhere on the street and sidewalk. It was the largest concentration of dead things he’d ever seen, bigger than what he had witnessed in Annapolis, and despair rose up into his gullet like an undigested lump. It had been a mistake to come into the city. Tenner had to have perished in such a hellish place. There was simply no place to run from them all.

The chalky glut of ice in the bay’s throat appeared pristine, but then dark shapes, like tombstones, bobbed into sight. Deadheads moved on the ice, perhaps trapped, perhaps coming from the other side. A green sign marked the street Scott and Amy travelled as Barrington. Another sign designated the vast dock area on the bay as the Halifax Shipyard, but the buildings were wrecked, flattened into splintery lumps by some unknown force. Amy moved on, following Barrington Street to the south. An embankment of ice and snow rose up on their right, and in the distance, suspended almost magically over the bay, stood an enormous red bridge spanning the two sides.

The sense of going somewhere filled Scott as he lurched after his guide, fighting down the urge to stop and simply take in the majesty of the still-standing structure. Half-destroyed buildings of unknown purpose stood atop the embankment on his right, and at first Scott thought they were hotels. A knot of zombies gathered underneath a white sign stating that the maximum speed was fifty. Scott thought there were at least two hundred gimps around the pole, spilling out into the street. There was a morbid joke in there he couldn’t pull the trigger on.

Amy sunk into them like a cell penetrating a permeable wall. The very sight of her going into the mass made his scrotum tighten. The woman was crazy. Either that, or she had the biggest pair of wrecking balls he’d ever seen. Even
worse
was that he was following her in. Taking a breath, Scott braced himself.

And then he was amongst them.

The smell of the things enveloped him, and he stretched out his neck so that he wouldn’t lose sight of her. Walled in as they were, with the bay on the left and the tall embankment on the right, Moe seemed to have stopped and gathered in the road as if waiting for one to rise and begin belting out demands from a soap box. The gimps pushed and crowded Scott like a tightly-packed herd of cattle. They banged into his front, sides, and back, and he had to stop and slowly twirl to get around them. Several times he went sideways, and those were the worst. They pressed against his back with an almost maddening pressure, and had he suffered from agoraphobia, it would have been enough to drive him over the brink. He lost sight of Amy. If it weren’t for the narrowness of the street, he might have gotten turned around and pushed away from her entirely. A railing kept him from falling over a ledge and into shipyard buildings just below the street. He pushed his way along the length of metal, ignoring the innumerable smiling faces confronting him.

Then the dead thinned out, and he broke through the crowd.

Relief surged through him when he saw Amy perhaps thirty meters up the street, stopped and waiting for him. A series of large, brown brick buildings stood behind her. Scott increased his speed ever so slightly and, minutes later, he drew up alongside her, even more relieved to see that it was indeed her and not some cruel trick.

Amy nodded approvingly—or at least he thought it was a nod, since she was still in zombie-mode—and started walked again.

They moved deeper into Halifax as the sun drifted past its apex. The landscape became even more of a warzone. Sections of the road actually had become glazed craters from massive explosions. Signs had been ripped from their posts. Cars and trucks were tipped onto their sides or crushed, as if by tanks. Some looked to have been blown apart in fiery glee. An Armed Forces G-Wagon, which Scott knew were militarized jeeps with machine gun mounts on the roof, lay buried in snow up to its grille. They moved past a green tank in the middle of the road, as dead as the patches of zombies crowding it, and Scott got his first look at the metal beast. Then he saw the soldier.

Amy walked by the thing as it stood at the heel of the armored vehicle, like a dog beside its master. It didn’t wear a helmet, but a full flak vest covered its torso and green military-issued jacket. The soldier gimp’s right arm had been chewed off just below the elbow, and the corpse used this to periodically beat upon the tank’s bulk, like a lost child trying to get the attention of an elder. Amy continued on and Scott followed, fighting down the urge to stop and stare at the undead soldier.

Time dragged on, and the cold chewed on his extremities. A chill reached his core despite his Nomex protection and the clothing underneath. They didn’t stop for lunch, and Scott began to admire the pace Amy set. The woman didn’t slow down. She was military stock through and through.

They passed under the bridge’s overpass and continued walking. Apartment buildings and houses came into view, blasted, burnt, and left for dead. A stone church rose up before them, just behind an apartment building in better shape than most. A garage door was opened three feet at the base of the building, and Amy veered toward it. Scott followed her in, bypassing the undead mobs.

She lowered herself to the snow and wormed her way underneath the door. Scott did the same and, once inside, she grabbed him by the wrist and led him along the door, the only light at their feet. The touch of her hand was far more comforting than he expected.

“There’s a stairway over here and an apartment on the first floor,” she whispered to him. “I cleared out the place a few days ago, but anything could be back in it. That’s where we’re going.”

“Tired?” Scott asked good-naturedly, knowing they had to have walked a good twenty kilometers in the dead- and snow-filled street.

“A little, but I also left two jugs of water in the fridge here.”

That information made Scott aware of his own parched throat. “Lead the way.”

They blockaded the apartment’s heavy door with a piece of two-by-four, then slid the pair of deadbolts on the upper and lower section of the frame. They took off their bloody clothes and tossed them into a bathtub, then closed the door to the washroom. They got out of their gear underneath and stretched. Scott figured it was nearing three in the afternoon, and Amy told him they wouldn’t make the base until tomorrow. It was safer to camp out at the apartment.

It wasn’t a bad place, in Scott’s opinion. A little lower end than what he would have expected, but he imagined the harbor view had once demanded a hefty price. Feeling peckish, they returned to the kitchen table to eat something. She got the two jugs of water from the fridge and placed one down on the table in front of him. Scott opened a can of beans and wieners, much to the disdain of Amy.

“What?” he asked.

“Beans and wieners?”

“Yeah? What?”

“They give me gas.”

“They give most people gas.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Amy said in a serious tone. “They give me
gas
. I’m warning you now, okay?”

Scott shrugged. “Don’t scare me. You act like women don’t get gas or something. I was married, you know. And you don’t have to eat it. Don’t you have anything with you?”

“Ate it all before I met you. Last half of an MRE. I was on my way back to base. I don’t eat much, actually.” Amy sat down across from him as he scooped out half of the can onto a glass plate. “How long were you married?”

Scott smiled faintly. “Not long enough. This mine?” He pointed at the jug.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.” He took the four liter jug and cracked it open. He drank almost a fourth of it before placing it back on the table. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Save it, because that’s all there is.”

“This is fine.” Scott gasped. “Oh my.”

They finished their meal. Afterward, they retired to the living room and pulled the sofa across the floor so it faced the bay. Sounds of the undead moving in the street some twenty feet below reached them. Scott feared that if he stepped up to the glass and peered over the balcony’s edge, the deadheads would be there staring back up at him.

“Not a bad place,” he commented quietly, not venturing any closer to the window.

“The view makes it. I call dibs on the bedroom.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t think there’s a need for shifts. We’re pretty safe in here. They can’t open the door in the stairwell, and someone cleared out this whole floor ages ago.”

“How many are you?”