Hellifax (23 page)

The swarm would undoubtedly devour him right to the bone in less than a minute.

Pushing the image away, he pressed on, shoving aside rats. They ranged in size, some as big as his hand, others half the length of his forearm, but they all moved sluggishly. Glimpses of teeth and bone flashed in the light. Tenner tramped through it all, mindful that they were almost to his knees. The rats foamed about him. He swatted more rodents from the pipes. One leaped and landed on his shoulder, biting into his fox tail almost immediately. He crushed it against the wall. Twice he slowed and whipped the flashlight back the way he’d come, illuminating the knobby mass he’d only just waded through. It was as if the heavens had opened up and vermin had poured down. He didn’t intend to stop, for fear of giving the rats time to climb up his legs. Already the lower parts of his winter coat had had its foamy stuffing ripped away. Worse, the constant pushing against their bodies began to leech away his energy.

No sooner had he realized he was tiring when he misstepped, falling to his knees.

The rats flowed over his lower legs and nipped at the ends of his coat, his jeans, and the backs of his legs, no longer slow-moving. Tenner sprung to his feet, gripping a length of pipe to stabilize himself and keeping his unprotected hands above the mass of undead animals. Rats clung to the edges of his coat and dug into the black denim covering his thighs. He started moving, knocking the dead things away with his fists in a flurry of frantic energy. The flashlight beam weaved and bobbled like a warped lightshow, showing the swarm at his feet one moment and the arch of the ceiling overhead the next. He crushed several rats, knocking them from his person, their grotesque forms swallowed up by the rising, furry surge. Tenner cleaned himself off in a frenzy and ran, no longer content to wade patiently through the deluge of bodies. Twice more he stumbled against the current, and once almost fell, but he caught himself on a nearby pipe.

Seconds later the rats thinned out and fell behind. He ran a few more meters before stopping and examining himself for bites. He wore two pairs of jeans, and the furry little bastards had shredded the first layer of denim. Some tears went deep, exposing hairy white flesh, even though he’d only been exposed for a few seconds. The vermin’s destructive energy fascinated Tenner.

The scrabbling of claws made him look up and shine the light on the tunnel floor.

The volume grew. They had turned about and were coming after him.

This realization might have frozen anyone of a lesser mind, but not Tenner. He lingered, until the rats charged into the light’s beam, before turning and jogging deeper into the tunnel, leaving the bulk of the rats behind. They could not keep pace with their longer-legged prey, and eventually they became nothing more than a presence in the dark somewhere behind him.

Sometime later, a ragged-looking Tenner reached the set of circular steps leading to Citadel Hill, some ten-plus stories of secret brickwork that bore straight upward. He shone the light up, briefly illuminating the stairs and tall shaft overhead, and paused to listen.

Nothing.

A low rustling made him jerk the flashlight in the direction he’d come. The sound could have easily been mistaken for the shifting of pebbles or twigs over a hard surface, and he would have missed it if he hadn’t been listening. They were still coming after him. He craned his neck and regarded the flights of stairs that would take him up. He’d lose them above. There was a steel door at the very top, and not even undead rats could gnaw through stone and concrete. How long had this new threat been festering underneath the city? And how had the virus managed to jump from people to rats? Rats would feed on carrion if available, and just sniffing around an infected corpse was probably all it took. From there, one rat could infect whatever else was around and simply continue spreading the virus.

Tenner envisioned entire litters being infected, and those rats infecting whole populations in short time, only to infect rats outside of the city…

The thought was more than a little disconcerting.

He started climbing the stairs to the surface.

They moved down one of the waterfront historical streets, alternating between a jog and a brisk walk. Hard-packed snow covered the grey pavement; large icy lumps dotted the road like white cairns. Figures with their faces covered lay against building foundations like bleached, featureless mannequins. Cars were also present, but they were pushed to the side to allow a clear pathway through the street. The men didn’t seem too concerned about deadheads, yet Scott attempted to see everything at once. Buckle and Shaffer were the farthest ahead; Vick walked just ahead of him and Amy, who stayed close by his side. All of them had their weapons at the ready. He spotted a sign for a ferry crossing just as Amy spoke up.

“You looking for Moe?”

“Yeah.”

“Just keep an eye out for Tenner. Don’t worry about Moe. Well… worry a little, but Moe was mostly all cleaned out from this section.”

“Those guys?” Scott pointed at the fallen snowmen.

“Only part of it, but yeah.”

“They’re either soldiers or Moe. Dead, of course,” Vick said in his deep voice. Scott thought the man could have easily had a career in narrating books if the world still functioned. “This whole area was sealed off. Buses and anything they could make into a barricade and fortify.”

“So what happened?” Scott asked, frowning.

“Moe happened, o’ course,” Vick explained. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Through open spaces between buildings, Scott could see the water.

“We think they boxed themselves in down here with their back against the harbor.” Amy kept close to Scott, and every now and again her shoulder brushed against his arm. “And duked it out. That crowd we walked through to the tower?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing compared to what’s up ahead.”

“What?”

“It was the city’s population against entrenched soldiers,” Vick picked up from ahead. “And at some point in time, our boys started using the heavy stuff.”

That explained the devastation in the area. To Scott’s right, buildings had been blasted and their guts had spilled into side streets, covering them with piles of snow-covered rubble and making their passage a chore. They passed a parking lot on the left that had taken a direct hit from an artillery shell. The pavement and shredded vehicles lay spread out like the ragged design of an immense winter blossom surrounding a deep crater. Statues ended at blasted knees. Bullet holes stitched lines in the nearby storefronts, and huge bites of destruction had been taken from building corners and walls.

The heavy stuff
, Scott’s mind repeated. Yet they had all perished anyway.

“Where are we now?” he asked after practically speed-walking for a few more minutes.

“Water Street,” Amy informed him, and pointed to the far right, to another bus barricade lodged in between wrecked buildings. Beyond that and back a ways was what appeared to be a distant ski slope. “That’s Citadel Hill up there. Tenner said that was the worst of it.”

“The worst?”

“All open ground up there, if you can believe Tenner. He said when he was up there, the hillside was nothing but torn up bodies of Moe. That might’ve been the head of whatever fortifications they had here, as it’s the highest ground around. Army boys dug in, laid charges around the base of the hill, and when Moe came for them, they blew it all.”

“Jesus,” Scott said. The sliver of slope winked from sight as they marched past the corner of a building. They moved on, through more parking lots and defensive positions filled with corpses that lay stretched out like overgrown creepers. The open space appeared as a vanilla killing ground of monstrous proportions. If he had to make a guess, the Army had fired into an advancing crowd of Moe until they ran simply out of bullets and were overrun.

Jeeeesus
, Scott mouthed in mute awe.

“Here’s where it got gruesome.” Vick looked back at him with a sly smile. “You can be thankful we’ve had snow to cover things up. But you can still see the shapes. And the size of it all.”

He was right.

Up ahead, Scott saw a wall of buses parked at the head of an intersection of three-, four-, and five-story apartment buildings. A wide slope ran up to the top of the buses, where sandbagged machine-gun nests were placed, and bodies hung over them like emptied sacks. Arms and legs stuck up through the layer of snow at irregular crooks and angles, leaving no doubt in Scott’s mind what comprised the ramp. Several white scaffolding planks went up the middle of it all, saving anyone from having to actually walk on the dead.

“Where’d you park?” Scott gasped.

“Over the wall there,” Amy told him. “We couldn’t get over the buses, so we found a place.”

“Awfully far to get back,” he observed.

“We’re okay,” Amy told him. Scott disagreed on that point, but he kept his mouth shut.

Buckle and Shaffer were already on top of the buses and disappearing on the other side. Shaffer glanced back at them with a face full of impatience. He motioned for them to hurry, and Vick increased his pace. Amy and Scott followed.

“Shaffer was our unelected leader before Tenner arrived,” Amy told him under her breath. “Nothing like having two alpha males jostling for position.”

That was something Scott didn’t miss, and he got the feeling that Amy didn’t care for it either. Underfoot, the scaffolding rattled as they stepped onto it and walked to the top of the buses.

Scott’s mouth hung open at what he saw on the other side.

If the open parking lots behind him were secondary defensive lines with wide killing fields, then the street ahead, now a choked chute of bodies, was a firing range from hell. The apartment buildings and shops that stretched out for perhaps fifty meters had their fronts ripped down by whatever explosive devices the Army had once commanded. Bodies, chunks of bodies, and lost limbs appeared imbedded into raw wood and concrete, which stretched down one side of the street and up the other. It struck Scott as a half-pipe of shredded frozen meat that started out beyond the buildings, but slowly built itself up like frosty coffee grounds, until it begin to rise in a second slope that breached the first wall of buses. Blasted corpses even decorated rooftops for as far as he could see. Huge menacing machine guns of unknown caliber, ruined by the weather, lined both levels of barricades. He stopped and gawked at the spectacle of carnage on either side of the bus, measuring which side was worse, and easily deciding on the front. Dead soldiers filled metal dumpsters. They had taken up positions inside the metal boxes, perhaps fifteen feet out from the buses to create the first battle line, with the machine gun fire overlapping and joining theirs from over the buses. With these two lines of fire, it seemed probable that the Army had lured or waited for the gimps for walk toward them en masse before they unleashed hell. The firing attracted more deadheads, and Moe kept on coming while the soldiers behind the line, eager at the prospect of using their weapons to their full destructive potential, ripped their targets new assholes. Scott wondered how many deadheads had been mowed down before magazines went dry, or how long the Army had waited until they started using the heavy guns, or if they broke and ran when Moe kept marching down this ungodly throat of death, taking losses that had no doubt eroded the soldiers’ resolve, until the first corpses scratched at the outer trash dumpsters, crawled over them, and feasted on what was inside.

And how long might it have lasted? A day? Two? Three, perhaps?

Doesn’t matter
, Scott supposed. In the end, Moe had eaten them all.

The stench of frozen corpses and the magnitude of the fight threatened to make him gag.

“C’mon,” Amy said, saving Scott from the bottomless well of hopelessness he suddenly dangled over. He looked into her round, pale face and couldn’t bring himself to say a word. These were once people who walked, worked, and breathed, and now… Amy took him gently by the arm and guided him down the ramp on the other side. Scott gazed ahead, past the raw ruin that stretched out for a whole block and then some, and silently noted that if she wasn’t there, he might have lost it a second time.

Up ahead, Buckle, wearing a black mask and hood that transformed him into a short, stout ninja, had stopped and turned around. “You all right, b’y?” he asked pensively, saying the word as
bye
, the Newfoundland equivalent of boy or buddy. The sound of his voice was uncomfortably loud in the street, which was lined with icy chunks of unmoving meat.

“Just a little shaken up,” Amy answered for him, still holding onto his arm.

“S’aright,” Buckle said in a new, nasal whine. “Vick’s like that all the time. Ain’tcha, Vicky, me ol’ trout.”

Vick rolled his dark eyes. “Told you to stop calling me that.”

Buckle shrugged and looked away.

Vick took to inspecting the rooftops for reasons unknown to Scott. “Been looking at this mess for the last few days, and I’m still not used to it. All them people. What was once people.”

“You okay?” Amy asked Scott.

“Course he’s not okay,” Buckle observed. “He looks like he shat himself.”

“Hey, shut up,” Shaffer ordered, stressing the words as if he was all out of patience. “Before you burst something and starting bleeding all over the place.”

“I’ll make sure it’s you, then.”

“I
said
shut up, goddammit. I’ll put my boot up your ass if you don’t quiet down.”

This time, Buckle let it go.

Scott was grateful for the silence. He regained control of his emotions, but the scale of the shooting fest still left him awestruck. The ruined buildings scrolled as he followed Amy, past an apartment building on the left and a ravaged parking lot on the right. The lay of the land tilted, becoming a slope that faced the water. Scott thought that back in the day, this particular patch of real estate must have commanded top dollar. Some very wealthy people had been infected here.

Another parking lot came into view. Waiting amongst a scattering of vehicles topped off with white cones was a beige passenger van, its ass pointed toward them.