Hellifax (35 page)

Framed in wood and shadow, he pushed himself back from the window and stared out at the graveyard, pondering the existence of the rats as the swarm rippled away. The Philistines were only the beginning. If the vermin were rising in Halifax, they would be in every city. He’d planned to journey to Mexico. If the cities were infested, what would be left for him? Who would have thought it? Perhaps he wasn’t the one to scour the last few souls from the earth. Maybe the rats were more efficient. They were certainly awesome to behold.

The rifle lay propped up against the wall, and his eyes flicked to it.

Perhaps he shouldn’t be here at all, anymore.

He took the weapon and eyed the fluted barrel.

Perhaps he should just be on his way…

He tipped the weapon until the muzzle’s black eye stared straight back at him and waited. His thumb found the trigger, and he squeezed just a fraction. Just a little more pressure and he would travel. The mouth of the weapon touched the top of his nose, right between his eyes, the metal cold to the touch. He waited for something to entice him to go that little bit further.

Nothing.

He eased off on the trigger. “Suicides,” he scoffed. “Not so easy to do.”

Or I’m just not motivated
, he thought.

“No.” He grabbed the rifle and examined its length. “Not yet, anyway.”

He sprang up from the chair, knocking it over with a clatter. “Not yet.”

Besides, if he killed himself, the whole world would wink out of existence with him.

The street below was empty, and the drone of the rats had diminished. He slunk back out the window and quietly made his way down the ladder, dropping the last meter. A skull lay at his feet, which he tapped with his toe. Tenner slunk along the wall, searching for rats ahead and eyeing the graveyard to his left. After the way the rats had devoured the two Philistines, he suspected the others had fled. The zombies knew about the rats, knew what they were capable of.

A part of him wanted to educate the dead that he should be
equally
feared.

He continued walking, keeping to the shadows and moving as stealthily as possible across intersections. Trash bins lay half-buried in snow and a low distant murmuring came from ahead, but otherwise Halifax was dead. He took no chances and stopped twice, listening to the city and hoping for some clue as to which way to proceed.

He hoped Vick, Amy, Buckle, and the mystery man had encountered the rats and had taken some form of refuge. In the dark, the chance of walking past clues as to their whereabouts would be quite high. Tracks could no longer be trusted either, as all the roads had tracks on them. He would need a thunderbolt of luck to find them, and even then––

A shotgun blast rang out over the city, haunting it, and Tenner froze in his tracks. More shots made him turn in the direction of the noise.

Then nothing.

Tenner smiled, felt a burst of hope, and started to jog.

If Scott was right about the time, it was somewhere close to midnight. The moon remained almost impossibly bright, transforming the city into a solemn dreamscape. They kept under the shadowy archway of the bare trees whose limbs reached overhead. Darkness draped across driveways and reminded Scott of open graves or entrances to family tombs, and he couldn’t quite shake the feeling something was watching him.

Amy was just ahead, stooped over slightly and hustling with barely a sound. The others trailed behind her in a straight line. She paused once at an intersection, checking a dark sign that informed them they walked along Oakland Road. Amy shook her head. In losing the rats, Scott thought they must have gone really far out of their way. He trusted Amy’s guidance to get them back on track.

She looked back and was about to say something when she stopped, staring past Scott. He turned, as did Vick and Buckle.

Emerging out of the midnight gloom was a mob of deadheads.

A
lot
of deadheads.

“Well, shit,” Buckle hissed.

The foremost rancid zombie raised an arm and cried out. Other gimps zeroed in on the living, and soon the street was a slow stampede of shadows, made extra creepy by the shadowy lashings of branches.

“Hurry!” Amy whispered and started jogging. They ran around snow-trapped vehicles and linked up with a larger road, where the drifts had been trampled. Amy slowed down. Twenty meters away stood another crowd of deadheads, barring the way. She looked back quickly, and Scott suddenly felt the space between the two bodies of undead close in on them. The houses in the area were generously spaced, considering how tightly packed they’d been on previous streets, and drifts rose up like serpentine spines, covering lawns.

Amy broke into a run.

Toward the zombies now fifteen meters ahead of her.

Holy shit!
Scott thought as he increased his own speed. What the hell was she doing?

He glimpsed one of the corpses before them, wearing the body armor and battle helmet of a soldier. A black visor hid its upper face, while its lower jaws remained visible.

Amy altered her path and stomped across a lawn, her feet driving deep into the snow. The men struggled to keep up, and Scott’s legs sunk to his knees––deep enough to suck the energy from him. The two separate groups of zombies joined forces behind them and pursued. Voices of the dead sang out, making Scott run faster.

They slogged around a two-story house and through a backyard filled with deep snow. Amy got halfway up the drift and looked over a fence. She turned around and waved off the men.

“Too deep,” she huffed. “Get to the house.”

Scott turned around and saw Buckle and Vick sunk to their knees. Behind them was a condensed featureless knot of heads, torsos, and arms, all blackened by the shadow of the nearby houses, blocking any retreat.

“Can’t go back!” Vick waved. “They’ll have more trouble than us.”

Amy didn’t argue. She struggled up the drift and crawled over the fence. Scott went after her, feeling the round tops of the fence pickets through his Nomex coat. Vick and Buckle struggled through the snow, their energy being sapped away. The zombies came under the full glare of the moon. The soldier marched forward, outpacing the others, its mouth hanging open almost sadly.

Closing in on Buckle.

“Donny!” Amy cried.

Buckle glanced over his shoulder and spotted the dead thing. He flipped himself over the fence, right behind Vick, flicking up snow as he went. The soldier staggered and bogged down in the drift’s depths.

“This way,” Amy yelled and waded onward, arms flailing, toward a copse of bare trees.

Scott and the other men pulled away from their pursuers, but he glanced back to see the undead crawling over each other to clear the fence.

“We could’ve made a stand there,” Scott blurted.

“Plenty of time to make a stand,” Amy answered, pointing. To their right, more dark figures plodded through someone’s garden.

“The hell they come from?” Scott asked.

“Don’t worry about them—just move!” Vick urged.

Through the frozen brush they went, each step leeching away a little more energy. They outpaced the zombies on the right, but the night was no longer quiet. All around them, Moe wailed in hunger. A wall of glowing snow rose up before them. The trees ended and they stumbled onto a walkway, closer to the towering wall in front of them. Scott realized it wasn’t a snow bank, but the side of a very large concrete structure.

“Dalplex,” Amy said and went to the right.

“Dalplex?” Scott echoed.

“Sports arena,” Vick informed him.

Amy came back and Scott saw why: huge chunks of debris had fallen from the building to the tree line, effectively blocking any further progress.

“Back the other way,” Amy told them. “The Army or Navy must’ve hit the place with something. The place’s shot to shit.”

They turned around and stopped in their tracks.

A crowd of undead came around the corner of the building, slinking and smiling as if they had just heard a truly amusing joke. They swayed on their feet, gesturing with limbs that, in some cases, were not whole. The humans moved forward as a dark wave of Moe––the ones chasing them for the last few minutes––struggled through the nearby trees.

“Lord Jesus,” Buckle said softly, seeing they were penned in.

“We have to go through them. It’s the fastest way,” Amy said, flicking out her tonfas.

“Then, we go through,” Vick said, stepping up to stand at her side. He slipped on his spiked knuckles, weapons Scott knew would have scared the shit out of the living.

“What do we do?” Scott asked.

“Watch their backs,” Buckle answered. “And keep an eye on the bunch behind us.”

There was a pause as teacher and student prepared themselves for the coming battle, then they were swinging. Amy and Vick attacked the dead with an energy that took Scott’s breath away. Back in the parking lot it had been Buckle and Vick facing Moe, but now Scott saw teacher and student united against a morbid enemy. Giving each other room, Vick and Amy greeted the dead with steel and hard wood.

The display was nothing short of stunning.

Scott stood dumbfounded, watching both martial artists as they created a close combat spectacle unimpeded by the inhibitions that would have been present if their attackers were alive. Whatever combat skills they had acquired over the years and finely tuned, they unleashed. The whirling tonfas and flashing steel pipe inflicted devastating blows to the advancing deadheads. Vick and Amy pounded in skulls, broke knees, and snapped arms, ripping out zombies like unpleasant weeds. Vick pumped his spikes into faces and temples while Amy attacked legs, upending corpses before bashing or spiking heads. She flipped one zombie over her back, and Buckle darted forward and brained it with his Halligan. He worked the weapon free with a crunch and pulled back to Scott.

Who just continued to watch.

It wasn’t because he was awestruck anymore or even scared.

He simply realized he would be in the way.

Vick made magic with his pipe and spiked knuckles, thrashing and destroying gimps before they could lay their frozen hands on him. He seemed to be laboring as the fight went on, and the whirling, destructive energy of the steel pipe slowed.

Amy, on the other hand, appeared to just be warming up.

And kicking ass.

She spun the tonfas in her hands so fast that they resembled propellers. Her speed and fury made Scott think of Bruce Lee. She blocked hands with the weapons, spread the arms of her attackers wide, and spiked faces with the pointed ends. The resounding clatter of skulls being smashed became a gruesome rhythm. A soldier got his face bashed to one side before being spiked under the chin. An obese office worker with a rug of a beard had his knee broken and his temple crumpled. She cracked the skulls of three boys so fast Scott wasn’t sure what had happened, hearing only the angry clack of a dancer’s castanets. A female zombie reached for Amy with a skeletal arm and had it snapped into rubber before being swatted to the ground. One bash to another’s jaw sent a hail of broken teeth bouncing off the concrete wall.

Amy darted left and right against the decomposing tide, not standing in any one place, but somehow aware of Vick and his steel pipe. Her movements blurred against the backdrop of slow-moving zombies. A low wall of unmoving Moe lay at her feet, and the zombies struggled to cross it, stumbling frequently. Several times Scott thought to rush to her side to stop a gimp reaching for her leg, only to see her kill it with frightening force.

Then Vick dropped back, chest heaving and arms drooping.

Buckle moved forward, kicking zombies and lashing out with the Halligan tool. Vick had been a symphony of destruction, a smooth-moving flow of practiced strikes; Buckle was brutal force. The Halligan broke bones with each heavy swing. With surprising speed, three zombies appeared out of the shadows and fell upon the former cop. Then Amy was there, hooking two zombies off their feet with her tonfas. Buckle crushed the skull of the last, but more crowded in.

Scott dropped his bat and drew the Ruger. He fired with both hands and emptied the magazine into the heads of three zombies, the exit holes bursting loudly. The weapon clicked dry and he didn’t have time to reload, so he shoved the gun into his boot and shouldered the shotgun.

Boom
. A face exploded. Both Amy and Buckle ducked out of the way, giving Scott all the room he needed.

Boom
. A huge chunk flew from a stomach.
Boom.
The head followed, flying from its shoulders.

Boom. Boom.
Two more gimps fell, their skulls shredded.

Buckle crushed the last deadhead’s skull, embedding the Halligan into the zombie’s temple with a harsh crunch.

“Five shots in that thing?” Buckle turned and asked with a wry smile. “That’s a firearm violation, me son.”

“Sorry, Officer,” Scott said.

“I’m not fucking sorry,” Vick muttered, steaming past them. “Get moving!”

The zombies still pursuing them were through the trees, getting closer.

Scott grabbed his bat and ran after the others. Following the wall, they raced around the building and arrived at the main entrance. The clear glass doors were unlocked, but the interior appeared as a starless void. The doors were the automatic kind, and the dead sensors would not allow them entry. With a grunt, Vick shoved one spiked fist into a crease and pried the door back enough so he could get his fingers in. Buckle jammed his Halligan into the widening slot and pulled, his back bending with the strain. The doors finally opened, and Vick waved them inside. Once in, they pushed the doors shut.

“The glass should hold for a while,” he said, eyeing countless dark figures making their way across a snow-filled parking lot. “I think we’re hitting the ones that went by the house.”

“And any others in the area,” Buckle added. Amy looked inside to a second set of doors. She pushed one open and went into the building, seeing soft light deeper inside, at the end of a corridor of blackness.

“Where you heading?” Vick asked.

“Can’t go that way. Gotta find another exit.”