Hellifax (36 page)

“There’s light ahead,” Scott said.

“Probably a hole made by the same thing that blew that wall to hell,” Amy figured. “Just don’t make any noise. We don’t want to have to go back the way we came.”

“Suppose not,” Scott said. He ejected the empty magazine from his Ruger and slapped in a fresh one.

“How many of those you got?” Buckle asked.

“Last one.”

“Too bad.”

“You said you shoot shit?”

“When I have a gun, yeah.”

“Here, then.” Scott handed him the shotgun. He dug out the remaining two dozen or so shells he had in his pockets and backpack. Buckle took the shells and the weapon, but regarded the shotgun in one hand and the Halligan in the other.

“Kinda awkward,” he said, but slung the shotgun over his shoulders.

“They’re getting close,” Vick whispered, watching the zombies in the parking lot. A gimp abruptly stepped into view at the edge of the glass doors, rapping its face against the clear surface and bouncing back two steps. It moaned and smeared its features across the glass, making it squeal, while others drifted in from the sides. The soldier was amongst them.

“They can’t see us,” Amy said. “We’re too far back from the doors and in the dark. They’ll give up after a while, I bet.”

“Lose the scent?” Scott asked.

“Exactly.”

“Hold on for a bit, then. Let me catch my breath,” Vick whispered.

“Seconded,” Buckle said.

“If you oldtimers can’t keep up, we might have to leave you behind.”

“Jesus, Vick,” Buckle’s voice issued from the dark. “Where’s the respect for seniors?”

“Couldn’t take the strap to Amy,” Vick explained. “Too damn fast. And you know how social services are, man. One phone call and you’d be arresting me.”

“True,” Buckle agreed. “World went to hell long before Moe.”

Amy and Scott eyed the outer doors. The zombies thumped against the glass panes, but they didn’t break. The dead groaned, the sound muted by glass. More came up from the rear, attracted by the others. Seconds became minutes, and a sizeable crowd gathered outside, thumping against the glass. Scott’s unease grew. He didn’t want to stay here much longer, even though he was sure Moe couldn’t see them.

“Time to go,” Amy said after a few moments, perhaps feeling the same way. She held her tonfas in one hand and grabbed Scott’s right arm. “Link up.”

“Ready, then,” Buckle said, latching onto Vick.

“Those are my balls, man,” Vick said, his tone as serious as only a man could be when his boys were being violated. “Just kidding. He really only grabbed my ass.”

Amy groaned and turned toward the men. “Fifties, my ass. You guys are like twelve-year-olds.”

“Just some levity,” Vick went on. “Lord knows
he’s
probably laughing up there.”

“Yeah, well, he’s up there and your ass is down here,” Amy said, pulling Scott after her. “So just remember that next time you make a funny, ’cause I’ll kick the shit out of it.”

Vick had his free hand on Scott’s shoulder. “How you doing?”

Scott wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

As a train, they slunk toward the shards of light further inside the building.

“Wish to Christ we had a flashlight,” Buckle muttered.

Scott did, too.

After killing Murphy, Fist felt one problem had been resolved, but he was more than eager to address any others, should they arise. Interestingly enough, none did, and their foraging went relatively smoothly over the next few days. They eventually rolled over the Nova Scotian provincial border, with a stop in the town of Truro. From there, Fist decided to drive for the heart of the province. Winter storms had made driving terrible. Hunting had been non-existent, forcing them to subsist on their Sackville kills, which they consumed quickly. They had cans of food, but no one was ready to eat only vegetables. It was the one thing they agreed upon with the reanimated corpses.

Fresh meat was best.

They drove down the 102 and slipped unnoticed into Halifax, arriving by early afternoon after a major storm that had clogged the roads with snow. They wrapped the tires in chains, which gave the vans better traction as they pressed deeper into the city. Zombies attempted to welcome them, and the vans pushed through several, their ravaged limbs slapping against the vehicles’ sides with fleshy thuds. The Norsemen eventually lost these greeters and made their way downtown, wary of roads rendered impassable by snow or abandoned vehicles, until they came out on the other side of an enormous office building with a gaping mouth at its base.

An underground parking lot.

It had been an easy thing to drive both vans into the darkness and use them to block the entrance with the vehicles. They cleaned out the two dozen or so zombies that inhabited the underground darkness, killing them with savage efficiency.

And they camped there for two days.

A campfire blazed a few feet away from the vans, fueled by old garbage taken from a nearby bin. Seven of the remaining eleven Norsemen gathered around the flames while the others stood guard at the entrance. They cooked up the last victim of Sackville and supplemented their meal with tins of watery carrots and peas.

It was about then, just after Fist had returned from the dark after urinating against a wall, when they heard the distant gunshots.

Around the fire, the others stopped talking and listened and, for a moment, the crackling of the flames was the only sound. Fist’s soot-blackened eyes narrowed, and he looked in the direction the shots had come from. Farther into the city, but not so far away from where they were camped.

The others didn’t move, waiting expectantly for more gunfire. When it didn’t come, they looked to their leader expectantly, like dogs waiting to be fed. No one would dare move before he gave the word, not after the example made of Murphy, and Fist liked that just fine.

He waited few more seconds before grunting as if he’d heard an amusing remark. The open fire pit burned, casting an evil hue over his men and the nearby area.

Fist got moving toward the van, waving a hand as he went.

Behind him, the others jumped to their feet in savage glee.

The darkness enveloped them and made their passage difficult. Several times, Amy bumped up against something, stopped for a moment as if in pain, and continued walking. They went through a gate and another doorway, and light from the moon suddenly gave the dark some semblance of shape.

“Where we heading?” Scott leaned forward and whispered.

“The pool. I’ve been here before, after the renovations,” Amy whispered back. “We’ll cut through the pool area and make our way to the exit on the other side. Get back onto South Street.”

Even though they both wore gloves, he liked being led along in the dark by Amy.

“Do we have to keep holding on?” Buckle whispered.

“Unless you want to fumble around in the dark, yes,” Amy told him. “All right, the pool’s this way.”

They entered a room where chunks of the roof had been destroyed, large enough for snow to blow into the area and coat everything in sparkling, ceramic white. Night sky, lighter than the building’s interior, shone through, and Scott saw stars twinkling between hanging banners. A pile of rubble lay in a heap underneath the rippling cloth. It was as if someone had blown away one section of the roof and left the rest. Snow coated the floor tiles, and even the pool glowed with eerie wonder.

“Holy shit,” Amy said. “Well, this will go faster.”

“What?”

“The water’s frozen.”

“Oh?”

“Hold on,” Amy said and broke away. She stepped to the edge of the pool and stabbed a tonfa through the layer of snow. “Feels solid.”

She tapped again, harder.

Two arms rose from under the snow and grabbed Amy’s wrists, pulling her forward. She shrieked and landed on the powdery surface, where more zombies straightened up, clumps of snow slipping from their frames. Vick yelled and jumped after her, swinging his steel pipe. Buckle went to the pool’s edge and brained a rising zombie with one strike of the Halligan.

Scott kicked one zombie that came up to his knees and bent him backward, only to have the thing come lurching back at him. He realized the dead thing was frozen in the water, from the waist down. Dead fingers grazed the lower parts of Scott’s legs, seeking purchase, before he squashed its head with two blows from his bat. The emerging zombies stayed in place, grasping for the living, but unable to close hands around them. Vick dispatched three deadheads and stood guard while Amy killed her attacker and struggled to her feet. The dead cried out, their voices echoing in the devastated pool area. The creatures reached and clawed for the living, but made no attempt to move forward.

“Well, Christ,” Scott said. All the deadheads had become trapped in the pool. At some point, they had stumbled into the shallow end and stayed there until the water eventually froze them in place.

Amy pulled Scott back by the shoulder, breaking the spell of fascination.

“Fuckers are frozen in there,” Buckle declared, and the four of them simply stood and stared at the writhing figures trapped in the water.

“They probably wandered in here, dropped in, and couldn’t get out. Then it got cold.” Amy shrugged, giving her arms a quick rub. “My tapping woke them up.”

“Just like a dinner bell,” Buckle said.

“We don’t have to go through, right? Just hang to the walls?” Scott asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Amy said, over her fright. There was plenty of room to avoid crossing the pool. The zombies continued wailing as the four of them threaded their way around the tiled edge of the pool. More gimps straightened up in the area where the living had first entered, while corpses in the deeper sections became shorter and didn’t move at all. The water trapped zombies up to their midsections, their lower chests, their shoulders, until…

Scott stopped and stared.

Heads like ruined bowling balls groaned feebly at them, as if the living were the reason for their situation. Other heads appeared as white lumps whose surfaces split apart when their mouths opened. Still
more
heads, deeper in the pool, didn’t move at all. They were just there, like snowballs waiting to be pushed under the surface. If he cleared away the snow covering the deep end, he was certain he’d find the tops of submerged heads. Perhaps even upturned faces, unmoving and staring up at the water’s surface.

“Move on,” Vick ordered him. Scott suddenly felt as if his own limbs had become blocks of ice.

“Un-fucking believable,” he said in wonder.

“Ain’t it,” Buckle agreed. “The places they get themselves into and still make a grab for you? Kills me, I swear to Jesus.”

“This way,” Amy called to them, standing to the right of a dark doorway.

They pressed on, moving farther into darkness. Amy groped for Scott’s arm again and led him along a concrete wall.

“Here we go,” she finally said.

“You okay?” Scott asked.

“Yeah.” She sniffed and adjusted her helmet. “Just got the jump on me, is all. Poppa Vick had me covered.”

Scott felt a pang of guilt. She was right. He’d stood by as if glued in place while Vick dove in and started swinging.

“I’ll cover it next time,” he vowed in a quiet voice.

Amy looked back at him. “Didn’t mean that as a cheap dig. Just that he and Buckle and I have been around awhile. Understand?”

Scott nodded. He still meant what he’d said, but he kept quiet.

“Did you just nod?” Amy asked.

“Huh? Oh, uh, yeah.”

“Barely saw that, mister. You watch yourself.” He could tell she was smiling. Scott found himself starting to like this woman. She was no-nonsense, tough, and possessed a sense of humor that he was only now starting to understand. Kelly had been like that—without the tonfas.

“Hold on a few minutes,” Vick said in the dark. “We’re safe here, I think.”

“Another breather?”

Silence. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Me, too,” Buckle added.

“Don’t worry about it,” Amy quietly assured them in the dark. “Ain’t leaving you behind. Even though you’re hard to clean up after.”

The group waited and collected themselves for a few minutes.

“All ready?” Amy finally asked.

They were.

“Let’s go, then.”

They heard the metallic clink of an emergency exit bar being pushed down, and the door swung open. They emerged from the Dalplex and looked around cautiously, checking the corners and trees ahead of them. Scott wondered what other horrors Halifax had in store for them. He suspected that if his hair hadn’t already turned grey from the constant frights, it would simply fall out.

No Moe could be seen.

Amy walked a few paces, the snow rising up to her shins, and peered into the darkness ahead. After confirming the coast was clear, she turned around and abruptly held up a hand.

“You hear that?” she whispered.

Scott listened, hearing that familiar low, rustling hum coming from their left, polluting the clean silence of the night. It was coming from the not-so-distant parking lot where the zombies had once pursued them. Moans rose above the humming, which struck Scott as odd.

“You want to check it out?” Amy asked.

“No,” Vick said.

“Fuck no,” Buckle added.

But Amy moved to a fire ladder nailed into the wall, just ten feet to the right of the exit. She unslung her pack and dropped it in a drift with a soft thud. “You guys hold on here, then.”

“Don’t do it, Amy,” Buckle said.

“I want to see,” Amy replied. “Besides, I’m on the roof.”

“We don’t have time for this.”

Vick didn’t protest, nor did he tell her to be careful, and Buckle shut up as well.

“I’ll come along,” Scott said, not really wanting to. He suspected he was going to see something he didn’t like, but he didn’t want her to go alone. Amy jumped to the lower rung and pulled herself up with surprising speed considering the weight of the padding and gear she wore. Once she got her boots onto the lower rungs, Scott followed.

They climbed fifteen feet to the top. Snow piled on the roof, almost knee-high in places, rising like pale dunes. Once Scott got to his feet, Amy pointed at the dark holes nearby that dotted the roof of the Dalplex.