Hellifax (38 page)

“Something was following me,” Scott managed to say.

“What?” Buckle pulled him back to the doorway, where he finally regained his bearings.

“Listen, and get ready just in case,” Scott warned.

But after ten seconds, it was Amy’s voice that broke the tomb-like silence. “Hurry, you guys.”

“Don’t hear anything,” Buckle said to Scott.

“It was catching up to me,” Scott said, fear in his voice. “Then I forgot about the open door and fell through.”

Silence. “Nothing out there now. Would’ve come for us after you broke the lamp or vase or whatever that was, I think.”

There was no mistaking that. So what had he heard?

“C’mon,” Buckle said, reaching out and guiding him back by the shoulder. Scott puzzled over the noise he’d heard all the way back to Amy and Vick.

“What happened to you?” Amy asked.

He shook his head and then realized no one could see it. “I don’t know. Heard something back there.”

“What?”

“Don’t know. It slacked off when Buckle reached me.”

For a moment they listened, not hearing a thing.

“Don’t want to scare you guys, but…” Amy began.

“But what?” Vick’s voice.

“This place had a reputation at one time. Back in the day. I never believed it, but…”

“But what?” Scott wanted to know.

“Well… just that there were a couple of suicides in the place. Some kids hanged themselves. Around exam time, I think. I remember Jordy––my husband––talking about it. Guys would hear things at night. Only hear things, never see. Sounds outside their doors or late at night in the laundry room. Whenever someone investigated, nothing was found.”

“Amy?” Vick asked.

“Yeah?”

“Can we get the fuck out of here?”

Amy hesitated before answering. “This way.”

“Thank you,” Vick said, annoyance in the martial artist’s voice––but Scott also thought that, in a world where corpses walked, it was very possible that Vick
believed
in such stories. There was a hint that perhaps the older man’s nerves were also starting to fray in the constant blackness.

Giving directions when needed, Amy led them once more through the dark, taking longer this time, until they turned another corner and a distant window oozed moonlight. Scott exhaled in relief.

“Almost there,” Amy whispered, her coarse voice sounding impish. Seconds later, they gathered before a door to the outside. The window offered a view of an empty parking space underneath the residence, and an opening that led out into a lane and, beyond that, a road.

“Well, shit. Almost home,” Amy said, looking out the window.

Scott took a peek and shrugged. “Nothing. I was expecting deadheads. Where are they, do you think?”

“You want to see Moe?” Amy asked.

“Hell no, I’m happy.” Scott smiled, relieved to be out of the dark.

“Ready, oldtimers?” Amy directed at Vick and Buckle.

“Gonna slap your ass you ever call me that again,” Buckle warned her softly.

“I like ‘oldtimer,’ myself,” Vick said. His steel pipe rasped against floor tiling.

“Anything’s an improvement over pussy, eh?” Buckle said.

Scott made a face and shook his head.

The Newfoundlander caught the movement. “Don’t worry about us, me son. Them’s only terms of endearment. Besides, old Vick won’t remember any of it two minutes from now.”

“I’ll remember kicking your ass just fine,” Vick deadpanned. “Just keep it up.”

The abrupt opening of the door quieted them all, and Scott suspected that was Amy’s intent. She entered the parking area and the rest of the men filed out after her. Beyond the parking area, an empty lane and parallel road beckoned. Amy stopped and peered around the corner, ensuring everything was clear. They took in the gleaming road frosted in white. Across the way, a large gathering of empty-looking condos loomed in the sky.

“All right, the way looks clear,” Amy said. “We’re on Oxford. We keep going straight, or at least parallel with it, until we reach Connaught.”

“Not a lot of places for cover out there, Amy,” Buckle said, frowning. “Except for the cars.”

“We’ll make do with that, then. Unless you have a better idea?”

Scott didn’t. Neither did Vick or Buckle.

“All right, then,” Amy stated. “We go.”

Tenner moved stealthily through the snow, hearing the moans from the dead up ahead and concealing himself when necessary. He didn’t want to stir them up, not when he felt he was close to his quarry. He ducked behind a car and studied his surroundings. A mob of zombies stood within the confines of what appeared to be a courtyard up ahead, and he didn’t think Vick or the others had gone that way. They’d be avoiding the Philistines.

So… where?

The tracks around him were of no help; there were simply too many. He looked at the closest building, a stone structure with every window dark and forbidding. His attention drifted to its base. The dark rectangular shape of a closed door captured his attention.

He checked on the zombies, making sure they hadn’t seen him, and kept low to the ground as he moved toward the closed door. When he reached it, he dropped into a crouch and extended his fingers, feeling the snow and appreciating that a section of it had been swept over in a fan shape, as a door might do if it had been opened and then closed. The marks were recent. It wasn’t a certainty, but he liked the odds that his old gang might have ducked inside the building to avoid the zombies lurking in the courtyard.

The moon hung fat in the sky, but it was dropping. He found the door handle and opened it; he could barely see the stairwell inside it was so dark. He paused and listened, not hearing anything. Staying bent over, he left the door open and crept around the corner of the building, taking the long way around. Ahead lay the white strip of the street. His boots sunk into deep drifts, slowing him, but he eventually reached the far corner and edged around it.

Holy shit
.

Just topping what might have been a rise in the land, he spied shadows on the pavement, moving away from him.

They might have been zombies.

But Tenner didn’t think they were.

He treaded softly ahead in pursuit, passing a parking area on his right, empty and uninteresting. Fresh tracks of a small number of people lay in the snow. They were grouped together and seemingly in a line, not at all like a crowd of undead. They went to the edge of the parking lane and dropped five feet, over a stony embankment and to the main street’s sidewalk. Tenner reached the corner of the building and placed his back to it. Off in the distance, he heard the restless dead.

The little devils
, he thought. They had come this way and stayed out of sight of the zombies by crouching below the embankment, which appeared to run beyond the length of the street. The building he had his back against was built on a low mound, as were the others surrounding it.

He retreated to a snow-covered car and placed his AR-20 on the roof, the butt of the weapon firm against his shoulder. He lifted the goggles to his forehead and squinted through the scope, moving the weapon until he spotted the retreating shadows sinking behind a rise in the street. They were spread out and, for a moment, Tenner wasn’t sure who he’d be firing at. He selected one shadow, targeted its head, and flipped the selector switch to single-shot mode.

Then he took aim once more, baring teeth.

Which one are you? Vick? The mystery man?
He focused on his target.
What might this bullet bring?

They were almost over the crest and out of sight, the asphalt gobbling them down to their waists, then their torsos. One winked out of sight––probably Amy. She was the shortest. Tenner centered the lines of the scope on the head of his target and held the weapon steady. He had no idea who he held in his sights. A ripple of excitement coursed through him, and he welcomed it with a shiver.
Someone
was about to die. Thoughts of what they might be talking about went through Tenner’s head, and he smiled. Whatever the conversation, it was about to be disrupted.

That familiar rush burned through his frame and nerve endings, the same chill that came before any killing. Then he reconsidered, frowning just a little.

He shifted his aim.

And squeezed the trigger.

Placing some distance between the gimps behind them, they straightened up and drifted toward the middle of the road. The street ahead was thankfully empty of both rat and Moe, and cars on either side provided enough cover so that the need to crouch wasn’t so great. Scott glanced up at the moon. He figured it was perhaps one in the morning of a very long day. Stars winked back at him, clear and sparkling bright enough for him to almost wish he could just lie down on the icy pavement and simply watch them all. Ahead, the road stretched out and narrowed to some dark, unseen point.

He stepped closer to Amy. “How much further?”

“Depends. If it was a straight walk, maybe six or seven hours.” She turned to look at him, her face and eyes dark under her visor. “But it isn’t a straight walk.”

“Okay.”

“Shhh,” Buckle hissed from the rear.

Scott winced at Amy, who gave him a little smile. For a long second, Scott saw just how attractive she was.

A gunshot punched the stillness and knocked Vick off his feet, belting him over as if a heavy plank had hit him upside the head and knocking him flat on his back. Scott and Amy froze in their tracks, processing what had just happened.

“
Get down!
” Buckle cried, all attempts at silence forgotten.

They flattened, scrambling toward Vick and seeing the puddle of blackness spreading around his head.

Amy let out a barely suppressed shriek, which came out like a muffled five o’ clock whistle.

“Shhh,” Buckle said, grabbing Vick’s armor and flipping him over. “Shhh, I got you. I got you. Shhh.”

He pushed Vick’s visor up over his face and peered into his open eyes. Vick groaned. His arm hung from his shoulder at an awkward angle, and blood spurted rhythmically from under the Kevlar plates, which made Amy moan as loud as any Moe.

“Shush, Amy.
Shhh!
” Buckle hissed. He quickly ripped open the padding of the man’s snowsuit with a wet sound.

“Is he okay?” Amy asked, leaning in and placing a hand against Vick’s rough cheek.

“No,” Buckle said. The Newfoundlander tried to turn his friend onto his side, but he gave up. He widened the tear in the snowsuit material and grimaced at the sight of raw meat. The round had bitten a chunk out of flesh and bone, and only a thread of sinewy tissue kept Vick’s lower arm attached. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Buckle whispered.

“What?” Amy asked frantically.

Buckle gripped Vick’s sizeable bicep and probed the flesh with his fingers. “See how the blood’s squirting out here? In bursts? That’s not a vein opened up. That’s an artery. Listen now, I’m going to keep pressure on this for as long as I have to. Head over to those apartments back there and find me something to tourniquet his upper arm, okay? And a lighter and something to burn––paper or cloth or anything. Okay?
Go!
”

Amy stood and bolted for the row of apartments. Scott watched her run off before looking back at Buckle, who did a double take.

“The fuck you waiting for?” Buckle snarled.
“Get after her!”

Scott did just that, leaving the former cop to tend to his friend.

Watching them go, Buckle turned his attention back to Vick. He pulled the man’s hood down with bloody fingers and placed a cheek over Vick’s face. The old bastard was breathing, but Buckle knew how bad gunshot wounds could be. Worse, it was clear to him that this particular shot had pretty much destroyed the bone in the upper arm and shredded the artery there, resulting in the
spurt––spurt––spurt
of blood. No vein did that. A vein would only ooze blood.

“I gotcha, buddy,” Buckle breathed, staying in control and releasing a hand so that he could unsling the shotgun and place it on the icy road. He saw the strap then, and scoffed at himself. With his free hand, he reached down and grabbed his knife. It was going to be tight. Buckle took a breath and quickly cut the hemp strap off the shotgun. Baring his teeth, he looped it around Vick’s arm and pulled tight, cutting off the flow. He looked up and couldn’t see if anything was approaching over the crest of the street, but it didn’t really matter.

“Don’t you worry one bit now, me son,” Buckle whispered to his old friend. He looked at the blood on the road. There would be company soon, and he expected he’d hear their wailing long before he could see them.

“I gotcha,” Buckle said, and adjusted the strap on Vick’s arm, trying hard to focus, to maintain tension, and hoping that Amy and Scott would return soon.

When the shadows crumpled together and disappeared, Tenner knew he’d hit the mark right where he wanted. Who’d he hit? Tenner stood up and listened, the AR-20 pressed firmly against his shoulder. Two shadows fluttered away from where the wounded man lay, disappearing in the gloom of an apartment complex near a stone church. That was interesting. Tenner didn’t think they were simply abandoning one of their own, which got him wondering if he’d killed his target. He wasn’t completely familiar with the rifle, and he wondered if it fired something more powerful than a standard 5.56 mm round. Memories came back to him, reports suggesting the Army had developed an explosive-tipped shell. That brought a wry smile to his face. He really wanted to use his knives on his quarry, but the idea of accidently killing someone with a bullet amused him.

That still left three to hunt down and cut up.

He figured it was time to get over there and check things out.

Tenner straightened up and moved around the car he’d set his rifle on, then stopped in his tracks. The undead were wailing, alerted by the shot and drawn to the commotion. He went to the building on his right and peeked around the corner.

Undead. A hundred of them at least. Probably more. Attracted to the blood.

In his haste to slow his old companions, he’d made the mistake of not considering what the Philistines would do. It was a stupid mistake, one born from uncharacteristic impatience. If nothing else, the dead were predictable. Once attracted to something, they would investigate, alone or en masse.