Hellifax (12 page)

Sunlight glared down and he was thankful for the visor. He looked this way and that before trudging through a ridge of hard snow. Reaching the drift sculpted like the crest of a wave, he punched his hand through the outer ice. He started jamming fistfuls of snow into the jug, looking around the backyard every so often to ensure that the area was clear. Something compelled him to turn around toward the street. There, like slow-moving husks caught in a current, undead stopped in the road.

Scott froze. He fought down the urge to run back to the house and concentrated on filling the jug. None of the corpses looked in his direction. More snow crumbled and fell down the sides of the bottle, and he wormed his hand deeper inside the drift to get at the softer stuff.

In the street, the zombies started moving, drifting like sluggish black ice floes.

Scott had almost filled the bottle when he saw a gimp turning in his direction.

He dove to the right, cutting off the angle of sight with the corner of the house. Blood pumping in his ears, he kept low and treaded across the snow with crunching steps. Once he reached the back door, he edged along to the corner, crouched, and waited.

It didn’t take long for a shadow to lengthen across the white ground. The moaning and shuffling grew louder.

Scott reached down to one boot and pulled out his Bowie knife. The foot-long blade gleamed dully in the daylight, and he positioned himself for a quick killing stroke.

The shadow swelled on the ground.

Scott tightened his grip on the Bowie, its tip in front of his visor.

The zombie shuffled forward with the creaking of frozen cloth, its arms hanging limp at its sides, and Scott surged upward and stabbed the corpse under the jaw. The tip of the knife punched through the undead’s thin mat of hair. Scott twisted the blade, feeling the grainy resistance of frozen tissue and skull, and yanked the corpse around the corner. He lowered the body to the ground and placed a boot against the dead thing’s head. The blade came out with a rasp of steel on bone.

One down. Scott leaned against the house and waited for more.

None came.

Breathing quickly, his heart hammering, Scott stepped away from the corner and peeked around the corner.

The dead roamed the street, but none came his way.

Thanking Christ above for that little bit of luck, he crept back toward his water bottle, mindful of the gimps popping in and out of view in the other backyards. Filling the jug wasn’t pressing anymore, so he took it, stayed low, and returned to the house. Getting inside the open porch door was a huge relief. He found a blind spot and relaxed somewhat, out of sight of any deadheads unless they came through the doorway. The jug in his hand was practically full with snow, and Scott swore at himself—quietly—for taking the risk. He tightened the lid on the container and stuffed it into his backpack.

One thing done for the day. And one less zombie to deal with.

The dead roamed the streets. He flipped up his visor and pinched the bridge of his nose. With an army between him and the vehicle, getting back to the truck was a lost cause. The chances of him surviving Halifax were low, Scott had known that from the start, but now death seemed almost a certainty.

And he wasn’t even sure Tenner had come to the city.

The more he thought about it, the greater the doubt clouding his mind.

Sniffing, he drew the Ruger and took inventory of his ammunition. Two magazines remained. One of those bullets would be for him if it came to that, as starving in an attic or being torn apart by a mob didn’t appeal to him.

The lip of the broken window drew his attention, and he looked into the yard. Zombies groaned dismally outside and in the distance. Being a realist, which he believed was just a pleasant word pessimists called themselves, he started to think he had little chance of finding Tenner.

But he wasn’t going to stop looking.

Not until he had to use that final bullet on himself.

He thought of the flattened snow outside and the dead populating the streets. So many. So goddamn many.

Give up and go back
, his doubt whispered to him.

No
, Scott mentally replied.
This one’s for Lea and Teddy… And anyone else left alive.

With that, he gathered up his gear, took a breath, and left the house.

Trying to look everywhere at once, he approached a neighbor’s home, walking on a parallel course with the street out front. When he saw his chance, he darted across the driveway, keeping low and baring his teeth as he ran. His boots punched through the gathered snow with an audible crunch, making him wince. Reaching the corner, he crouched and slipped along the wall to the back door. Even when he placed a foot down as softly as possible, the snow would hold for only a second before breaking.

The back door had already been forced open. Scott cautiously entered a kitchen with a rotten apple skin of a linoleum floor. The pipes had broken at some point, flooding everything and eventually seeping through the wood. Frozen blooms of mould dotted the wooden windowsill facing the backyard, and the smell of something decayed wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t going to stay long, and he didn’t want to engage any zombies that might be inside.
Make like a ghost
, he thought.

After a few moments, he took a steadying breath and crept back outside. Zombies paced the street, mumbling as if asleep. He sprinted across the driveway toward the next house, with a deck and patio furniture blanketed in white. Diving in between wide railings, he scrambled to his knees and came to a sliding glass door with the drapes closed. Just beyond a work shed, figures walked aimlessly in the sun, forcing him to stay low. Scott slunk along the length of the sliding window until he reached the end, expecting another driveway––another fifteen feet of exposure to the main road.

What he found momentarily stunned him.

There
were
no houses.

Charred timbers, like frayed fence posts, stood on foundations smothered in twinkling snowdrifts. Scott leaned against the wall hiding him from the road and gaped at the open space. There was no chance of covering such a distance with the zombies around. They’d be on him right away if he tried to go that way. The gap of three or four house lengths was just as lethal as a bottomless pit.

Scott backed up to the sliding glass doors and tried them. Locked. Making a face, he took his bat and positioned it where he thought the lock would be. He didn’t like doing this, but he didn’t want to return to the previous house either, and each second spent debating endangered him all the more. The head of the bat crunched through the glass on the first punch, shattering it in long shards. Pieces tinkled to the floor. He reached inside and fumbled with the lock before opening it and sliding the door open. Slipping inside, he locked the slider, drew the curtains, and hoped that nothing would come to investigate.

Then he heard the hissing.

He’d stepped into an open area that was a combination of kitchen, living room, and dining room. From the kitchen, a decomposed dad dragged himself toward the intruder using the wall for support. The thing’s right arm was missing. Rising up from behind a couch was the mother of the home, her blond hair a wild mop that did not cover her jawless mouth.

Then came the true horror show.

Pulling themselves along the floor like bloated snakes were two small boys, each perhaps ten years old. One of them had both legs gnawed off at the knees. Their mouths opened horribly in the dim light, like young birds waiting to feed.

The cold slowed the family, so Scott pulled the gun from his boot with time to spare. He shot the father through the forehead, dropping him before he even got around the black kitchen island. He put a bullet into the head of the mother next, flipping her over the back of the couch. The children were the worst. The children were
always
the worst.

But he shot them within seconds of each other.

Moments later, Scott discovered the front door wasn’t locked. Crouched low, he secured it, keeping his head below the curtainless window. A stairway with rose-pink paint led to three bedrooms and a bathroom. An ensuite lay off the master bedroom, and it was there Scott stopped and dropped his drawers upon his bowels’ insistence. Ordinarily he’d be somewhat constipated, but for some reason, things were flowing.

Once finished, he left the bathroom and set up in a boy’s bedroom. Scott jerked the curtains across on a window facing the street below, shading the little room in summer blue, and peeked out from one corner.

Deadheads. A thick parade of them.

His heart sank. Realizing he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, he decided to get comfortable. He plopped his gear down on a nearby desk and chair, and that alone made him feel tons lighter. The bed beckoned, but it was too early for that, and he didn’t want to have to camp out here with the damaged sliding doors below. It didn’t feel safe. So he stood at the window’s edge, the wall at his back, and peered out at the world at a narrow angle. Something, he supposed, he’d done for most of his life.

He watched the zombies file by, risen from their icy graves by his hand. If he hadn’t walked over the first few deadheads, perhaps they would have all stayed beneath that frozen carpet, swept by blustery gales that whistled at their strongest. The dead meandered through the street, staggering, searching, sometimes bumping into one another and falling on their asses. They would climb back to their feet with little gruesome grunts of protest, ignore each other, and stumble off in search of a bite. Opposing tides of zombies flowed in and out of sight, clotting at times, and Scott realized with dawning horror that there were more gimps out there than perhaps Annapolis and Saint John combined.

More than he had ammunition for.

Having nothing better to do, he continued watching the dead, wondering how he was going to continue on or even get out of Halifax alive. He remembered people-watching from when he was a baker, from behind the counter while on breaks, casually observing folks as they walked by the shop. All zombies now.

At some point Scott felt hungry, opened up a can of roast beef stew, and ate half. He left the rest on a nearby desk and covered it with a cloth. He pulled a chair away from the desk and placed it near the window so he could sit and look outside, studying the undead’s movements. There would be another snowstorm soon, he was certain of that. Perhaps the temperature and snow would bury them again, enabling him to move on.

On the other hand, perhaps the currents of undead would maroon him in this upstairs bedroom for days, weeks even, turning the refuge into a cell.

Clouds drifted overhead, herded along by a heatless sun, and Scott watched the gimps slog away, flattening the drifts. He reflected on how the zombies sensed the living, which had been a popular topic of discussion with Teddy and Lea. None of them were certain if the creatures’ eyes worked anymore. The gimps responded to movement, though, which suggested they used their eyes—at least the ones that still possessed them. The three of them had also established that the zombies got by on hearing or smell. The debate on whether or not the things were truly dead was never really settled. He remembered Lea had taken the position that in order to smell, they’d have to draw breath—voluntarily or involuntarily—which went against them being truly dead. The same went for the idea of seeing people move. Teddy had quietly countered that no one could live with the wounds some of the zombies sustained, running off a veritable horror list of undead creatures missing entire sections of their bodies. How could they be anything else than dead? They both agreed that perhaps the virus that transformed people into walking corpses might somehow commandeer the part of the brain controlling those senses and use them at will, much like a puppeteer, which had struck Scott as odd. He couldn’t see how any virus could manage such a thing. And how could anything survive with the wounds some of the zombies walked around with?

They had decided that hearing seemed more plausible than smell or sight, but even sound had to be converted into signals for the brain and then interpreted somehow in order for the zombie to react.

He remembered throwing his two cents on the fire by simply saying, “They’re undead,” as if that explained everything. Arguing about what had reanimated them, the science behind it all, wasn’t important. They were undead, and a blow to the brain killed them. Nothing else mattered.

Scott realized how short-sighted he had been. Fully understanding what attracted the zombies meant staying alive that much longer. Perhaps, depending on the corpse’s wounds, they used whatever senses they had remaining to get by. He didn’t know what a gimp did that had been robbed of its eyes, ears, and nose. Could he somehow fool the dead into thinking he was one of them? They did it on TV. Why not real life? Perhaps he could camouflage himself or imitate their movement, passing himself off as dead. The idea was worth exploring further, but how to do it?

Their clothes
.

The notion made him straighten up and savour it. The clothes they wore stunk as much as their dead flesh. What would happen if he wore enough of it to mask his own scent? And if he did clothe himself in undead fashion, could he walk like them? To further strengthen the illusion?

With that simmering in his mind, Scott watched the zombies even more intently from behind the curtain. Some walked better than others, but even the best shambled as if they had downed a flask of booze. And they all made noise.

He rubbed his chin and growing beard and mulled over the problem. Hypothetically, it might work. If the zombies were getting by on the barest of brain impulses, emulating the smell, sound, and movement of one of their own just might save his ass. The only question was how to get what he needed.

Then he remembered the four dead people in the house.

The raw material was there and waiting.

Three cargo vans, black and bruised, cruised along Highway Two of the Trans-Canada Highway, slowing only when passing through the city of Edmundston. Long deserted cars, trucks, and transports littered the four lanes, and Pell navigated and led the others through the mire of leftover steel and rubber, at times leaving the asphalt entirely and driving on the shoulder to get around clumps of vehicles. The highway cleared once through the city, and it opened up into scenic views of hills and valleys dusted with light snow. The air was getting colder, and mornings gleamed with frosting as inviting as a cake.