Hellifax (14 page)

“Holy
shit
,” Scott gasped and backed away, draping an arm across his face. The rancid cloth he peeled away from the dead man stunk to hell. The quivering of hairy fat rolls didn’t help, either. He had played with the idea of gutting the father, or at least bleeding him a little, and wiping the blood on the cloth strips, but after smelling as well as tasting the foulness, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The way the stench was making him nauseous, he wouldn’t need to
act
like deadhead. He resumed cutting around the dead dad, leaving him shirtless in a pair of cut-off Dockers. The mother received the same treatment, and she reeked just as badly. The danger of swooning made him stop once more, just to retreat to the living room to get some fresh air. Scott went back to her side and sliced away the arms of her dark, stained shirt and slacks. He stripped the T-shirts off the boys, but left the rest.

With the sour rags in his hands, Scott went into the kitchen and started cutting. He knotted strands together and tied the rotten material around his forearms, legs, and backpack. The father’s shirt got turned into an uneven poncho. One boy’s T-shirt became a hood to stretch over his helmet, something he wasn’t looking forward to doing. If only he had some ointment to put under his nose, something to dilute the smell.

Inspecting himself when he was all done, Scott figured there was no better time than the present to go for a walk and test his theory. He gathered up his things, flipped down his visor, and pulled on the hood and poncho, praying to God above the fresh air outside would help him breathe.

Outside, the evening sky bled dusky red.

Scott opened the front door and eased himself outside, closing it behind him. He had his bat in one hand and the Ruger in the other, just in case. Standing on a set of short, worn steps, he hunched over and watched the zombies walk past, heedless of him. He hoped his nerves would hold out.

He shuffled down squealing steps, taking his time and making no rushed movements.
Act dead
flashed in his mind. A ragged crowd lay no more than fifteen feet ahead of him, and Scott scrunched a shoulder up to his ear and let loose with a moan of what he hoped was convincing zombie-talk. He dragged his feet as he moved toward the road.
Steady
, he told himself.
Don’t rush anything
.

No sooner did he think it than his toes hooked into something under the snow and he stumbled, falling to his padded knees. His hands flashed out to stop his fall as his mind screamed
NO!

The ground rushed up and slammed into him, bunching one arm uncomfortably against his chest. His bat rattled away, but he held on to the gun. Grinding his jaw, he reflexively drew his hands to his head and rolled over onto his back.

Too fast
. A zombie detected the movement and slunk toward him, wheezing as if it possessed cancerous lungs. Scott watched the thing loom over him, its mouth hanging open in a frozen rictus. He forced himself to stay still while his heart screamed. The zombie came close enough for Scott to see its bare feet and the shredded flesh from soles that had once frozen to something. The urge to raise the Ruger, to blow the thing’s head off, became unbearable, and Scott understood what it was like to play chicken for real, when the stakes were life or death.

The deadhead
stepped
on him, planting one of those tattered feet squarely on his stomach, squeezing the breath out of the man draped in corpses’ clothing as it swung its weight across him, momentarily blotting out the sun.

Then the crushing pressure was gone, and the zombie moved away.

Scott lay on his back, composing himself before getting to his feet, acting as zombie-ish as his rattled mind could manage. He staggered a step and slowly picked up his bat from the ground. Something bumped into him and moved away, but he didn’t react. Didn’t move. Gimps staggered toward him, getting close enough for him to almost gag on their stench and weep at their horribly ravaged features. A woman walked toward him on a collision course, a nurse, with a huge chunk of meat missing from her bare left bicep, enough to see a generous amount of yellowed bone. Scott didn’t even blink as the creature thudded into him. He let its momentum spin him in a lazy circle so that he faced the other way. The nurse sleepwalked by, and the sight of the mob choking the streets made him almost giddy in the knees. The feeling of a small dog being chummed and thrown into a tank with sharks came to mind, and Scott willed himself to stand and watch and act as if he was one of the dead instead of the living, even though his fear yammered at him to bolt for high hills.

Two more zombies shoulder-nudged him and pushed him aside like a block of ice bobbing in a river. Scott rolled with the hits, forcing himself to not react, keeping his shoulders slumped and his arms at his sides. The gimps left him alone.

It was working. The dark visor hid the near panicked smile he felt spread across his features.

It was working
better
than he had expected.

In a thunderclap moment of amazement, Scott saw that the zombies actually ignored him.

Turning around in the tide, he peered ahead at the masses made dark by his visor.
Act dead
, he told himself, and stepped forward carefully, picking a path through the walking slabs of cold, hungry meat. Some came at him headlong, bent on colliding with him, and when they hit, he spun like a ponderous top. Scott forced himself to remain a lump on two unsteady legs. The zombies milled about, but none raised a hand toward him. He paced himself, slackened his posture, and shuffled through the gimps and the deserted cars and walked.

He walked until the sun dropped out of sight and the sky purpled.

Brown paint covered the two-story house in flakes that fluttered in a breeze. There was no front lawn to speak of, just the bare concrete slab of a sidewalk glazed in dark ice. Three stone patio squares led to a front door of what appeared to be heavy oak—the kind of door a person would feel safe behind. Scott moved in the direction of the house, swaying as if he’d broken both hips and downed a pint of rye whiskey. He climbed the steps, feeling dead eyes on his back and ass, and latched onto the knob like it was life itself.

Taking a breath, he twisted it.

Lady Luck smiled on him once more. The door was unlocked.

He stood there for a moment, hunched over as if waiting for a bullet to the skull and ever so grateful to have made it this far. He pushed, and the door moved with slight, sticky resistance. It didn’t open all the way, and he had to nudge it with his shoulder, making it squeal loud enough to make him cringe. He shambled inside, banging his shoulders off the frame as he went in and closing the door with a foot. The house was dark and he lingered in the entry, sizing up its dark hallway.

He waited, standing there in the dark, taking short, curt breaths and smelling the foul air.

“Anyone home?” he asked.

An answering hiss came from the kitchen, as startling as a snake’s rattle. A sexless shadow, slouched and menacing, oozed into the dim doorway ahead with the grace of a slug.

Scott fired the Ruger twice before it collapsed with a fleshy clatter.

He waited, gazing both inside and out. A throaty rumble came from the end of the hallway, organic and decomposing. Then an unsteady clumping drew closer, as if the person wore heavy work boots and walked on bare floor. Adjusting his stance, Scott waited until a
huge
gimp came into view. The thing clacked its forehead against the top of the door frame, and Scott blinked. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a taller specimen since the fall of civilization. The undead had to have been a basketball player in its life, but now it grunted and groaned as its skull prevented it from going any further.

Not wanting to wait, Scott walked up to it, taking zombie steps, and blasted its brain from underneath its chin. The gimp crashed to the ground in a heap. Scott listened for more zombies before finally figuring the place only had the pair of corpses. Relaxing, he returned to the door and locked it, then walked through an almost totally dark family room until he found the stairway to the upstairs.

He walked normally as he explored the rooms in the dark, fumbling as he went along. Locating the master bedroom and finding it empty, he took off his zombie clothes and placed them outside of the door, which he closed. A window overlooked a backyard almost swallowed up by the encroaching night.

Scott lay down on the bed without undressing, and while the smell of zombie flesh clung to him, it no longer bothered him as much.

He dreamt of Kelly and Suzy, the smell of rot surrounding them.

The next day, under an overcast sky, Scott once more walked with the dead.

Before he took to the road that morning, he had sliced up the clothes on the giant gimp and the smaller one, a pair of corpses that oddly complemented each other somehow, and used their ‘fresh’ clothing as additional camouflage.

He continued down Bayer’s Road. The Ruger in his right hand, the bat in his left, he weaved in and out of derelict cars and trucks when he had to, body-checking deadheads when necessary. On multiple occasions he leaned into his shoulder a second before making contact with a gimp, usually hard enough to put them on their bony asses. The first check he delivered scared him quite badly, as he thought it would attract too much attention, but he soon realized the gimps weren’t vindictive. None of them sought him out after he laid them out.

In fact, he had to pace his body checks, as it was far too much fun.

There was no wind, only the constant, freezing gnaw of winter and the eye-watering stench of his disguise, despite being outside in fresh air. Gimps walked, crawled, and slunk about the ground, complaining incessantly, and not taking notice of the hidden meal making a steady, but crooked line deeper into Halifax. Behind his visor, Scott’s eyes darted this way and that, taking in each deadhead as it came close to him, deciding quickly on whether he should lay into a corpse or let it bounce off him. For an old hockey player, it wasn’t a difficult rhythm to get into.

He paused at an intersection of Bayer’s Road, Windsor, and Young Street and felt his stomach lurch. Empty lots the color of the purest cream waited for him, offering no shelter or refuge for several hundred meters. A huge apartment complex lay to his right, and gimps had spilled out onto the streets and populated the open expanse like drunken people enjoying a park.

Behind him, only the hordes he’d already passed through.

There was no retreat.

Steeling himself, Scott plunged forward.

One zombie slipped on ice and fell across his path. Scott resisted the impulse to walk around the body for fear of being detected, so he stepped over the dead thing without missing a beat. He kept on, focused on what lay ahead. More zombies congealed into a wall, blocking his way and forcing him to slow down. He hoped they would split apart. They didn’t, however, and his course took him into two of them. He put his weight into his shoulder and broke through the pair, dropping one to the pavement. The flesh covering one bare knee broke open like a rotten potato, and blackness spurted out.

Scott stumbled along until the next scene stopped him dead in his tracks. His visor saved him, concealing his jaw just before it dropped in horror.

A van had crashed into a power pole, buckling the length of wood so that it leaned across its roof. A man hung from the T, crucified, his arms kept in place by what looked to be rope. His lower body, starting right at his waist, was gone. Devoured. Whoever had hung the man had done it so the zombies could feast on his legs and waist. Once it was gone, the undead had then reached up as far as they could into the rib cage, pulling down whatever had not simply dropped, perhaps even a rib or two, until the torso collapsed like a sloughed off snakeskin.

Scott tried very hard not to look at the reanimated upper half, moaning pitifully for release.

He lurched forward.

The intersection curved and Bayer’s Road abruptly became Young Street. A red billboard blazed “Value and S,” but the rest of the sign was covered with frost. Businesses drifted by his line of sight, some displaying signs announcing services and lunch specials, while underneath, zombies roamed aimlessly. A large Super Store rose above a parking lot teeming with the dead. An office building on his right had most of its windows smashed out. The dead cried out with decomposing vocal chords, making Scott wish they’d shut up for a moment. A transport trailer on the left had mowed down a tree before crashing into a power pole. A skeletal driver hung out of the cab, devoured from the waist down, a seat belt keeping the remains in place.

Scott passed it all, feeling the frayed seams of his sanity being tested from all angles.

He kept composed, stayed dead-looking, and avoided attention. At times he paused and slouched against a nearby car or truck and closed his eyes. In those moments, he concentrated on what the world had been like before the dead walked. In his mind’s eye, it was a winter’s day in the city; living people were all around him, carrying on with their business, heeding the slow pulse of traffic lights.

But as real as he managed to make these memories, they were only fleeting, like a painkiller that wore away far too soon. Then he was back in
this
world.

A feeling came over him as he walked down Young Street, passing once popular food chain restaurants and automotive service stations. The urge to stop and look around came upon him. Could he chance it? He decided he would and eased to a stop. A few seconds later, he turned around as if he possessed shattered hips.

Zombies passed in front of his vision—grisly, disfigured forms of rot, walking without direction.

Scott kept his posture slumped and studied the mob. Something would not allow him to tear his eyes away.

Then he saw it. A gimp walking with a pronounced sway to its shoulders as if it had trouble making its legs work. Covered in black gore, it strode straight ahead, pushing its way through.

Curiosity laced with growing dread hooked Scott’s attention. The gimp was heading straight for him. He turned about and got walking, deviating slightly from his path and crossing the street at an angle. After lumbering ten meters or so, he slowed and glanced back as nonchalantly as any deadhead.