Hellifax (16 page)

Scott wasn’t sure about that, and Amy picked up on it. “Don’t worry. We’re cool.”

“Oh, uh, well…”

“Need time to think about it?”

“It’d be nice,” Scott admitted.

“You have as long as it takes me to catch my breath and walk out of here.”

Wow
. He struggled to think of something to say. “That mask you have…”

“Something, ain’t it? It’s an old Brian Mulroney Halloween mask. Found it in a costume shop’s bargain bin.”

“Who?”

“Brian––never mind. Obviously before your time. Before my time, really. The benefits of a Poly-Sci education at Dal.”

“Where you get the nightsticks?”

Amy’s brow creased. “Nightsticks? Oh, these. They ain’t nightsticks. They’re tonfas.”

“What?”

“Tonfas. Hardwood martial arts weapons. I don’t have a gun. Wish I did, though. Something like that silencer you have there.”

“Sound suppressor.”

“Huh?”

“The proper term is––” Scott shook his head. “Where’d you get them?”

“From my teacher.”

Scott truly didn’t know what to make of Amy. Her brisk manner of conversation and her unwavering stare made him feel uncomfortable.

“We ran out of bullets long ago. One of the reasons we came to Halifax was to look for guns and ammo. There was an armory in town, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, well, there was. One of our guys was there. Blown to hell, though. Too bad for us. You don’t see it much around here, but downtown had the shit kicked out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I
mean
it had the shit kicked out of it. Halifax explosion two point oh. The Army set up defenses around the place, blocking off whole streets with steel barricades, razor wire, and sandbags. Even buses in some cases. I wasn’t around for it, but you’ll see. Houses have been levelled, man. Some buildings look like blocks of cheese. The ones still there, I mean. We have theories on what might have happened, but before they died, the Forces kicked ass.”

“They died?”

Amy nodded. “The ones that were lucky. A lot of them rose as the dead. Unfortunate for us. We ran into a few already.”

“Why’s it unfortunate for us?” Scott knew he wouldn’t like the answer.

“The soldiers wore body armor, and it didn’t come off if they were turned. It stayed on. Worse, their
helmets
stayed on. I doubt your little sidearm there could poke a hole in one of them. And a smack to the head with a tonfa does shit all.”

“So how do you kill them?”

In answer, Amy reached down and pulled up a tonfa. The hilt of the weapon had been sharpened into a spike. Once Scott had an eyeful of that, Amy dropped it to the desk and pulled a survival knife out of her boot. She held it up, twisting it this way and that, showing off the serrated edge.

Scott was at a loss for words. The thought of facing zombies in full body armor made him uneasy.

“Through the eye or under the chin. The weather makes it harder than usual. You really have to punch the tip in hard, and it feels gross. Like you’re plunging into a frozen watermelon or thick slush or something like that. All grainy.”

“The cold freezes them,” Scott added.

Amy nodded. “I guess you know all about it since you’ve lived for this long.”

Scott supposed he did, but his mind still lingered on the zombie soldiers.

“So,” Amy finally announced. “I’m ready. How about you?”

“You don’t mind me coming along?”

“Nah. I think you’re okay.”

That surprised Scott. “Yeah, how so?”

“You have at least two guns on you, and you didn’t try to use them on me.”

Scott blinked. All this time, she’d been waiting for him to draw on her.

“And you didn’t try to rape me,” she said.

Stunned yet again, he couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Oh… I guess that’s a, uh, good indicator.”

“Yep. Big man like you. Armed to the teeth. Little girl like me with a pair of sticks. I wouldn’t have had much of a chance if you really wanted to bend me over the desk here.”

“Uh,” Scott said. He didn’t feel comfortable with the sudden change in conversation. He scratched at his neck and remembered her destroying the gimp from earlier. “Well, I wasn’t––”

“Thinking about it? I saw that. I have this thing about people. Hasn’t failed me yet.”

“Oh.” Scott felt strangely, awkwardly, on the defensive. “Good… Glad we had this. This talk.”

“Me too.” She got up off the desk. “I’m getting ready to leave. You still have a choice, but once I walk out of here, I’m gone. Plain and simple.”

“Where are you headed again?” Scott asked, standing.

“Downtown. It’ll be a day-long trip, with all the snow and shit in the streets. And then there’s Moe, of course. But you have the clothes, so that’s fine. Gonna have to touch them up some time, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re
clean
. You haven’t saturated them in blood and guts. It’s worked for you so far, but sooner or later, your own smell will come through. Once that happens, they’ll be on you like a football in slow motion.”

Scott wasn’t sure he got the simile.

“We have a base downtown. Like I said, a bunch of streets were cut off and fortified. It didn’t work for the soldiers, but it’s all we got for now. And we all walk around in dead guts if we go beyond the fort.”

Jesus Christ
, Scott thought.

“Shall we, then?” Amy asked as she gestured to the door.

Feeling as if he could have worse options, Scott nodded.

“Wait a second,” Amy said and went to one of the zombies she’d put down. Her knife appeared in her hand and she cut through the corpse’s shirt, revealing the sallow belly. The knife flashed as she stabbed down, sinking it to the hilt. She sawed with some effort, making a slit in the fish-belly flesh, gasping at the end. The smell of rancid guts poisoned the air, and Scott held his breath, looking away for a moment.

“Here you go,” Amy said and splashed a fistful of decomposing innards on Scott’s poncho-covered chest.

“Oh Jesus,” Scott gasped and bent over, suddenly sick. His hands went to his knees.

“You okay?”

Scott shook his head.

“You’ll get used to it,” she said.

He dry-heaved instead, suddenly thankful that he’d skipped breakfast. He spat and grunted, the powerful smell of intestinal juice making his eyes water.

Then he felt a splash against his back.

“All right,” Amy declared. “You’re done. Now do me.”

“What?”

“Stand up, you big baby, and take this.”

Scott glanced up and winced. Amy stood right before him holding a fistful of what appeared to be wet eels, grey-black, like something scooped out of a sewage line.

“Oh Jesus.” Scott looked away and felt his stomach rumble in dangerous fashion.

“I was like that once,” Amy said. “You get over it.”

Scott wasn’t sure he’d ever get over it, and rubbing the deadhead’s intestinal tract over himself was something he had difficulty processing mentally and physically. Amy waited for him to compose himself, which he had trouble doing.

“Look, it’s the best way.”

“Guh…”

“You okay?”

Scott cracked an irritated eye at her, shook his head, and went back to fighting the upheaval in his stomach. After a few moments, he regained control and straightened up once more.

“You really are a wuss, aren’tcha?” Amy asked. Scott saw that she had smeared the innards over her front and lower back.

“Yeah,” Scott muttered quietly. She had him there.

“Let’s get going, then,” she said and pulled on her hood and mask. Scott did the same, thanking God that he didn’t have to smear any guts on his hood. As it was, he was still combatting some dizziness. He never thought smell could be so powerful, so debilitating.

“You ready?”

Scott nodded, not even wanting to open his mouth. He pulled on his own hood, making sure it covered his nose. Then his helmet went on, and finally the cloth hood.

“I need air,” he informed her.

But she was already walking for the store’s front door.

Scott lurched after her, feeling very
not
ready for what was coming, but not wanting to be left behind, either. He suspected Amy was quite capable of doing just that if she had to. She opened the door and left it swinging for him, and he followed her outside.

Into a river of zombies.

Scott watched Amy blend in almost seamlessly with the tide of undead thanks to the bulk of her disguise. Fighting down the impulse to catch up to her, he hunched over and waded in with slow, lengthy steps. The air cleared the stench clinging to his person and helped alleviate his queasiness, but the thought that he wore a gimp’s insides on him was almost enough to make him barf. Once again, he thanked Christ above he hadn’t eaten anything that morning. A deadhead hit his right shoulder, off-balance, and crumpled to the ground. Scott walked on, eyes fixed on Amy’s back, doing as she did and hoping he was every bit as convincing.

They meandered along in undead fashion, passing a number of quaint houses submerged in finely sculpted drifts. Some houses were burnt out husks that gleamed with frost, while other lots were empty except for snow. Scott believed that if he dug, he’d find blasted foundations. Whatever the Army had in their armory, they hadn’t hesitated to use it. Cars lay buried in driveways or parked on the sidewalks. Some dotted the road itself, no doubt once seeking to escape the city. The snow on the roads became more packed down as the dead trampled over it, pressing it until the main drags were relatively easy to walk.

They kept going until Scott noticed Amy deviating ever so subtly from her path. Then he saw why. Young Street narrowed to almost a single lane. Power poles crisscrossed the street, creating a logjam of wailing deadheads too brain dead to simply turn around and walk out of the trap.

Just over their heads, Scott thought he saw an ice bound harbour.

Amy turned to her left and walked up a long slope. More picturesque houses half destroyed. More Army destruction. Four houses in a row appeared to have been firebombed. Their blackened walls stood, but Scott didn’t think they would stay that way for long. Deadheads fell into step alongside him, but he focused on Amy just ahead and slowly out-paced his unliving companions.

They passed a white dune where three torsos jutted from the snow bank, their horrid features staring into space, their mouths frozen open. Scott wasn’t certain if they were deadheads or not, and they soon passed out of sight. He kicked at corpses at his feet, animated and groaning as they made do without legs and pulled themselves forward. Two corpses didn’t have limbs at all, and one tried to inchworm along the frozen asphalt with one arm that ended in a splintered wrist.

Amy marched on, ignoring the horrors and earning Scott’s growing amazement. How did she
do
it? How did she simply walk by such gruesome displays and not lose it? It urged him to control his own frayed nerves.

The street ended in a wire fence and she eventually stopped against it, swaying as if a wind pushed her. Zombies stood on both sides of her, staring at the same thing, and she blended in. Scott stopped just behind her and forced himself to ignore the others, feeling that if one brushed up against him, he just might scream. A nearby sign read “Needham Memorial Park.” Beyond the fence,
hundreds
of deadheads trudged aimlessly in a slow cadence through trampled down drifts. Some crested a hill, as if mulling their unlife, while others moped around its snow cap. Some bumped into a distant jungle gym. Scott spotted one that had somehow gotten tangled in the chains of a swing.

Well, shit,
Scott thought, feeling a strong surge of unease bubble up, wanting to turn and run. His breathing picked up, and nervous energy was building up in his calves, causing them to ache. Some of the zombies on the other side of the fence were walking toward him, eyeing him evilly. Never had he seen so many undead. Not in Saint John, and not in Annapolis. He gaped at the horde enjoying the park, the words
“so many, so many”
pulsating in his skull. Control started slipping away. Zombies were closing in, sensing something off about him, something not quite dead. A hospital patient wearing light green pajamas dragged itself toward the fence, toward him. Surgical tubing and IV lines hung from its stomach and arms like horrible, bloodless veins. That one knew he was alive, Scott was suddenly sure of it. That one was coming right for him, and it would reach over the fence with a palsied hand and grip his poncho and rip it from his body. It would only take that one movement and one triumphant wail from the undead thing, and then
all
of them would pile on him like a sacked quarterback forced to the ground, where they would work their teeth into everything and
pull
until something gave in a burst of blood. All to his muffled shrieks.

Amy nudged him a little too hard, bumping him into the zombie next to him. She had turned around ever so casually, then began walking back the way they had come.

Struggling with the sense of imminent doom, Scott did the same, convinced that any second he would feel the groping hand of the hospital invalid on his shoulder. He couldn’t move fast enough from the gate, and the urge to check on where the zombie was swelled up in his brain like a murderous tumor ready to pop. His legs went to rubber. His skin became clammy and his breath quickened. His
breathing!
They could hear his
breathing!
He sounded like a train! The dead things along the fence were watching him with graveyard amusement, daring him to give up the act. Who was he fooling? Any second he’d be halted and bitten.

But that didn’t happen.

As he stumbled away from the fence and the vast mob in the park, nothing reached out to grab him. Nothing clamped rotting teeth onto his shoulder. Nothing tried to stop him.

Scott hoped that Amy would seek shelter in one of the houses soon. He’d had enough walking with the dead for one day. His mind redlined, and its needle quivered toward meltdown.

If they didn’t get out of sight soon, he knew he would freak in epic proportions.