Hellifax (2 page)

Weak
, Fist thought.

The others gathered on either side of him, a wrecking line of brute force. Clubs, baseball bats, and axes rasped against the pavement. Tugging and checking of armor plates, padding, and leather bindings went on for a few seconds more. Fist allowed it, waiting for the mass of dead to smell them. He had to hand it to them; they could smell anything from a very long distance, and on a day like this, he was a little surprised they hadn’t turned his way yet.

But then, they were quite stupid.

Not bothering to ask if his men were ready, Fist raked his maul across the asphalt and shouted, the sound frightening in the afternoon air. He did that twice more. Then he took a breath, sniffed, and tongued at an area in his mouth.

Some of the undead turned around and saw them, while others kept pawing at the house.

Fist marched forward, and his boys followed. Some of the men eyed their flanks, mindful of zombies coming at their sides, but the highway remained empty. More dead peeled away from the house, catching either scent or sound, and lurched toward the approaching meal. The fences stopped them, but then a section swung open and bodies flowed through. Fist gathered his maul two-handed, drawing a bead on the first walking corpse he would put down. He couldn’t count how many were turning away from the house, and it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t an army, and it would take at least that to stop the Norsemen.

Fist stopped them at the end of edge of the pavement. The terrain favored them there, and he liked having solid ground underfoot. The line of undead stumbled down over an embankment and gathered like spilled dolls at the bottom. Almost comically, they tripped and fell over each as they struggled to their feet.

“More this way,” one of the Norsemen called. Fist and the others saw a thick group of walking carcasses, perhaps thirty or more, emerging from the backyard of another house and forcing their way through a veil of trees and clawing branches. They were nowhere near as close as the ones coming from the house.

Fist turned his attention to the first group. They had pulled themselves apart, stood up, and closed.

None of the living said a word. They stood with their leader and watched with readied weapons.

The tide of dead things was no more than ten feet away.

A power lineman in his yellow and red reflective vest grimaced as he walked unsteadily toward Fist. Its open mouth was a dark hole, pitted in the center of a bush of grey beard. Its thigh had been opened up to the bone. The creature beheld Fist in wide-eyed delight, and it took the Norseman a moment to realize that its lids had been chewed away.

Fist took its head off with one swing. His attack signaled for hell, and the ten other Norsemen swung and stabbed at the wall of undead. Zombies had their skulls staved in or removed from their shoulders. Some heads, rotten to the center, simply exploded in a shower of particles. An axe split a face to the neck while another drove a zombie to its knees. An accountant type had her arm removed at the shoulder and got kicked back into the advancing throng. Fist swung his maul in a steady rhythm, his great arms flexing as he bashed in faces and skulls, driving corpses to the ground with each powerful swing. The dead stumbled over the low wall of bodies forming at the line of men, then had their own bodies added to the barrier. The moaning grew, then broke into single voices.

Then nothing.

In less than two minutes, Fist and his men had chewed through a hundred of the dead things, give or take a dozen.

“More here,” someone shouted. Fist shoved some of his men out of the way, not caring in the least what they thought about it. He took up a new position and waited for the zombies to arrive. His arms felt good, like after a hard, but not exhausting workout, and he was nowhere near out of breath. Around him, his boys formed a new line and faced the next group of attacking dead.

Behind his face cage, Fist took a deep breath, readying a lungful of air. After killing so many of the zombies over what seemed like years, he was desensitized to the horrors of the reanimated flesh.

An old woman dressed in a bathrobe sprinkled with embroidered daisies stumbled toward him. A black, visceral shawl of torn scalp hung over one side of her face.

Fist stared at the thing’s destroyed features, at the terrible faces crowded around it, bobbing and weaving in that slow, stop-go motion that marked them as undead. There were sometimes runners as well, but none in this pack. At the least the runners made things interesting.

The shambling dead were nothing to the Norsemen.

With a grunt, Fist swung the maul when the granny was within reach.

The slaughter was over in less than a minute, and the corpses lay in a ragged mound that stopped at the wall of living men. Sounds of heavy breathing met Fist’s ears. He shrugged, causing his shoulders to
crick
, while shaking out his burning arms. None of his boys had been taken down by the mob, which was both good and bad. There was strength in numbers, but he knew he’d probably end up cutting a few of their throats, anyway.

The dead were piled up on top of one another, creating a squishy embankment that Fist and the others climbed over. They grunted and cursed in disgust, and one even stumbled and landed facedown amongst the bodies. Once clear of the unmoving flesh, Fist held his maul by the neck and led the others straight to the house. The gate in the fence hung open, and pieces of cloth caught and torn from the zombies hung from its top. Fist carefully edged through the opening, listening and focusing on the back door and steps. Painted green with white siding, the house might’ve been a picture for life in the suburbs. A pool, the above-ground kind with flimsy walls, lay flattened in one corner of the backyard. A small garden ringed with white-painted beach rocks and filled with bare soil lay just to the left of the pool.

Fist walked up to the backdoor, listened for a moment, and then rapped on the unbroken glass. He placed his maul against the siding.

“Hello?” he said in a strained tone, as if unaccustomed to such pleasantries. Another rap of knuckles. “Anyone home?”

In the dark of the kitchen, in an open doorway, a man came into sight. He looked haggard and old and held a double-barreled shotgun—what the boys referred to as a “fat ass.”

“Who’re you?” he demanded, appearing close to losing control. A woman peeked out from behind him. Both looked somewhere between frightened and hopeful.

“We took care of the dead,” Fist said through the glass and smiled.

“What?” The man’s expression lightened and became even more hopeful.

“The zombies. We killed them.”

“You did? That’s wonderful!”

“What did they do, Rick?” the woman asked, appearing just as frayed as Rick.

“They… they killed those bastards!”

Fist straightened on the lower step. Even then, his forehead was level with the upper frame of the door.

“They killed those things! Jesus H. Christ, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day! All week!” He broke into French then, which Fist didn’t understand in the least.

Rick came to the window, beaming, and propped his weapon against a counter.

Fist waited until the old man threw back the locks and pulled away the wooden braces reinforcing the door.

It opened with a yank, and Rick leaned out, smiling from ear to ear. He offered his hand. Fist took it and allowed his hand to be pumped as if he were an old-fashioned water well.

“There’s a few of you,” Rick said suddenly, his smile dimming at the fearsome collection of men standing outside his door, eerily quiet.

While the warriors captivated Rick’s attention, Fist held out his free hand. Cray placed a cleaver in it. Fist hacked at Rick’s wrist and took it half off. Rick’s mouth puckered into shock. He tried jerking his hand away as if he’d been scalded with hot water, but Fist held on, the wound yawning and spilling blood. He swung the cleaver at Rick’s head and sheared away a healthy flap of scalp in another burst of blood. The woman screamed. Fist forced his way through the door, slamming a bleeding Rick against the wall and letting him crumple to the floor. The older man stared at his fountaining wrist in both shock and awe. The Norsemen forced their way inside and pounced on the wounded homeowner.

“Non! Non!” the woman squealed, but she didn’t have strength in her legs to run. Fist caught her by the throat and dug his fingers into her windpipe, turning her pleas into rusty squeaks. He rolled her into his embrace. She bucked and clawed at his face cage, then his shoulders. Fist bear-hugged her, feeling several ribs pop like bubble wrap. Her screams transformed into breathless grunts. With the fight gone from his victim, he tossed her over the kitchen island to let his men finish her.

Process her.

The warriors crowded in, holding the couple down only as long as was necessary––mere seconds, really. More cleavers and meat knives came into view. Clothes were torn open. White flesh was cut, sawed, and chopped. The smell of blood became thick.

Heavenly.

Fist stood on the threshold of the living room and stuck his head in, breathing stale air. No doubt the room had been boarded up for a lengthy period. Some stairs were at the edge of the room, and he’d check the second floor in a moment. He didn’t feel rushed. Two full-grown people were more than enough fresh meat for his men for a day. If any children were upstairs, they wouldn’t get far.

Sustenance
. Pure and filling.

The Norsemen would eat anything they came across. Anything that couldn’t be consumed right away would be taken: leftover packaged food, wild crops, animals, and people. People, in Fist’s opinion, were the easiest to hunt because most of them, if they weren’t already insane, were gutless, fearful, and initially,
stupidly
hailed Fist and his minions as if they were saviors.

Just as this pair had done.

The truth became painfully obvious, especially when the meat hooks came out and the cleavers fell and pleas of mercy were met with the cruel laughter of jackals.

Fist paused, half-tuned out to the quartering going on in the kitchen. If fortune smiled upon them, there might be a few more survivors in the neighboring area. It went like that sometimes. It was enough of a probability that they would hunker down here for the night and do a search in the morning, maybe even set up camp for a few days and see what the hunting was like in town.

He sized up the many cupboards in the kitchen, wondering if they might find some condiments.

There was nothing like a bit of garlic salt to go along with a roast.

The SUV wormed deeper into the core of the melancholy city, avoiding the prowling dead where necessary. In the last hour, Tenner had seen more zombies walking about than he had in all of Nova Scotia combined. Thick and porous, crowds of dead seeped into the streets like a mindless, flesh-eating ooze. They didn’t have any sense of the cold or the stormy elements about to descend upon them. They weren’t concerned with taking shelter. All they were focused on was the next bite. Tenner wondered if they could actually relish the taste of still quivering, warm meat. He wondered a lot about that at times. It had to be good, somehow, for the Philistines to want it so badly. Tenner wasn’t a cannibal, but he could see himself partaking, especially if it came to the point where food was a concern.

The black vehicle snaked through a lesser throng of walking corpses, bumping some out of the way and knocking others down. The vehicle would go over them with a
whump
. Some waved at Tenner as he passed, perhaps angry, maybe drawing the attention of the zombies ahead. Even though he was thankful for the virus or whatever it was that had brought the dead to life and established anarchy as the new order, he didn’t have time for the corpses. He considered himself above
all
the remaining human race. Perhaps even the only “one.” Not the creator, of course. He’d never have fucked up so badly, although he wished he’d been around for input when ideas were being tossed around. But destroyer… Yes, he was a destroyer—
the
destroyer. Before everything had changed, he’d tried willing bankers and CEOs to appear, but he’d had to settle for people of little consequence, the ones who wouldn’t be missed too badly.

However, that had all changed. Now he was free to kill off every last living soul. But not the dead. The dead were utterly beneath him, a nuisance to be wary of, but Tenner had no doubt they would soon be long gone. Whatever had reanimated them and preserved their flesh had its limitations. It slowed decomposition, but by no means did it stop the process. It merely delayed the inevitable.

Ahead, a zombie pulled itself along, chest flat on the asphalt, crossing the white lines of a crosswalk. Ropes of entrails snaked out behind the thing like dull, sun-scorched ribbons, and Tenner saw how the soles of the thing’s feet had been ground down to where they could no longer support its weight. The protruding bones reminded him of the bare wires of a shredded umbrella. Even as the zombie dragged itself onward, its chest rasping against the dull cheese grater of the pavement, Tenner glimpsed the gleam of a shattered ribcage, the jagged ends of worn bones clicking from the dead thing’s forward motion, like old cards in bicycle spokes. This particular corpse had even rubbed away the flesh on its knees and upper thighs, and Tenner wondered how long before the muscle remaining on its bony arms would continue to function.

Then the SUV rolled over the creature. Tenner steered the vehicle so the right tire would crush the skull. The crunch of bone pulsed through the steering column and stretched a smirk over his features.

They were beneath him. The dead only caught the ill-prepared ones. The cattle.

Tenner was so much
more
.

The street he followed ran toward the bay, where he glimpsed war ships on their sides. Even the military had fallen to the dead. He didn’t expect to find many, if any, survivors in the city. There were simply too many walking corpses. Some of them even wore the remnants of body armor and helmets, marking them as former soldiers. Tenner hunched over his steering wheel and looked up. The damage was only superficial on the outskirts of the city, mostly from fire, but craters from artillery shells and other explosives appeared deeper into the city. The houses in this area weren’t burnt to the ground, but flattened, as if a hammer the size of a train had repeatedly smashed them. Debris blocked the narrower side streets in places, while in others, telephone poles had been blown off their bases, and they prevented both Tenner and the Philistines from passing.