Hellifax (25 page)

“Stinks?”

“Stinks or stinkers. What we call the dead.”

“I see.” Fist smiled again, even though it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. Impatience swelled in him. He didn’t like conversing or smiling in large quantities. “And then what?”

“Well, let’s just play it by ear, if that’s okay with you?” Claire said, hope once again back in her voice.

“Sure, where are you staying?”
Too fast.
Fist chastised himself.

“We’ll be around,” Claire replied. “See ya.”

“Later,” Fist said and watched them back into the shop. He took a breath. There were six, possibly seven of them. Some very good eating—and at least one woman. Fist gnawed on his lip as they disappeared into the shop. Women were… prizes.

Snow continued to fall. It would be an easy thing to allow them a head start and track them down. They had done it many times before.

At least six, with the chance of more. Fist felt the stares of his dogs behind him. They waited for the word, but he slapped the passenger side of the van and started walking down the street. The houses they had mentioned sounded good to him, and if Claire were truly cautious, he suspected they would be watched. That was fine, too. The game was afoot.

Fist
so
enjoyed a good hunt.

Hunt they did.

Within a day, the Norsemen tracked down the house of Claire and her people. They had taken up refuge in a large house that had a ten-foot-high stone wall around the entire property. Fist and his boys attacked at night, quietly killing the men on watch and scaling the walls. Moments later, they were in the house.

After that, chaos.

There had been ten of them, including a boy and a young girl, which Fist executed outright. In the gunfight that ensued, Claire was gut shot and died slowly, quite the opposite of what Fist had planned. There were two other women, and he let his boys have them. By morning, all of them had been killed, gutted, and quartered, and the kitchen had been turned into a smoke house with chunks of fresh meat hanging from hooks.

They stayed at the house two more days, just in case they had missed anyone.

They hadn’t.

On the third day, the two vans did one final exploration of Sackville, searching for crumbs. They left in midafternoon, driving through town and onto the highway, only to pull off after travelling a short distance. The days were getting shorter, and Fist spied a roadside service station and truck stop, with the small Rosie’s Hotel nearby, just as Claire had said. Fist remembered her screams, her white skin dappled with dark blood, then tuned it all out.

Stopping in front of the main door of the hotel, he organized a party of seven, including Murphy. They tooled up and entered the hotel, Fist in the lead. As expected, the dead haunted the halls of the establishment, and the Norsemen cleared the first floor within minutes. The second was cleared in equally short order. Fist allowed a short, but terse smoke break in one of the rooms of the third floor, eyeing Murphy, before finally clearing the rest.

Once the bloody evictions were completed, Fist had the vans back up to the main doors of the hotel, noses out in case they needed to leave quickly. As the cold winter dark deepened, the Norsemen conducted searches of the hotel’s kitchen and storerooms. The propane lines for a set of stainless steel burners were still functional, and three men were charged with heating supper while the rest roamed the lower floors.

Later that evening, they all gathered and ate in the large and relatively untouched dining area. Bottles of gin, vodka, whiskey, and other spirits were liberated from the hotel’s untouched bar. Shadowy from flashlights and lamps, red carpet covered the entire floor and made Pell think of haunted places. As expected, the men sat and ate mostly with those they usually shared a van with. There was some movement between tables, but one group seemed to stay put. Pell looked at Fist and saw him take in the gathering of four in a corner. A castle of bottles was being assembled before the men.

Murphy sat and drank there.

Mealtimes were loud affairs, but the discovery of the booze made this one exceptionally loud as they ate and spoke with the enthusiasm and revelry of a true Viking hall. Murphy’s table seemed to laugh the longest and the hardest. Fist, nursing a bottle of port wine, found his attention coming back to them time and time again. They would hunker down and whisper before bursting into laughter, as if sharing in a conspiracy. Sitting at his leader’s table, Pell could smell trouble, despite being half cut on rye whiskey.

Nearby, Fist took a long gulp of wine. He’d gotten quieter, more attentive to what was happening across the room.

Murphy felt eyes on him and glanced over, meeting his leader’s gaze. He didn’t linger, but went right back to whispering to the men gathered about him.

Another eruption of scalding laughter.

Pell took a shot of rye and barely felt the burn. He watched Fist. The man had tensed up in his chair, and the two other men sitting nearby felt the heat coming from him. Fist was a pressure cooker warming up.

Then Murphy made his mistake. The jackal looked across the way and nodded at Fist, even hefted a bottle in his direction, before whispering once again to his boys. There was another short conference and a snickering from all three. Murphy leaned back in his chair, grinning as if exhausted from the last joke, and took a long pull from his drink.

Pell was only a little surprised when Fist got slowly to his feet and placed the bottle of port down carefully.

The nearby Norsemen quieted one by one as Fist removed his tire tread cuirass, fashioned from the image of a Roman legionnaire. Then he stripped off the leather jacket underneath and tossed it on an empty table nearby.

That got the attention of Murphy and his companions.

Working at something lodged in his teeth, Fist pulled off his tight T-shirt, revealing the progression of evil tattoos up the length of both arms, his neck, and the snarling green dragons on each pectoral muscle. Fist had been a large man before the Fall. Powerfully built, but with a sheen of fat. His current diet had allowed him to slim down to a chiseled form, and his midsection appeared as rows of corrugated iron.

Murphy leaned back in his chair. If he was worried, he didn’t show it.

With exaggerated nonchalance, Fist reached into his left boot and extracted a Bowie knife, a huge blade that could’ve been mistaken for a machete. Holding the weapon in his fist, blade pointed at the floor, the leader of the eastern foray stepped away from his table, moved to the middle of the room, and started overturning anything within reach. Three Norsemen sat at a table in the middle of the room, but deserted it seconds before Fist lifted it from the ground and threw it against a wall.

He cleared a ragged space in the middle of the floor.

“Murph,” Fist growled in his subterranean bass voice. “Get up.”

Instead of obeying, Murphy smiled at his companions, appearing at ease. He was the only one at his table who appeared relaxed. The others had tensed up.

“Why?” Murphy asked insolently.

Pell considered himself to be a brute, but he was fighting not to shit himself, and it wasn’t even him being called out.

“Stand the fuck up,” Fist exhaled mightily, his voice like released steam.

“Looks like you got something on your mind.” Murphy leered. “Imagine that.”

“I have.”

“Yeah?” Murphy countered as he got to his feet. The men at his table scrambled away before he flipped it and rolled it away, white dishes, bottles, and gnawed bones scattering across the carpeted floor.

“Well, I’ve been thinking, too. Been thinking you ain’t been doing your job good enough. Might be time for a change,” Murphy seethed, his face darkening in the shadows of the room. He didn’t remove his riot gear, but he did produce a long serrated blade, every bit as evil-looking as the eager gleam in his eyes.

Fist said nothing.

“Fuckin’ aye,” Murphy said, gathering up wind before switching to the harsh Norse speak. “Maybe I kill you now. Take lead of pack.”

He flipped his blade and caught it by the handle.

Fist glowered.

“Huh?” Murphy’s eyes widened with indignation. “You think you can take me?”

“Son,” Fist finally said in his deep, deep voice. “I’m gonna cut your balls off.”

The silence that fell over the room after that line gave Pell shivers. A man could’ve heard a corpse squeak-fart six feet under, it had gotten so quiet.

Murphy didn’t appreciate the threat or the stillness in the least. He roared and lunged forward.

Fist slapped Murphy’s rushed stab aside, leaving his attacker wide open. He grabbed his would-be usurper’s weapon arm and doubled it over, dropping and splitting the elbow joint over his knee. Murphy shrieked and dropped his weapon. He clawed at Fist’s face, but the Norse leader slapped the pommel of the Bowie square into his nose, stunning him.

Then Fist stabbed him, pulled the knife out, and bent the challenger over. A second man lunged at the leader then, swinging a bat.

Fist caught the weapon, the brazen slap of flesh on wood echoing in the room. Then he knifed his attacker through the eye, burying the steel in his head. The body dropped, and Fist had to stoop to rip his knife free.

The third man held up his hands and backed against a wall, his frame trembling. Fist spared him, but pounced on Murphy, who lay on the floor holding in his guts. Fist held him by the throat as he punched the Bowie through his flesh. The thrust came fast and hard enough to pierce the carpet and the wood beyond. There was a soft
yurk
from the impaled man, then Fist’s heavily muscled torso rippled as he swirled the blade in a sawing fashion. Murphy trembled briefly, all fight gone.

Fist kept on cutting.

He stood up a few moments later, Murphy’s bloody heart squishing in his hand, and glared at the men around him. No one dared move for fear of being next.

Fist walked up to the last one of Murphy’s group. “Open your hand,” he said.

Not knowing what to expect, the man did as he was told.

Fist slapped the raw heart into it. “Fry that up,” the leader hissed. “I’m not finished eating.”

The Norseman hesitated for only a moment, then fled the room with the organ. Fist remained and sized up the remaining pair of dogs.

“Anyone else think I’m not doing my job?”

Heads shook no.

Not satisfied with their answers, Fist gazed about the room, meeting even Pell’s eyes for a moment and unnerving him in an instant. His point made, the leader returned to the two men before him.

“Cut that up,” he ordered, indicating Murphy’s body.

They jumped to the task.

“Tomorrow,” Fist informed them all, “we hit Nova Scotia. By the end of the week… Halifax.”

They reached Purdy’s Wharf without incident and quickly ascended to the floor designated as base camp. The afternoon sun had gone behind some clouds, and the air inside the building seemed just as chilling as outside, perhaps even more so with Sam’s corpse decorating the meeting room. They gathered around the body, and Buckle took the initiative and covered him with the dead man’s coat.

Amy took charge over the men. “Gather up everything you got now. And grab everything you can carry in your packs.”

“We can’t take it all now, Amy,” Buckle protested.

“No, but maybe we can bring Scott’s rig back here and transfer it all into the back?” She glanced at them for approval, then at Scott. “Where did you say you parked?”

“School Street.”

“School Street? I don’t know that one.”

Scott thought about it. “Maybe I’m wrong, then.”

Vick and Buckle exchanged pensive looks.

“School Avenue?” Amy asked.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.”

“Our Amy knows the city like the back of your hand,” Vick joked. “I’ll be in my powder room. What’s the plan, by the way?”

Amy scratched her head. “We take the long way around. Might take a few days, but we’ll have food and water with us, so that’s okay. School Avenue is right on the 102.”

She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “We came through a lot of Moe to get here. I say we go around them. We can trek up South Street to Oxford, then jump over to Connaught, and eventually get onto Bayer’s Road. If we meet Moe, we’ll sidestep him if we can.”

“And Tenner?” Vick asked.

“I’ll do him,” Buckle growled, then considered Scott. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

Scott didn’t reply right away. There wasn’t any other punishment to fit the crimes Tenner had done, other than feeding him to the gimps. He had thought about it earlier, but was he ready to kill another living person? He sighed. It was the wrong time to start questioning his resolve.

“Yeah,” he replied.

Buckle’s forehead mashed up. “A noncommittal answer if I ever heard one. Tell you what. If we meet up with the bastard, I’ll give you first dibs.”

“Feeling bloodthirsty?” Vick asked.

“You’re not?” Buckle retorted.

“No, I am,” Vick stated. “I liked Sammy and Tickle tons better than Shaffer, but… can’t believe they’re gone. That Tenner killed them. Still expect Shaffer to start screaming any time.”

“Get ready,” Amy ordered them all, “and we’ll meet back here.”

Buckle followed Vick out the door. Scott was about to fall into step behind them when Amy stopped him with a shake of her head.

“You stay with me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Those guys have their armor in the same room. I don’t think any of us should be separated right now.”

Made sense.

“You get to watch me dress,” Amy stated with a wry little smile, which both startled him… and made him smile back.

“Um… body armor?” Scott asked as Amy moved past him and into the corridor.

“Yeah. Some they pulled off dead soldiers in the streets. Took a little while to find something to fit over their winter gear, but they got some.”

“You too?”

“Yeah, well, I have some. Mostly joint protection. I’m too small for the other stuff.”