Hellifax (3 page)

Only big guns could have wrought such destruction.

The warships had to have opened fire on all sections of the city.

Tenner marvelled at the destruction. Some of the taller buildings had huge bites taken out of them, and bare girders like loose teeth dangled and moaned in the breeze. Half-flattened houses and trees that had been felled from artillery fire lined the streets. Cars and trucks were torn in half, ravaged by flame and flipped onto their roofs. He spotted one zombie writhing underneath a minivan. God only knew how long it had been there. Tenner shook his head. There had been a death party in Halifax at some point in time, and he wasn’t too troubled by missing it.

He found a road that wasn’t so damaged or filled with zombies and drove down it. The hope of finding any sort of munitions, supplies, or survivors in this particular mess was waning. Ahead, the water of the bay beckoned, black and cold looking, and he drove toward it. The streets opened, and Tenner was mildly puzzled to see the crowd of zombies thinning. He turned the wheel and drove on, approaching twin towers that seemingly rose up from the sea, perched at the very edge of concrete covered land.

Then he spotted a row of military-made iron barricades, silent and cold. A pedway lay behind them, and a second wall of metro buses came into view just beneath the elevated walkway, tipped over on their sides, the gaps between them plugged with sandbags. He pulled closer to the barricade, noting how hundreds, perhaps thousands of the Philistines lay stretched out before the wall, put down for the last time. Limbs, heads, and ripped torsos lay strewn over a horrific expanse. Razor wire sprung up in places like broken springs. Tenner braked and parked in front of a corridor leading through the wire, right up to the buses and pedway. The long, fluted snouts of machine guns pointed at the sky and the field of shredded corpses, likewise dead to the world.

Tenner got out and hauled on his winter coat. Once that was done, his hands went to his holstered guns and he tensed for a moment, waiting to bolt back into his ride if things got too dicey. Nothing moved, however, and he walked through the wire and the fields of decaying flesh, wrinkling his nose at the smell. He paused and kicked at one body, feeling the frozen husk rip as it came away from the pavement. The wind caused some loose clothing still clinging to the dead to flutter, the only movement and sound in the immediate area.

Curious
, Tenner thought.

He homed in on a ladder that went up one of the buses. He walked under the pedway and saw a gap between the underside of the construction and the tops of the overturned buses. The Army had put the buses behind and as tight to the pedway as they could manage, while still leaving a gap for soldiers to climb through. Tenner took a hold of the ladder and climbed. He stood on metal sheets on top of the bus and studied the nearest machine gun emplacement. He jumped up to the pedway and walked over to the weapon, only to discover it bone dry. Metal ammunition boxes were nearby, emptied completely. The soldiers had fired every shell they had.

Into that.

Looking down upon the scene, Tenner was impressed with the level of destruction inflicted upon the dead. The wall he stood upon gave him a great vantage point to take in the scope of the fortifications the Army had built. He scanned the area behind the defenses, seeing it mostly bare of dead things. That in itself was a puzzle. Something caught his attention then; no dead lurked beyond the wall of buses and rusted, military fabricated metal barricades. Tenner wondered for a moment just how far the defenses went.

And if there was anyone alive.

It didn’t matter much if there wasn’t anyone alive. The place had possibilities. Countless possibilities, and Tenner saw them all, considered each. He saw a place that might attract whoever was left in the city, searching for sanctuary. He saw a place that might attract anyone coming into the city, seeking out supplies.

Eventually, they would find this place. They would find him.

That thought made his face split into a creepy smile. Tenner envisioned a new game to play, one of deception instead of outright murder.

He quickly walked along the red carpeted pedway to a distant door, which lead to the first of the two towers. There was no time to waste.

He had work to do… and potential guests to prepare for.

Then, just ahead of him, the steel and glass door abruptly opened.

A man pointed a shotgun in his face.

Bowman had been around.

He’d traveled through Cape Breton, and had wandered as far as Yarmouth, walking the highways, but keeping within the treeline. Since the world went tits up, he found it was better to keep moving, check in on relatives—all gone—and friends—all gone as well—before making his way back to the capitol. He’d thought there would be a control center of some kind, a main base to take in survivors.

By electing to find friends and relatives, he had probably saved himself from what had gone down in Halifax. One of his favorite sayings was “shit the bed,” and as far as he could tell, someone had unloaded a massive dump in the city. In all of his adult years, he had been something of a recluse, an oddity. Never had his driver’s license and had lived off the beaten track in a small bungalow outside of rural Truro. Never owned a smartphone—he was dismayed and disgusted by how the devices turned intelligent people into dumbasses. At fifty-one, his wife had died of cancer two years prior to the outbreak, and he was eternally thankful that his precious Becky never saw their undead neighbors come up the long driveway one morning in August, lumbering through an early morning haze like hungry phantoms unearthed from a mass grave.

He’d stayed at his home as long as he could, fending off zombies until his ammunition ran out. His father had left him a small monetary inheritance as well as an impressive illegal weapons cache, the foremost being a vintage Kalashnikov assault rifle, more commonly known as an AK-47. There had been a polished Desert Eagle in the collection as well, but only two magazines for the hand cannon, and honestly, Bowman didn’t like firing the monster, as it numbed his arm after every shot. The rifle was the most useful because his dad had stored hundreds, perhaps thousands of rounds for the weapon. In fact, when the shit had truly hit the fan, and Joe and Francis Pardy, along with twenty or so strangers, decided to shamble over to see if Bowman was ready to be a spread and snack, the Kalashnikov was the beast that he took from the cabinet. Damn thing was a marvel of design, and it had rattled against his shoulder when he started firing at the corpses pounding on his door as if it had come right off the assembly line instead of being seventy years old. He wasn’t even sure if the ammunition would be any good, but it was. He supposed his father might’ve had a hand in that. No point in keeping a monster like that around if you didn’t have anything to feed it.

All the rounds were stored in the basement. Bowman never thought he’d use it all. Never in a hundred years.

Well, he’d used it all mighty fast. He even ran out of bullets for the Desert Eagle and his Winchester .30-30, both of which he tossed because finding spare ammunition for the weapons would be next to impossible. In his travels, he’d used a mountain bike hitched up to a two-wheeled storage cart to carry his gear. When the tires had blown out, he carried what he could.

In Antigonish, he’d come across a twelve gauge shotgun three days after leaving the Kalashnikov in a ditch. Ammunition seemed to be plentiful, but Bowman had learned his lesson with the assault rifle—conservation.

And he’d practiced that during his search for family and friends throughout the province. There were other survivors. Good people. Scared, but good. At one point in time, he’d been part of a band of about thirty survivors.

All gone now. Ravaged by the hunting dead.

Leaving him with only Halifax.

And the tall bastard he had just stopped from entering what Bowman considered to be his fortress.

“You scared me, man!” the taller newcomer burst out, holding his hands above his head.

“Back up,” Bowman said. It wasn’t like him to be forceful, but he could see the guns on the guy’s hips. Better safe than dead.

The man, who looked like a biker dressed for winter, blinked and didn’t move.

Bowman didn’t like that. “Got shit in your ears or something? I said back
up
.”

This time the stranger did as he was told, but there was a glimpse, a quick flicker around the eyes that Bowman almost missed, that indicated he didn’t like being caught so flatfooted. The tall biker with the black eyes sized him up, noting Bowman’s blue-black body armor—what he taken from a dead soldier in a nearby store. But what really had the lad’s attention was the shotgun, its mouth not five inches from his face.

“Stop right there,” Bowman said.

“Right here?”

“You trying to be smart or something?”

“Just asking is all.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bowman said quietly.

The other man complied. Bowman had the drop on him and tried to look mean enough to pull the trigger. He’d grown a rusty-looking beard that had reached the base of his throat during his time on the road, and he wore a black toque decorated with skulls. One shot from this range would shred the newcomer’s parka and chest, and no doubt blow him through one of the pedway’s windows.

“Any more of you?” Bowman demanded.

“No.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for supplies,” the other said, concerned.

“Supplies?” Bowman chuckled and quieted. He took a quick peek at the streets below. “Figured as much.”

“You got anything to eat?” he asked, black eyes suddenly hopeful.

“I’ll ask the fuckin’ questions. You got that?”

“Got it.”

Bowman exhaled. “Anyone else with you?” he repeated.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you get those guns?” He dipped his chin at the other’s waist.

“Father’s collection.”

“Hm. We got one thing in common.”

“Huh? Why? That shotgun your dad’s?”

Bowman let that one go unanswered. “Just you, eh?”

The other man appeared flustered. “You keep askin’ me that. Take a look around, man. There ain’t no one else around here but me. I could ask you the same thing.”

That furrowed Bowman’s hairy face. “Yeah… you could.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You going to shoot me or let me in?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” Bowman admitted. “Been… been a while since I’ve talked to anyone.”

“I can see why.”

Smart ass,
Bowman thought. He gnawed on the inside of his cheek, his whiskers going one way and then the other, mulling things over.

“Take them guns out,” he eventually said. “One at a time. Two fingers. Slow. You put them on the ground and kick them toward me. I got a twitchy finger, so you be careful doing that, else the neighbors get a wake-up call and dinner bell all in one.”

The newcomer did as ordered, kicking one Glock toward Bowman, then the other. Neither man so much as blinked, nor did the shotgun waver. Bowman kicked the guns behind him.

“Now then,” he asked. “What’s in that truck of yours?”

“Some supplies. Food. Water. A rifle.”

“And you got in here all by yourself?”

“Yessir.”

That’s better
, Bowman thought, and he relaxed his posture just a bit. “I ain’t no sir, so you can cut that shit out.”

“That armor you’re wear––”

“Not mine,” Bowman interrupted. “Pulled it off a soldier in here a day ago. Plenty around, but this one was the only one that fit. Lucky me I found it inside, down in the lobby. I wouldn’t worry about that. What I’d be worried about is what happens next. Like the elephant that caught the mouse by the tail and said, ‘Now that I got you, what the hell am I going to do with you?’”

The other man shrugged. It was a good question.

“Shit,” Bowman muttered. “Back up a bit.”

The newcomer backed up three steps.

Attention divided, Red Beard stooped and picked up the guns, stuffing each down a boot. If he was going to be jumped, now would be the time.

But the man made no move to stop him.

“What’s your name?”

“Tenner.”

“I’m Bowman.”

Tenner nodded, uncomfortable with the shotgun introductions.

“Can’t be too careful around here these days,” Bowman went on. “With dead folks about.”

“Lots of that going around.”

“That’s right. The way I figure it, being introverted is probably the best way to be, know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

A breeze rose up, chilling and mournful sounding, and the big bastard before him seemed to realize he was either going to die here or not. It had been a long time since he’d had company. That part he didn’t lie about. A long time on the march, looking for places to hole up for a while. Looking for others, until he gave up. He suddenly realized someone had found him and he was hesitating, and he wasn’t sure why. Bowman sighed. It was probably from being on his own for so long.

“Get in here,” Bowman said, lowering the shotgun.

Tenner took a deep breath. “Oh man, you ain’t gonna rape me, are you?”

“Huh?”

“Please don’t. I mean, fuckin’ shoot me if you have to.”

“The fuck’s wrong with you? I ain’t no
poof
,” Bowman protested.

“Just what a rapist would say. To, you know, lure me in.”

“The fuck he would,” Bowman exclaimed. “Get your ass in here before something gets wind of you.”

“You ain’t gonna rape me?”

“The
fuck?
No
, but I’ll sure as hell stomp your ass if you don’t get inside
now
.” With that, Bowman backed up, kept the door opened, and glared.

Hesitating, Tenner made a wary entry. He was much taller than Bowman, well over six feet. The door closed behind both of them.

“This way,” Bowman growled. “But keep your distance, all right? Let’s get to know each other first.”

Tenner stopped in his tracks. “What do you mean by that?”

Bowman winced. “Grow up, will ya? At least I don’t have the gun in your face anymore. Christ, you’re jumpy. Thought I was jumpy. You’re fuckin’ tweaked.”