Hellifax (31 page)

Vick had almost always detected the bad ones.

But he hadn’t gotten anything off Tenner. That one had fooled him completely.

For now, Vick eyed Amy from where he lay on the floor, a rug underneath him. He didn’t say anything to draw attention to her, because he knew while she didn’t get flustered, she could be easy to embarrass. Vick wasn’t one of those people who enjoyed embarrassing other folks, and he didn’t like people who did.

“Well, someone just nodded off,” Amy said.

“Mmmhm,” Vick said and propped himself up with a groan. “Looks like a good idea. Let him have the couch. There’re beds upstairs?”

Amy nodded.

“Unoccupied?” Many a suicide victim seemed to prefer taking the final plunge in their own beds. It was a disturbing trend that Vick had noticed in the last couple of years of scavenging houses for supplies. He pulled off his own innards-soaked camouflage and plopped them on the floor.

“Shit’s gonna stink up the place,” Buckle observed.

“The little old lady in the kitchen is gonna stink up the place,” Vick deadpanned.

Buckle grunted. “I’ll take care of it. I think I can put her outside. Believe it or not, the street’s clearing up.”

“What?” Vick asked, and both he and Amy went to opposite ends of the curtains and peeked outside.

Buckle spoke truth. Where once there had been a black rush of corpses, only a trickle seemed to be stumbling by, heading away from the downtown area.

“Gotta be a reason for it,” Amy said, letting the curtain fall back into place. She went to Scott and shook him lightly, urging him to straighten out on the couch. “Your neck will thank me for it later.”

Vick glanced back at her, then looked at the scene outside. As he did, Buckle caught his attention with a knowing look and a sly smile. Buckle saw Amy’s interest in Scott, too, and he’d only known her half as long. Vick went right back to looking outside and hoped Buckle would follow his lead. Unlike him, Buckle didn’t mind teasing people, Amy in particular.

“Y’gonna tuck us all in, darlin’?” Buckle inquired innocently.

“You can tuck yourself in,” Amy informed him and went upstairs. Buckle grinned and winked at Vick. Vick shook his head in silent warning.

“G’wan and turn in, me son,” Buckle told him. “I’ll take first watch.”

“Thanks, man.”

“No sweat. I’ll lug out the old lady corpse as well,” he said, pronouncing the word as
carpse
. “Put her on the front porch. No need to stink up the place.”

“Wake me up in a few hours.”

“Fair enough.”

Vick stretched and regarded the sleeping man on the couch. Was he fooling them as Tenner had done? He didn’t think so. God above, he hoped not.

Climbing the stairs was a chore for Vick, and his fifty-six years seemed to be getting heavier with each passing day. He was grateful for the mask he wore. The last fight in the parking lot had taken more out of him than he wanted to share with the others, and the thought of a prolonged confrontation with the dead didn’t make him happy.

That thought made him smile. The last two years had been one prolonged confrontation.

He met Amy at the top of the stairs. She carried a thick blanket in her arms.

“Nice of you,” Vick said, keeping his voice as neutral as possible.

“Plenty more where that came from. There’s a linen closet back there.”

“I’ll make do with the beds.”

“G’night then,” Amy said, moving around him, and descended the stairs.

Vick had the idea of lingering just long enough to see her cover Scott on the couch, but decided against it in the end. He saw no point in potentially ruining the path nature was taking.

He’d keep an eye on Scott all the same.

Amy was, after all, like a daughter to him.

The water ended in a line that was almost impossible to distinguish from the sky. The sun warmed the sand, which was surprisingly soft and bespoke the heat of the day. The smell of surf as it rolled in was pure and clean and heady.

Suzy was out in the water with her flutter wings on, standing up, splashing, grimacing, and laughing her butt off. Her long dark hair splayed out wetly on her back. Scott and Kelly watched from the beach, laid out on a blue towel sporting tropical fish.

“Look, Mommy!” Suzy cried, and tried to swim again.

“You watching her?” Scott asked.

“I’m watching her,” Kelly said and flashed him a smile. Sunglasses that were too big for her face and yet fit her perfectly hid her eyes. “She swims like you.”

“She does not.”

Kelly made little puppy paws in front of her chest, fluttering them energetically.

“She does
not
.” Scott laughed, feeling good. “Leave me alone or you’ll be paying for dinner.”

Kelly snorted and looked at their daughter swimming in the surf. The sun, huge and high overhead, had browned her back to an almost well-done tone. “You’re paying for dinner, buster. I didn’t bring my purse.”

“You don’t have any money?”

Kelly regarded him with a look of mock disdain. “I came out here to swim.”

“Can’t believe a woman goes anywhere without her purse. You don’t have any money on you? At all?”

“Look at me.” She grabbed her breasts, covered by one part of a modest two-piece bikini that she’d earlier claimed showed off too much. He’d disagreed. “Where am I going hide it? Here? Down here?”

“Strippers do it.”

“You better not be comparing me to strippers, mister. I’ll
so
pummel you, right here.”

“
Some
women would be flattered to be compared to strippers. You got the chops for it.”

“I got the chops for it?” Kelly looked back at Suzy, still kicking away in the water and crying out
look at me, look at me!
“Man, you are just digging that hole deeper.”

“What I meant is I’d never guess you were in your thirties.”

Kelly simmered. “Keep it up.” She rolled toward him on the beach towel, the curve of her breasts shifting, kept in check by some thin material. Scott could just make out her nipples. A tan line, only a millimeter thick, marked how much skin the sun had gotten.

Scott felt another smile building.

“Hey, I’m up here.”

Scott met her eyes. Over her shoulder, Suzy’s silhouette ran out of the water and down the beach. Water glistened in his daughter’s wake.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Do I have to bring you back to the room and beat you?”

Scott’s expression shifted into something sardonic, and he made a show of thinking deeply on the offer. “You just said ‘beat’… right?”

Mommy, look at me! Look at me!

“Sicko. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Only if I can drop it into the cleavage.”

Squeals of delight rose over Kelly’s sun-browned shoulder, but Scott could only pay attention to his wife’s eyes, peeking softly at him over her large sunglasses.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked.

“Don’t know. But if you keep giving me those kinds of lead-in lines…”

“You’ve got a dirty mouth,” Kelly informed him.

Scott clamped down hard on what he wanted to say, but his grin said it all.

“That’s it,” Kelly warned him. “You keep that in check. Now, about dinner…”

Suzy leaned over Kelly’s bare shoulder and bit savagely into her mother’s unprotected skin, ripping the flesh to white bone in a flash. Kelly shrieked. Scott shrieked. Blood spouted from her. Suzy grabbed her mother’s hair in a fist and, when she opened her mouth for another bite, the meat fell out. It wasn’t their Suzy anymore. It was a slimy thing with pasty white flesh, wrinkled from being in the water for too long. Skin tags as long as barnacles decorated the thing’s bloody maw. The flutter wings she still wore squeaked. Suzy didn’t even make a sound as she chomped into Kelly’s cheek and ripped…

He woke with a jolt, both legs kicking as if someone had staked him through the heart. The house was dark, but from the window where the sofa chair was stationed, a voice asked him, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Scott lied and hoped Buckle wouldn’t ask any questions.

Instead the Newfoundlander went back to peeking out through the window.

“What time is it?” Scott asked.

“Dunno. Nighttime.”

Smartass
. “I’ll take over for you,” Scott offered.

“That’s my shift your taking,” Vick said from the steps. In the house, he appeared as a shadow against shadows. Buckle stood up from the sofa chair and cracked his back.

“Y’can duke it out, now,” Buckle said. The ex-cop and Vick tapped fists as they passed on the stairs. Seconds later, Vick was at the window looking outside. Satisfied with what he saw, he placed his steel pipe against the wall and sat down heavily in the chair.

“Go on back to sleep,” Vick said.

“Can’t now,” Scott replied. “But that might change in a few minutes.”

“Not the company, I hope.”

“No, no, not at all. Once I get over waking up, I can usually fall back. Might be an hour, but I’ll get there.”

“Bad dream was it?” Vick said in the dark, his silhouette leaning toward the window.

Scott didn’t see any reason to lie. “Yeah.”

“Hm. You still get them?”

“Every now and again.”

“Of who?”

He sighed. “Wife and daughter.”

Vick didn’t ask where they were or anything else, and for that Scott was grateful.

“Had my share of bad dreams,” Vick said. “We all have. Hope you sleep easy soon.”

“Me too. Hey… you were something else in that parking lot today.”

“You liked that?”

“Sure did. Hell, could you teach me that stuff?”

Vick chuckled. “Sure. Free of charge, too.”

“Thanks. I mean it. Once we get out of here.”

“Deal.”

“Take you long to learn?”

“The arts?”

“Yeah. Them. Take long?”

Vick leaned toward the window and glanced out. Moonlight silvered a sliver of his features and sparkled off one eye. Seeing nothing of interest, he dropped the curtain.

“Quiet out there. Streets are empty. What was your question?”

“How long did it take you to learn?”

“I’m still learning,” Vick answered him. “That’s the… the spiritual answer, I guess. The answer you want is all my life. From when I was ten. Learned right here in the city, too.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow,” Vick said, sounding pleased. “Course Halifax was changing back then. Still a beautiful city to live in. Safe, too, as long as you minded where you went. Like all places, there were some areas a person just didn’t go alone.”

“You made a career of it?”

“A career,” Vick purred, tasting the word. “Yeah, I guess I did. Had my own little hagwon down on Quinpool. That’s Korean for private school. Had a little side business selling exotic weapons. Did some of that online as well. I’ve done okay by it, I suppose.”

“What I saw in the lot there, man, you did just fine.”

Vick smiled. “What you didn’t see was how I was out of breath almost right away. My conditioning ain’t what it used to be. I like to think it’s the same, but it ain’t. A career. Hm. You know something? People around me accepted me for what I did, for what I taught them. But I dare say you’re the first to call it a career. I don’t have a teaching degree, yet I taught people––a lot of people now know how to defend themselves because of me.”

“Pretty noble.”

“Noble, eh?” Vick chuckled softly. “Some didn’t think so. Had one guy once tell me to my face that I was preaching violence to our city’s youth. That I was a violent person. I remember him plain as day. Old fella, in his early sixties. Big set of dentures on him that were much too white, y’know? Like they were over-bleached or something. Anyway, yeah, he stood right in front of me, my height he was, and waved his finger in my nose telling me how I was a bad person for teaching what I was teaching. Selling weapons and such. All legal, I says. Not in the eyes of decent folks, he says, wagging his fingers at me, as wild-eyed and aggressive as anyone I’ve ever met in a street fight. Those big teeth flashing, too. Told me I should be ashamed of myself and that I should close everything down. Ask God for forgiveness. Hm.”

Scott waited. “And?”

“Oh, well, that was that. He left me then. I think he even confronted my students and their parents once outside my hagwon and ranted at them for a while. That was a bad scene. Some of those moms and dads weren’t as understanding as I was. Anyway, I remember one day the same guy, white dentures and all, was being mugged in an alleyway near the school. I went down there and no sooner did the punk grab his watch—he’d already gotten the wallet––I was on him. Kicked him in the guts and laid him out cold. Knocked the wind out of him. I thought he was going to die, but he didn’t. I got the watch and the wallet from him and handed it back to… Rumstead, that was his name. Handed it back to him. You know what he said?”

Scott shook his head.

“He looked at me, then the kid on the street, and back to me again and goes ‘Did you have to kick him
so hard?
Why the hell you have to kick him so hard?’ And then went on about charges, about how the kid would be within his rights to sue me. Man, oh man.”

“Whoa. That’s one real asshole.”

“Yeah, well, I admired him in a way,” Vick confessed. “He stood up for what he believed in. Didn’t like the way he did it––loud as he was––but he had the balls to do it anyway. Especially to my face. I mean, for all he’d have known, I could’ve hurt him. Course I wouldn’t, you understand, but he didn’t know that. All he knew was that I taught kids and adults how to kick the shit out of others.”

“Why the pipe?”

“The pipe?”

Scott pointed at the weapon leaning against the wall.

“Oh, that. I had katanas and an assortment of weapons at the shop when Moe started walking around. First used a sword on them, too, but a sword’s not much good against an enemy that has no regard for its own safety. Also, if you chop deep enough into a head, there’s the risk that you’d get it stuck in there. Takes too much time to pry it loose. Axe is the same way. All the blades I had didn’t really do the job. I had one set of tonfas, but Amy took those. Better off. She’s faster than I ever was.”