Hellifax (34 page)

“We’re going to have to get back on South Street further down the line,” Amy said. “Once we catch our breaths here, we can stay ahead of them. Get around them.”

“They’re like a fucking wave,” Vick muttered. “Like that helicopter shot, the one covering the tsunami that hit Japan, where the water was rushing across the flatlands. Just like that.”

“We can wait here for a bit, see if they give up the chase,” Scott offered.

“They
can’t
find us now,” Vick said. “We’re in a house again. The last house I can see how they found us—the body that was out on the front step.”

“Sorry, man,” Buckle said.

“Hey, I was only stating a fact, not pointing fingers. How would you know there was a swarm of rats heading up the street? You couldn’t. There was no way. They came up the street and found the body. From there, they must’ve smelled us inside.”

Amy inspected herself. “The ponchos. They could smell the ponchos. And the hoods. Anything coated in blood and guts.”

There was a moment of silence as those words sunk into their heads.

“Christ, you’re right,” Scott said. “Gimps can smell. Rats can, too. And if they’re feeding on the dead, this probably isn’t helping us too much at the moment.”

“What do we do, then?” Vick asked. “We drop them? What if we come up against a pack of Moe? We got nothing. Sure as hell can’t walk through them like before.”

“Rather square off against Moe than rats,” Buckle stated. “But I see your point. We’re fucked either way.”

“Fucked more with the rats. Those things were chewing their way through the wood. Moe doesn’t do that,” Vick said.

Scott shifted from one foot to another. “We can test to see if their sense of smell is better than Moe’s.”

“How?” Amy asked.

“Look. We’re ahead of them. I say we stay ahead of them. Let’s drop the clothes here and bug out. Get back on track.”

“And if we run into Moe?” Vick asked.

“We try and avoid them. If not, we go through them.”

“Anything we kill might attract the rats. It’ll be a massive connect the dots,” Amy pointed out.

“And if we wear the shit, the rats might find us anyway,” Scott countered. “You got any better ideas?”

Amy shook her head.

“You guys?”

Neither Vick nor Buckle opened their mouths.

“Okay, then. Another minute tops and we go. All right?”

They agreed.

“Fucking rats, man,” Buckle muttered. “And I thought
zombies
creeped me out.”

Scott mentally ticked off the seconds, feeling his wind return. Once it was up, he stripped off the blood-soaked garments camouflaging him from the gimps and threw it onto the floor. The others did the same.

“We just leave it there?” Buckle asked.

“Yeah. Maybe it’ll throw them off, give us chance to get away. Everyone ready?” Scott looked at each of their faces, dark, but visible through the clear visors attached to their helmets.

“Let’s go.”

Opening the back door, they once again stepped out into the night, listening to the rats in the distance. They darted across two backyards, then walked down another driveway and into a road glutted with low drifts and half-buried cars. Their boots crunched through the frozen snow, making them cringe. They proceeded in a zigzagging line, jogging past swing sets, marble fountains, work sheds, and benches hidden amongst tall, skeletal clumps of trees.

Amy went through another driveway and stopped, the menfolk behind her. A truck parked between two houses was almost covered in snow, but the first thing Scott noticed was the lack of noise—other than their own heavy breathing.

“Can’t hear a thing,” he panted.

“Lost them?” Vick wanted to know.

“I think.”

“Let’s go, man,” Buckle urged.

Amy went ahead with her tonfas in her hands and checked out the street ahead. Against the backdrop of the moon, she seemed almost ninja-like. She returned to the shadows of the houses a few seconds later.

“We’ve got to head down to the end of the street here so I can see where we are, okay? Once that’s done, we can get a better bearing on where to go. That sound good to you guys?”

“All in,” Buckle said.

“Lead on,” Vick added. Scott didn’t say anything.

“You with me?” she asked him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said suddenly. “Just thinking , is all.”

“Anything we should know about?”

Where’s Tenner now?
“No. Nothing.”

Amy’s gaze lingered on him for a few seconds, as if wondering if she should press him further. But she didn’t.

She led them out of the shadows.

Tenner heard the rats minutes before he saw them.

He had moved down South Street, following the tracks that made him think a parade had gone through town––a notion that was further supported by spying the rear of a huge zombie migration away from the downtown section. He had crept along, not wanting to attract the dead’s attention, drifting toward Spring Garden Road. When he’d realized he had strayed so far off his intended path, he started retracing his steps back to South Street, which he believed his quarry was following. The undead were on the march, and he’d figured they were in pursuit of the living, so he would stay a hundred meters behind the lot of them, moving stealthily from cover to cover and staying out of sight.

When the sun dropped behind a concrete-and-steel horizon, he’d kept on, moving on a slant that would bring him back on the trail of the four last surviving people in Hellifax. He’d turned a corner, and a massive graveyard spread out before him. Seeing the coast was clear, he’d turned to his right and moved parallel with the graveyard, thinking he would reconnect with South Street on the other side.

That was, until he’d heard the noise.

Something told him that getting his ass to higher ground was probably a good thing.

Slinging his rifle over a shoulder, he spotted a fire escape ladder on a nearby brick building and jumped for the lowest rung. He caught it and hoisted himself up until he got his feet underneath him, breathing hard from the exertion. Up he climbed, panting, and pulled himself onto a metal landing three levels aboveground. He elbowed the glass, smashing it, and climbed through the window, noticing right away the stench coming from within the dark room.

Two lanky corpses sat at a narrow kitchen table and turned in a half-frozen way, baring teeth in lipless mouths. They were dressed in summer clothes, and Tenner got to his feet as they tipped over chairs to get to their own. They didn’t hiss or moan, and the only thing brighter than the moonlight shining in through the shattered window were the zombie’s teeth, which appeared in remarkably good shape.

Philistines
.

His rifle slid off his shoulder, hindering his right arm, but his left was free. Tenner knocked away a hand and reached behind his back, gripping one of his two ceremonial knives. He unsheathed the blade and stabbed the head of the female zombie coming for him, who was dressed in cut-off shorts that hung from bony hips. The woman dropped in front of him and, for a moment, the blade hooked into her jawbone and he struggled to free it. The male loomed over him, his fingers caressing Tenner’s back like fat worms. Tenner straightened up and shook his arm free of the rifle, which clattered to the floor. He took a hold of the zombie’s head and drove a boot into the side of its knee. The joint snapped like an icicle and the zombie fell, still attempting to hold on to Tenner. The killer gripped the zombie’s head and twisted it around as if trying to pull up a deeply-rooted weed. The pop and crinkle of vertebrae actually made Tenner cringe, although he wasn’t sure why––he’d done much worse to his victims.

The dead thing still moved and pawed at his body armor.

Tenner saw a chair leg sticking out a few feet away. He bent the zombie over, taking his time, and impaled the creature’s eye and skull with the piece of wood. There was resistance, like plunging a finger into sugar, but the zombie stopped moving. Only then did Tenner release it and examine his surroundings.

At the end of the room and next to a gleaming marble countertop was an open doorway.

Then he heard the shuffling.

Tenner went to the doorway and blinked at a corridor filled with carnivorous shadows. The closest one hissed at him, revealing a mouth full of broken teeth.

Tenner slammed the door and pressed his weight against it. A second later a heavy thumping moved him just a bit, but he set his legs and pushed back. The weight from the other side increased, and he knew he would not be able to hold the deadheads back for long. The rifle lay on the floor, but to get to it would mean allowing them to rush in. Tenner snarled and placed his back against the door’s surface. He pulled out his Glocks.

Then he opened the door.

The first dozen or so heads packed into the hall exploded in chunks and startled jumps, as if he were spraying bullets into a mosh pit. He emptied one gun, then brought up the second. The Glock’s lengthy burp devastated another dozen corpses, silencing their wailing.

But more were coming around the corner.

Apartment building
, Tenner’s mind giggled in scathing dismay. In getting to high ground, he’d inadvertently climbed into a goddamn nest.

Tenner emptied the mag and
tried
slamming the door, but legs from the fallen corpse stopped him. Growling, he stomped on the limbs and kicked the zombies savagely. In the corridor, zombies, like unrelenting ghouls on the hunt, crept over the piles of wasted flesh, stumbling against the walls, but advancing on his position.

Tenner got the door closed and reloaded both guns.

When he opened the door again,
more
zombies entered the fray. Setting his jaw, he poured a full magazine into the mass, making them dance. Faces burst. Skull fragments bounced off the walls. Dark streaks lashed the corridor’s length. The gun went dry and he unloaded with the other, hosing the corpses that remained and mowing them down in a chatter of bullets.

The gun emptied.

But the zombies continued to enter the corridor, drawn to the fight.

Could be at this all night
, Tenner thought in exasperation. He didn’t feel like playing anymore. Holstering his side arms, he grabbed a grenade from his vest, pulled the pin, and baseball pitched it over the heads of the reforming Philistines looking for a fight. It bounced off a far wall, and Tenner slammed the door once again.

This time he placed his back against a wall.

The explosion shook the floor, and a mass of flesh blew open the door. Tenner grimaced and peered outside. The blast took out the wall thirty feet away, and surprising moonlight revealed what looked to be a chunk of missing floor as well, making a ragged pit that nothing was about to breach.

Tenner kicked the limbs clear, torsos and blast-severed heads, into the hall, and shut the door for the last time, marveling at what it was like to call down holy fire to smite one’s foes. He turned his attention back to the kitchen. Darkness shrouded most of the room, but he could make out the refrigerator and countertops. The putrid smell of the place made his eyes water, and he was glad for the smashed window. He turned around and went to the woman he’d put down only a minute earlier—Philistine filth. There was no excitement in killing the undead. It was just a chore that had to be done, not at all as interesting as executing the living. Grabbing her arms, he hoisted her up—not surprised at how light the once reanimated cadaver was—and threw her onto the metal landing. Once she was out of the place, he turned his attention to the second zombie and went about pulling the chair leg from the zombie’s eye cavity. The willowy figure was also shoved out the window. Tenner stepped onto the metal platform and grabbed one leg of the woman, upsetting her and sending her falling to the road with a fleshy splat. He did the same for the other before crawling back through the apartment window. Once inside, he righted one of the fallen chairs and sat down.

Then he heard the noise again, forgotten in the brief battle.

He stuck his head back out the window and peered back the way he’d come, but he couldn’t see anything. The road appeared black and wet under the clear night sky, but something struck him as strange.

A feeling he couldn’t identify—fear?—lanced through his consciousness. He realized what the blackness truly was when it advanced. It oozed steadily over the snowy pavement below, and Tenner could only stare. The rats slowly came into view, some of the faster ones scrambling ahead and outpacing the mass. The vermin located the two fallen zombies at the base of the building and pitched into the corpses. More rats joined in twos and threes, until the creatures covered the carcasses like a shifting jigsaw puzzle. The unmoving zombies disappeared quickly in a writhing, twisting carpet. Tenner stayed where he was, watching them consume the carcasses and witnessing the darkness flow down the street. Thousands of rats, perhaps
hundreds
of thousands, passed the building. He was suddenly grateful that the fire escape’s ladder was well out of their reach. He wouldn’t put it past the little furry bastards to be able to climb.

Tenner flipped up his goggles, lifted his mask, and wiped his face with his palm.

Then he saw the graveyard in the distance.

The rats flooded the area as far as his eyes could see. An undulating
sea
of undead turned the pale glow of white into sewage black. The bases of tombstones stood against the rush, and the rats flowed around them. Tenner realized then that what he’d encountered in the tunnel was
nothing
compared to what was crawling over the earth. He looked down to where the two zombies once lay. Dull bones bobbed as every last morsel was gnawed clean.

He could’ve been
them
.

This wasn’t just a horde anymore.

This was something …
biblical
.

Tenner picked up his rifle and placed it against one wall. With one hand on his chin, he watched the undead churn. They crawled over each other like black maggots, and he believed he saw faces in their patterns, crying out in terrible pain just before splitting apart. Time and time again faces formed and dissolved. After a while, the rats began to thin out.