Hellifax (39 page)

It was just his luck that
this
time, they were investigating en masse.

Placing his back against the stone wall of the building, he thought about his next move. High ground came to mind, and he looked at a nearby window just to his left. He wheeled toward it and kicked, putting a boot through the glass. A moment later, he’d cleared away the shards and squirmed into a student’s dorm room, with a mussed up bed and desk. Tenner went to the door, opened it, and entered a corridor where windows allowed moonlight to transform the opposite wall into a length of wide piano keys.

He located a stairwell and huffed up three floors, emerging into a similar corridor and entering an identical room. He took up position at the window, facing the street below from a higher vantage point. Tenner smashed out the glass with his elbow. Dropping to his knees, he pointed the barrel of the assault rifle out the window, resting its length on the sill, and panned from side to side. He immediately spotted two figures, their faces swathed in shadow. One was bent over the other, who appeared quite dead.

Tenner took his eye away from the scope. Zombies were approaching their position, walking through a smattering of trees and heading for the street. Though the cold had slowed them, it wouldn’t take them long at all to reach their stricken prey. Tenner felt a bit of disappointment. He’d already played a game of “Dead Invaders” with the old mechanic––he couldn’t remember the guy’s name. It had been weary work shooting all those zombies bearing down on the man, and he really didn’t want to do the same again.

He settled in to watch. If anything, it would be interesting to see just what kind of person the attending shadow would turn out to be. Would he or she stay with their fallen comrade to the last? Or perhaps try to move the wounded, which Tenner dismissed.
Better than reality television
, he thought, smiling faintly with his cheek against the scope.

Right at that moment, two sets of headlight beams lit up the street.

Tenner’s brow crumpled up in puzzlement a second before he saw what was coming and heard the growl of engines.

Buckle’s heart leapt in his chest when he saw the headlights. Two sets of great, harsh eyes bore down on him and Vick. The engines got louder, and he hoped beyond hope that whoever they were, they were friendly. He heard Moe coming, but he wasn’t about to leave his
compadre
to bleed out on the pavement. If things looked bleak… He had the shotgun and would do them both. Not that he wanted to die––he might actually enjoy living in a world where survival was day to day.

If it weren’t for all of the fucking zombies.

So, with Moe heading their way, he hoped for a miracle.

The machines steamed toward them, slowed, and stopped not ten feet away from where he and Vick lay in the road. The brakes squealed, and the angry glare of the headlights made Buckle squint and raise a hand to shield his eyes. It seemed like a long time since he’d last seen a moving vehicle, and the headlights on this one made him feel exposed. The grisly extent of the blood pooling around Vick heightened his worry.

Doors opened and boots hit the pavement. Shadows formed. Big men, covered in slabs of something that Buckle couldn’t quite distinguish in the harsh light. They spread out without identifying themselves. The engines idled, creating a grim chugging that did nothing to allay Buckle’s growing trepidation.

Three figures sauntered over to where he still clenched Vick’s arm, their boots scuffing up snow. The slabs covering their bodies were a collection of sports gear or body armor, seemingly nailed to their persons or lashed on with strips of leather twine. One wore a hockey face cage, but he couldn’t see the man’s face. It took him a second to realize that the newcomer had blackened his face with paint or some other substance.

The one with the face cage spoke. It came out in a guttural bark that sounded exhausting to produce. Buckle was no linguist, but it sounded like a hodgepodge of Slavic languages.

Others came into view on the Face Cage’s flanks. Buckle saw their spiked clubs and shotguns, all short-barreled and swinging from hip holsters.

For a few seconds, they stood in the wash of the headlights and stared down at the pair of men.

“Who the fuck––” Buckle started.

Face Cage stepped forward and kicked Buckle in the face, crumpling him. He turned his head at the last possible moment, so the steel-toed boot connected with the edge of his helmet. The force was still enough to knock him away from Vick. He felt something grab him and drag him by his arms, away from Vick.

“Hey,” Buckle tried to say, in a loopy daze. Someone hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the van. A massive paw clamped about his throat. The pressure increased, choking off any more words.

The others stood around Vick. They talked, but Buckle couldn’t understand a word. Five of the warriors made a skirmish line facing the zombies shambling toward the street.

Buckle grimaced. Only five?

Behind the line, Face Cage beckoned to another man, who looked as if he wore chopped-up tire treads. The warrior brought forth a heavy-looking cleaver and bent down over Vick.

Buckle struggled, and the man holding him punched him twice, and then a third time––quick, powerful blows to his stomach and liver. His body armor absorbed most of the force, but then an elbow slammed into his jaw, snapping his head to the right and bringing sparkling motes to his vision.

“Relax,” a floating head said. The face had a huge grinning mouth filled with white fangs. “We’re going to operate on your friend.”

Buckle saw figures kneeling beside Vick. He saw the cleaver rise up and strike down, then heard the muted chink of steel on asphalt and ice, echoing in his daze. Laughter rose up then, deep and cruel-sounding, and he saw one of the brutes lift Vick’s arm into the air, pumping it in mocking victory.

Then Buckle smelled the tang of gas.

The men around Vick set fire to the stump of his arm. It ignited with a
whoosh
, and they let it burn until they decided to stomp out the flame. In nightmare fashion, the man with Vick’s arm jokingly reached out with it to paw at his companion. A hand swatted the limb away with a curse.

Another elbow slammed across Buckle’s face, clipping his already broken nose and refocusing his attention. The impact made his eyes water and his vision go hazy. He struggled to see, and gradually a black line of warriors standing before a crowd of Moe came into view. The zombies approached the end of the slope and, heedless of the five-foot embankment, fell and landed flat on their faces. The line of men moved forward, and the reaving began. Axes and mauls rose and fell in time with war cries and the wail of the dead. A few shotgun blasts punctuated the air. The warriors allowed the zombies to come forward, fall, then dispatch them as they tried to stand. The brute holding Buckle up by the throat laughed and cried out in a foreign tongue and, when the Newfoundlander looked down, he saw his captor’s forearms were covered in writhing black and green eels.

Face Cage appeared at the edge of Buckle’s vision and barked something at the man holding him. He didn’t sound overly impressed. Face Cage loomed in front of him, and the warrior held up a scarred fist that looked to be the size of a bony melon.

Just before it crashed into Buckle’s face.

The door to the apartment Scott and Amy chose wasn’t locked. They went in and began frantically searching for something that would serve as a tourniquet for Vick’s arm. The apartment was a small two-bedroom that smelled of stale animal hair, suggesting the owners had owned a dog or cat. The darkness hid no gimps, and for that they were thankful.

Scott fumbled his way through kitchen drawers and cupboards and located an extension cord, a tablecloth, dish towels, and a box of matches, all the while listening to Amy tear through a room behind the kitchen.

“You got anything?” he called, dumping his goods into the table cloth and bundling it into a makeshift sack. The matches went into his pocket.

“Yeah,” Amy said as her shadow emerged from the bedroom. “I got a belt.”

Amy’s voice became distracted. “Who are those guys?”

“Huh?” Scott turned. She pointed to the still open door and the light in the street. Outside, a good fifty meters away, stood two large vans. Men got out of the vehicles and surrounded Vick and Buckle.

Then one almost kicked Buckle’s head off.

Scott made for the door, but Amy grabbed him by the arm. “Wait,” she hissed.

“They’re kicking them!”

“I can see that,” Amy said, visibly straining to keep her control. “But there’s more of them than us. Just
wait
.”

“But Vick––”

“Vick would do the same.”

Scott blinked at her before turning back to the scene on the street. Buckle was being dragged to a van, while several men had made a line facing a crowd of dark deadheads moving in from the slope. In the glare of headlights, a figure crouched over Vick’s body, lifted what looked to be a cleaver, and chopped down.

Amy gasped and clamped a hand over her mouth. Scott said nothing, not even when the chopper stood with Vick’s severed limb and made jokes with it.

Scott pulled out the Ruger. Amy caught the movement and didn’t say anything to stop him this time.

Gunshots made them both crouch and hang back from the door, hiding in the apartment’s darkness. Zombies on the slope fell, partially illuminated by headlights. Men stepped toward the front ranks of the mob and started swinging axes and clubs. More gunshots cut the air. Howls and cries rose up from the newcomers. One of them hacked off a gimp’s head and held it up to the night, screaming as he shook it fiercely, before slinging it into the snow. The gimps continued to attack, but the men that fought them didn’t back down. They kept on dispatching the dead with enthusiastic efficiency. More zombies shambled in front of the headlights—white, half-naked forms that clutched and clawed at the front of a van. One van lurched forward with a dragon’s growl, pushing some zombies back and running over others. Rib cages crinkled before being crushed. Skulls popped like knots in burning wood. Human voices cried out in an unrecognizable language.

“You hear that?” Scott asked.

“Yeah,” Amy said. “What language is that?”

Scott listened and brought the Ruger up to his waist. “Don’t know. Hey, I’ve still got this.”

“There’s about eight of them out there,” Amy said. “And they’ve got guns, too. We can’t do anything right now.”

“Thought they were your friends?”

That got a reaction from her. She turned to face him, displaying what Scott recognized as barely suppressed fury.

“They are,” she said at last. “So…
wait
.”

Suddenly feeling like shit for saying such a thing, Scott took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he got out. “That was dickish of me.”

Amy looked back to the road. “It’s okay,” she muttered.

He wasn’t sure if it was or not, but he still stung a little from the exchange. He stepped back, dealing with the maddening urge to rush out there and start shooting. There were now seven men that he could see, with drivers still in the van. It finally occurred to him to ask
who
had shot Vick. He believed it was Tenner. Somehow, the sick bastard had gotten his hands on a rifle. But who were these
other
guys?

“I think Tenner shot Vick,” Scott said.

“I agree,” Amy said, not taking her eyes off what was happening outside. “So who are these guys?”

“Just thinking the exact same thing.”

“And?”

A second shot split the night air, and one of the newcomers fighting the zombies fell.

Tenner didn’t know who the hell these new guys were, but he knew they were taking away two people he wanted to finish off himself. Through the scope, he watched the newly arrived road warriors spread out, subdue Buckle, and drag him away––easy to distinguish with the headlights lighting up the entire scene. And he saw the field surgery performed on the man he’d gunned down while others put down zombie after zombie, holding a line and systematically killing the dead. They looked like a line of assembly workers the way they were stretched out, taking apart any corpse that got close.

Two of the men picked up the carcass of the man Tenner had shot and carried it back behind one of the vans, where Buckle had gone. He realized these warriors weren’t hanging around for long, and that bothered him. Two of his former companions were still out there, perhaps watching as he was. Waiting. And why exactly was he waiting? These guys could obviously take care of themselves, yet they were nothing compared to Tenner. He was the
man.
Even better, he was the man with the gun. He watched them through the scope, merrily killing zombies. They were having far too much fun, it seemed. They had no fear, and Tenner believed that was just unhealthy. Fear was a defense mechanism.
He
didn’t need it, but others did. He’d give them something to be scared of. It was his world, after all, and anyone existing in it had to realize that glaring fact.

Tenner adjusted the rifle’s butt against his shoulder. He caressed the trigger of the AR-20 as if it were spider’s silk, and he drew a bead on one unfortunate brute hacking away at Philistines with a fire axe. He drifted from the man with the axe to the windshield of one of the vans. He couldn’t see the driver, but he imagined he’d be there, right behind the wheel.

None of them were going to leave the area.

Fist walked up and down the battle line, swearing at his killers as they hacked the dead to pieces. Some of the dead tried to flank them, and Fist stepped in to stop them. Pell joined him, and both of the Norsemen took to bashing in the skulls of the slow-moving corpses or shooting them outright. Fist had to admit, he never tired of killing the dead.

But then he heard two shots––shots that weren’t from his lads.

He turned around in puzzlement and saw two bullet holes in the windshield of the nearest van.

“The fuck…?” Fist exhaled in shock. Pell looked to him in wide-eyed confusion.