Hellifax (41 page)

“Well, goddamn.” Grinner chuckled darkly as his thumbs pressed further inward. “This fucker’s about to shit himself.”

Feeling something about to give horribly, Buckle’s mouth dropped open to scream.

“Hey.”

Vick drove his spiked knuckles under the chin of the torturer. The impact bounced Grinner’s head off the ceiling of the van. He released Buckle, who opened his eyes as if he’d been underground for years. Vick stepped forward, cocking his one arm and driving it into the man’s throat. Grinner went down with a bloody-sounding gurgle, and the driver with the horns whipped around. The one with the short, spiked hair lunged out of the passenger seat, his face a horrible snarl of rage.

Buckle grappled with his shattered ankle and battered body, but still managed to get one leg under himself and stand. Pain exploded in his skull like a halogen light on full power. Buckle tried to get his hands unhooked from overhead and fell back, out of strength and out of breath. The new attacker reached out and grabbed the front of Vick’s body armor. Vick twisted, wrapping his remaining arm around the man’s elbow joint, and heaved up against it. The man with the spiked hair screamed. Vick kicked out a knee and Spike went down. Vick went to punch him and blinked in confusion. He realized he
couldn’t
finish off his foe.

He was one arm short.

Growling, Spike surged forward, lifting Vick off his feet, and even with his arm still locked up, heaved him into the ceiling. The impact rattled the van’s still-moving frame. The driver shrieked gibberish. Vick grimaced and released Spike. They toppled to the sofa, Vick landing underneath the other man. His boot heel flashed up and cracked Spike’s chin. Blood burst from the man’s face. Spike shouted something in that Klingon-sounding language. He swarmed the one-armed sensei and rained punches down into Vick’s midsection, huge haymakers that dropped like fifty-ton bombs falling from heaven. Even from where he hung, Buckle heard the furious rhythm of meat on metal plates.

Filling his lungs with air, Buckle got his one good leg under him. He straightened, unhooked himself from above, and suddenly dropped to the floor. He rolled over the still-gurgling Grinner lying on the bare metal, the sounds of punching just next to him crashing into his ears like fleshy cymbals. He felt the butt of something on Grinner’s waist. Buckle grabbed it, lifting it free with a rasp of leather on metal.

He brought up a sawed-off pump shotgun.

“Hey, buddy!”

Spike looked up and, for the briefest of moments, looked utterly gobsmacked, a split second before Buckle blew the man’s head apart like an overripe melon.

The ex-cop roared, jacked the weapon, and sent a spent cartridge flying into the dark. He placed his back against the wall of the vehicle. Amazingly, Grinner pushed himself up on his elbows, a dark froth spilling from the ruined meat of his throat.

Buckle shot him through the base of his skull, dropping the man like a reanimated Moe.

The van veered wildly, eliciting cries of pain from both Buckle and Vick. Buckle pumped the shotgun a second time and slapped an arm against the wall for support. He steadied his gun arm,
willed
it to be still. The Viking at the wheel looked back, saw the barrel pointed at him, and fumbled at the door. Buckle fired just as the horns clattered off the man’s head in his haste to fling himself out of the moving van.

Vick groaned as he pushed the corpse away. “Is that all of––”

The van crashed, slamming into something that refused to move. The impact turned Vick’s words into a startled grunt, jolting both men and flinging them into darkness where everything stopped at once.

With a brute of a henchman behind him, Fist entered the parking area of the dormitory and took a moment to compose himself. He adjusted the hockey helmet covering his head, sticking his fingers into the cage that protected his face and rubbing an itch around his nose. Then he snarled.

“That was a grenade,” he hissed to Shipp.

“Grenade?” Shipp asked, his eyes almost bulging behind his black painted visor. “Where the fuck did he get that?”

“Don’t know,” Fist said. “Leftovers from a soldier, maybe? But that’s valuable property, in any case. Where the others?”

“Gone around. Looking for another way in from the sides.”

Fist grunted. He spotted a door facing the parking area, leading up into the guts of the building. Hefting his maul with one muscled arm, he briskly walked toward it with Shipp at his heels. They stopped at the door and studied the dark interior.

“All sorts of nasty shit could be in there,” Shipp said warily, holding a spiked club.

Fist’s eyes, blackened with soot, fixed on the other man and narrowed evilly. “
We’re
nasty shit.”

Shipp quickly nodded his agreement. That was good. Fist knew he had to get his boys in the right frame of mind before an ass stomping, and this was a
fight
––not the slaughter they’d grown accustomed to.

Not bothering to ask if Shipp was ready, Fist opened the door and entered the building.

In the crinkling of brick and the weedy sound of dust and debris settling, Tenner sat and waited. He carefully stuck his head out over the windowsill and scanned the ground. Brick, concrete, and shards of wooden beams sprinkled the snow, as if the foundation had taken a direct artillery shell. The amount of destruction made him touch the six remaining grenades at his chest and give them an affectionate rub through the Velcro. He couldn’t see any of the remaining screamers down there, but he believed he’d gotten at least one. The safest thing was to assume the remainder were in the building, looking for him. Naturally, they would be coming upstairs—the highest point in the building, where a sniper could inflict the most damage. He wasn’t at the highest point. There was at least one more level above him, but they would probably search the entire place, just to be certain—unless they were idiots.

Evil
. Delicious and pungent. He sensed their raw presence closing in. Packs like this might have a purpose in the new world, but Tenner didn’t want them around. Their methods were raw and unrefined compared to Tenner’s silky approach. He was well aware that, unlike good, evil fed upon evil. Even if he could’ve somehow rolled back time, perhaps even been able to converse with them and establish an alliance of sorts, he knew eventually he’d kill them or they’d kill him.

No, it was best to execute the whole fucking lot.

The remaining van was still in the street. Tenner knew he’d sniped the driver, and chances were good he would be able to drive away in the vehicle. But first he had to kill some people. He slunk to the door and dropped to his chest, feeling the weight of his body armor. Just outside and to his right was the stairwell he’d used earlier. Ahead was an indistinct corridor, its length slashed in two places by moonlight coming from open doors. The spectral light cut up an otherwise haunting darkness. He had a choice: go hunting or stay here and wait for them to find him. Exhaling, he climbed to his feet and went to the stairwell door. It opened with a whine, making him cringe. He listened. Nothing. Tenner returned to the room and rummaged around until he found some paper, which he immediately folded. He took the wedge and jammed it between the door and the floor, keeping it open and in place. He would hear anything coming up that stairwell, and one grenade would mangle the lot of them.

Tenner hefted the AR-20 and flicked the rate of fire switch. He couldn’t see exactly what he’d selected, but he’d find out eventually. Hopes of getting the full electric
rock and rolla
show filled him. Dropping to his chest again and aiming down the length of corridor, he decided to sit and wait.

And let the dogs sniff him out.

The silenced weapon felt heavy in Scott’s hand as he and Amy slunk in the shadows, skirting the flood of headlights from the van.
Was he really about to shoot someone, a living being?
That question branded his mind and distracted him from the task at hand. Amy stopped once and glanced back at him, and he could feel her wondering what the hell was wrong. He thought about telling her, but it would take a good five minutes to explain why he wasn’t certain he could pull a trigger and how killing dead things was pretty damn easy, comparatively speaking. The moral implications of shooting a living person bothered him, and if it was bothering him now, what would he be like if he actually did catch up to Tenner? The man who’d sliced up his friends and left them hanging from support beams in a basement?

Amy stopped behind a low drift, just under the van’s passenger side window. Scott settled in beside her, watching the machine for any signs of life. He caught the unmistakable tang of blood and wondered if the dead would smell it as well. If so, they would have very little time.

“You ready?” Amy asked.

Scott blinked.

“Scott?” Amy asked, and he faced her.

“I don’t know… I don’t know if I can do this.”

“What?”

A fine time to pussy out of shooting someone.
He winced and shook his head.

“Give me the gun.” Amy held out her hand and beckoned with gloved fingers. “I’ll do it.”

The sharpness in her voice surprised him. He did as he was told.

“I’m sorry.”

“Just watch my back. Here.” She handed him her tonfas.

“I’m sorry, Am––”

But she was already moving, on knees and elbows, approaching the van from the rear. Scott felt ashamed by his inability to act. He thought he could kill Tenner, knew he could put the murderer down,
swore
it, but those gears had slipped with the reality of the moment. The men in the van were savages, but he just couldn’t do it. God above help him, he couldn’t bring himself to kill another living, breathing person.

He held up one of the tonfas and briefly wondered if he could make it spin like Amy did. He settled on holding of it like any regular club.

Amy was at the back of the van and on her feet. She edged around the rear, holding the Ruger at shoulder height. Shouting came from the van, and Scott kept his eyes on the passenger side, occasionally glimpsing a hand coming up to the glass.

Amy disappeared around the side of the van.

His heart began to race. Scott wondered if he should go after her, but he decided against it. Amy could handle herself––had handled herself for a very long time. He could back her up, but––

The Ruger’s hushed bark erupted from the other side of the van.

Amy didn’t know why Scott couldn’t pull the trigger, but she didn’t force the issue. It took a lot to put down a living person. Lord above knew she’d crossed some dark line when her husband and daughter had become infected with the virus, clubbing them to death with a cast-iron frying pan of all things. They weren’t her family anymore, of course. At the time, though, when wide-eyed Jordy came flying at her from the bathroom, he was
still
her husband of eight years. She’d flipped him over her hip and put him through the glass coffee table. He’d just kept coming, even when she broke his leg, then his arm, then his
other
arm, and finally his other leg, just to immobilize the twisting frothing thing that only that morning had held her in his loving arms.

She remembered going to the kitchen afterward and hearing the pounding on Joanne’s door. Amy had gone to her daughter’s room, placed her face to the door, and simultaneously felt and heard Jo beating the wood. She wouldn’t answer her mother. Worse, the screeching had intensified at the sound of Amy’s voice. Since then, she’d had nightmares of Jo clawing her way through the door and coming for her.

When Amy had turned around, she discovered Jordy slinking along the floor, bunching up a rug under his dripping mouth, eyeing her as he moved like some hellish slug.

She jumped over him in the hallway, his teeth snapping at her feet as she went over and found the only weapon in the house besides the knives. She’d completely forgotten about the golf clubs in the bedroom.

Amy clubbed Jordy’s skull with the edge of the frying pan until he stopped moving, until the bone crumpled and grated under his scalp like the broken pieces of a plate.

When she regained control, she found out Jo was on the floor in her bedroom, her head mashed in as well. Somehow, Amy had forgotten the details, but she’d killed her own daughter. And that was that. The zombie apocalypse had baptized her in the harshest way possible.

She approached the driver’s door. Something had smashed the side mirror, so she wasn’t worried about being spotted, but there was a chance the driver might get out. She gripped the door handle with her right and brought up the Ruger with her left.

Amy had killed the two people who had meant the most to her. She still struggled with the psychological damage of those acts, even though they’d been necessary. Vick had tried to help her, but his forte was hand-to-hand combat; they both knew he wasn’t cut out to be a grief counselor. He’d tried, though, eventually becoming her new family.

And these fuckers dressed for Halloween had cut him up. Probably even killed him. Outside the van’s door, Amy adjusted her grip on the handle and took a short, clarifying breath.

Living or dead, it didn’t mean too much to her. If someone fucked with her family, Amy would not hesitate.

She yanked the van door open and fired a salvo into the two men inside, making them jump and jolt in their seats. The driver came off the worst; his arm burst in a swell of blood, and his face became a spurting wreck of meat and bone. Blood spattered the dash. The guy on the passenger side took rounds to his armored chest. Amy fired high, but his head was encased in a battle helmet of some sort, and the air sizzled with the sound of bullets ricocheting off metal. Another lacy white hole appeared almost magically in the windshield. Rushing her shots, she put a round into the passenger’s meaty thigh, his kidney, and blew off the pinky of his left hand as he tumbled out of his door and out of sight.

She stepped back from the driver’s side, intent on going around and finishing the task, but she glimpsed the glazed eye of the driver swivel in her direction.