Hellifax (6 page)

And became claws.

Bowman felt the hands and teeth rip him wide open, felt an abrupt
sinking
sensation, a
voiding
.

Then pulling.

That sensation stayed with him for what seemed like a very long time before his perception went mercifully red.

Across the way, Tenner watched the farmers’ market crowd of Philistines feast on the lower half of Bowman. He saw the blood spurt. Saw the old man go into an electric frenzy. Some zombies, pushed onto the hood of the car by those behind them, got up and pulled themselves toward Bowman’s upper body. Two of them started in on his arm, working their way up to his shoulder and face.

Tenner stayed back, enraptured, checking over his shoulder at times to ensure nothing was creeping up on him.

Unfazed, he went on watching the feast to the gritty end, when bones were worked free of moist sockets.

There were other things to do, but he could let them wait.

It was his world, after all.

And right now, some curry would hit the spot.

Halifax called.

Scott was going to see what it wanted.

The Durango SUV cut sluggishly through the mounting, swirling winds that lashed the tinted windshield and the highway beyond in a snarl of white. The ferocity of the storm made him scowl, depressing the brake and slowing his speed further. His breath came out in a quiet hiss, drowned almost immediately by the gale pummelling the glass, and he held on tighter to the steering wheel. The gust fought for control over the SUV, and Scott thought it would only take a little more power to whisk it off the road. The wipers streaked back and forth fast enough to potentially grind the rubber away, or even inflict mortal wounds if they could be used as a weapon, and he had to force himself not to look at the damn things whipping across his vision. The clock showed 9:16 in the morning, but the way the snow was attacking the vehicle and darkening the sky, it could have been almost sundown. The sun and sky were up there somewhere, smothered by monstrous war clouds seemingly intent on burying Scott alive. He sighed again, wishing he had something to plug into the stereo: music, an audio book, anything to alleviate the boredom brought on by his fight against the storm. Any second he expected a frozen cow, blown out of its pasture by this titan of a blizzard, to crash against his vehicle.

Why the hell had he taken to the road this morning, anyway?

Scott thought about it, shifting in his leather seat enough to make it creak. Windsor. He just wanted to be away from Windsor. The town had lured him into stopping, but after a couple of days exploring its historic streets and fighting gimps, he’d come up with nothing. The houses he searched held a few meager supplies, which he ate, saving the stores piled in the back of the Durango, but there wasn’t anything to justify that initial feeling, that tractor pull, he’d had for the place. The only thing he did find was an aluminum bat tucked away behind the door of a bedroom that had, he suspected, belonged to a teenager. Could that have been the thing mysteriously dragging him to stop in the town? He had to admit, the bat was a useful weapon against deadheads. A little unwieldy, but nowhere near as bad as the war hammer he’d once had. It wasn’t as unbalanced as an axe, and it didn’t run the risk of catching in a gimp’s skull like a sword. If the ammunition Gus had so generously given him ran out and he didn’t find any to replace it, the bat would come in handy. It was the only thing Scott took away from Windsor, before climbing back in his vehicle and getting the H-E two sticks out of town. Anxious to get back to the hunt.

The hunt for Tenner.

That’s
what got him on the road, in a blizzard lathering up the countryside in freezing white. His anxiousness was rewarded with diminished visibility, which forced him to slow down to a crawl on the one, barely seen lane of a suspected four, split by a continuous wedge of waist-high concrete. He drove down the 101 heading into Halifax, straining to see anything on either side of him. The closer he got to the city, the mightier the storm became.

Scott stopped the SUV, listening to the brakes shriek. He leaned forward onto the steering wheel, as if about to gnaw on his own knuckles.
Jeeeeee
sus. If snow were shit, then the Lord had downed a case of fibre supplement and was voiding in spectacular fashion. Beyond the frenetic
one-two, one-two, one-two
of the wipers, he could barely make out the road anymore. The Durango wore all-season tires, but the first hill he came to would probably halt the vehicle in its tracks, spinning its wheels in place, four-wheel drive or no. On impulse, he turned off the wipers. It only took seconds for thick chunks of snow to blot the windshield, draping the already dark interior in deeper gloom. Perhaps the snow was really volcanic ash from Krakatoa, and the end of the world had started this very day. That made him shake his head. Only a couple of days since he’d left Gus and already he was thinking of dire shit.
Tsk
ing, he reached behind his seat, groping at the floor. His hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle, and Scott brought up a forty ouncer of Jack Daniels Sour Mash whiskey. The black label greeted him, and he twisted off the stopper. A sniff cleared his thoughts and distracted him from the weather. Not normally one to drink, and especially never when driving, Scott took a sip of the whiskey and grimaced. It didn’t go down like water for him, unlike Gus, but he couldn’t deny that in a world like this, on a day about to be buried in snow, the whiskey had a grounding effect.

He took one more sip from the bottle before replacing the cap and tossing the whiskey into the passenger seat. The last sign he had spotted declared Halifax was only thirty kilometers away. Only thirty, but at current speed, he wasn’t going to get there anytime soon. A blast of wind slammed into the windshield, coating it with even more snow and darkening the interior to the point where the dashboard lights gleamed brightly. Well, he figured, he wasn’t doing anything by staying here. Time to get a move on. The clock read 9:47. The faster he could get into the city, the better chance he had of finding some place to wait out the storm.

He flicked on the wipers, and the first swish revealed a face coated in snow and ice. Torn cheek flesh, meaty enough to have slivers of frost formed on it, exposed a ferocious sneer of yellow and black teeth, all the way back to the last molars and the thing’s dirty alabaster hinge of a jaw. Inky sores and skin tags blotted the parts of its face not ripped away. Dead eyes peered into the interior of the SUV, the corpse’s horrid smirk unflinching.

The fright of suddenly seeing the thing subsided, and Scott let out his breath. The undead outside couldn’t see him. Certainly couldn’t smell him. But it was there because… Why? Was it just wandering through the blizzard, searching for something to feast on?
Jesus Christ
. What were the chances of running into Frosty the fucking Flesh Eater on the highway?

Then another, more gruesome chill flooded his person, penetrating even his ass, which had the benefit of having a heater built into the seat under it.

What if Frosty wasn’t alone?

The beat of the wipers matched the pounding in his chest. He put the machine into drive and edged past the dead thing in the road. The side mirror bumped the corpse and pushed it off-balance enough for it to fall. Just like that it was gone, and there was enough swirling around the SUV and in his mirrors to make the gimp disappear from sight. The truck pushed forward, reaching twenty kilometers an hour, but only a few seconds later, two more figures appeared in the road, hunched over and frozen-looking and wearing only summer clothing. Then three more—stood off on the shoulders of the highway, pitiful in the cold, but eyeing the moving truck with famished curiosity. Their blood-drained flesh repulsed Scott enough to speed up to thirty, and he kept his eyes open for others. Cars and trucks dotted the road, slowly being swallowed in white drifts, and the snow snaked around the remains like steam from fresh kills.

Why are there so many gimps around?
Scott didn’t understand it, unless there was a small town on the outskirts of the city. Something he’d passed without noticing the sign. Some of the signs were nothing more than broken wooden posts, appearing like jagged ankles and shins in the snow. Or maybe there were simply so
many
of the things about, and that notion did nothing for his nerves. He kept easing the SUV forward, craning his neck to see anything resembling a sign, but finding nothing except a thickening of cars and trucks. The wind subsided for a moment and, off to the right and through the passenger window, he thought the forest fell away into a valley. He stopped and lowered the window to see. The blizzard howled once more and spat snow into the interior. After a few moments of seeing nothing through the bleached veil, the window went back up.

He rubbed his face, feeling the growing carpet of stubble on his chin and knowing he needed a shave. Maybe he’d let the beard grow and become Gus’s twin. The man would probably chuckle at that. The Durango’s GPS still functioned, and Scott saw that he had reached Sackville. The SUV climbed a hill, and he slowed down to allow greater traction. After levelling out, the road ahead disappeared in a sheet of flying white that whipped across the highway. Ghostly buildings, their shapes barely recognizable, stood behind tattered fences of trees and brush on either side. He couldn’t see anything that might provide shelter from the storm. Scott grimly drove on, pushing through wild streamers that screamed from the heights of rising drifts.

Another hour and the highways would be buried.

He suddenly wanted another shot of booze. Something to take the edge off.

More gimps, staring and partially bowed by the blizzard, came into view and vanished as the SUV squeezed by, not even moving on the vehicle.

But they were there.

Worse, they were there in numbers.

Scott remembered Saint John in his native New Brunswick, and how the city had become a teeming nest for the undead. Halifax was an even bigger city, due to an influx of shipyard construction contracts it had won some twenty-five years ago. The city had ballooned from a modest population of perhaps four hundred thousand to at least one and a half million. That number burned in Scott’s mind and furrowed his brow. One point five million people. At least eighty percent probably turned into roaming flesh feeders, which made an army of well over a million. Perhaps some had been destroyed by Army efforts and law enforcements agencies. Maybe a few had been put down by folks like Gus. But in the end, a
population
waited for him. For anyone wanting to visit the city.

Scott sighed. Finding Tenner in the concrete guts of Halifax wasn’t going to be easy, if he was even there. The only thing he had on his side was the weather and the freezing temperatures. The cold slowed the zombies down, and the elements certainly ravaged the pasty flesh and musculature covering their bones, but for some reason unknown, they never fully rotted away. At least, not after more than two years. Whatever was keeping the undead animated apparently kept them from decomposing, or at least slowed the process to a crawl. Somewhere, there were scientists in bunkers studying the deadheads, trying to better understand them… or so he liked to think.

Regardless, the season and everything that came with it were on his side. After that, he couldn’t think of anything else. He could spend months,
years
searching the city for Tenner, but a central hub was perhaps the best place to start a major hunt.

The need for a secure base came to his mind. Something that was easily defendable against the masses, like Gus had with his estate on the mountain. Perhaps even one of the high-rises in the city, once the lower doors had been sealed off. It merited more thought and investigation. He would need a place to stay while hunting––hell, he needed a place
now
to get out of the storm.

Shops, restaurants, and gas bars on either side of the road passed by in the hoary gloom, filing into sight and rolling behind as if on a massive conveyor belt. An unmistakable golden M against a background of red loomed up on a dented post, appearing like a giant fly swatter poised to smash something. A shopping plaza formed at the absolute edge of his vision, its storefronts frosted and hunkered down in the gathering snow like forgotten bunkers. Fangs of ice hung from power lines and swung in the wind. Some houses appeared on the right, cresting a small rise, which Scott spotted the turn-off for. He slowed for a moment, considering the road ahead and the GPS, still functioning two years after the collapse of everything.
Closer
, he told himself.
Need to get closer.

Trouble was, getting closer might become a problem. Abandoned vehicles littered the highway in growing numbers, appearing out of the heart of the storm and forcing him to slow down and weave amongst them. Driving in a straight line became more difficult. Ice coated several burnt-out wrecks, crystalizing metallic bones that rose up like clasping fingers.

A bleached wall rose up out of the raging blizzard. Scott stopped the Durango and stared at the barrier for a moment before finally realizing what it was––an overturned transport truck, its top facing him. The crashed carrier had smashed through the concrete barrier dividing the lanes and barred all travellers from proceeding any further. Snow rasped the outer shell of the Durango, sounding cold to Scott and daring him to step outside.

Fuck that
, he thought. Looking around, he put the Durango into reverse. The GPS display built into the dash disappeared, replaced by a white speckled image of what was behind the SUV. Scott scowled and almost swore. Snow covered the lens of the rear camera, which showed only a partial image. He placed his arm behind the passenger seat and twisted in his seat to look out the rear window, not liking having to back up the old-fashioned way. All he could see was a blank, tinted canvass bordered by lumps that were car wrecks.

“Five feet.” A calm female voice spiked the air, emanating from the speakers. It was the only voice he’d heard in days. “Four feet. Caution. Three feet. Caution. Two feet. Cau––”