Hellifax (13 page)

To break the monotony, the drivers sometimes sped ahead to pass the leader, and even as Pell looked ahead at the countryside, one van overtook him and blasted away like a hot cannonball. Nightmarish men hung out the windows, screaming and shaking fists in excitement as they drove past. Pell looked at the boss man. An armored Fist sat and stared ahead, squinting at the daylight. He was like that most of the time while on the road. Sometimes silent, sometimes humming some indistinct tune to himself, barely heard above the engine. This was one of those times when the leader purred away. Pell thought it was a surprisingly melodious sound, broken only by Fist’s deep breaths, which would fuel the next few bars. Given his leader’s ferocious reputation, Pell was certain he was the only one who knew of this musical inclination. No one really knew much about Fist or what he had been before the Fall. Not that it mattered. One only needed to follow his commands.

In the back of the van dozed four killers, almost boneless in their seats, snoring and stinking up the interior with their rancid breath. Bare meat hooks hanging from overhead clicked off each other like gruesome chimes, adding to the rattling of the moving vehicle and Fist’s oddly comforting humming.

Pell concentrated on the road, staring at the backside of the van ahead and waiting for word from the big man to stop. Scavenging had been fair in Quebec. They’d even left behind a garage full of excess gas they drained from vehicles, to be used for the trip back west. Meat was constantly an issue, and while they managed to take down two people and cook them, hopes were high the pickings would better further east. They had stores of cured and smoked meat, but that would only last so long.

From the passenger seat, Fist took another breath before turning it into a slow song Pell knew he’d heard before, but couldn’t place. That would bug the hell out of him for the rest of the day. The lines of the highway flashed by, ticks of distance and time, becoming brighter as the road pulsed into the graceful curve of an overpass, all channeled by guardrails.

Then their van hit ice.

The rig ahead of them suddenly swerved, crashed through a guardrail, and plunged into the valley between the opposing lanes. It flipped over, rolling onto its side, in a song of screaming engine revolutions and crumpling metal before disappearing below. Pell felt his own tires spin for a second, before momentum pushed his van past the crash site. The vehicle fishtailed and he turned into it, regaining control. His foot crushed the brake pedal as his heart gonged in his chest.

“Turn around!” Fist shouted, startling Pell more than the lead van doing a dog’s trick.

They returned to the overpass and parked, blocking the road. The men from the third van got out, their boot heels clicking on asphalt, and stared down at the dead transport.

The crashed van had nosedived into the pavement below. It had smashed itself at an angle upon impact, crashing into the median. Steam rose from the crumpled engine block; a pair of legs stuck out from the shade of the concrete, as if someone was trying to hide under a bed.

For a while Fist said nothing, studying the scene with a grim patience and listening to the weak groan of wheels until they came to a stop.

“They’re fucked,” someone said into the rising wind.

Fist straightened and studied the countryside. Houses lined both sides of the road running underneath the highway. The road beneath led into a large town of sorts. Pell looked about and felt his anxiety rise just a bit. This wasn’t the best of places to have an accident. But then, where was?

A hand slapped against the side window of the wrecked van. A face peered up at them, ghostly pale. Then another.

“Get down there and pull them out,” Fist rumbled at the rig pigs standing around him. “Salvage what you can. Food and water. Gas.”

Orders heard, the men jumped the guard rails and huffed down to the crash site. They swarmed the van and pried open the ruined rear doors with crowbars. Norsemen in tire armor and motorcycle helmets pulled their dazed companions out and heaped them on the ground. In a minute, five men were free. A sixth man, the driver, had been the guy trying to hide in the shade of the second overpass. He had flown through the windshield and skidded across two lanes and up a concrete incline. Most of his face had been cheese-grated away, but mercifully, a snapped neck had taken his life.

Pell was one of the men to flip the driver over.

“Dead,” he yelled back to Fist, standing tall on the road above. Their leader brooded above them as grey clouds sped overheard. He stood with both hands on his hips, gunslinger style, with his elbows jutting out. The huge man drew a flat hand across his throat, then down his middle, and finished with the motion of tossing something away.
Waste not, want not
, Pell thought, knowing it was a saying of Fist’s. He repeated the hand signs to three men nearby. The trio took out cleavers and knives and fell upon the dead man with gusto.

Meat was meat, regardless of where—or who—it came from.

Pell wandered to the front of the crashed van, studying the exposed underside of the vehicle as he went. Herman and a few others stood about the crumpled hood, which they had managed to pry back.

“Engine?” Pell asked in Norse speak.

“Dead,” Herman said in English, shaking his head.

“Can’t do anything?”

“To this?” Herman asked, sooty face incredulous. “It’s dead.”

Pell stepped away from the mechanic and looked up at the shadowy, cobra hood shape of their leader, who seemed to have taken a menacing interest in the conversation. He pointed at the van and drew a thumb across his throat.

Fist nodded once.

“Get the gas out of the tank, then,” Pell said to Herman. Pell didn’t mind being a mouthpiece, nor did he mind being something of a right hand to the boss, since he sat across from him when on the road. Such a privilege afforded him certain liberties, even when he stood low in the pecking order.

“Hey,” grunted a man wearing Viking horns. He pointed beyond the shade of the concrete. Zombies, featureless in the distance, appeared in ones and twos on the road. They staggered out from between houses. Some oozed from underneath cars like enormous worms. As the rising wind gave soundtrack to the scene, the dead mustered their forces and, with heavy steps, marched toward the wreck site.

Above, Fist turned and gazed on the small army.

Pell wasn’t afraid of the dead. None of the Norsemen were. The dead weren’t something to fear—in small bunches. Large numbers could be a problem.

“Get them into the vans,” Murphy shouted, making Pell swivel around. Whether they needed to be told or not, the men bearing the weight of the dazed Norsemen complied, walking with their companions up over the slope to the vehicles.

“Get the food and water!” Murphy shouted. His emaciated face was covered by a visor spray-painted black. The man was a jackal amongst dogs and quick to bite.

“You’re not in charge,” Herman yelled back, gathering up plastic jugs of water. Pell looked at Fist, but the leader had disappeared to the other side of the highway.

Murphy stopped in his tracks long enough that Pell thought he was going to fight the mechanic, this time with a zombie mob bearing down on them all. If he did, Pell decided to shoot the man himself, and his hand strayed to the sawed-off shotgun hanging off his thigh. But Murphy reconsidered, spun away, and grabbed an armful of packaged food from the rear of the van before huffing back up the slope.

Pell stepped to the back of the wreck and was given a milk crate filled almost to the brim with loose shotgun shells. He scrambled up to the highway and his waiting van.

When he reached the top, Fist was gone.

Quickly depositing the shells into the back of the van, he went to the guardrail and stared at the zombies moving toward them. Several dozen of the creatures spread over the street like an infection of black pox.

Pell blinked. Casually walking toward the undead with two unsheathed Bowie knives was the grim and armored shape of Fist. He had donned his hockey helmet, and he strutted toward the dead without any backup. He took his time, looking this way and that, as if wondering which would be the first to perish.

The corpses drifted toward him, leering and challenging him with rotting voices.

In reply, the Norse leader stabbed the first creature through the face. He knifed two more, taking them through the sides of their skulls. A pair of zombies feebly reached for him, and he kicked both away with a boot and a grunt, clearing a killing zone. He decapitated one and crushed the head of another he’d thrown to the ground with a boot heel. More of the dead wobbled forth, focusing toward the man as if he were a gate, and Fist put down zombie after zombie, ending their moans with curt crunches of metal and bone, or the heavy, clay-like clatter of a shattering skull.

Pell watched, awestruck, as Fist decimated the approaching crowd in a slow cadence of violence, showing the dead what little concern he had for them. Though none of the Norsemen feared the dead, no one would wade into a crowd of them alone and start swinging. They had long since learned the best way to combat the decomposing legions was as a closed unit. Other warriors stopped at the guard rail and shouted, pumping fists, and for a moment, Pell imagined Fist not even hearing them, but simply humming to himself.

“Finish loading the vans!” Pell shouted.

“Done,” someone called back.

Pell put his hands to his mouth and yelled, “We’re clear!”

A moment later, Fist started backing up, disengaging from the reaching arms of the dead. The zombies pursued him, but like many times before, they did not heed what was underfoot and stumbled over the wrecks of their truly dead companions. One topless, grey-blue man dressed in sweatpants rushed Fist. The Norse leader’s hands snapped out like thunderbolts, smashing into the dead thing’s head and whisking it off its feet. The remaining zombies stumbled and flowed over the body, hiding it from sight.

Fist walked away from his pursuers and contemptuously showed them his back. He glanced back every ten steps or so, just in case another runner appeared.

The cheering died as Fist hiked up the incline to the waiting vans. No one had truly expected him to die.

“Saddle up,” Fist bellowed as he reached the top, slapping a speechless Pell on the shoulder to get him moving. The driver didn’t think his leader had been in danger either, but he hadn’t seen anyone walk right into a crowd of the dead, alone, as Fist had just done.

Still moving, Fist walked up to Murphy, who stood his ground.

“Did I hear you giving orders, Murph?”

“You might have.”

Fist’s blackened face scowled behind his face cage. “Don’t get used to it.”

The other man blinked.

Warning delivered, Fist got aboard his van. Pell and several of the others had paused to watch the short exchange, and Pell thought for certain Murphy was about to be gutted. He’d seen Fist do it for less. Shaking his head, Pell and the others climbed into their rigs. Sitting in the passenger seat, the face-caged profile of Fist stared ahead at the open highway.

“Find an off ramp and take us down there,” the leader rumbled. “Time for a show.”

Pell settled in and pressed down on the gas pedal.

The vans rolled down an exit and went into an unnamed neighborhood, a collection of houses and small commercial buildings. Zombies tried to stop this invasion, blocking the road in small clumps, but the vans knocked them down and crept over their cold forms, their bones crackling underneath the tires. The rig pigs inside squealed in delight. Fist rolled down his window and repeatedly slapped the side of the door with a meaty hand. More walking corpses came into the street—attracted by the fleshy beat and the sound of engines—but not enough to stop the machines. They were crushed like the others, and once the convoy reached the end of the road, they turned about and drove back, flattening any remaining zombies. On the third pass, Fist released his Norsemen. Almost a dozen erupted from the side and rear doors, whooping and roaring and making quick work of anything moving. They decimated any zombies that came into view, striking them down with wild mirth. Heads were struck from bodies or cleaved in two. The men joked and became almost uncontrollable, but they ran to the vans when their rides started moving again, falling in and walking alongside the vehicles.

As the sun descended and the shadows lengthened upon a road littered with unmoving bodies, the Norsemen kicked in doors and smashed windows of businesses and houses. In twos and threes, they raided property after property. When they discovered something of use, they took it outside and dumped it on the curb. Once finished with their looting, they set fire to the houses. The homes of the day weren’t the ones of yesteryear. While up to building code standards, open concept was the most popular floor plan, and coincidentally the best for allowing a fire to breathe. With no small rooms in a dwelling to contain a fire, cheap prefab building materials, and an overabundance of glue, open flames quickly grew into truly monstrous things and gutted houses from the inside out.

By nightfall, the Norsemen had ignited whole streets, still screaming, singing, and merrily basking in the heat and smoke from the impressive blazes.

In the morning, the fires still burned.

But the vans had moved on.

None of the corpses’ clothes would fit Scott, not even if he took off his Nomex coat––which he had no intention of doing. It was hot and heavy, and running in it would probably give him a heart attack, but it was also the most protective gear he possessed.

Having crept downstairs to where he’d shot the family, Scott stood in their midst and quietly contemplated his next move, his thoughts broken by the cries of the undead outside, as dull and dreary as foghorns around a midnight bay. The father of the family had a smaller frame than Scott and he decided any clothing would have to be cut off. He pulled the Bowie knife out of his boot and held it up like a scalpel. He dropped to one knee and grimaced at the smell of dead flesh. Taking the clothes off the corpses was all well and good in theory, but the reality was going to be difficult to do without puking. Scott pulled the bottom edge of his firefighter’s ninja mask up over his nose. He took a hold of one pant leg and inserted the knife. He sawed the length of the leg, straightening the dead limb out as needed, until he got to the upper thigh.