"What?"

"That's how I get back man," Death said plainly. "That's how I leave this place. I do myself. Course, I can't do myself now, seeing as I'm the most f.u.c.ked up I've evah been. The car crash would've done the trick, but I wasn't ready to leave then."

"Why not?" Tony demanded.

"I just wasn't ready."

"And now?"

"Pain is too close." Death explained. "He knows I'm around here. Too many of us special folk in the area. You can bet that c.o.c.ksucker is just waiting for the next vibe of agony, so he can zero in and kick the living s.h.i.t out of me. And it'll happen when this spinal s.h.i.t wears off. f.u.c.k that. Time to go. I had my days in the sun."

Death looked Tony straight in the eye. "Give me the morphine."

The request made Tony hesitate. "Morphine?"

"Yeah, the morphine you got. You think I forgot or something?"

Again Tony hesitated. Then, he reached into his pocket and felt the injectors he had retrieved from the car trunk so long ago. There were six of them. He pulled them out and slowly handed them over. Death took them one by one. He gave Tony an approving nod. He plucked the plastic tops off of the autoinjectors and studied the needles. Nodding to himself, Death wasted no time in placing one to his neck. He placed a thumb on the end, ready to deliver the load, and then took a breath.

"Wait," Tony said.

Death looked up at him.

"I mean, that's it?" Tony grated. "I travel warp speed across the country to backwater BC to find you-which I do-and then get to watch you shoot up?"

Death made a face. "You wanted me to go back, right? I'm convinced. If Pain gets his hands on me, he won't let me die. He'll just keep right on torturing me for all f.u.c.king eternity. And if I'm in f.u.c.king limbo, where does that put the human race? All the bad parts of the Bible. And probably worse." He regarded them all. "Well, that's it then. It's been real people, and it's been fun, but it hasn't been real fun."

With that, he jammed the autoinjector into his jugular.

He grimaced for a moment and held the injector in place while the load of morphine was delivered. When it was done, he dropped it to the floor and readied the second one. "What?" Death fired at them. "Never seen someone overdose before?"

"Not on purpose," Crew commented quietly.

Death injected number two, and held it there for a moment. He sighed and smiled. "Well, you're in for a treat, buddy. You're going to see a lot more before I'm done here."

Then, the cabin shook in fury.

It was a loud collective slap, as if four separate waves had clapped the walls of the dwelling at once, and it was frightful enough to make all within jump, with the exception of Fear. The weathered planks covering the breaches made by the attack earlier began to buckle inwards. Wood splintered loudly. Sounds of the dead permeated the interior. The Stickman pressed himself in a corner, eyes wide with fright. Danny and Crew fell back towards the kitchen to where Tony and Lucy stood. All of them looked to the door. Something was pressing very hard up against it.

"Keep those f.u.c.kers outta here!" Death wailed at them.

"Keep them out!" Tony screamed at the men. They all looked at him with eyes flooded with terror. Hands, black hands of the dead, seeped in underneath the wood nailed over the doors and windows. They turned like huge seeking worms, looking for purchase, clawing into the wood's surface.

A frantic Tony reached into his coat and withdrew the knives he had. He gathered up his hatchet and bat. He gave the three-inch Beretta knife to Danny, who took it but merely gazed at the horrors trying to enter the cabin. Tony gave Crew the military boot knife with the four-inch blade. He moved and shoved the baseball bat into the Stickman's hands. "Stay in the middle!" Tony shouted at Lucy. Her beautiful face looked petrified. Tony mentally vowed to let nothing happen to her while he drew breath.

He flew at the door and hacked away a hand with one chop of his hatchet. He placed his shoulder against the bulging wood and heaved back. Another hand sought to grab his shoulder. Tony twisted away and chopped. Fingers fell to the floor. Another hand burst through the wood in an explosion of shards and splinters, and clawed for his face. He caught the wrist and cut through it with one swipe of the hatchet.

Then, he looked back.

The others were frozen.

"f.u.c.king move!" Tony screamed at them. But he could see they could not. Their fear was too great. The Stickman had wormed himself as far into his corner as he could, bat clutched before him. Danny and Crew crouched, looking everywhere at once, and doing nothing. They were rooted in place by the sudden ferocity of the undead's attack. Over their shoulders, Tony saw the wood covering the window in the kitchen burst apart, and a dark writhing ma.s.s of bodies began to ooze through. At the door, he felt the planks crack and bulge from the pressure building outside. An icy blast of wind blew through the house.

And Fear stepped up.

Tony saw him-saw f.u.c.khead Freddietake a quick look around at the situation and then focused on the men in the room. Almost instantly, Tony saw their expressions of fright melt away. Incredibly, he felt the same way, and he quickly looked upon Fear with an expression of wonder and understanding. Perhaps that was why Time insisted Fear come along in the first place. For so long, Tony thought of the thing called Freddy as something evil, but now he saw Time's wisdom in including him in the hunt for Death. Only now did Tony understand when it was most important and needed.

For not only could Fear inflict his nature with but a thought...

He could also take it away.

Whatever terror, dread or panic the men felt suddenly disappeared and left them blinking, wondering pointedly what just happened?

It was Crew who moved first. He bolted for the breach in the kitchen, grabbing a zombie halfway through the window by its rotting head and twisting it clear off its shoulders. The corpse shuddered, and its upper torso fell into the sink while its lower half remained outside. But Crew did not stop there. He grabbed limbs where they snaked in and broke them with such savagery that Tony could only stare at the man's single-handed butchery of the dead.

"Holy f.u.c.k," he breathed as he watched Crew halt the dead from coming into the kitchen.

Danny also moved. The big man rushed to the windows in the front of the cabin and began stabbing and slashing at the limbs attempting to break through.

The Stickman bounded past him, bat raised and crying out at a stunned Tony "'Old on, me son, 'old on!" He smashed in the face and skull of one zombie just above Tony's head. He fought with the fury of a man without a drop of fear. Tony's own adrenalin rushed in then, and he lifted his hatchet to swing.

And the battle for the cabin began in earnest.

Injecting morphine shot number four, Death watched it all go down with a s.p.a.ced out smile on his features. Everything seemed to move in super slow motion. What was it they called it in The Matrix? He remembered then. Bullet time.

In the kitchen, Crew fought with a terrible energy that actually pushed the tide of zombies back. He felt no fear whatsoever, and what remained was an overwhelming desire to kill the should-be-dead. He was a rock in a river, and any corpse that sought to pa.s.s had their limbs twisted and broken or, much to Crew's surprise, simply ripped free. He removed the heads of five of the dead, the heads falling to the kitchen floor like stringy black coconuts. He punched when he could and used the military knife in an underhanded fashion. He slashed the fingers off one seeking arm, and when it did not retreat, he drove the blade through the rotten skull of the owner.

That seemed to be the last.

When he was done, he stepped back and surveyed the area. h.e.l.l's kitchen, he thought with dark humour, witnessing the ma.s.s of ownerless limbs, black blood and fingers splashed all over.

At the front of the cabin, Tony, Danny and the Stickman fought with a calmness that could only be matched by the best locally-grown pot. They placed their shoulders to the splitting timbers, and as limbs came through, they held and cut, dropping the limbs in seconds. They held the attack back before Tony jerked his head up and looked over the Stickman's grimacing face.

"Danny, get to the washroom!"

"Why?"

"They can get in there!"

"s.h.i.t," the giant hissed. He broke away from the door and window, and headed for the john.

"Just ye and I now, me son," the Stickman smiled at Tony.

He did not smile back.

Two powerful frost bitten arms smashed through the planks and grabbed a hold of the wood before either man could react. Black fingers gouged wood, making it squeal. The arms pulled backwards, and a huge hole cracked open in the front window. Dark bodies pushed forward, moaning as they came on. Tony chopped with his hatchet, taking one zombie between its unseeing eyes and splitting open its skull. The thing fell back to be replaced by two more. The Stickman threw down his bat. He grabbed and broke three of the arms in a matter of seconds while Tony dealt with more clutching hands. They fought side by side, fuelled by adrenalin, and in perfect timing with each other. When one man stepped back, the other stepped in and held the line. If a stray hand sought to grab the man standing before the breach, the other would disable it by breaking it, severing it, or simply ripping the hand off its rotting wrist.

"How many are there?" Tony heard Lucy from somewhere behind.

The front door exploded inwards with a loud snap and groan of wood. Zombies fell into the living room with tidal force. Lucy and Fear stepped back, placing the sofa between them and the rush of undead coming into the cabin. The dead pushed past Tony and the Stickman who were still holding the front windows, and staggered and pawed their way towards the form of Death on the couch. Death watched them shamble at him. He had just finished injecting the fifth shot of morphine into his system. He smiled.

And flipped them the finger.

One tall undead reached for him, its lipless mouth opened in a feral hiss. The thing still had eyeb.a.l.l.s in a head that had been grotesquely half caved in. Death could no longer smell the thing because of the morphine, but he winced all the same at the horror. The thing was about to touch his ankles.

"Ugly f.u.c.ker ain't"

A baseball bat whipped through the air and removed the head from the zombie's shoulders. Danny stepped up then and swung at a second head, shattering it with a sound of breaking clay. But the river of bodies did not falter, and they pushed the big man back before he could swing a third time. Zombies grabbed his bat, his arms and his shoulders. A zombie right in front of him leaned over the bat being held by a half dozen undead hands and opened its mouth wide to bite. Danny watched it coming.

There was a crack and wet crunch as Crew buried his knife to the hilt in the skull of the creature. He left it there. Then, he was moving forward, placing himself between a very stoned Death and an amazed Danny. The hit man had not carried a weapon into Halifax when he arrived, and now Danny understood why.

Crew was the f.u.c.king terminator.

He a.s.saulted the zombie tide from the side and tore into them with a fury and speed that either destroyed or crippled everything he touched. Anything that laid its hands on him was struck down immediately by fist, spinning elbows or devastating knees and kicks. Crew shattered kneecaps, snapped arms, popped elbows and plied back wrists. He flipped undead over his back and stomped on them when they hit the ground. In a blur, he punched and grabbed when he could, hooked thumbs into eye sockets, and twisted necks from their shoulders. In one instance where four zombies piled onto the American and seemed to have him, two of them suddenly crumpled to the floor with their knees broken and the remaining two were dispatched by fist and open hand.

Even Death was impressed.

The counter-charge of Crew was fierce enough to clear the room of attacking corpses in less than a minute. Danny plodded behind the man at a distance, smashing in the heads of any fallen foes still moving. Then Crew was at the door and, with a vicious front kick, drove the remaining zombies back out into the night. He paused and looked back at the others.

"Go f.u.c.k 'em up!" Death roared from the couch.

Crew smiled briefly. Danny handed him his knife and the two men exchanged a moment. The Stickman and Tony realized there was nothing outside the windows anymore and the sky was actually beginning to turn early dawn grey.

"That can't be right," Tony said, finding it hard to believe the night had pa.s.sed so quickly. But the darkness was fading, and the wind had also dropped. No snow fell. Peering outside, dark shapes formed up against the white gloom of the snow.

Crew had no trouble seeing them. "Only a few left. We take 'em?"

"h.e.l.l, yeah," Danny growled at his side. The Stickman moved to the door as well with Tony right behind him.

"Be careful out there," Lucy cried after them.

Three of the men piled outside, but Tony hesitated. He turned to look at Lucy standing next to Fear. Fright and panic filled her face. To Tony, it was her most beautiful expression yet. "Don't worry," he breathed.

And then he was gone.

Death dropped the last spent autoinjector on the floor. He exhaled mightily and smacked his lips. "Got any more of that s.h.i.t?"

"You took it all?" a surprised Fear asked him.

"Yup," Death replied.

"You're not dead," Lucy almost shouted out.

"Nope," Death agreed, popping the 'p' again. "Not even close. Wasn't enough s.h.i.t. f.u.c.kin s.h.i.t... s.h.i.t," he ended, studying himself seriously.

He regarded the open door of the cabin. Saw the snow that lay beyond. "You better get one of those guys back here."

Chapter 70.

As dawn approached, the snow began to take on the dark blue of morning. The storm had all but vanished. The wind subsided to a light breeze. Grey Northman watched impa.s.sively as the last of the undead horde was torn apart by the men emerging from the cabin's wrecked husk. He still wore his black ski mask, his face protected against the cold. He stood knee deep in the snow, his Nomex protective gear coated in frost. He shook his head in distaste. There were greater powers afoot here than he. The men were not being taken by the undead as they should have been, and now they were attacking? Where were the terror-stricken cattle Grey Northman had expected? These Mundanes were fearless. Even worse, they were inspired. The game had somehow been raised a level without Northman's knowing it.

"You've failed," he hissed to the Speaker for the Dead. The corpse at his side chose to remain silent. It gazed across the snowy field to where the last few zombies were being destroyed.

"Revengeeee," it finally managed, heedless of both Grey Northman and the destruction of its brethren. A terrifying sound came from the ruins of its throat.

The Minion watched as the four men dispatched the last zombie in their midst. It took only a moment before they spotted them, standing across the road made non-existent by the snow.

"Yes," Grey Northman agreed, his face wincing in the diminishing night. "Go, then."

The Speaker for the Dead moaned a frightening sound in what Northman alone understood as a battle cry, and then it lurched ahead to meet the four men coming towards them. In the early morning, the rags hanging off the dark corpse did not move, but its fingers flexed in b.l.o.o.d.y antic.i.p.ation.

"You will give me a little time at least," Northman said as he watched with dispa.s.sionate eyes. He was Plan B. He would not fail his master. Not when they were so close. Not even if it meant his own destruction. All of his time on this plane of existence had come to this. It was no surprise to him.

"A little time," Grey Northman whispered, holding his fire axe two handed across his pelvis.

His fingers flexed on his weapon.

The Speaker for the Dead closed with the first man. Crew looked back to Danny and gestured for the bat. Danny tossed it to him. Catching it, Crew quickly went into a batter's stance and spread his legs wide for balance.

The Speaker for the Dead did not falter. Its fingers, rotted to bare, black bone tips, came up like pointed hooks. It meant to plunge all ten into the flesh of the man before it. It did not pay attention to the warrior's stance. Its white marble eyes widened, its battle moan reached a peak.

The bat took its head off as neatly as an axe.

It landed in a plume of snow and disappeared from sight. The Speaker's body stood upright for a moment, its claws flicked open and close on air.

Then, it dropped quietly to its knees.

Crew landed the second swing of the bat into its torso, bending the corpse backwards on its legs and flattening it in drifts of snow.

The four men gathered around the last of the dead, studying its grey-black flesh and saying nothing in the gloom of the growing morning. They became distinctly aware then of how quiet it had become, of how the wind had disappeared. And how quickly the night was fading.

"This must be Time," Tony spoke aloud.

"'Oo?" The Stickman grunted.

"Time," Tony said. He looked up to the sky. "You never met him."

"We didn't?" Danny asked. There was too much s.h.i.t going on for him to try and disbelieve all of it. It was better to just accept all and go along for the ride. That's what Boomer said whenever he went on a bad mushroom trip.

"One more over there," Crew nodded.