The sergeant set the pace as the squad advanced. Quick, but not a sprint. Fast, but still slow to give the squad time to sight on individual targets as they advanced, as opposed to firing blindly into the mass before them. But most importantly, steady and relentless; they would not be giving up any ground, and every foot that they gained fighting forward, every inch of terrain that they covered, the squad would put behind them and continue onwards. There would be no retreat, not with a second horde of the Dead advancing on them from the north and getting closer by the moment.
From her position on the trailing right flank, Jun sighted through the telescopic scope of her T-99, picked out the glowing heart of another animated skeleton like the one who had attacked Curtis only a matter of moments before, and squeezed off a round. Her shot hit true, as evidenced by the muffled thump of an explosion followed by an expanding cloud of bone splinters, shredded cartilage, and desiccated viscera.
Jun could hear the voices of the refugees shuffling forward in the midst of the vanguard, muttering prayers in a babble of voices, calling on whatever divine forces might still be receptive to the pleas of the living to provide assistance.
Moving steadily forward, Jun swung the barrel of her rifle around, searching out another target. She didn’t have to search for long. There was one of the Dead already emerging from the dissipating cloud of bone her last shot had produced, shambling forward through the remains of its undead brethren without any sign of recognition or acknowledgement. That was something else that separated the living from the Dead. The undead forces of the enemy would never pause to mourn a fallen comrade, never be spurred to rash action by the fall of another that they held dear. It was unknown whether the Dead held anything dear, for that matter, but that was more a philosophical point than a tactical one. Where a living opponent might be driven to act contrary to their own strategic advantage through grief or anger or the desire for vengeance, the Dead scarcely seemed to take any notice of losses on their side at all. Each of the Dead might just as well be an army of one advancing on a shared enemy, rather than a member of a larger force acting in unison.
But this, in its own way, was often an advantage for the living. A group of enemies composed of living, breathing, thinking soldiers could coordinate their efforts, opting to have one member of the team take point and others to defend the rear, just as Jun and the rest of the squad were doing now. But a group of the Dead were all driven by the same naked appetites and instincts, each of them individually propelled forward by the desire to satiate their insatiable hungers. There had been times when fighting the Dead on the Eastern Front that this bit of wisdom had come in handy for Jun, as she had positioned herself at the mouth of a chokepoint through which only one body could pass at a time. The enemy Dead would crowd the other side, pushing against one another ceaselessly in their attempt to break through to the other side where light and life beaconed to them, leaving Jun free to fire on them one-by-one as they tried to squeeze through the narrow opening. There were times when she had managed to plug a breech in the wall with the bodies of the fallen enemy themselves, at least until the fallen Dead began to quickly decay.
To her left and a few paces ahead, Jun could hear Werner’s MP40 barking in his hands, firing round after round into the horde advancing towards them. In battle, any indecision or awkwardness that might occasionally be glimpsed in the German’s manner in peaceful moments was long forgotten: he executed each maneuver flawlessly, placing every shot where it would do the most strategic damage, selecting his targets with expert care and precision.
Jun squeezed the trigger of her T-99, taking a moment’s grim satisfaction in seeing the head of one of the shambling Dead exploding into mist, then working the bolt of the rifle to chamber another round and selecting her next target.
Lights burned deep within the cloud of dust, and before Jun could fire another round a burning figure burst forward into clear view, limbs flailing as it shrieked a horrifying scream and came charging towards the vanguard.
Jun was flustered, having had close calls with the fire zombies on several occasions. She swung around her rifle’s barrel, her heart in her throat, and fired off a round…
The round went wide, missing the head of the burning figure by several inches. The burning figure raced forward, mouth open wide in an inhuman howl.
Hands trembling, Jun struggled to work the action of her rifle’s bolt again, but her fingers slipped and her palm jammed down hard against the rounded end of the bolt. Cursing in Mandarin, she shook her hand, and tried again to take hold of the bolt. Only seconds remained until…
From her left came the sudden bark of Werner’s MP40 and the burning zombie’s head exploded just instants before its entire body collapsed into a pile of ash on the ground.
Jun chanced a quick glance in Werner’s direction, and the German soldier gave her an abbreviated nod before turning his attention back to the horde of Dead charging towards them.
Swallowing hard and collecting her wits, Jun worked the bolt to chamber another round in her rifle, took a deep breath, and then sighted her next target.
She only got off a single round more with her rifle before she heard the sergeant shouting from the head of the vanguard.
“Close quarters!” the sergeant called out. “Mow the bastards down!”
Jun’s gaze darted in his direction, and she could see that the leading point of the vanguard was now almost within arm’s reach of the forward-most of the horde. She slung the T-99 over her shoulder and limbered up her Thompson submachine gun.
Jun fired a burst of submachine gun fire at a shambling Dead who threaten to drive through the narrow gap between herself and Werner, and then took a step over its headless and already rotting corpse without missing a beat. As she did so, the Dead who had been following in the shambler’s wake were still shambling towards the spot that she’d just vacated, and were now having to turn their lumbering attentions towards the spot that she had advanced into.
This was another of the instances in which the enemy Dead’s mindless drives could be used to the advantage of the living. The Dead were forever driven to shamble or shriek or hurtle towards the place where their living prey was in that precise moment. They could not strategize or plan ahead, moving instead to intercept their prey where it would shortly be, instead. So that even in the midst of a large number of enemy Dead, the living could still work this to their advantage if they simply kept moving. Aim for the head or the heart, scan for incoming, and keep moving.
In a scrum such as this, of course, there were the grasping hands to contend with, to say nothing of the deafening shrieks and the noxious scent of rotting flesh. But the basic principle remained the same.
Jun was directing a spray of fire across a wide arc before her when one of the shamblers, stumbling forward on two stumps of legs that each ended at the knee, managed to grab hold of her right arm. The Dead managed to yank her right hand away from the trigger of her Thompson M1A1, and was dragging the arm towards its own yawning maw, teeth gnashing as its rotting jaw worked furiously in its ruined mouth.
For the briefest of instants, barely the duration of a heartbeat, Jun felt a momentary panic. This was familiar, too, in a far less pleasant way. She remembered the sounds of her friends and colleagues in Moscow screaming as the rising tide of the Dead had dragged them under, and the feeling of helplessness that had overwhelmed her as she watched them go, unable to save them. For that brief heartbeat, she could feel that same sense of helplessness threatening to rise up and overtake her, as she struggled fruitlessly to drag her arm from the shambler’s vicelike grip.
Then that helpless feeling was squashed down as an iron resolve settled over her like a suit of armor, and she gritted her teeth in barely control fury.
“Let go!” she shouted as she swung around the stock of the Thompson in her left hand and bashed it into the side of the shambler’s skull. The submachine gun’s stock slammed into the Dead’s head with a sickening thud and a crack, but still
the Dead maintained its grip on her arm.
The vanguard was advancing. Jun could see the rearmost of the refugees from the corner of her eye, their backs to her as they huddled together and shuffled forward in the sergeant’s wake. If Jun was not able to keep pace with them and defend the vanguard’s right flank, then the Dead would be free to approach and attack from the rear.
Jun referred to the shambler grappling her with a Mandarin obscenity that would have shocked her mother to hear, and then brought the stock of the Thompson crashing down onto the skull of the Dead, and again, and again. A deep rage had risen up from deep within Jun, and her vision went red as she continued to bash in the shambler’s skull again and again and again, and still its desiccated claw of a hand continued to grip her arm.
“Jun!” the voice of Werner broke through the red haze, shaking her out of her violent reverie. “On your right!”
She looked down and realized that the hand which gripped her right arm was no longer attached to a body, as the Dead who had grappled her had collapsed in a heap on the ground, its forearm snapping off in the process. She shook the severed limb off her just in time to swing her submachine gun back in line and fire at the next undead shambler who was approaching from her right.
As the next Dead fell in a heap Jun moved quickly it until she regained her position at the trailing edge of the vanguard. She didn’t know if the refugees had noticed her absence behind them or not.
The zombies who had been shambling towards her previous position were in the process of changing course and heading towards the ground that Jun now occupied, but she didn’t intend to stick around long enough for any of them to catch up. A few carefully placed bursts from her Thompson cleared a path ahead and to the right of her current position as the vanguard climbed over the bodies that had fallen before them, already rotting to putrescence beneath their feet, the smell of foul decay thick in the air. The echoes of gun fire and shotgun blasts echoed all around them, as the members of the deadhunter squad carried out their grim mission without hesitation.
Jun was in the process of swapping out the now-empty drum magazine for her submachine gun with a full one, hurrying lest one of the faster moving zombies managed to close the distance to her before she was through, and then swung the barrel up and sighted for her next target. It was only then that she realized that there were no more of the Dead remaining in front of the vanguard, only behind them. They had broken through the line of the undead horde and were now completely on the other side.
“Double time!” shouted Sergeant Josiah from the lead of the vanguard. “Flat out until we make base camp!”
The vanguard took off in a sprint down the road, with Jun and Curtis in the rear drifting closer together, closing in behind the rear of the refugees, covering them from any attack from behind.
“See? What’d I tell ’ya?” Curtis said, slowing down for a brief moment to fire a round from his M1 Carbine at one of the glowing heart of a skeleton who was racing towards them from behind, bony limbs flailing. His shot hit its mark, and the skeleton erupted into a bloom of splintered bone. It was as if he was trying to wash away any memory of the way that the skeleton that had burst from the ground only a short while before had made him a frantic mess for a short while. “A piece of cake.”
From the far corner of the horde one of the suicide zombies came charging towards them, grenade clasped to its hollow chest, a horrible shriek issuing from its wide-open maw. Curtis recoiled in panic, fumbling with his M1, almost dropping it in the process.
With cool precision, Jun drew her Webley from its holster, sighted along its barrel, and planted a round dead square in the suicide zombie’s forehead. It toppled, arms falling to its side and its grip on the grenade loosening.
“Right,” Jun said with a sidelong glance in Curtis’s direction as he watched wide-eyed as the grenade exploded, sending bits of rotten flesh and bone fragments flying in all directions. Curtis had developed a kind of phobia of the suicide zombies ever since one of them nearly detonated right in his face a couple of months earlier, and now he seemed to lose all composure if suddenly presented with one without warning. “Now come on, you heard the sergeant, let’s get moving!”
Chapter 9
THE SUN WAS just beginning to set behind the western horizon. The undead horde that the sergeant had driven the vanguard through still trailed them, followed not far behind by the second horde that had been following some distance to the north, and if Jun and the others were to stop advancing them the Dead who remained up and ambulatory would be on them with grasping hands and biting jaws in a matter of moments. So it was a considerable sense of relief when they caught sight of the stockade fence around their base camp, rising to the south, with electrical spotlights shining brightly from poles high atop the corners of the fence, and a second wire fence encircling the whole camp at a distance of a dozen paces or so.
Jun was eager to get behind the safety of those walls. They had been travelling since sunup with only the one brief rest in the afternoon, and had been moving as fast as their legs would carry them since breaking through the horde of the undead the better part of an hour before. And none too soon, as the refugees that they were escorting seemed barely able to stay upright. Not that Jun wasn’t in sore need of a rest herself. The idea of setting down her weapons and her pack, or sitting herself down somewhere… She paused, sighing deeply at the thought of unlacing her boots and stretching out her bare feet for a while. It feel like ages since she had last had a chance to wash up and properly relax for a moment.
But so long as they remained exposed and out in the open, she couldn’t drop her guard even for an instant. All it would take was a single undead menace bursting from the ground beneath her after she’d put down her weapons and put up her feet, and her long battle against the forces of the Dead would finally be at an end, and not in a good way.
“Anybody home?” the sergeant called up to the watch tower that rose above the stockade fence. They were only a short distance from the gate, and by now they should have been issued a challenge by the guards on watch. But while a spotlight shone from its swivel mount atop the watch tower, its beam was not pointed at the approaching vanguard on the road, but was instead directed aimlessly off into the night sky. So unless the guards were watchful of airborne zombies winging their way towards the camp, then it seemed that the approaches were not being covered.
Jun found herself wondering about the possibilities of there actually being airborne Dead, and already beginning to formulate possible strategic defenses against them when a voice called down from the watchtower above.
“Who’s that, then?” It sounded like whoever was up in the tower had just been rousted from a deep sleep.
Jun was still thinking about how best to defend oneself against an undead menace attacking from the air. It was an unconscious habit she had of dealing with nervous energy, or of staving off fatigue; come up with a hypothetical, and then perseverate on possible solutions until some other productive task presented itself to her. Her eyes and ears remained open to her surroundings, wary of any encroaching threat, but her conscious thoughts busied themselves with trivial speculations.
The sergeant was identifying himself and the rest of the squad.
“And we’ve got a group of refugees down off the mountains, civilians in need of medical attention and secure lodgings.”
There was a hushed exchange that took place atop the tower for several moments, a back and forth that registered as nothing more than a susurration by the time it reached Jun’s ears, and then she could hear the reinforced gate in the stockade fence beginning to be cranked open.
“Okay, you’re clear to enter,” the voice called down from the watchtower. “But be quick about it, looks like you’ve got Dead on your tail.”
“We know that, jackass,” Curtis snarled in the direction of the tower as they ushered the refugees in through the gate and into the security of the base camp. “Who the heck do you think we’ve been saving thes
e poor bastards from this whole time?”
The refugees all seemed shell-shocked after the events of the day, and their reprieve time and again from the nameless undead who seemed to hound their heels. They scarcely even spoke now, seemed hardly to react to their surroundings, but simply moved in the direction that the sergeant told them to, stopped when he said to stop, spoke only when he fired questions directly at them.
Once the last of the refugees was safely inside and Curtis and Jun had made it through the gate, the sergeant signaled up to the watchtower for the gate to be closed again. As the gate began to creak shut, Jun saw one of the tower guards descending a ladder that was attached to the side of the tower facing the interior of the camp, a rifle slung across his back and binoculars hanging from his neck.
He wore the uniform of a major in the British infantry, with a battered beret atop his head and the yellow armband of the original Survivors Brigade wound around his upper arm. It signified that he was one of the combatants who had been in the battlefield fighting the last war when the Dead had first climbed from their graves and the surviving members of all of the living armies on both sides of the old conflict had been forced to set aside their differences and fight together for the living.
Most of the Resistance fighters who Jun had served with since transferring from Woolwich to Reclamation Zone Italia had been newcomers like herself, who had only recently joined the effort long after the Dead War had already begun; or else they were soldiers like Werner and Curtis who had served out the last days of the previous war in some form of ignominy, prisoners of war or members of penal battalions; or they were volunteers like Sergeant Josiah and Sibyl, who had been civilian adventurers of one form or another before the outbreak of the Dead War, but who now served within a paramilitary chain of command. It was rare to encounter someone who wore the sign of the original Survivors Brigade so prominently, in large part because the death toll in those early days of the Dead War had been so high, and there were precious few of those initial resistance fighters still among the living.
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