Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  “God damn it,” Curtis shouted from the sinks at the rear of the barracks, “which one of you jokers used up all the damn hot water?!”

  Jun shook her head. She just hoped that they would all survive the days to come…

  Chapter 12

  “FIRST AND FOREMOST,” Major Wilkins said as he began the mission briefing, a broad smile stretching beneath his bushy mustache, “don’t for a moment imagine that I’m ordering you simply to march up the side of a mountain.”

  Curtis Goodwin turned to Jun and the rest of the squad with a smug expression on his face, and silently mouthed, “See, I told you” to them all.

  “The mere idea is preposterous,” the major went on. “That would take far too long, and time is of the essence.”

  Jun watched as Curtis’s smug expression melted into a look of crushing disappointment and bewildered confusion. She stifled a giggle behind her hand, turning her attention back to the major.

  “Well, if you don’t mind me asking…?” Sergeant Josiah began.

  “Of course, of course,” the major answered, waving a hand dismissively, “always happy to hear comments and suggestions from the rank and file, my door is always open, that sort of thing. Never let it be said that Colin Alistair Wilkins is a stickler for needless hierarchy and hidebound tradition, blind to the possibilities inherent in questioning accepted wisdom, eh? No, I should say not. I dare say that none of us would be here today if we had failed to adapt in the early days of the Dead War, what? Survival is the name of the game, and adaptation is key to survival. How does that bit from Darwin go, survival of the fitted?”

  “Fittest, sir,” corrected the man with the neatly-trimmed mustache wearing a flight suit in the corner of the room, not looking up from the clipboard he was reading. “The core concept of Darwinian evolution can best be expressed as ‘survival of the fittest,’ though the phrase originates not with Darwin himself but with Herbert Spencer in response to reading the former’s ‘On The Origin Of The Species’, though Darwin later adopted it for his own use in subsequent volumes.”

  “Quite right,” the major plowed ahead after a cursory nod in his direction. “Now, as I was saying, time here is of the essence, and so a more expedient means of getting your team into position will be—”

  “Sir?” the sergeant interrupted with a little more urgency to his tone, holding up his hand like a student in a classroom to catch the major’s attention.

  “What is it now, man?” Major Wilkins replied, blustering.

  “I never actually asked my question, is all.” Sergeant Josiah was clearly trying to keep his tone respectful, but Jun could see that he was struggling a bit with it.

  “Well, get on with it, then.” The major leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest, a slight scowl on his face. Then, before the sergeant had even had a chance to reply, the major gestured impatiently and added, “Come along, we haven’t got all day. Time being of the essence, as I said…?”

  “How,” Josiah began, keeping his tone even tempered, “are we supposed to get up the mountain?” He paused, and then added with emphasis, “Sir?”

  “I was getting to that, confound it,” Major Wilkins snarled back. “If you hadn’t been distracting me with talk about evolution and such like I’d have already gone over that by now.”

  Curtis leaned in close to Jun’s side and in a voice scarcely above a whisper said, “We are all going to die.”

  “Now where was I?” the major went on, thankfully not having heard the young American’s words.

  “Something about Darwin, dear?” Sibyl chimed in, sweetly.

  “No, dash it all,” the major scowled, “now I’ve lost the thread…”

  “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” the man in the flight-suit in the corner said, his eyes still on the clipboard in his hands. He flipped over the top page and studied the one beneath just as closely.

  “What’s that, Hector?” Major Wilkins said, glancing over in the man’s direction. Jun recognized him from the mess tent the night before, the one who had been reading a stack of letters and laughing. He didn’t seem to be finding his clipboard this morning as entertaining, but it evidently was equally as engrossing. He had barely looked up from it since Jun and the rest of the squad had entered the room. “What’s that gibberish you were spouting, now?”

  “It was Latin, sir, but it is not really germane.” He lowered the clipboard and fixed his gaze on the major. “I believe you were about to introduce my role in the proceedings, unless I am very much mistaken.”

  The major looked momentarily confused, and in response the man named Hector held his hands out at shoulder height, swaying back and forth slightly as he made a humming sound that faintly resembled the airplane engines that had roused Jun from slumber that morning.

  “Ah, yes, a capital suggestion.” The major clapped his hands in triumph, and then gestured in Hector’s direction as he turned his attention back to the sergeant and the rest of the squad. “Allow me to present Captain Hector Jennings, late of the RAF, seconded to the Resistance at the beginning of the current difficulties. You could not be in safer hands.”

  And with that, Major Wilkins simply turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

  Jun caught the sergeant’s eye, and could see that he was as perplexed by the major’s sudden departure as she was.

  “You’ll have to excuse the major,” Hector said as he stepped in front of the squad, both hands on the clipboard held at waist-height. “He’s a decent chap and a ruddy good leader when the chips are down, but it all takes its toll on him and he can get a bit dotty when the pressure is off. Still, acta non verba, eh?”

  “He seemed lucid enough over dinner last night,” Sibyl observed, looking towards the door through which the major had just exited. “A trifle maudlin, perhaps, but otherwise right as rain.”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong, the old boy isn’t quite clapped out just yet. He’s still right enough in the head. But with all of those poor souls gone for six after the bally rotters made it over the wall…? It weighs heavily on him, is all I’m saying, and sometimes gets a touch preoccupied.” Hector drummed his fingers on the clipboard and chewed the corners of his mustache. Then he shrugged and put a smile on his face. “Still, ad meliora, eh, what?”

  Hector paused expectantly, as if waiting for some kind of response, but Jun and the others just treated him to blank stares.

  “Ad meliora?” he repeated, like a teacher prompting a classroom with a hint and waiting for one of the students to come up with the correct answer. Then he translated, sighing, “Towards better things, then?”

  “You’ve got our full attention, cap’n.” Sergeant Josiah crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  Hector brightened immediately, eyes widening.

  “Ah, another devotee of the bard, I see,” he said eagerly. “Though as I’m sure you know, the original line was actually ‘lay on, Macduff,’ and Macbeth was in fact exhorting his Macduff to carry out a vigorous attack upon himself rather than to lead him anywhere, though the line has been commonly misquoted and misapplied since the middle of the last century when…”

  The sergeant cleared his throat loudly, interrupting the captain’s ramble.

  “The briefing?” Josiah said pointedly, remaining immobile with his arms still crossed. “I seem to recall there was some suggestion that you might explain how it is we’re expected to reach the top of a danged mountain?”

  Hector blinked several times, mouth hanging open slightly, as if caught unawares and needing a moment to process what he’d heard.

  “Oh, I’d thought that much was obvious,” he finally said with an amused chuckle. “I’ll be escorting you there myself.”

  By way of illustration, as he’d done a short while before, Hector held his hands at shoulder height and swayed slightly back and forth.

  “In an airplane,” he added, speaking loudly and over-enunciating as if addressing the hard of hearing or the dimwitted.


  Jun and the others exchanged a glance.

  “You expect to land a plane on top of a goddamn mountain?” Curtis said in disbelief, more or less speaking for them all.

  “Oh, good heavens, no,” Hector answered hurriedly, shaking his head. “I’m a dab hand behind the stick, I’ll be the first to admit, but even I wouldn’t try to set a kite down on those rocky peaks. Quickest way to get the chop I can think of. It’d be a damned short flight and no return trip for any of us. No, we’ll be hedge-hopping it as low as possible to reduce our exposure to any flack, and the second you lot join the Caterpillar Club I’ll jink away and back up into the wild blue yonder, as the Yanks call it.”

  Jun was still trying to work out what “gone for six” meant exactly, and was having increasing difficulty following everything that Hector was saying. She’d prided herself on picking up British and American idioms fairly quickly on arriving at Woolwich late the previous year, having found that the more formal English that she’d learned in the course of her duties as a diplomat’s attaché only somewhat resembled the language as actually used by native speakers. But listening to Captain Jennings speak reminded her of those first nights after she’d arrived in the barracks for anti-necro training, where she could identify almost every word spoken to her but often struggled to interpret the speaker’s actual meaning.

  But glancing over at her squad mates, Jun could see that she was far from the only one who was struggling to follow what Hector was saying.

  “Caterpillar… Club?” Curtis was the first to give voice to the confusion that Jun was sure that they all shared.

  “Sure, caterpillar as in ‘silk,’ eh, what? Umbrellas?” Hector grinned for a moment, then the grin began to fade as he saw the bewildered looks that persisted on the faces of the squad. “Silk as in parachutes?”

  Jun could hear Sibyl gasp, and thought that the Englishwoman might be frightened, but when she glanced in her direction Jun could see a smile playing at the corners of Sibyl’s mouth as her eyes flashed, and she knew that had been a gasp of excitement and not one of fear. From the stories she told of her adventures before the war, Sibyl had made it clear that she had been a thrill seeker in her younger days, and the thought of jumping out of an airplane was obviously appealing to her.

  For her part, Jun was less certain.

  “You have all been trained up on parachuting, haven’t you?” Hector asked, a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice.

  Jun and the others alternatively shook their heads or muttered “No” or some combination of the two.

  “Well, then,” Hector tucked the clipboard under one arm and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “In that case we should get started. I think the training rig is still set up in the old hangar, assuming we can drag together enough mattresses or bales of hay for you to…”

  Whatever Hector had been about to say would have to remain a mystery, as his voice was suddenly drowned out by the piercing peals of alarm bells sounding from somewhere outside the building.

  “The devil…? Hector said, turning in the direction of the door.

  A heartbeat later, as if in response, the door slammed open and Major Wilkins thrust his head and shoulders inside.

  “Don’t just stand there with your tongues hanging out!” the major barked, eyes bright and clear, his manner focused and driven. “We’ve got hostiles on the fence and I need all hands on deck manning the walls. The blighters won’t get through a second time, or on all of our heads be it!”

  The somewhat scattered major who had left the room only a short time before had been immediately transformed by the sudden emergence of a threat, it seemed, the encroaching danger sharpening his thoughts and wits to a razor’s edge.

  “You heard the man,” Sergeant Josiah said, racing over to where his Springfield M1903 lay propped against the wall. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  Hector, who seemed completely in charge when discussing all matters aviation-related, had instantly ceded authority to Josiah the moment that a terrestrial-bound threat presented itself. Without question or comment and without missing a beat, the pilot drew his Enfield No. 2 revolver from the holster at his hip and fell in line with the rest of the squad as they followed the sergeant racing through the door and out of the room.

  “I shouldn’t worry, miss,” Hector said to Jun with a smile as they filed out side by side. “We’ll soon have this bother sorted out and have you parachuting in no time!”

  For the first time Jun found herself grateful for an unexpected zombie attack. Anything that delayed the moment when she would have to strap on a parachute and jump out of a plane was a welcome distraction at this point, even a horde of flesh-hungry undead. At least she could face the Dead with her feet planted firmly on the ground.

  Chapter 13

  AS SHE STOOD atop the wall that encircled the base camp, peering through the telescopic sights of her T-99 at the Dead horde massing below, Jun found herself regretting her choice of words only moments before. Because while she was not yet being forced to leap from a plane, neither was she able to face the present danger with the ground beneath her feet. Instead she was perched awkwardly on a narrow ledge that ran along the inner side of the stockade fence, with only a low railing between her and the open air behind her. Even as relatively short as she was, it would be a matter of ease for her to step over the railing if she choose to do so; and while stepping over the railing into the empty air beyond was the last thing on her mind, still she worried that it would be all too easy to accidentally topple over it if she weren’t careful, with a long fall to the hard ground below.

  The winds were picking up, not only carrying with them the scent of putrefaction and decay from the approach horde of the Dead, but also serving to buffet Jun and knock her off balance. With her right hand over her T-99’s trigger and her left hand steadying its stock, she couldn’t reach out and take hold of the top of the stockade fence to steady herself, and instead had to continually shift her weight from one leg to the other, constantly moving her center of gravity to maintain her position. It made sighting for targets more difficult than normal, which only complicated what were already trying circumstances.

  Jun had originally assumed that it had been the arrival of a new group of undead shamblers that had occasioned the ringing of the base camp’s alarm bells, but when she and the rest of her squad had first climbed to the top of the ramparts she had been surprised to see that there were only a handful of zombies shuffling about along the northern edge of the electrified perimeter fence that ran all around the camp, with a handful more approaching from the north. The heightened response seemed disproportionate to the threat, and caused Jun to wonder whether Major Wilkins’s unsettled thoughts and feelings of guilt about the recent undead incursion into the camp had lead him to overreact. The major would not be the first combatant in the Dead War driven to make irrational decisions by undigested fears from a previous fight, even one that he had himself survived unharmed.

  But then Sergeant Josiah had drawn her attention to the fallen log draped over the wire at the northwest corner of the perimeter fence, and suddenly Jun had a better understanding of the urgency of the situation.

  “I’m telling you, it’s just a coincidence!” Curtis shouted as he fired a round from his M1 Carbine at one of the zombies that was shuffling towards the base of the stockade fence. Another of the Dead was in the process of clambering over the log that lay across the wire fence some distance behind. “It’s not like these jokers can strategize.”

  “You put a considerable amount of faith in the likelihood of the most unlikely of coincidence, dear boy,” Sibyl answered out of the corner of her mouth, taking a pot shot at the Dead who was just now stepping off the fallen log and onto the no-man’s land between the outer wire fence and the inner wooden stockade. “Isn’t it easier to accept that they knocked it down on purpose?”

  Whether by accident or by design, it had become immediately apparent to Jun and the rest of the squad that the a
pproaching group of zombies had collided with one of the dead trees that stood a short distance away from the outer perimeter fence, and that the collision had caused a limb that had clearly already been close to dropping to fall to the ground. And again, either through intention or happenstance, the log had fallen directly onto the electrified wire fence, one end resting on the ground outside the fence, the other hanging a few feet in the air above the ground within. The wire fence was sturdily built enough that it had withstood the added strain, though the metal posts on either side were bowed inwards somewhat by the additional weight. And though a strong electrical current still flowed through the wire, the wood that made up the fallen log was apparently dry enough that it was not especially conductive, as the zombies that crawled up and over the log did not suffer the same ill effects from electrocution that the undead who grappled other parts of the fence were currently displaying.

  Effectively, the zombies had managed to create a makeshift bridge that allowed them to circumvent the electrified fence, and could now reach the inner fence directly. There were few enough of them that the snipers atop the ramparts were able to keep them from climbing to the top, but enough that the danger they posed was still very real.

  For her part, Jun felt that the fact that some of the zombies were still trying to climb directly over the metal wire at other points along the perimeter fence argued strongly in favor of the notion that the whole thing had been happenstance and not strategy. The smell of cooking flesh was strong in her nostrils.

  “There’s more of the blighters approaching from the east!” Major Wilkins called out from a few dozen feet to Jun’s right.

  She glanced in the direction that the major was pointing, and saw another horde of the Dead advancing on their position through a stand of trees. If they continued to advance in roughly the same trajectory then their path would carry them right towards the fallen log that breeched the perimeter, and then the squad would have even more of the undead to contend with on the inner side of the electrified fence.