Werner bent down and picked up the Luger P08, and with a sour expression tossed it onto the desk with the dead man’s handwritten log.
“And in the end, Ziegler took the coward’s way out. All of the atrocities he oversaw in his lifetime, all of the evil he was directly and indirectly responsible for bringing into the world, and this is where it all led. A sad and frightened little man cowering here in the dark, listening to his own flowery speech about the noble future of his hateful regime, while the flower of German youth and vitality is left to rot in the darkness on the other side of the door…”
He then moved to stand over the dead man’s corpse, glaring down at its wizened features.
“I should have killed you myself when I had the chance,” Werner snarled. He spat in the dead man’s face, and then turned and walked away.
“So the zombies that attacked the village were just random shamblers who came down off the mountain,” Curtis said, ticking off points one by one on the fingers of one hand, “and it was just a coincidence that two hordes attacked us in those ruins at the same time, and there’s been a rise in undead activity in the northern part of the country because fate is a fickle bitch and we’re just that unlucky, not because there is some grand plan at work being masterminded by some evil genius up in the mountains. Does that sound about right to you guys?”
“That just about covers it, I think,” Sergeant Josiah answered quietly.
“I knew it!” Curtis threw his hands in the air. “Whole thing was just a waste of our damned time.”
“Oh,” Sibyl said from the far side of the room, “I think it might well be a little worse than a waste of time, I’m afraid. A good deal worse, in fact.”
Jun turned to look in her direction, and saw that the Englishwoman was standing beneath the bank of screens that lined the far wall.
“These show the hallways we just passed through,” Sibyl said, pointing to the screens on the bottom row. Even from her vantage point across the room Jun could see movement on the screens, and as she crossed the floor to stand beside Sibyl she could clearly make out several of the Dead making their shambling way down the corridor. Then Sibyl pointed to the top row of screens. “And these show the hangar through which we entered.”
Jun raised her gaze to look at the top screens. The one on the top left showed the interior of the hangar from a point somewhere high on the outer wall, and as Jun watched several of the Dead made their way into the hangar from the doorway that lead to the interior corridor beyond. Another screen displayed the reverse view, showing the rolling hangar doors that lead outside. On that screen, Jun watched as several more of the Dead were leaving the hangar and moving out onto the landing pad, passing through the three-foot gap left below the bottom edge of the hangar door. The squad had left the rolling doors open when they entered the facility, in case they needed to make a hasty exit. It would never have occurred to Jun that something else might exit the fortress by that route, instead.
“They’re getting out,” Sibyl went on, sounding mournful. “They’ve been locked down here in the dark all of this time, with no way out, and then we came along and opened all of the locked doors barring their way.”
Jun’s eyes darted to the other screens. She saw the barracks they had passed, and the hundreds of Dead who were pouring out of the open doors into the corridors beyond. And the screens showing the hundreds upon hundreds of the Dead who shambled and jostled through the hallways and corridors of the fortress. Even now they were beginning to spill out of the hallways into the stairs leading to the upper levels, and it was only a matter of time before they all made their way to the hangar and out into the open air beyond.
“There’s…” Curtis began and faltered, all composure lost, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, without a trace of his customary cynical detachment. “There’s so many…”
“A whole goddamned army of the bastards,” Josiah said in a low voice.
Jun couldn’t bring herself to speak, her thoughts racing as she processed what they were seeing. The sergeant was correct, it was an entire army of the Dead, and thanks to the actions of Jun and the rest of their squad, it would now be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The reanimated remains of the SS officers and Hitler youth who had been sent to the Alpine Redoubt in the last days before Plan Z was carried out would in a sense complete their original mission. They had been sent up into the Alps to wait for the coming day when they would wage war on their enemies in the lowlands below. And now they would, making their mindless way down the mountains in search of heat and life, destroying and consuming all who had the misfortune to be in their path.
The forces of the Resistance in Northern Italy were already strained to the breaking point, hardly able to deal with a relatively minor increase in Dead activity in recent weeks. How could they hope to withstand the hundreds upon hundreds of the Dead who would now be descending upon them? How long until the whole of Reclamation Zone Italia was affected? The Resistance forces would doubtless be able to overcome eventually, but how many would die needlessly in the meantime, both Resistance fighters and civilians alike?
“What…?” Curtis turned in a slow circle, his gaze passing over each of their faces in turn until finally coming to rest on the sergeant’s. “What are we going to do?”
“They can’t get through that door, clearly,” Sibyl said, nodding in the direction of the reinforced door through which they’d entered the control center. “We could wait them out, let their numbers thin a bit, and then fight our way to freedom.”
The young American wheeled on the Englishwoman, his eyes wide with shock. “What, and just let the undead bastards loose on the world?”
Sibyl’s expression was carefully guarded, her jaw clenched and her lips pressed tightly together.
“An untold number of the Dead already roam the countryside,” she said, “and their ranks being increased by these unfortunates would mean a difference of degree, not of kind.”
“Tell that to the people who are gonna get themselves eaten by the goddamned zombies we just turned loose,” Curtis said, his cheeks flushing red with emotion.
Sibyl’s eyes flashed darkly, and an unfamiliar expression settled over her normally composed features. It seemed to Jun as if the stiff-upper-lip calm composure that the older Englishwoman normally projected to the world was like a mask that she wore, and that mask was beginning to slip. Because Sibyl suddenly looked jaded and world-weary, and tired of it all.
“We all die in the end, dear boy,” she said with no trace of warm or humor. “Cancer takes us, or a truck runs us over, and we die needless in some godforsaken war in some godforsaken desert far from our homes and the ones who love us.” Her eyes darted for the briefest of instants to Werner, and then back to Curtis. “We cannot hope to defeat death, only delay the inevitable.”
Curtis looked shocked, and it was clear that he was not quite as cynical as he liked to let on.
“No, enough of that,” Sergeant Josiah said, cutting off the response that Curtis was clearly about to deliver, silencing the both of them with a wave of his hand. “There ain’t nobody else but us who can do anything about this mess, y’all, so we’re going to fix it.”
The sergeant drew his Colt M1911 semiautomatic from the holster at his hip, and started towards the door.
“We’re going to fix it, dammit,” he repeated, “or die trying.”
Chapter 22
ONLY A MATTER of moments had gone by since Jun and the others had entered the command center through that reinforced door, but now that they were about to exit through that same door everything had changed. No longer were they hoping to find the supposed mastermind of the Alpine Fortress with some faint hope of surviving long enough to escape back to the outside. Now they had to fight their way through the zombie hordes roaming the hallways of the facility in time to keep the army of the Dead from spilling out and threatening countless lives beyond the walls of the fortress.
But at the very least, Jun thought as she
tried to find some upside, they no longer had to worry about stealth or subtlety.
“Everybody locked and loaded and ready to roll out?” Sergeant Josiah had one hand on the door handle, the other holding his Colt M1911 at the ready.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Curtis drawled in response.
“What are our orders, sir?” Jun asked, tightening her grip on the stock of her submachine gun.
“Put the bastards down and try not to get killed your ownself,” Josiah replied.
“That has a certain elegant simplicity, I’d say,” Sibyl chimed in.
“But seriously,” the sergeant continued, glancing back over his shoulder at Jun after hearing her weary sigh, “we’re going to drive right through the middle of the bastards in a tight vanguard, just like we did on our way to base camp, heading in the direction of the stairs to the upper levels. Any of the Dead bastards who we leave behind still standing aren’t any concern of ours. Our only worry should be the Dead who are ahead of us, and getting up to that hangar on the top level before too many of them get through the hangar doors. So, your orders basically are…”
“Put the bastards down,” Jun replied, “and try not to get killed ourselves.”
Josiah flashed her a quick smile, and winked, before turning his attention back to the door.
“Werner, are we good?” the sergeant called back to the German soldier, who was glaring daggers at the corpse of the dead Waffen-SS colonel in the swivel chair. “Can we count on you to show up to work here?”
Werner spared one last angry glance at Ziegler’s body, then blinked hard and turned back to face the sergeant. “I am here, Herr Sergeant. You may rely on me.”
“Glad to hear it. Okay, y’all, good luck out there. Now let’s roll out.”
With that, the sergeant turned the handle and then leaned forward, driving his shoulder into the door to shove it open. The door almost immediately hit something on the other side, partially arresting its motion, and the head and shoulders of one of the Dead lurched into view in the gap.
Josiah didn’t pause an instant, but raised his Colt and fired a round point blank that hit the Dead right in its forehead. As the lifeless body collapsed to the floor, the sergeant shoved the door once more with his shoulder, and it banged open against the wall on the other side.
Werner and Jun immediately stepped in front of the sergeant, providing cover for him as he holstered his Colt and unslung his pump-action shotgun from his shoulder. Werner took aim with his Karabiner and fired a round at another of the Dead shambling towards the door, and Jun took out another with her submachine gun, while the sergeant worked the pump to chamber a round in his shotgun. Werner and Jun took up positions on either side of the door outside, drawing a bead and firing again and again.
Sibyl and Curtis followed the sergeant out into the hallway while Werner and Jun continued to lay down suppressing fire. The squad was now in a roughly box-shaped formation, with the sergeant in the middle flanked front and back by the other members of the squad.
The Dead jostled and shambled erratically through the hallways, but aside from the few who had pursued the squad through the corridor to the command center in the first place and then lingered waiting for them on the other side of the door, the rest of them seemed only now to be becoming aware of the squad’s location. Whether attracted by their body heat or some kind of life energy or whatever answer one could formulate for what motivated the undead, the zombies were reacting to the squad’s arrival in the hallway, and moving to intercept them from all directions.
Which meant, Jun realized, that not only would the squad need to contend with the Dead who lay between them and their objective, but they would also need to be wary of Dead who would be following them.
“Forward,” the sergeant shouted as he moved up to a point a half-pace ahead of Sibyl and Curtis, who fell into position on his flank to either side. Jun and Werner followed suit, taking their places to either side of the inverted-V formation.
“Clear a path!” Sergeant Josiah blasted a zombie who was shambling towards him, and then immediately stepped over the body that fell on the floor at his feet, moving closer to the intersection of corridors up ahead.
With the voice of the dead colonel no longer droning on from the now-silent loudspeakers overhead, the hallway now was filled with the shuffling footsteps of the Dead, their inhuman shrieks, and the constant chorus of the squad’s weapons firing again and again and again. The clamorous din was near deafening, and Jun found it more than a little disorienting. It brought to mind the tumult surrounding the defense of the embassy in Moscow when the Dead first rose: the shouts of the city’s defenders, the screams of the terrified citizenry, the shrieks of the invading undead hordes. Jun bit back the anxiety and fear she could feel welling up from deep within, and instead focused on the anger that those memories brought with them, and vented her rage on the Dead surrounding her, firing round after round from her Thompson into the oncoming swell.
They were making decent progress by the time they reached the intersection where several corridors met, and it was only after glancing back the way that they’d come that Jun saw that the command center door was still only a dozen or so paces away. She was in the process of replacing the magazine drum of her submachine gun when she realized that the sergeant had brought the squad to a halt, with Dead closing in from all sides.
“God DAMN it,” the sergeant muttered. “Which way is it…?”
Jun glanced back over her shoulder in his direction, and immediately recognized the trouble. In the confusion of their hasty advance through the facility to the command center in the first place, following the course of the cabling from the surveillance cameras overhead, they were now having to retrace their steps but without the benefit of any familiar landmarks, since the cabling that came together at the junction box above the command center door now branched off in all directions the farther they went. Which evidently now left the sergeant unsure which of the branching corridors to follow.
Fortunately, Jun had spent more time facing back the way they’d come as she brought up the rear and fended off the encroaching Dead while Sibyl inspected the door’s lock, and knew exactly which hallway it was that they’d come down.
“Second on the left!” Jun shouted back over her shoulder, punctuating her words with a burst of fire from her Thompson M1A1, dropping a zombie who was almost within arm’s reach.
“Copy that!” Josiah replied, and motioned for the squad to move in that direction. “Move out!”
Once they’d made it through the scrum of Dead that crowded the intersection and through to the corridor that Jun had indicated, the going became relatively easier. It appeared that with Dead converging on their position outside the command center from all sides, the growing horde had formed a bottleneck of sorts in the intersection, limiting both the number of Dead that the squad had left to encounter as they charge towards the stairway at the far end of the hallway, as well as cutting down on the number of Dead who were able to pursue them from behind.
Few of the Dead were able to keep pace with them so long as the squad kept moving at a healthy clip, and so Jun felt a tremor of optimism as the door to the stairway came into view before them, with only a handful of the Dead between the squad and their goal.
Then that brief tremor immediately subsided into stark pessimism when a partially-open side door burst wide open just as the squad passed by, and a small horde of zombies rushed out towards them from only a few feet away.
“Bastard!” Curtis shouted as one of the Dead grabbed hold of his left arm, dragged him close, and immediately sunk its teeth into the meat of his left shoulder. The young American tried to fire a round from his M1 Carbine, but the shot went wide as his face was twisted in a rictus of pain and terror.
Sibyl reacted immediately, instinctually, rushing forward and bashing the zombie in the face with the butt of her Lee Enfield, hitting it hard enough to smash its nose into paste and knock loose one of its eyeballs from its
socket. The zombie released its bite on Curtis’s shoulder, and as it reared back and prepared to attack Sibyl instead, she spun her rifle around and fired a round from the hip that exploded up and through the zombie’s skull, sending a shower of gore flying into the air.
Curtis was bent forward, gripping his left shoulder with his right hand as blood welled freely through his fingers. Sibyl bent down and picked up Curtis’s Carbine from the floor, then slung it over her shoulder as she moved to his side and helped him stand up straight.
“Come along, dear,” Sibyl said, the plummy tones of her voice only slightly showing the strain and stress of the moment, “mustn’t dawdle. We’re all in this together.”
With Curtis’s arm around her shoulder for support, Sibyl fired another round in the mass of Dead issuing forth from the side door.
“A little more haste might be in order, Josiah,” she called over her shoulder back to the sergeant, who was busy blasting away at the Dead himself.
“We’re almost there, sir!” Jun shouted, scanning the route ahead. There were now only two or three of the Dead between them and the stairway door. If they were able to move quickly past the horde that had emerged from the side door, and quickly put down the few who remained in their way, then they would be able to reach the stairs without much difficulty. Assuming of course that no more surprises lay in store for them.
Jun wasn’t sure they would be so lucky.
The sergeant and the others were still fending off the newcomers who were crowding out of the side door towards them, which Jun now realized must lead to one of the barracks that they’d passed on their way in. So Jun, in an uncharacteristic moment, opted not to wait for orders but to make an executive decision on her own. Leaving her position on the rear flank, she stepped forward past the others and focused her fire on the Dead shambling towards them from the front. Three bodies dropped one after another as her shots hit home. Then she raced forward, covering the short distance that remained, and skidded to a stop just in front of the door to the stairway.
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