by RW Krpoun
“It there anyone in this place who isn’t crazy?”
“Talk to anyone you like.”
“What about the monks?”
“They explained most of it to me.”
“The Church is death on witchcraft-I know that for a fact.”
“I know, but this is something different. Look, Brother Andrew served in the French Foreign Legion before he got the call, and he says he saw it happen before. But the zombies are an end to a means: the guy doing this, the necromancer, wants the kids.”
He was watching me with the air of a man waiting for the punchline or for me to throw a fit. Finally he glanced at the approaching dust. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re crazy.”
I grinned. “I’ve had this conversation several times in the last few days. Just remember to aim for the head. Anyway. I’m glad you came; I just wish you brought your cannon.”
“Cannon?”
“I saw ruts at your place from a gun carriage.”
“Ah, I need to make sure they rake the yard. No, its not a cannon, it’s a Gatling gun. Out of date, but it does the trick.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The dust we saw were the two columns, not the main show, because besides a long column of crazies each only had a couple wagons drawn by more crazies. It was grim watching them come, each shambling column about ten crazies wide and fifty or more long, a solid block of former humanity that moved like a badly-wound child’s toy.
Standing on the wall with the others I lowered my binoculars as the Judge cursed under his breath. “How is sanity working out for you, Judge?”
“They look dead.”
“Close enough. When the third group gets here they’ll come for the children.”
He lowered his binoculars, then raised them again and studied the columns some more.
I left him to his pondering and moved to Captain. “You get a clear shot at Green Coat or any other ranking Human, take it.”
“I caught a glimpse of him, but the boy is shy,” he advised laconically. “I think I’ve got a line on the fella leading the other bunch.”
“I’m not particular. Once you take that shot do what you will; I’m thinking these boys have heard of sharpshooters, even if the Chuj haven’t.”
“Nothing’s ever easy, hoss.”
The Judge had his glasses down again so I moved back to him. “What do you think?”
“They’re dead?”
“Close enough for our purposes. Think of them as puppets, a shot to the head cuts the strings.”
He shook his head. “That’s hard to grasp.”
“It doesn’t get any easier with time. But there’s a more urgent point: the reason they are here, and why the third group is coming, is to take this place by storm. A siege is out, for reasons Brother Paul can explain if you’re interested. Anyway, I would recommend leaving before sundown, as I expect they’ll surround us at some point.”
“Huh.” He stared thoughtfully at the columns as they were shepherded into lines about eight hundred yards out; I caught a flash of Green Coat, but as Captain said he was staying behind bodies. “Where is this Brother Paul?”
Mac, Captain, and I have discussed and challenged each other on the subject of which of us was the best shot; we have killed a lot of tin cans contesting the point. I personally believe that I am a better shot with a handgun, but with my affinity for heavy calibers the other two fire a good deal faster than I can. At medium-range work with long guns we are very evenly matched.
But at long-range rifle work there is no debate: Captain was the best of us by a wide margin. With an infantry version of the Krag and a support I can reliably hit a man at three hundred yards without much problem, but to Captain that’s just a warm-up distance.
With his rifle resting on sandbags and Tobias holding up a blanket to get the shade just so he squeezed off a shot, and over seven hundred yards away a man staggered and fell to his knees-I was watching, and there was nearly a second’s lag between the shot and the strike.
Captain ejected the shell and loaded a live round. “Not bad,” he observed judiciously.
“Not bad? That was pretty damned good,” I waved towards the target, who was struggling feebly as a couple men dragged him to safety.
“This new powder makes it a lot easier. I don’t know if I could have made that shot with black powder.”
“I couldn’t make that shot with a three inch Hotchkiss breech-loading cannon. Was that Green Coat’s counterpart?”
“I believe so. I doubt he will recover-that was a soft-nosed load.”
“Good. They can pour that goop on him and he can hit the walls like a ranker.”
Captain snuggled behind his rifle and eased it to bear on a Chuj keeping watch. I left him to his work, glad that he was on our side.
The Judge was discussing something with his men when I came down from the wall so I went to get a drink of water. When I came back the Judge was writing in a notebook while one of his men sat on his horse nearby. “You don’t have to leave me a letter; a simple goodbye will do.”
“I’m not leaving-this is to warn my people.”
“You might want to include a last will and testament while you are at it.”
“That seems sensible.” He closed the notebook and handed it to the horseman. “I don’t know how much good six more rifles will do, but I intend to find out.”
“Might be quite a bit.”
“Let’s hope so.”
Stuck in an ageing fort that was about to be hit by a sea of zombies bent on recreating the Alamo should have depressed me, but frankly I felt rather good, even jubilant. Part of it was being reunited with friends after the trauma of Sanchez’s Stand, even with being reunited with my horse: Pork Chop had tried to bite me and then ignored me when I went to see her, which I took to be a good sign. But part of it was just a good feeling-despite the savage odds against us I felt good inside, almost eager. I think part of it was a desire to bring this mess we had been living with to a conclusion. However, I’m not the sort to question a good feeling.
That good feeling took a hit the next morning when the third column arrived. The handlers had pulled the crazies back another hundred yards because of Captain’s sharpshooting, but it was pretty flat and we had no trouble seeing.
What there was to be seen wasn’t pretty: two teams each of a hundred crazies harnessed to a pair of sledges, dragging them up from the south by main force, their palm-leaf-covered cargoes piled with blocks of rock salt. Twenty more drew a carriage whose wheels had been replaced by runners and whose windows had been covered with screens and drapes.
“That would be the necromancer, I guess,” Mac jabbed a thick finger at the carriage.
“I would suppose,” I nodded. “I guess he’s heard of Captain, or good shooters in general.”
“Brother Paul said these types often have all sorts of rules they have to live by,” Captain advised. “This one might need to avoid the sun.”
I watched the carriage until it pulled behind a small clump of trees, trying to imagine the man sitting within, undoubtedly old, certainly highly intelligent…what was he thinking? What sort of man set his feet upon the path this one had chosen?
For some reason I envisioned a small man, neat in his mannerisms, deathly pale and old, his white hair wispy and thin. Blue eyes as hard as a sword blade would be reading the codex on the traveler’s desk resting on his knees, one thin finger lightly tracing the lines of symbols on the age-darkened stucco.
It was unsettling to think about.
Chapter Fourteen
Not long after the carriage arrived the entire enemy force shifted over to the west, lock, stock, and barrel. It took quite a bit of time and effort to chivvy the crazies into formation and get them pointed in the right direction, and the undertaking allowed Captain to pick off two handlers who got too wrapped up in their duties to pay attention to cover. There were well over a thousand crazies in the ranks-we were able to get a decent count
as the columns shambled over to their new positions.
“They’re not too manageable,” Captain observed as we watched them.
“Yeah, but once they get them set up and start them on a charge they will be hell to break,” I said. “Against Sanchez’s force they waded through the incoming fire like it was a warm summer rain.”
“Still, this isn’t just a case of close and kill: they need to breach the walls, and then probably at least another barrier,” Captain lowered his binoculars. “We jumble them up enough, they’ll be unable to function as a group.”
“Could be. I hope you are right. Looks like they’re not going to mess around,” I checked the flanks. “They’ll hit us like a hammer on the west wall.” The wall in question consisted of two long buildings, one a former barracks now divided into children’s quarters, and a former storage building which now served as a school. Fifteen-foot sections of wall with timber catwalks connected each building and the two end-towers.
The interior walls of both buildings had been braced, and even now Brother Lars was marshalling the older children to stack bunks, beds, benches, desks, tables, and anything else handy into a second barrier inside the buildings, while adobe brick barricades already stood in the gaps between buildings.
It made a brave show, but the outer walls were old, and under the plaster there was strap iron and bolts holding them together. These were not castle walls made of granite.
“What do you think?” Mac asked as we watched tools being unloaded from a wagon and issued to the crazies.
I drew my watch out and glanced at it. “Almost noon. I suggest we eat and get ready-they’ll be coming between two and three.”
Captain grinned. “Yeah, right when the sun starts getting behind them.”
“Why not attack at night?” Mac asked.
“Crazies can’t see in the dark any better than they could when they were alive,” Captain shrugged. “What the necromancer gains in lost accuracy on our part they lose in the disorganization. If they didn’t have to cross so much open ground it would be a different matter, but here they have no choice.”
The children in the mess hall were subdued as lunch was served; I looked at them carefully as I ate, for up to now I hadn’t really paid all that much attention to them. Children and civilians in general were just scenery to me.
They were being tended to by nuns and novitiates, and not the sort of grim-faced war horses who had busted my knuckles in parish school growing up. These smiled and seemed motherly, although I expect they didn’t have the sort of hellions to govern as my parish school’s nuns had had to put up with. I know I deserved every stroke of the ruler I had gotten, and more besides.
There were about twenty kids eating in this shift, most between around three to ten or so (I am a poor judge of age in children), a mix of Indians, Mexicans, and mixed-blood. Three had crutches propped against the wall behind them, one little girl was missing half her left hand, and a little boy appeared to be blind. These were the children no one wanted, abandoned or orphaned by tribal conflicts, murder, and most recently the revolution.
The kids no one wanted, no one except by the necromancer, for whom they were just a means to an end. A bloody means. But I could see their value to him, now that it had been explained to me. These kids had been given a haven and affection in a world that had shown them only hardness and harm; to rob them of that was doubly cruel.
It struck me that these were the ones who were paying for the revolution, and who would go on paying long after it was over. For the first time I wondered what had been left in our wake after China and in the Islands-were there kids in those places who were left fatherless because of me? And if so, why did they leave their kids to wage war? That seemed pretty stupid.
“Sad little critters, aren’t they?” Captain said quietly, having noticed me watching them.
“Yeah. We have to hold-they deserve better, but we’re all they are going to get.”
“I think we might just be all they need, hoss,” he said judiciously.
After lunch we gathered on the parade field to lay out our plan of defense, which was pretty basic. The Judge and his men took the school roof, Mac, ten Mexicans, and Sibley the child quarters roof. I took the south tower with Nhi and two Mexicans (Raoul and Chabo) while Captain took the north tower with six Mexicans. The remaining two Mexicans and four Chinese workers were positioned in pairs on the other three walls to keep a sharp eye out for any untoward surprises, each with a couple orphan runners. Brother Lars oversaw his pole-grenadiers, while Brother Simon, the monk who I had seen carry a revolver with two fingers as if it were something nasty, commanded the older children and a couple Chinese on the fireworks detail. Brother Andrew would remain on the ground level with a work detail, ready to buttress the walls if a breach looked likely, although I was certain the monk himself would be watching from a vantage point.
As a battle plan it wasn’t much, but a unit on defense doesn’t need much. My biggest concern was an effort to send a small group of Chuj to scale the wall from one of the other sides after the battle started and hit us from behind. Such a group blowing a hole in the wall wouldn’t accomplish much because as we had seen, the crazies were not all that easy to handle as a group. But rifle fire from behind would really wreck our plans.
Mac, Captain and I shook hands after the meeting broke up. “Good luck, boys, and never fear: I’ll carry the day,” Captain grinned.
“See to it that you do,” I slapped Mac on the shoulder. “Luck, Mac.”
“You, too, Seth.”
I sketched a salute to Sibley, who was reassembling the Mauser we had issued him, and received a solemn nod in reply. I headed over to where the Judge was sharing out a case of rifle ammunition amongst his men. “Judge, good luck.”
“Vaya con Dios, mi amigo,” the big man grinned. “I thought I had seen the last of my youthful foolishness, Seth. Old men are supposed to be immune to vainglory.”
“I think our foolishness stops about the time of the wake.”
I grabbed Nhi just short of the ladder to the tower and kissed her, really kissed her. She wasn’t as surprised as I thought she would be, and she didn’t resist, either.
We had built a platform for the MG.08 that gave it a full field of fire-I could fire across both the west and south fronts. Of course, it meant that I was fully exposed to enemy fire, but the Chuj were poor shots and the two Mexicans with me were supposed to be on the lookout for sharpshooters. At this point worrying about my safety seemed pretty pointless in any case.
We leaned a blanket stretched between two poles against the rampart to block the enemy’s view before I assembled the weapon-since we had taken it from them they should know we had it, but it is in my nature not to give away any possible advantage.
Unlike Sanchez’s gunners I used the full traversing and elevation mechanism, which made the gun much slower to traverse, but which drastically increased accuracy. I checked the water jugs, oil can, tool kit, and ammunition, and then fussed around the weapon’s ‘sled’ mount until Nhi punched my shoulder and told me to stop.
The crazies were drawn up in ranks the width of the wall, twelve hundred yards out. As the hands of my watch neared three the first rank lurched into motion and a shout rose from several points along the wall; a small, grim faced Indian boy down by the flagpole began to beat ‘to arms’ on a flathead drum, rolling it out like he had ten years in a regimental band. It made a brave sound in our little fort, but we were all in position already.
As the crazies shambled forward and the second rank started to move Nhi grabbed my hand and held on. We watched as the third rank started forward, and then the fourth.
Movement caught my eye, and I saw a dozen Chuj mounting up and moving to the southwest. Releasing Nhi’s hand a bit regretfully, I packed my ears with cotton (the others did likewise-we had test-fired the gun in the past and they knew what to expect) and adjusted the sights. Cranking the gun around, I motioned for the blanket to be lowered and studied
the riders-they were at the walk, about a thousand yards out.
Adjusting the three-inch-wide steel elevation disk, I eased the trigger up and let four rounds go, the thud-thud-thud-thud ringing through the warm afternoon air like a loud fart in church, making everyone start and look.
I saw the dust fly short; Nhi, standing and using her binoculars said, “Dead on, twenty yards.”
Twisting the greasy disk two full clicks, I opened fire as the Chuj, too far away to hear the shots, tried to see who had kicked the dust up. I walked a twenty-round burst across their group, steadied, fired two more, adjusted for the barrel warming up, and fired three ten-round bursts. Downrange at least eight horses had been hit, another had bolted, and a tenth had thrown its rider and was bucking, either nicked or panicking from the blood smell. I couldn’t tell if I had hit any of the men, but the group abandoned whatever they plan they were attempting to execute.
The sight of it raised a couple cheers from our wall-it always helps to start out a fight with a small success. I don’t care to kill horses-it’s not their fight, after all, but needs must when the devil drives, and sitting in that carriage carefully positioned behind an old adobe hut was certainly a would-be devil.
They had learned from the fight with Sanchez: they kept the lines further apart so the front ranks would have time to get back on their feet without hindering those who followed. Or at least that would have worked against Sanchez. That’s the trouble with combat experience: not every battle follows the same pattern. And there’s the danger that the enemy learned from the last battle, too.
With a solid platform and the complicated traversing and elevation assembly in place I opened fire on the advancing lines at eight hundred yards, firing short bursts, working south to north. When I reached the north end of the line I started back south on the second rank, firing bursts of around six rounds, smashing at least one crazy off its feet with each burst.