by M. Lorrox
Eddy is checking out the device Stephanie is building, and he looks up. “What?”
July motions with the very pointy tip of the sword into the forest, toward the north. “That.”
Eddy, Stephanie, and Johannes each train their ears and listen for a moment. Eddy walks up to her and whispers, “I don’t hear anything.”
What is that sound? Is it birds or something rustling leaves? No, it’s not in the trees, it’s the ground. July opens her eyes. “There’s something coming.”
Eddy turns to face Johannes and asks him with his eyes. Johannes shakes his head. Stephanie frowns. “I don’t hear anything.”
“There it is again. It’s far away but coming closer.”
Eddy cups both his hands to his mouth and yells in that direction, “Perimeter Status! Naga! Report!”
July stares. Eddy is on her one side, and Johannes steps up to her other.
All the other knights also heard Eddy, and now they too wait to hear Naga’s report.
“Naga clear!”
Eddy frowns and glances at July. “Probably just the wind.”
Then another voice calls out, “Ricochet clear!”
July shakes her head. “I don’t think so, it didn’t sound like wind.”
Another voice, this time to their side. “Balena clear!”
Johannes sighs, but nonetheless, he grips his Zinner sword more tightly.
To the southeast, “Charlie clear!”
Stephanie, who wants to keep working on her project but finds herself unable to concentrate, waits for the final all-clear.
From the south, “Gabriel clear!”
July turns around, and Eddy watches as her eyes dart around. She raises the Patton saber and points with it again, this time southeast. “I hear it there, too.”
Eddy looks. That’s where Dad is... “Oh, that’s where Major General Hecate should be coming from. I bet you hear her.”
She shakes her head, then they all hear a distant explosion, coming from that direction.
Charlie hears the explosion and freezes, staring toward where the sound came from; a few hundred yards directly in front of him. Eddy is right, it is where Major General Hecate should be coming from, and she should be coming back any time now. Cazzo, there goes the element of surprise. Charlie turns to face the camp. “Stephanie! Push up to my position! I’m moving forward! Johannes, hold in the camp!”
He tosses the scabbard off Ketsueki Seishin and toward a big tree, then with the blade in one hand and an M4 strapped across his back, he charges forward.
Naga has his rifle slung over his shoulder and his large, halberd-like guandao in his hands. He grips the metal shaft of the great weapon and stares out into the forest, waiting and listening. He didn’t hear what July had heard before, but he does now. “Ricochet! Incoming. Pull up and give me cover!”
Naga pushes forward, deeper into the woods, as the distant sound of rustling and grunting grows louder.
Ricochet, positioned northeast of base, heads toward Naga. “Balena! Pull north!” As Ricochet runs, the Zinner sword at his waist bounces around awkwardly, and he frowns at it. He pulls the blade and sheath from the sword hanger attached to his belt and runs while holding the heavy blade in his hand. He picks up speed.
Balena shouts for Owen to pull up from base and head east, and then she moves to cover Ricochet’s old position. She sees a large tree, so she rips her way up the trunk to get an elevated viewing position.
Stephanie was headed southeast to cover Charlie when she hears Balena asking Owen to pull east. Fuck, he’s still on the boat. Stephanie splits the difference and angles north, so that she’s midway between Charlie’s old position and Balena’s old position.
From a branch fifteen feet in the air, Balena has a line of sight on a clearing to the east—an area that Ghost will cross through later on her way to the rendezvous point. Balena watches and then squints when she sees movement and reflections flashing far in the distance. Are those armored troops? They have skull-caps... She turns to yell behind her, “Incoming from the east! Looks like armored soldiers!” She considers staying in the tree; it’ll give her a firing advantage, but her own options for cover are limited. She starts to climb down.
Armored soldiers? What is this, the Middle Ages? Stephanie loads a multi-projectile 40mm shell into the grenade launcher mounted under the barrel of her M4. We have better weapons though... Weapons that we’re not supposed to use because they’re loud. She frowns but keeps the grenade launcher loaded. She swings the rifle to her back and draws a pair of Zinner swords. She crosses the blades in front of her and looks at their pointy tips. These things are heavy. I bet they hack even better than old school cutlasses.
The bushwhacking and ground-pounding sounds are close to Naga now, and he tilts his head in one direction and then back, cracking his neck. He spins the shaft of the guandao in one hand, and the large, flat blade whistles in the air. He takes the weapon back into both hands and catches the first glimpse of the enemy as they descend a hill ahead.
He squints and tilts his head. Well that’s new...
Zombies from the container placed in arc section thirteen charge toward him in a very loose group. Shiny, twelve-inch-long blades extend from the zombies’ arms. The zombies don’t hold the weapons in their hands, but instead, the blades are mounted to their forearms. As they run, these arm-mounted swords carve a curving path through the air.
The zombies have shiny armor to match, but it only covers the top and back of their heads, the back and sides of their necks, and the top of their shoulders.
Naga frowns. Their spinal cords and brains are protected. Good thing their front is open. He turns toward Ricochet and shouts, “They’ve got blades! Ready your swords!” Naga unscrews the shaft of his guandao and separates the two halves. He holds each blade in a hand, and he waits for the first zombies to reach him.
Hector watches as his units approach the site marked as the target. A group attacks from the north, one from the east, and one from the southeast.
Paul Baudin clears his throat. “Engaging enemy.”
“Good, let’s see how they fare.” Hector marks the time, then he glances at the Unit Overlay monitor again. “Drone team, what’s your status?”
Andre Cojocaru, also seated in the bullpen below Hector, checks his monitors and a readout. “Four surveillance drones on lap two of six around The Plant. Their replacements are ready to dispatch. Six attack drones are ready to deploy.”
“Good. Break the attack drones into two squads. Send them between our zombies, one at the northeast angle, the other one at the east-southeast angle.”
“Acknowledged.” Hector programs in a starting flight plan for each of the two squads. “Alright, we’re sending nine-through fourteen. Switcher: let’s see them on the wall. Drone Ops, One through Six, take them once they reach their pre-attack positions.”
A video technician switches the feeds being sent to the monitors, and soon, six of the monitors show six different views of a room with an open roll-top door facing the valley in front of The Plant. The drones, initially controlled by programmed GPS and altitude coordinates, take off.
The drones’ cameras are mounted straight ahead, thus creating a first-person view as the drone flies, and Hector watches the monitors. On their video feeds, the valley opens up before him, then almost in unison, the videos tilt as the drones bank. On a few of the screens, another drone is visible.
While commercial drones typically have plastic fairings and body panels, these do not. These have a carbon fiber frame that supports motors and rotors, a control board, a camera, a radio receiver, a mushroom video antenna, a lithium graphite battery, and a bomb with anti-personnel pellets held in a mesh beneath the explosive.
On the Unit Overlay monitor, Hector watches as these green X’s split into two groups. “Arm them.”
He waits,
still watching the map, then he grins. “Confirmed.” A circle radiates from each X, just like on the zombies. Hector once again marks the time.
As Naga parries attacks from the rushing zombies, he’s only able to inflict minor wounds at first. Their head, neck, and shoulder armor is thick, and more than once, Naga’s powerful strikes are thwarted. He’s also resisted stabbing them head-on, because doing so would put him in range of the blades attached to their arms.
A zombie whose face appears to be filled with both rage and terror rushes him. He deflects it to the side, and he carves it up the back. It drops to a knee, then stands and turns.
It can’t turn its head? He thinks back, and every zombie’s head had been pointed straight. They’ve always attacked straight on, and always with their head straight compared to their body.
He looks more carefully at the next approaching zombie, and he notices that on the inside of the neck-armor is a camera. Naga drops his huge mass to the ground, and he carves straight through a zombie’s knees. It falls, flailing its bladed arms in the air. While other zombies rush him, he cleaves an arm off this dropped zombie and glances at his enemy’s weapon. The blades are more than two inches wide with a channel cut in their centers. They extend from devices attached to the zombies’ arms, and to Naga’s surprise, they’re not attached to the loose flesh; they seem to be attached to the bone. Hmm. No matter.
He’s about to stab the dropped zombie in the eye with his spear tip, but other zombies are almost upon him. He spins while blocking the strikes from a zombie and slices it across the back. It tumbles as another rushes forward. Naga leaps backward into the air and has an open line of attack on the zombie’s front. He extends his flat blade straight through the zombie’s throat and cuts all the way to its spinal cord. Its arms go limp while Naga is still in the air, and then the explosives in the back of the skullcap explode, sending a blast directed by the thick armor straight forward.
Small pellets that were placed in front of the explosive module shoot through the zombie’s head, crushing the skull into hundreds of tiny fragments that also rocket forward with the blast.
Naga’s abdomen takes the brunt of the explosion, while pieces of bone and the steel pellets reach as high as his chest and as low as his knees. He’s sent flying backward into a tree. -Crrk!- He breaks his neck and dies before the loss of nearly one-third of his body mass would cause the same result.
Ricochet stands his ground while holding his Zinner sword at his side with one hand, and with the other, he holds the optical sight of his .22lr carbine up to his eye. Through it, he can see Naga in the distance fighting the blade-handed zombies. He sees him jump, stab, and -Boom!-
Ricochet drops the gun from his eyes. “Naga!”
Smoke fills the area where Naga was, and the rest of his body along with other debris falls to the ground.
Ricochet stares, then he hears the sounds of zombies running. He swallows, tosses the Zinner sword to his side, and raises his rifle. He clenches his jaw and aims his weapon toward the approaching horde. When he sees a shape emerge from the smoke, he fires.
-Bang!-
-Ping!- His bullet bounces off the skullcap at the forehead. Fuck. He shoots again—a little lower—and puts a bullet into the zombie’s eye.
When the bio sensors inside the armor register that the zombie has been killed, it triggers the explosion. This zombie was about twenty-five yards from Ricochet, and he gets a front-row seat to see a head explode straight toward him. HOLY SHIT!
Ricochet gets a pellet in his leg as another slams into the tree beside his head. Shit shit shit. He looks around, finds a climbable tree, and makes like a monkey to a branch twelve feet up. “Now you’re mine.” He takes aim and fires as the zombies enter his view, and as each dies, it explodes like a gross-grenade in the direction it was running.
“Well shit, sounds like we’re clear to fire.” Balena sheaths her sword and raises her gun. She’s positioned at the back of a clearing, and coming straight at her is a group of zombies. Three of them tear out of the forest and into the far side of the clearing about forty-five yards away. -Brrittt!- -BOOM!-
She shakes her head. “What the holy hell?”
She aims and fires again at the next closest zombie, forty yards out. She hits center mass, and the bullets do enough damage to drop it and blow it up. They’re rigged. FUCK! She screams over her shoulder, “They explode! Keep your distance!”
Stephanie, a hundred yards to Balena’s side, raises the swords she holds in both hands. “Fuck this.” She tosses them to her sides and swings her rifle forward. She runs north until she can see Balena firing and zombies exploding. Stephanie raises her M4, grabs the pistol grip of the grenade launcher, and folds down its foregrip. When Balena switches magazines, Stephanie takes aim and fires at a group of zombies far from Balena. -Throop- -BooBOOOM!-
The multi-projectile shell explodes and takes out a pair of zombies, which then quickly explode.
Stephanie checks her sides to make sure she’s not about to be run down by zombies, then she loads another shell.
Balena hears Ricochet yelling for help, and as she moves to assist, she orders Stephanie to pull up into her old position and hold the clearing.
“On it!” Stephanie finishes loading another grenade shell, and she runs forward while looking for another zombie group to take out.
As Charlie approached Hecate’s position, she warned him that the zombies explode. Without that warning, he would have charged straight at the zombies and would have found brief pleasure in murdering one before having his head blown off. So now, he’s in a tree trying to sharpshoot zombies below, and he’s doing a lousy job of it. He fires again, and he drills a round down through a zombie’s chest and out its side. It doesn’t drop, but when Charlie follows his shot with another that smashes into its pelvis, it does. It’s not dead, but it’s not getting back up either.
Charlie scans for another zombie, but he can’t see any more. “Hecate!”
She’s in a tree about twenty yards away. “Yo!”
“How’d you know they blow up?”
“I cut a couple up from behind, and they exploded before they hit the dirt! It was so weird; it made me think I had explosive tipped urumis!” She shakes her head. That would be CRAZY.
“See any more over there?”
“Not from this angle.” She jumps down from the branch and lands firmly on two feet. Her thick boots imprint into the soft earth. She spins like a top on one foot and looks in all directions. She spots a zombie running further north, toward the camp, so she raises her rifle, aims, and lands only one of the burst-fired bullets. The zombie lurches forward against a tree, then keeps moving and disappears around the other side. “Shit... I think we’re clear here!” At least it’ll be wounded and slow. I wonder how the others are faring.
She tilts her head, listening to a new, odd buzzing sound in the distance. Bees? No, there’s no friggin’ way they weaponized bees... Could they?
As the green X’s move closer and closer to their targets, Hector inches forward in his chair. On the monitors, the whole room has been watching the battle from zombie-mounted cameras, while six screens show aerial views of the evergreen trees as the drones fly into their attack positions.
Andre clears his throat. “Sir, does Drone Ops have permission to detonate?”
Hector smiles. “You sure do.”
Ricochet is still in the tree, and he’s running out of zombies to shoot at. I don’t think any got past me though, so we held the line... Naga, you bastard. How dare you get killed?
Ricochet sighs, remembering the giant knight’s rare, but magnificent smile. Oh and Ghost... Damn it. He notices movement on the ground a dozen yards away, and he raises his gun. There’s a zombie trying to get up on all threes—it lost a leg at some point in an explosion—but the blades extending past its wrists prevent it from doing anything other than ar
my crawl and drag its body. The armor on its head and shoulders is still intact however, and it protects the zombie’s upper spinal column and brain.
Ricochet clicks in a new magazine of thirty bullets. “Where do you think you’re going?” He pulls the trigger over and over on his semi-automatic carbine.
-Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! BOOM!-
His bullets don’t have a ton of penetration depth, individually, but he was able to keep pounding at the zombie’s side in the same spot until he dug deep enough to kill it. He lowers his gun, then squints and looks around. What’s that buzzing sound?
The repeated muzzle flashes from Ricochet’s gun catches the eye of a drone operator in SeCComm. Hector, and many of the others working below him, hold their breath and watch a monitor on the wall. They see the drone’s POV video as it flies straight toward Ricochet.
He looks and sees the drone flying at him at full-speed—forty miles per hour—and he’s concerned about it slamming into his head or the blades cutting him up. In a fast motion, he tosses his gun to the side and pushes off from the tree branch. With an injured leg, he uses his hands to help break his fall.
The drone also drops, but it hits another tree’s branch. When a propeller hits the wood, it snaps off a blade and tosses the drone down. It lands a few feet from Ricochet.
“Damn it!” Hector pounds the armrest on his chair. “You had him!”
“I’m sorry sir, but I still might. Is that his gun in the corner of the video?”
Hector takes a closer look at the monitor. The drone is upside down and at an angle, and there’s something dark jutting into the frame. “If it moves, detonate.”
“Yes sir.”
Ricochet lands hard, and his leg sends a tremor of pain through him. He spits his toothpick out. Goddamn tech-gizmos... Where the hell’s my gun? He looks around and spots it five feet away from the crashed drone. He grumbles as he limps over, crosses in front of the drone, then bends down to pick up his gun.