by J. W. Vohs
“And Barnes doesn’t even know we’ve chosen Vicksburg as the place to make our stand?” Carlson shrewdly inquired.
“Not that we know of, sir. We got good reason to believe that Barnes is thinkin’ that Jack is leadin’ a small band of fighters out in front of the horde, and that Barnes is willin’ to continue the chase till he corners his prey.”
Carlson rubbed his hands together with a hungry look on his face, his eyes gleaming in the lamplight like a cougar ready to pounce. He stood up and stepped next to Carter, where he turned to face the rest of the leaders gathered in the room. “Carter, please excuse my interruption, but I must suggest in the strongest terms that we send a sizeable force to the Pickwick Dam.”
Jack leaned forward in his seat, “Stephen, if we do that the great majority of fighters will have to come from the Utah divisions. Are you absolutely certain you want them sent out on what could easily become a suicide mission?”
Carlson cocked his head as if he was puzzled before answering. “General Smith, we have learned that standing behind defensive works waiting for Barnes to attack has become a suicide mission. We need to weaken him before he gets here to have any chance of destroying the fighting capability of this trained army of his.”
Jack nodded, smiling on the inside as the mission he never would have asked for was practically being demanded by the man with the soldiers to do it. “I agree completely. What do you have in mind?”
Three days later the 1st Infantry Battalion of the 1st Regiment of the 1st Utah Division, all five hundred fighters and their equipment, were loaded into a convoy of modified SUVs hastily gathered and serviced from all over the Vicksburg area. A team of locals had been sent out by watercraft two days earlier to travel up the Yazoo River and attempt to make radio contact with Chad Greenburg’s outfit so they had some idea what was heading their way. The mission was under the command of “Colonel” Carter Wilson, who’d asked Luke and T.C. to serve as his staff.
The plan was a good one, as long as they had enough time to implement it. The 1st Infantry was armed, armored, and trained in phalanx fighting. None of the soldiers had any combat experience using the formation, but Carter and Luke planned to lead from the front and keep an eye on how the Utah fighters handled their first encounter with the infected. The unit was full of veterans from the fighting that had raged throughout their state during the early days of the outbreak, as well as the push-back campaign that had been going on ever since the infection had been contained. These troops wouldn’t run or lose their nerve when they saw an army of hunters bearing down on them, but they might have some trouble maintaining the ranks and executing line rotations. That was the main concern Carter and Luke had about the upcoming confrontation, and they were confident that they could guide the westerners through the maneuvers in the face of the enemy.
The path over the dam was narrow, and, of course, offered the best flank protection for a shield-wall. Fielding a phalanx sixty or seventy lines deep across the road was the goal in the looming battle, but if the full weight of Barnes’ army was pushing behind the front ranks, it would be impossible for any five hundred men on earth to stop the hunters. Carter needed to figure out a way to break up the momentum of the enemy attack, and had what Luke and the others considered a fairly good plan for doing so. If they had enough time after reaching the dam, the soldiers were to construct propane-tank bombs in the backs of pick-up trucks and park them bumper to bumper along the first half of the road. Once that was accomplished, the next step in organizing the defense was to find as many semi-trucks as possible and park them, haphazardly, across the ground leading to the dam so the hunters would be forced to climb over, under, and around the big rigs. Finally, ten snipers would be placed in boats and anchored in the lake just behind the dam with AR-15s. Each sharp-shooter would have one hundred, pre-loaded, thirty-round magazines to fire at the monsters.
Luke was riding in a pick-up with Carter and T.C., and as they bounced along a series of Mississippi back roads, he couldn’t keep himself from thinking about what they were heading out to do. He knew, being the only veteran of the bridge debacle in Brandenburg, that none of these proposed measures would stop Barnes’ army from reaching the Utah phalanx. But he did hope that the fighters on the dam wouldn’t have to face the full weight of the entire hunter-army pushing the assault forward with irresistible force. If Carter’s plans did manage to create gaps in the horde, the tip of the spear where the confrontation was taking place might actually be a fight instead of an avalanche of dead and living infected. But Luke had seen Barnes’ army filling the horizon as far as the eye could see. He’d seen tens of thousands of prime hunters turn on a dime and head toward what appeared to them to be nothing but a wall, no prospect of a meal driving their attack. More than anything, he’d seen an enemy beyond counting.
Finally, he felt compelled to share his concerns with Carter. “Carter, can I talk to you about this mission?”
“Of course, kid, what’s eatin’ ya?”
“Math is bothering me.”
“Always bothered me, too,” Carter quipped. “Main reason I joined the Army instead of goin’ to college.”
“Well,” Luke advised, “try to follow me here. If the truck-bombs kill a thousand hunters, which I really doubt—the creatures are tough. If, every round from the snipers kills a flesh-eater, something that wouldn’t happen in the best of circumstances, let alone bobbing in a boat. And if, the 1st Utah somehow found the strength to fight and kill from dawn to dusk, there would still be more than a hundred thousand hunters coming at them in the dark. This mission might delay Barnes by twelve hours, and with luck, might deplete his force by anywhere from ten to thirty percent, but is it worth the loss of an entire infantry battalion?”
“Carlson thinks so,” Carter quietly replied. “I mean, we’re done runnin’ now. Jack plans to destroy Barnes’ army in Vicksburg or die tryin’, ya do realize that, don’t ya?”
Luke hesitated as he thought about what Carter had just said. “So even if it boils down to a battle of attrition, we’re gonna fight Barnes to the end this time.”
Carter nodded as he kept his eyes on the road. “Yep, the odds will never be better. With Utah on board we’ll have what, somewhere close to fifteen thousand soldiers? I know ya believe Barnes has more’n double what we were hearin’ just a month ago, so maybe he has a couple hundred thousand?”
Luke quietly muttered, “At least—might be a million of ‘em.”
“Well, if we kill twenty thousand of ‘em at the dam, I guess it’s worth five hundred soldiers to do it with.”
Luke didn’t respond, and after a minute or so of silence Carter continued. “Look, I wouldn’t bring ya along, or T.C., if I didn’t think some of us are gonna survive the fight. Hell yeah, we’re gonna lose people defendin’ that dam, maybe hundreds, but we ain’t gonna lose everyone.”
Luke finally replied, “I wonder if this is how the men of the 101st Airborne felt when they were being sent out to Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge?”
“Yer pretty smart fer such a young pup. I bet they felt somethin’ like this,” Carter admitted. “I’ll guarantee ya they knew they was headin’ into a bad one, and they knew by then that a lot of men didn’t come back from bad fights ‘gainst the Germans. Hell, entire battles and wars got decided by suicidal last stands, Luke. Sometimes war demands a fight to the death, and if yer people ain’t got the stomach fer it, yer gonna lose. So yeah, this is a crazy, hopeless mission if the goal is to stop Barnes, but nobody’s expectin’ us to stop him. Our job is to kill as many hunters as possible so there’s fewer to deal with in Vicksburg, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”
CHAPTER 19
When Carter was a kid his parents would sometimes rent a cabin on Pickwick Lake during summers when the family could afford to do so. This had led him to assume that he actually knew the area and the dam he had volunteered to defend. One look at the massive TVA hydroelectric structure blew that assumption all to hell. The tw
o-lane highway running above the dam was actually supported by iron beams, latticed across the top of the wall with what appeared to be a service road running beneath. That route would have to be stoutly blockaded or the hunter army would simply pass under the defenses planned for the road above. In addition, the surface of the road atop the dam appeared to be over a hundred feet above the water line, meaning that snipers would only be able to shoot at targets on the approaches to the bridge rather than those already on it. The height also meant that escape over the sides of the dam for troops cut off along the road would be very difficult to plan and execute.
Luke was seeing everything Carter was observing, and their minds were processing the information in much the same way, but T.C. came to a different conclusion. “Why don’t you just scrap all the plans for defending the road and blow it up so it collapses on top of the dam? Then those monsters will have to pick their way over all the rubble to even get at us on the other side; they won’t be able to push each other the way you say they did at Brandenburg.”
Carter looked at his nephew with one raised eyebrow, then turned his gaze to Luke. “Tell this rookie why that plan won’t work.”
Luke sat quietly as he considered everything that could possibly go wrong with T.C.’s suggestion. He thought maybe he was missing something, and tossed the ball back in Carter’s court. “Uh, since you’re in command, Colonel Wilson, I’ll defer that task to your expertise.”
Carter squinted at Luke, trying to decide if the young man was reluctant to criticize Carter’s newfound nephew or if he really couldn’t find a hole in T.C.’s idea. He finally turned to T.C. and admitted, “Blowin’ up the road might work better than the plan I had.”
“Hey Uncle Carter, uh, I mean, Colonel, I wasn’t suggesting that we dump your plan, just modify it a bit.”
“I’m listenin’.”
“Well, we still benefit from muckin’ up the approaches to the dam as much as possible, and the snipers still need to do their work. We’d want to keep some of the road over the dam still intact, so we could spear the hunters climbing up from the rubble. This phalanx-thing y’all keep talkin’ about could set up right at the edge of the blown road and push hunters off the sides all day long.”
Carter nodded as he considered the possibilities. “Okay kid, I’ll give yer ideas some serious thought. Truth is, I think ya may be onto somethin’, and if Luke here agrees, I may just hafta promote ya to tactical engineer.” He playfully punched T.C. in the arm. “And since I’m yer commandin’ officer, that means ya gotta run all yer ideas through me in case I wanna take credit for ‘em. That’s how the chain of command works in the military.”
By the end of the day, scout teams had been sent forward to keep an eye out for Barnes while everyone else was busy preparing for the monster-army’s arrival. Most of the iron-beam-supported road was wired for destruction, while semi-trucks and propane-tank bombs were scattered all over the northern approaches to the dam. Boats for the snipers were quickly scavenged from nearby homes and positioned near the north shore, and the convoy of SUVs that had transported the battalion from Vicksburg was turned around, refueled, and ready to pull out in a hurry if the inevitable retreat became a rout. Carter was being true to his word: he didn’t consider this a suicide mission. Humans would die fighting above this dam, but everyone would go into battle knowing that they had at least a chance of surviving the horde heading their way.
The soldiers worked in shifts throughout the night and following day, finally receiving word that Chad Greenburg had been located at sunset on the second evening after Carter’s force was in place. Messages had to be relayed through smaller radios back to Vicksburg before being forwarded on to the battalion defending the Pickwick Dam, but eventually the information trickled in. The reliable old Ranger reported that his men had been quite busy, and Barnes’ army was missing a few thousand hunters since Jack had last seen it in action. In addition, the cattle had been scattered again, and the cowboys moving the food-on-the-hoof had apparently been turning up missing at an alarming rate. That was the good news. The bad news was that the army of infected was only about thirty miles from the dam, and still marched in numbers beyond counting. Carter accepted the incoming messages with feigned nonchalance, anxious about the hunters being so close, but thankful that his troops had used the time they had been given to such good effect.
Much of the road above the dam was now a ragged pile of twisted steel beams and boulder-sized chucks of concrete. The route to that perilous path was mined with more than two-hundred propane-tank bombs and over thirty large vehicles to break up the enemy approach. Luke had been at Brandenburg, and even he had high hopes that this time Barnes could be held for a while. Carter and the Utah commanders were basically incapable of imagining how the position could be taken by any force of infected, no matter how numerous, but Luke knew that time and numbers would eventually win the day. What excited him about the defensive works was that thousands of hunters were obviously going to die here, perhaps tens of thousands. He smiled when he thought about the scene that would greet people still living downstream of the dam in the coming days, the corpses stacked and floating like a forest chopped into cordwood on the way to a paper-mill.
Luke and T.C. decided to scavenge area stores for arrows and broadheads and ended up taking out several packs of infected along the way. The deadly archer from Ohio would be going into this battle with over five hundred quarrels at his disposal, and that was bad news for the approaching horde. After the road had been blown, a huge semi-trailer had been backed up right to the edge of the chasm. From on top of this improvised observation post, Luke would command at the front of the phalanx. A radio-man would be stationed next to him, to keep Carter, commanding from the rear, updated on what was going on at the point of contact. Luke figured he could pour arrows into climbing hunters while he called for rank rotations and kept his commander supplied with information.
Carter, on the other hand, was once again disgusted with the reality that a colonel in charge of a battalion had to be in a position where he could exercise control of the fighting. He had argued that in a battle like this it didn’t matter if he led from the front, but Luke and several of the Utah officers had pointed out that there were multiple parts of the operation happening at the same time, and that meant a commander was needed. Ultimately, Carter would have to be the guy calling for the retreat when the time came, and that responsibility alone demanded his removal from the phalanx. Carter agreed that they had a point there, and he then won his point that he would keep two squads at his side with which he would personally conduct the rear-guard as the weary fighters made their way to the convoy. It was a grim compromise; Carter would command what was basically a certain defeat, and then he would fight in the most dangerous position in any battle as he covered the retreat. On the one hand he fulfilled the responsibilities placed upon him by his commanding officers, while on the other hand he satisfied the demands that the myth of southern honor placed upon his heart. Nobody was satisfied, but everyone accepted the arrangement and finished final preparations for battle.
The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 1st Utah Infantry slept fitfully that night, if at all. A cold wind blew from the north across the Tennessee River, and by dawn the stiff breeze carried the sound of helicopter rotors in the distance. A few minutes later, the scouts Carter had ordered out could be seen emerging from the tree-line in the distance, trotting down to the shoreline of Lake Pickwick behind the dam and boarding the boats waiting to ferry them back to their companies currently positioning themselves into a phalanx. Carter and Luke had demanded that the battalion practice forming into the tight formation several times a day since their arrival at the dam, and the soldiers had spent hours going through the motions of rotating to the front and back again. They appeared to be combat-ready.
As Luke watched his Utah allies move into position at the edge of the wrecked road, he felt a tremor of anxiety and was surprised at the dryness in his mouth. He knew he was expe
riencing fear, but was surprised that he felt anything but anticipation. Normally he looked forward to a fight, excited at the prospect of removing more infected from the planet. With a start he realized that the fight at Brandenburg had left him shaken; he, Luke Seifert, had been utterly helpless against the horde that had overrun their position as if it was completely devoid of defenders. There had been no stopping, or even slowing, the tidal wave of hunters that had washed over him and his friends on the walls of that bridge. Always, Luke had won his fights, and if he did have to retreat, he was able to cut down enough of the enemy to give himself the time and space to do so. That hadn’t been the case at Brandenburg, and Luke now realized that the memories of that rout had stuck with him: he would never again take victory or survival for granted.
He now stood on this dam with five hundred fighters at his side, but he alone had seen the enemy stomping their way beneath the damnable Blackhawks. Only he knew the unstoppable force of hundreds of thousands of hunters pushing in the same direction. The rational part of his mind argued that the preparations Carter had ordered would break up the enemy momentum, but there was a dark place hidden in his subconscious that threatened to overwhelm reason. Finally he shook his head slightly, clearing away the unpleasant thoughts, and began placing quivers of arrows in the small stands he had constructed for holding them. He realized that he really didn’t need to think too much in the upcoming battle, just kill with efficiency and confidence, and be seen doing so by the Utah troops under Carter’s command.
Carter was four hundred meters back, somewhat safely ensconced in a wooden tower erected on top of a semi-trailer. As he watched through powerful binoculars, a half-dozen Blackhawks slowly approached from the north. He ordered his radioman to send the message for the sniper-boats to move into position. As the watercraft slowly pulled away from their moorings on the southern side of the lake, Carter asked for an update from Luke. Word came back that the Utah troops were in position near the edge of the collapsed road, arranged by companies and platoons just as they’d practiced. Now there was nothing left to do but wait, and five minutes was the amount of time it took to see the first hunters trot out of the woods on the northern side of the dam.