by J. W. Vohs
Stepping back several paces, Luke found his last quiver of arrows and replaced his axe with the bow. He then moved to the right flank and shouted over the din of combat, “Everyone back to the line, NOW!”
To his surprise the blood-soaked fighters listened to him, perhaps hearing something in his voice that told them Luke was to be obeyed, or maybe it was the discipline all of the western soldiers displayed. Luke didn’t care why, he was just thankful that they stepped away from the edge and began the nasty walk back to the phalanx. As they did so the hunters rushed to fill the gap left behind, where systematically Luke put arrows into eye sockets, open mouths, and nasal cavities at the rate of one shot every three seconds. Then he pulled his .22 pistol and dropped nine more monsters before he too headed back to the formation where the hands of comrades eagerly pulled him to safety.
Carter watched all of this happening with open-mouthed astonishment, nothing unfolding as he had so greatly feared it would. Luke and the others all returned safely to the 1st Utah’s lines instead of ending up as hunter-chow. Now he breathlessly awaited the reaction of the front ranks of the phalanx as the leading flesh-eaters thundered across the bloody asphalt and corpse-mound before launching themselves at the humans. He could see steel flashing and blood spraying through the air at the point of contact, then blades furiously slashing up and down into the faces of the monsters that managed to evade the wall of spears to penetrate the formation. The assault was relentless; every dead hunter was immediately replaced by another being pushed from behind by what seemed like a million frantic flesh-eaters.
Carter waited for the phalanx to break, or at least to be pushed back at an alarming rate, but the soldiers held their ground. The decision to place troops on top of the semi-trailer so they could weaken the hunters’ left flank played an important role in the 1st Utah’s ability to withstand the horde’s assault, but Carter could also sense a change in attitude among the fighters now streaming back through the ranks as the line rotations began. As they lifted their visors to drink and talk, there was something close to fanaticism in their eyes while they recovered their strength and prepared to return to the battle. These soldiers wanted to fight, perhaps more than they’d ever wanted anything else in their lives. Carter could only shake his head in awe and wonder as he witnessed the transformation the troops were undergoing, and for the first time in a long time he began to believe that maybe, just maybe, they were going to find a way to defeat Barnes.
Luke was directing the platoon on top of the trailer as if he’d been commanding troops in combat his entire life. The soldiers followed his orders promptly and eagerly, certain that their leader would guide them to victory. The battle-lust had faded in Luke’s soul just enough that he could step back from killing hunters once in a while to see how the fight was developing. For a brief moment, he realized that this was the balance Jack and the others had been trying to encourage him to find, the state of mind that would allow him to effectively lead without taking the edge off of his deadly killing skill. Right now, it seemed like the most natural condition he’d ever experienced, and his confidence overflowed into the warriors fighting by his side.
Morning slipped into afternoon, and the battle continued to unfold as nothing less than an absolute slaughter of the infected, but humans were dying as well. As Luke suspected, the evolution of the hunters was far from complete, and they kept surprising the soldiers with their ability to change tactics as they watched others fall to the steel wielded by the troops. Through dodging, weaving, and other evasive measures, enough hunters were making it through the wall of spears and pikes at the front of the phalanx to penetrate the lines and disrupt the complicated rotations. Other flesh-eaters were occasionally able to get a grip on some piece of a soldier’s clothing or gear and pull them screaming into the mass of monsters from which none of the humans returned. Luke figured something like fifty to a hundred hunters were dying for every soldier killed or incapacitated, but even at that rate the 1st Utah would ultimately lose the dam.
Hour after agonizing hour the fighting continued unabated; the hunters never slowed or stopped attacking. The soldiers had lost twenty meters to the flesh-eaters, mostly due to the build-up of corpses that couldn’t be pushed off the dam. Once a mound of dead was high enough, the creatures were able to leap over the front ranks of the phalanx while others found better positions from which they could attack the troops on top of the trailer. When that happened, a short retreat was efficiently conducted and the battle resumed. Carter had radioed Luke to tell him that the 1st Utah had lost about a hundred and fifty troops, almost evenly split between dead and wounded. That was a thirty percent troop reduction, and the phalanx had been seriously weakened by the losses. Carter remembered Jack once telling him that the word, “decimated” came from the Greeks, and it meant that ten percent of your force was gone. When that happened a unit was basically considered combat-ineffective. But there was nothing they could do about the losses right now but continue to fight, so the exhausted soldiers kept killing hunters as the afternoon waned and dusk began to settle over the battlefield.
Carter had plenty of experience fighting the infected at night; sometimes it turned out well, and other times it dissolved into a fiasco. If he had to generalize about the outcome of combat in the dark, he would argue that the greater the number of combatants involved the more likely the situation was to result in tragedy. The hunters didn’t seem to have any better night-vision than humans, but in this battle that fact wouldn’t affect the horde. All the monsters had to do was keep pushing and grab at anything that wasn’t another infected. The soldiers, on the other hand, would soon find themselves confused and disoriented as darkness set it, and the rout would then be unstoppable. The 1st Utah had won an epic victory today, a slaughter of infected that had never been matched, but now it was time to sound the retreat.
Carter had known all along that pulling the phalanx from the road over the dam would be the most difficult maneuver of the day. In the end he’d settled for wiring the support-beams under them with enough explosive to collapse the road as they’d done earlier over the rest of the dam. The retreat signal was a massive ship’s horn taken from a barge found on the river; they’d all hoped it would be loud enough to be heard over the howling of the monsters and shouts of the soldiers. The troops would then have to conduct a fighting withdrawal to a point where the destruction of the road wouldn’t hurt them, then kill all the hunters that had followed them across. Once that was accomplished, the soldiers would have to make their way to the vehicles and leave the scene before the horde found a way over the new rubble-piles atop the dam and resumed their attack. All things considered, it was the worst plan, except for the one that called for everyone simply running for their lives all the way back to Vicksburg. Jack had always tried to explain during training sessions that the greatest danger to soldiers in a phalanx was retreating while in contact with an enemy. Now the 1st Utah was going to try to do just that.
The ship’s horn turned out to be much louder than Carter had thought it would be, and there could be no doubt that everyone had heard it blow. The soldiers in the phalanx began to give ground step by step, while Luke’s platoon worked even harder to cover their comrades below. As more of the monsters found their footing on the road, the pressure on the battalion’s ranks became nearly unbearable. The soldiers in the phalanx were stumbling backward, and even though the troops in the front lines continued to fight the enemy, they were vulnerable once the pressure at their backs disappeared. The power of the rear troops pushing forward had allowed the fighters in front to stand their ground against creatures whose only tactic was to jump on humans and pull them to the ground. Now the hunters found the opportunity to do just that.
Luke ordered his platoon to abandon the semi as the phalanx was rapidly being pushed past the rear of the trailer, and his command was in imminent danger of being cut off by the horde. As soon as his soldiers were on the road, he led them along the edge until he thought they were pa
st the end of the explosives set to collapse the structure. There he formed the troops into four ranks that he hoped could help cover the retreating infantry’s flank. Now the remnants of the battalion were streaming rearward in a ragged column, able to escape only through the sacrifice of the forward ranks. As the few survivors from those squads finally came into view, they were being chased by what seemed to be the entire hunter army.
Carter had suddenly appeared to Luke’s left with what looked to be an oversized squad. This meant that the two leaders had nearly forty soldiers with which to slow the thousands headed their way long enough for the troops from the phalanx to escape to the vehicles. The last of the battalion’s survivors ran past, their escape route protected by the rearguard using spears and halberds to efficiently dispatch the pursuing hunters. Then the main wave hit, and within seconds the position was completely swamped. Carter shouted at the top of his voice for everyone to run, not even considering the idea of sticking around to make sure he’d been heard. T.C. was still up in the observation post where he was waiting to execute his uncle’s orders. From the moment the rearguard started their retreat, he counted to five and then blew the ship’s horn again. This pre-arranged signal warned everyone that the road was about to explode and they should seek cover or at least drop to the ground. Two seconds later the teen pressed the detonator and the stretch of road the 1st Utah had defended so valiantly erupted in great gouts of fire with huge pieces of concrete flying through the air.
Carter and Luke were on their feet before all of the debris had settled back to earth, screaming for the soldiers to stand up and fight. T.C. was with them now, and he actually had a twelve-gauge loaded with double-ought buckshot. Carter shouted for him to save the shotgun and use his spear. The Utah troops were up and moving for the most part, and there was no time to check on those who weren’t. At least two hundred hunters had managed to cross the now-destroyed section of road before the explosion, and the horde on the other side of the chasm was already up and pushing across the new pile of rubble in its path.
Luke was moving quickly now, stepping amongst the struggling hunters and smashing their skulls with his beloved axe. In a war where the only mercy was releasing what was once a human being from the bondage of the virus, Luke was a merciful warrior, swinging the blade of freedom. To the soldiers gathering their wits and forming a line of defense, the gore-coated teen seemed to be nothing less than the manifestation of the Angel of Death.
The scraggly line of battered soldiers stepped out as one, moving forward to engage the remaining hunters while the monsters were still dazed from the explosion. For several minutes the killing continued, until the only creatures left moving were obviously too injured to present an immediate threat. The Utah fighters tried to pull fallen comrades to their feet as they began heading back to the convoy, some of the larger men picking up their buddies and carrying them over their shoulders. The hunters scampering over the rubble were now only a few meters away from the solid footing where only Luke, T.C., and Carter stood waiting, able to delay their return to the truck since it was the last in a line of vehicles still in the process of pulling out.
A score of flesh-eaters had somehow pulled ahead of the main army, and Carter knew they’d have to be stopped before he could lead the teens to safety. He finally turned to his nephew and shouted, “You can use that shotgun now!”
T.C. took his time squeezing the trigger, careful to adjust his aim after each shot so he could maximize the damage done with the eight shells he had loaded. By the time he was finished shooting, only three hunters were still on their feet, all them easily put down by Carter and Luke when they stumbled into weapons range. More flesh-eaters were on the way, thousands more, and the first of them would reach the three soldiers in a matter of seconds.
“Get to the truck!” Carter shouted, making sure the others were on the move before he followed.
Finally, mercifully, the three exhausted warriors were driving down the road, watching the enraged hunters chasing them grow smaller in the distance until the truck rounded a curve and the monsters were out of sight. After several minutes spent draining water bottles and scarfing down granola bars, T.C. asked a question.
“So, you two do this sorta thing often?”
Luke snickered, then Carter began to laugh out loud. Hearing Carter’s guffaws led Luke to begin giggling uncontrollably. T.C. was smiling but didn’t seem to understand what was so funny. When he asked, “What?” the laughing only got worse.
Finally Carter wiped at the tears in his eyes and took several deep breaths before he gave an answer. “It wasn’t as challengin’ as what were used to, but it was a good fight.”
“Really?” T.C. asked with wide-eyed doubt etched all over his face.
When Luke managed to stop laughing he moaned, “Jack and David are gonna kill me. Any chance I can bribe you two not to tell them I went out front like that?”
T.C. shrugged while Carter snorted, “And the whole 1st Utah?”
“Oh, yeah,” Luke grumbled.
“So did we win or lose back there?” T.C. innocently asked.
Carter declared, “We got our asses kicked!”
“And we kicked ass like never before,” Luke added.
T.C. looked confused. “So which is it, we win or lose?”
“That was one hell of a fight,” Luke observed.
“Biggest battle of the war,” Carter replied.
“And we didn’t die,” T.C. added.
“Bingo,” Carter and Luke shouted at the same time.
A wide smile crossed T.C.’s face. “I knew we won.”
CHAPTER 21
Carter estimated that the convoy’s drive back to Vicksburg on the post-apocalyptic road would be a ten to twelve hour jaunt. He made the decision to stop near Tupelo after several hours to take roll call, tend to the wounded, and share out supplies between vehicles. From the battalion’s pre-battle strength of five hundred soldiers, only three hundred and forty had left the Pickwick Dam. Six had died from their wounds during the trip, but fortunately none of the survivors had bite wounds. Two men were in comatose states, while three others appeared to be dying from internal bleeding. Thirty-six others were suffering from injuries that seemed to be non-life threatening. The 1st Utah had suffered over forty percent casualties in a ten hour battle. Soldiers were already saying that if they survived the coming fight at Vicksburg, their unit would forever be known as the Pickwick Battalion. The troops were battered and exhausted, and immensely proud of one another. More than one westerner had expected to see the entire force wiped out, so even though all the soldiers had lost many people they knew and loved in the battle, the general mood in the unit was one of solemn thankfulness.
Luke was quiet during the long ride back to Vicksburg, mostly replaying the recent battle in his mind and trying to integrate the hunters’ evolution into any future strategies against the creatures. An echo of a headache still lingered, and his body was starting to painfully remind him of the physical burdens of close combat. Being scrunched in the front seat of a pick-up truck with Carter and his nephew for hour after hour as they bumped along with the rest of the convoy only encouraged his muscles to stiffen uncomfortably, and he started to daydream about stretching out next to Gracie under the stars.
Somehow, T.C. managed to sleep for most of the trip, and Carter seemed content to pass the time listening to country music CDs on the stereo. The sun was rising behind the convoy as it finally approached Vicksburg on I-20. The expedition had only been gone for five days, but during that time the surrounding landscape had been utterly transformed. Every tree and building within several hundred meters of the bridge had been flattened by bulldozers, and as the soldiers in the convoy approached the settlement, they could see thousands of people working in the woods and on the railroad embankment far to the north and south of the highway. Carter had radioed ahead to let Jack know they were close so he could keep the area clear as the vehicles rolled up to the bridge, but there were still
dozens of officers and most of the Fort Wayne contingent waiting to meet the returning soldiers.
Carter went straight for Jack and Carlson, with T.C. and Luke close on his heels. The mood of Vicksburg had changed with the landscape, a sense of anticipation hung in the air and mingled with the hardened expressions of the workers and would-be fighters. As he walked toward his comrades, Carter thought he could feel the weight of history pressing down on this place.
“Everyone’s assembled at the meetin’ house,” Harden explained as Carter and the teens approached. “Let your boys know that we’d like to start as soon as possible. We’re purty anxious to hear about what happened at the Pickwick Dam.”
T.C. spotted his mother and ran to greet her. After a long embrace with her son, she found Carter and hugged him as well. She whispered in his ear, “Thanks for bringing T.C. back safe and sound.”
Carter grinned and replied, “That boy can hold his own.”
Charlotte smiled and turned to Jack. “Well, professor, you’d better get your meeting started. The folks are getting antsy waiting for you, and the sooner you all figure out how to put an end to Barnes and his army, the sooner we’ll be able to reminisce about old times.” Even Carter noticed the slight flush that rose to Jack’s cheeks as Charlotte turned and walked off toward the meeting house.