by J. W. Vohs
The horns again sounded the retreat, and this time every unit had to cut their way to the third berm. With the echoes of the call still bouncing around his eardrums, Luke felt the pressure behind him give way suddenly and completely. He tried to take a controlled step backward but immediately stumbled over a corpse and fell into a pile of gore that was the stuff of nightmares. Through his left glove he felt an iron-fisted grip clench onto his hand and yank him rearward from the horrific morass he’d become entangled in. He tried to see who had him, but his visor was literally clouded with blood and what looked like strands of intestines. He had no idea if the gore was human or not, but he wasn’t about to let go of his axe to try to clear his view. Finally he felt himself being pulled to his feet by rough hands as the ground shook from the second line of bombs being detonated. Somebody wiped a rag over his visor, and when he could finally see, he realized that he was in the midst of one of the Louisiana Companies.
The soldier who’d pulled him from certain death was none other than the old man who’d promised that his troops would hold their ground. “You all right, son?” he shouted.
Luke just nodded before lifting his axe as his answer. The old man grinned through his blood-spattered visor as if he was out hunting or otherwise enjoying himself. He smacked Luke on the shoulder good naturedly before turning to a soldier by his side and yelling, “Ready to get back in there, brother?”
Then he was gone, and Luke looked left to see David catching his breath behind the Indiana lines. Luke tried briefly to find the hardy patriarch, wanting to thank him before heading back to his own unit, but the fierce old warrior had headed back to the front lines with his brother in tow, both of the gray-beards displaying the strength and energy of young athletes. Luke stared after them in amazement before slowly stumbling toward his friends.
Jack could only watch as the units under his command were steadily whittled away by the unrelenting attack of the hunter-army. The Allies were now struggling to hold the final berm. The ground was literally covered with the bodies of dead and wounded hunters, a carpet of flesh and gore stretching all the way back to the railroad-cut. The number and condition of the corpses worsened the closer he looked to where they phalanx had first stood, but there he could see pieces of humans liberally sprinkled among the dead monsters. If the creatures were eating anyone today, Jack had yet to see evidence of it; they simply ripped apart every person they caught and kept attacking. He estimated that less than half of the forces that had been present at the beginning of the battle two hours ago were still on their feet. Not all of the missing were dead, of course, certainly not even half—the stream of wounded to the rear never stopped or even slowed.
Jack had no idea how many hunters were down, but taking into account his estimate of the enemy losses at the railroad-cut, he was guessing that something close to half of the horde was out of action. As he’d feared, the Allied soldiers were killing the monsters at a rate of ten to one and still being swamped. Now the humans were all exhausted, thirsty, and disheartened. Even the professionals from Indiana and Utah were beaten, their body language betraying their weariness as they still stabbed and slashed at the enemy.
Jack knew he had to make the final call to retreat quickly; the fires around the walls had been set, and smoke was rapidly blocking the view of the defenders atop the structure. He shared a long look with T.C. and nodded. Seconds later, the horns sounded one last time.
Gracie and the other snipers were nearly out of their minds with worry and nervous energy when the final retreat was called. The only news most of them were getting about the raging battle was that being passed along from some of the barge captains monitoring the radio chatter. Jack had repeatedly warned everyone all week long to resist the urge to pass judgment on the battle’s progress by what was seen or heard in the rear, but Gracie knew that thousands of wounded had been making their way down the steep bank since the fighting started. She also knew that there couldn’t be too many thousands still fighting in the phalanx since the Allies had started the battle with somewhere around ten thousand soldiers in that formation. Jack had known that the losses would be heavy, that was part of the reason for building a series of shortened lines. But eventually the Allies would run out of time and space, and with the call for the last withdrawal ringing out over the river, Gracie and the other shooters prepared to do their jobs.
Her weapon for this phase of the battle was an AR-15, which she’d requested, deciding that she’d rather sacrifice stopping power than endure the recoil of the larger caliber guns available. This time she had to make her shots count, with only five, thirty-round magazines in her pack. The soldiers who’d survived so far found that they now had to navigate the treacherous route to the barges before their escape was complete. In most places the bank was steep, and in others it was covered in brush and other foliage. More than a few weary fighters slipped on gravel and slid all the way to the bottom, but with their armor Gracie figured that probably wasn’t a bad option. Right on their tails came the hunters, but not as many as she expected to see. She held her fire until a monster offered a still target, and then she shot him in the face. That set the pattern she followed until the withdrawal was complete.
She didn’t know if some of the snipers with AKs were taking body-shots in order to slow the pursuit, but a lot of monsters seemed to be falling to the ground where they struggled to regain their feet. Those were the creatures she focused on. She’d replaced magazines twice and had counted to sixteen with the third when she realized she didn’t have any more targets. Allied soldiers were still helping one another board the barges, many of them turning to cover their comrades only to find they were no longer being chased. Gracie pulled her eye from the scope and scanned the field for moving hunters but couldn’t find any. Finally one of the Utah officers put a hand on her shoulder and said, “C’mon down, ma’am, they’re attacking the bridge now.”
Jack had known all week, when he was honest with himself, that Luke had been right when he’d argued that the Allied forces couldn’t stop the horde. Every strand of wire they’d laid, stake they’d planted, and bomb they’d rigged, had been done with their commander’s knowledge that it wouldn’t be enough, not even close. Jack had ridden out to battle with the 1st Utah along Highway 61, knowing that their mauling would be the end result. He’d placed thousands of soldiers who trusted his judgment in a phalanx he knew would eventually be overrun, and he knew that many of those trusting souls would be lost in what would certainly be a confusing, bloody series of retreats. All of these actions, and more, he had commanded in order to bring the horde to the walls on these bridges. After Gracie had come up with the idea for modifying the walls, he’d known one other thing for certain: if the Allies could lure the hunters into attacking the bridges, they could destroy Barnes’ army here at Vicksburg.
The soldiers on top of the walls were all wearing firefighting masks and oxygen tanks, which was a good idea in the midst of such dense, dark smoke. The training run Jack had ordered had quickly shown that the fighters defending the bridge would be engulfed in the toxic cloud, and salvage teams had been sent up and down the river to search for the gear they needed to function after the fires were lit. Chad Greenburg was now talking to Jack over the radio from a barge out in the middle of the river, and he described the entire area around the walls as “zero visibility.” According to him, the smoke cloud was hanging over several hundred meters of the bridges where they met the shore, soaring far into the sky above. “Jack,” he shouted with excitement, “nobody can see anything up there!”
“All right, Sarge,” Jack replied, “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Jack gave the order to blow the temporary, wooden buildings off of the modified walls after one more check through the smoke to make sure everyone was under cover. The charges worked as planned, destroying most of the structures while avoiding damaging the sloped walls. The surfaces weren’t completely covered with ice, as Gracie had first suggested, but the soldiers had buc
kets of vegetable oil to pour down the walls if the hunters came too close to the top. Now all they could do was wait, and pray that Barnes’ hubris led him to charge the bridge defenses even when he could no longer see them.
Another radio call came in, this time from Captain Hardin who was sitting in a boat just on the edge of the massive smoke cloud. Jack had been lecturing all week about radio security, so the message, “Help, help, help, Hardin needs help,” was repeated four times in a row to let everyone know the plan was working.
Jack and the rest of the defenders atop the wall could hear the howls of the hunters as they came closer, finally seeing the first of the monsters reaching for them as they scrambled over the bodies of hundreds of their mates in a maneuver that had always worked for the horde in the past. This time thousands of the monsters had fallen back from the sloped surface as they all rushed forward to shove their way up and over the structures, just as they’d done at Brandenburg and many other places. Some tumbled back to the surface of the bridge, usually breaking bones in the process, while many others fell into the muddy waters of the Mississippi far below.
Jack figured it had been about ten minutes since he’d given the last call for retreat, and he was just now seeing monsters near the top of the wall. That was ten minutes filled with thousands of flesh-eaters crushing one another as they tried to climb a surface that only led them to deadly falls. Now that there were apparently enough bodies under their feet to reach for the top, all they found were long, cruel pikes stabbing down into them and pitching them backwards or over the side. At this height, either result was deadly.
Jack grabbed a radio and sent out his own coded message, fairly certain that Barnes would have people monitoring all signals. “They came through the smoke. They are over the walls. Everyone over the river.”
This was repeated four times, and when he was finished transmitting, everyone who’d received the message sent it on over their own radios. Meanwhile, the troops continued to exact vengeance for all of the heartache these monsters had brought to Tennessee, Kentucky, and the rest of the south. Jack had asked Captain Hardin to pick the soldiers he knew could hold these walls, and every last one of them had been with him in the doomed community they’d lost to Barnes on the Cumberland River. This fight was also turning out to be one-sided, but this time the humans were the unstoppable force. Not one hunter even got a hand on the top of the wall as the slaughter continued unabated.
For over three hours the Tennesseans killed the creatures with their pikes, so many of them that the troops had to work in shifts to keep pace with the climbing hunters. Jack mostly watched, at one point telling T.C., “Extermination is better than fighting.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.” T.C. commented as he chugged down a bottle of water.
Jack grinned at the boy’s bravado. “Just remember the strategy: Lure your enemy into the open, then kill them with overwhelming force.”
“So in this case,” T.C. observed, “most of that force is a wall modification?”
“Yep,” Jack declared, “this wall is a force multiplier—it exponentially increases the strength of our killing power.”
T.C. nodded as he dropped an empty water bottle on the surface of the fighting platform. “Well, if you don’t mind, I’ve still gotta few scores to settle with these bastards.”
When there were no more hunters visible to the soldiers atop the wall, Jack waited half an hour until he was convinced no more were coming. Then he risked a call to Chad. “What do you have for me?”
“Nothing. I repeat, nothing.”
Jack simply replied, “Same here. Will wait a while longer.”
After a few minutes he checked with Chad again. The report was the same. Jack set up a guard detail with instructions to radio him immediately if anything changed, then he made his way down to the bridge and walked out of the smoke. Barges and smaller watercraft covered the Mississippi to the north of Vicksburg, while to the south the river looked like a scene from hell. From out of the smoke cloud floated thousands of dead hunters, close enough to the bank that helicopters couldn’t see them but far enough out to ensure that they’d all drowned. The vast flow of corpses reminded Jack of old photos he’d seen of logging operations that used rivers to float trees to mills downstream, but these were the prized flesh-eaters Barnes had used to terrify the entire eastern half of the country. He wondered what his former boss would think when he saw this mess. As a helicopter passed over the bridge, he figured he’d find out soon enough.
When Jack turned back towards the northern side of the bridge, he noticed that several barges had returned to the bank from which they’d evacuated soldiers from the defeated phalanx just hours earlier. Now troops from Utah and Indiana were forming into skirmish lines on shore, preparing to move back toward their previously held positions. A call from Carter came over the radio, “Gotta lot of wounded hunters up there—we’re gonna tend to ‘em.”
Jack hesitated for a moment before asking, “You have friends with you?”
“Most of my best friends, and yers too. By the way, that was a purty good idea ‘ol Gracie had. How’s it feel to get shown up by a little girl?”
Jack smiled. “It feels great. Better than great. Aw hell, get a move on and I’ll meet you on the field and help you guys mop up.”
“Ten-four, ‘ol buddy.”
Jack smiled again as he pictured Carter’s face, certain that he knew the exact expression on his best friend’s face as the enormity of this victory slowly set in. Suddenly another voice came over the radio.
“Jack Smith this is President Barnes. Answer me; we just heard your voice yapping to your little friends on this channel.”
Jack keyed the mike. “What do you want?” he purposely sounded annoyed and dismissive.
Barnes’ voice seemed to rise several octaves as he shouted, “Do you really think you can beat me?”
Jack’s voice was smooth as silk as he replied, “Looks like we just did.”
A long silence ensued, during which, Jack assumed, Barnes was getting himself under control.
Jack couldn’t resist taunting his old nemesis. “Look, I’m kinda busy down here cleaning up the mess you’ve left behind—you know, the corpses of what used to be your unstoppable army of hunters. Is there something you want?”
Any composure Barnes had mustered quickly dissipated. “There are millions of these creatures in the world, and I’m the only one who knows how to control them!” he screamed.
“Yeah, have fun with that,” Jack retorted.
After another short pause, Barnes managed to lower his voice. “Next time I’ll have more of them, Jack, and I won’t be overconfident either.”
“Somehow I doubt that last part.”
“You’re a dead man walking!” Barnes snarled.
“Aren’t we all?” Jack mused. “In fact, I’d watch my back if I were you.”
Another brief silence ensued before Barnes made his final threat, “You can’t protect everyone, Smith. See you soon.”
“Whatever,” Jack said to himself as he holstered the radio and continued on his trek to meet up with Carter and the others. A ladder went over the side of the bridge and led to a catwalk beneath the structure that Hardin’s workers had built when the walls were first constructed. Jack now used the shaky contraption to avoid what he expected to be the biggest pile of corpses he’d ever seen on the outside of the wall. Sure enough, when he finally climbed back to the surface about a hundred meters from the wall, he saw the dead stacked up on the road leading into the still roiling smoke cloud. He contemplated the grisly scene with deep satisfaction: his men, and Barnes’ impatient stupidity, had killed somewhere around a hundred thousand hunters today. Jack figured the Allies would be busy finishing off the wounded and disposing of the corpses for weeks to come, and he was finally grateful for the unseasonably cold weather.
Luke still hadn’t heard from Gracie by the time the barge he was on hit the shore, but he figured she’d find him so
on enough as the rest of the boats were heading toward Vicksburg and there was still an hour of daylight remaining. He found it hard to believe how much had happened since he’d joined the phalanx in the pre-dawn hours; they’d actually defeated the horde. Jack’s plan had worked, and most of the Allied army had survived. As he looked over the steep bank he was about to climb back up to the bridge he realized again however, that several thousand soldiers were now mostly in pieces on the battlefield. The ground was so littered with corpses and gore, in fact, that Carter ordered a left-face when their barge was unloaded and led everyone around the mess near the river.
Eventually they completed a one-eighty and came back to I-20 between the corpse-strewn railroad-cut and the first defensive line manned by the phalanx. Here the bodies were all hunters, and more than a few were still breathing.
“Form a skirmish line,” Carter yelled out. “Stick a blade through the skull of everythin’ still movin’ between us and the bridge.”
Nobody liked the order, but it sure beat the dangers they’d faced the last time they were on this ground. This was mopping up, and the sooner it was done the sooner everyone could head back to camp. The line had covered about a hundred meters before a column of troops came up the bank from another barge that had just landed, and Luke looked up just in time to see a familiar young woman carefully working he way through the carpet of corpses. Gracie covered the distance to Luke as quickly as she could, expecting to help dispatch wounded hunters with the rest of the clean-up crew, but Carter waved the teens off to the side of the main carnage.
“Jack’s on his way down, but David’s chompin’ at the bit to rendezvous with the professor, so we’re gonna meet up with ‘em halfway between the railroad cut and what’s left of the first berm.” Carter winked at Gracie, “He prolly wants to make ya a general for savin’ our sorry asses with yer brilliant plan.”