Juggernaut

by Adam Baker

  Lucy’s voice:

  ‘Swarming like bugs.’

  A couple of soldiers crawled along the Pullman roof towards Voss.

  ‘Chrome motherfuckers flanked us. Circled our fire avenue and reached the train. Still got some residual smarts.’

  He took aim. Neat headshots. The skeletal creatures fell dead, slid from the carriage roof and landed in the dirt.

  ‘Time to get radical.’

  He climbed down the ladder and jumped to the ground. He opened the carriage door and climbed inside.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Sweet,’ said Amanda. ‘Don’t worry about us.’

  Voss snatched a bandolier of rifle grenades. He slung the belt over his shoulder: 40mm pepper-pot rounds in leather loops, like elephantine shotgun shells.

  He jumped from the carriage. He ran across open ground towards the convoy.

  Lucy and Amanda on over-watch. Soldiers lumbered towards Voss. They cut them down. Skull-shattering impacts.

  Voss pushed a grenade from a belt loop. Gold tip, high explosive. He slotted the grenade into the breach of the launcher slung beneath his rifle and snapped it shut.

  Voss aimed the launcher and fired. Thud. Whistle-whine. Rotted troops blasted to fragments. It rained rocks and scraps of flesh.

  He advanced. He stepped over cratered ground and smoking limbs. He could see soldiers massing among the wrecked vehicles of the convoy.

  Voss grew up in Bloemfontein. A dilapidated house. A pile of wrecked furniture in the backyard. ‘Put a match to it,’ his father said. Voss slopped gasoline and threw a burning rag. Rats streamed from the woodpile as smashed cupboards and chairs started to smoke and burn.

  He thought of rats as he watched rotted soldiers swarm and teem among burned-out vehicles.

  He slotted a fresh grenade into the launcher and fired. Thud. Streak of efflux. Thunderous concussion. Eruption of sand and smoke. Trucks rolled. Sedans flipped and burned.

  Amanda fed a fresh belt into the SAW. She locked the receiver closed.

  ‘This is it. Last chain. Two hundred rounds, then she’s done.’

  ‘Make them count,’ said Lucy.

  Two half-dissolved Republican Guard stumbled towards Voss. Skin hung in strips. They tried to flank him from the right as he fragged the convoy. Amanda cut them down. The SAW spat brass. The soldiers were ripped apart.

  Nearby sound of smashing glass. Amanda pulled plugs from her ears.

  ‘Shit. They hit us from the rear. They got in.’

  She opened the connecting door to the second carriage. The dining car. A banquet table. Upturned chairs. Cobwebbed dereliction.

  A rotted figure squirmed through a broken window. He hauled himself over the sill, shredding clothes and flesh on jagged shards.

  More soldiers crowding outside the coach. Hands slapped glass. Windows cracked and broke.

  Amanda grabbed the SAW. She slung the strap over her shoulder and lifted the weapon. She stood in the doorway of the dining car.

  The man-thing fell to the floor of the coach. He struggled to his feet. His right arm was a mess of metallic spines.

  He saw Amanda and hissed.

  She braced her legs and pulled the trigger. The heavy machine gun ejected a stream of links and smoking brass. The soldier burst apart. He was hurled backward. He hit wall panels and slid to the floor. Another burst from the gun obliterated his head.

  Windows shattered. Three Republican Guard began to haul themselves into the carriage. Amanda opened fire. The creatures were pulverised and flung from the train.

  The SAW ran dry. Amanda unhitched the strap and dropped the smoking weapon at her feet. She unholstered her Glock and backed out the carriage. The floor was carpeted with spent shell casings. Her boots kicked scorched brass.

  ‘Did you get them?’ shouted Lucy.

  ‘There will be more,’ said Amanda. ‘We can’t cover both carriages. We have to barricade the doorway.’

  Amanda tipped the mahogany desk onto its side and pushed it to block the connecting door.

  Lucy fired from the window. Soldiers approached across open ground from the east. Headshots. They fell dead.

  She flexed cramp from her trigger hand. She slapped a fresh mag into her rifle.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ shouted Amanda. She pushed a heavy bureau towards the carriage doorway.

  Lucy lay down her rifle, threw her bodyweight against the bureau and helped shunt it against the barricade.

  Voss continued to frag the convoy. Trucks and jeeps blown apart. Flame and eruptions of dust. Scattered doors, trunk lids, seat springs and axles. Each detonation followed by the lazy thrum of whirling shrapnel.

  Republican Guard converged from all sides. Voss oblivious as encroaching soldiers threatened to flank his position.

  Lucy and Amanda gave cover fire. A succession of clean headshots.

  Dead man’s click. The mag run dry. Lucy ejected the clip. Nothing in the ammo pouches strapped to her vest. She took a fresh magazine from the backpack.

  She shouted into her radio.

  ‘Voss. Hey, Voss.’ No response. ‘Voss. Arsehole. Pull back. We’re running dry.’

  His earpiece hung loose.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ said Amanda. ‘Fucking idiot. He’s going get ripped apart.’

  ‘Keep him covered,’ said Lucy. ‘Do the best you can.’

  She slapped the mag into her rifle and cranked the charging handle. She took aim and fired.

  Voss watched a group of Republican Guard push open the rear door of an APC and emerge from darkness. He took aim and fired a grenade into the interior of the vehicle. Flame jetted from every vent and hatchway. The soldiers were ejected from the APC, reduced to burning, scattered limbs.

  He checked the bandolier slung over his shoulder. No more frag grenades. He retreated from the convoy, backed slowly towards the carriage. He loaded a red-tip flare into the grenade launcher.

  Three skeletal figures heading his way. He aimed and fired. The middle soldier staggered like he took a gut punch, flare imbedded in his thorax. Ignition. A jet of red, magnesium fire. Ragged uniforms caught alight. All three soldiers burning like they had been doused in gasoline. They fell to their knees. Pillars of fire. They collapsed, flesh slow-cooking with a blue flame.

  Voss slotted a fresh illume into the launcher. He snapped the receiver closed.

  Two men weaved between convoy wreckage, fused like conjoined twins. They must have lain pinned beneath a truck, or curled in the trunk of a sedan, as the parasitic infection took hold. Metallic carcinomas erupted from flesh and melded the two Republican Guards together.

  Voss took aim.

  A hand grabbed his ankle. He looked down. A rotted figure slowly pulled itself from the dirt, streaming subsurface sand. A horrible, sightless thing, vomited half-dissolved from the ground. Flesh scoured by lime, skin sloughed in strips.

  Voss stumbled backward and fell. He tried to jerk his leg free. The ghoul bared its teeth. Voss struggled to aim his rifle.

  A second half-dissolved creature broke through the sand-crust behind Voss. A skeletal hand closed over his face.

  Voss gagged. His head was wrenched back. Stink of advanced decomposition. He tried to squirm free and screamed as teeth sank into his calf.

  He tore his head from grasping claws. Clumps of hair ripped out at the root. He looked down at the rotted revenant that gripped his leg. The creature drooled blood. It spat flesh. Voss fired the grenade launcher. The illume punched through the creature’s mouth and wedged in its throat. Voss rolled clear as the creature’s head exploded in a brilliant sunburst of red fire.

  Lucy dragged Voss aboard the carriage and slammed the door. She swept empty mags from a chair. He sat, face white with shock.

  Lucy unsheathed her knife. She sliced open his pant leg. She examined the wound. A deep bite mark.

  She turned to Amanda.

  ‘Pass me Gaunt’s jacket.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re out of
surgical dressing.’

  ‘Fuck him.’

  ‘Come on. Give me the fucking jacket.’

  Amanda reluctantly lifted the jacket from the back of a chair and handed it to Lucy.

  Lucy ripped out the nylon liner and cut it into strips. She pulled on latex gloves, took Raphael’s Zippo from her pocket and held her knife blade in the flame.

  ‘Bite your rifle strap.’

  ‘Didn’t do Huang any good. This shit is a death sentence.’

  ‘Do it anyway.’

  Voss unclipped the rifle strap and bit down. Lucy propped his leg on a chair.

  ‘Hold him still.’

  Amanda gripped his leg.

  ‘Hope this hurts, motherfucker,’ said Amanda.

  Voss closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists.

  Lucy sliced flesh with the hot knife. Voss screamed and arched his back. Amanda fought to keep hold of his leg.

  Lucy carved out the bite mark. She grabbed the gobbet of flesh with a gloved hand and threw it out the window. It fell in the dirt. Infected soldiers crouched and fought over the scrap of muscle.

  Lucy padded the wound with a couple of tampons and bound it with satin strips.

  She took a morphine syrette from her pocket. She popped the cap, jabbed the needle in Voss’s thigh, and squeezed.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ protested Amanda. ‘Wasting our last fucking shots on this guy?’

  ‘Check the window. Keep us covered.’

  ‘Crappy day,’ panted Voss.

  ‘We acted quick,’ said Lucy. ‘Maybe we stopped the infection.’

  Voss shook his head.

  ‘We both know the score.’

  ‘Well, as long as you can pull a trigger, I don’t give a shit.’

  A cadaverous soldier began to climb through the window. Amanda raised her rifle and pulled the trigger. Dry click. She swung it like a club. The plastic stock cracked the creature’s skull.

  She checked the magazine.

  ‘That’s it. I’m out.’

  She threw the rifle aside. She grabbed the machete and hacked at the sill. Fingers flew.

  ‘Beaucoup hostiles. Time to unhitch and roll.’

  Transmission crackle.

  Lucy picked up the sat phone.

  ‘Roger that, Carnival. Holding at fifteen thousand. Heading two-nine-five. Approximately twenty minutes from target . . .’

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  Voss

  Lucy opened the carriage door and was immediately beaten back. The malignant army massed at the doorway reached for her, tearing at her legs and ankles, trying to haul themselves into the carriage. A seething mass of rotted flesh. Awful stench.

  ‘Cover me,’ she shouted to Amanda. ‘I’ve got to shut off the fuel pump.’

  Lucy fired into the crowd. Headshots. She jumped from the carriage and found herself surrounded by a jostling horde of grotesquely mutated soldiers. Metal dripped from suppurating wounds like they were bleeding chrome.

  They lunged. A circle of grasping hands. She switched full auto. She opened fire, and swung her rifle in a sweeping arc at head height. The crowd scythed by bullets. A rolling wave of skull fragments and brain tissue.

  She ran for the fuel truck. Her path blocked by a cadaverous soldier. She cracked his skull with the butt of her rifle. He fell. She stamped on his head.

  She reached the ladder. She slung her rifle and started to climb. Skeletal hands seized her feet and dragged her down. She thrashed and fought as she was dragged beneath the truck. She lay beneath the chassis, kicking at snapping, snarling mouths. Two soldiers clawed at her legs. She couldn’t release her rifle strap. She drew her pistol and fired between her feet.

  Lucy rolled clear of the truck. Emaciated figures stood over her. Blood-caked hands reached down.

  Gunfire from the carriage. Headshots. Three mutations fell dead. They slumped across Lucy and pinned her to the ground.

  She squirmed free of stinking bodies. She grabbed her rifle from the dirt and ran for the carriage. Amanda leaned from the coach and held out her hand. She hauled Lucy aboard and slammed the door.

  Lucy checked herself over. She patted down, looked for blood and torn clothing.

  ‘Think I’m okay. Didn’t make it to the pump.’

  She climbed to her feet. She slapped sand from her rifle.

  Fists pounded the side of the carriage. A steady drumming like heavy rain. They heard fingernails gouge the lacquered livery.

  ‘We have to unhook that fuel line,’ said Amanda. ‘Someone has to get on top of that tanker and hit the Off button. If we pull away while the truck is hooked up and pumping gas we’ll be incinerated.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Lucy, pointing at the carriage door. ‘Be my guest.’

  The barricade blocking the doorway to the adjoining carriage began to tremble under heavy blows. The shriek and rasp of shifting furniture. The desk obstructing the door began to slide.

  ‘Bunch of them in the next coach,’ said Voss. ‘Must have piled through the windows.’

  Lucy got to her feet. Voss stood unsteadily by her side.

  ‘Got any shotgun shells?’

  Voss slotted five shells into the receiver of his Ithaca pump.

  ‘Last few.’

  ‘Let’s put them to good use.’

  Lucy unhooked a frag grenade from her webbing. She pulled the pin.

  ‘Okay. On my mark.’

  She gave the nod.

  Amanda and Voss put their shoulders to the upturned desk and bureau and shunted them aside.

  Three soldiers stumbled through the doorway and fell to their knees. Voss stepped forward, racked his shotgun slide and blew their heads apart.

  Lucy looked through the doorway. Soldiers massing in the dining car, squirming through broken windows.

  She released the safety lever of the grenade and tossed it to the far end of the carriage. The grenade bounced beneath the banquette table and rolled between rotted, dirt-caked combat boots.

  ‘Down,’ shouted Lucy. They threw themselves away from the doorway and covered their heads.

  A muffled boom. Dust and flame.

  They got to their feet. Carnage glimpsed through blue smoke-haze. The banquette table and chair blasted to fragments and draped in viscera.

  A soldier lay among smashed furniture, struggling to move.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Lucy. ‘We don’t have time for this shit.’

  Amanda ignored her. She kicked through wreckage, swung her machete and split the creature’s head with a single hacking blow.

  They rebuilt the barricade. They shunted furniture against the doorway. They threw headless bodies from the train.

  Soldiers climbed through the windows. Amanda delivered precise headshots with her Glock.

  Voss fired his shotgun dry. He threw it down and picked up his rifle.

  Sound of splintering wood. Amanda pulled a rotted Persian rug aside. A fist punched upward through the centre of the floor, shattering hard-wood planks. Clawed hands tugged at broken floorboards to widen the hole. A snarling, skeletal thing began to squirm through the aperture. It saw Amanda and hissed. She decapitated the soldier with her machete. The severed head rolled across the floor. She grabbed its hair and threw it from the window.

  Lucy overturned a heavy table and slammed it across the hole. She threw the missile case on top of the up-turned table for added weight.

  ‘Use the grenades,’ she shouted.

  They unhooked frag grenades from their webbing and pulled pins.

  ‘Keep them clear of the fuel truck. All right. Count of three. One. Two. Three.’

  They hurled grenades from the carriage windows. They crouched and covered their heads.

  One of the ghouls looked down as a grenade rolled in the sand at his feet, his expressionless face clouded by a moment of memory and doubt.

  Eruption of dust and flesh fragments. Body parts littered the sand. Flesh and bone trampled by boots as comrades pushed forward to
hammered the side of the coach.

  The carriage was filled with blue combustion smoke and the bitter taint of chemical ignition.

  Sat-com handset:

  ‘Angel Flight to Carnival, over.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Approaching target.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘We got to roll,’ shouted Amanda. ‘Forget the fuel line. Just rip it loose and take our chances. We’re out of ammo. We’re out of time. We have to go.’

  Lucy distributed the remaining mags. Amanda kicked among spent cartridges on the carriage floor, searched for bullets ejected during gun jams.

  They loaded their weapons.

  ‘That’s it. Last rounds. All I got left. Make them count. Let’s retake the loco, and get moving.’

  Voss shook out a couple of ammo pouches. A single 40mm grenade fell from a pouch and rolled across mahogany. Gold tip. High explosive. He put in his pocket.

  ‘Lucy. Mandy. It’s been a privilege.’

  He pushed the carriage door wide. He shielded his eyes from fierce sunlight. A horde of rotted creatures jostled for him. They reached and clawed his legs.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ shouted Lucy.

  Voss shouldered his rifle and emptied his mag full auto. He dropped the spent clip and slapped a fresh magazine into the receiver.

  He jumped from the carriage doorway. A carpet of bodies. Horribly deformed soldiers closed in on all sides. He raised his rifle and lay a sweeping arc of fire in a four-second burst. Chests ripped open. Republican Guard hurled backwards, sent reeling.

  He hitched the empty weapon over his shoulder and drew his Glock. He edged towards the fuel truck, delivering swift headshots as snarling, mutated creatures lunged for him.

  He shot the weapon dry, then used the butt as a bludgeon. Hammer blows. He cracked skulls.

  A soldier tore at his face, ripped skin above his eyebrow. Voss delivered a vicious head-butt. The creature staggered backward.

  He threw the pistol aside, drew his knife and punched it through the revenant’s eye socket. It toppled backward, knife jammed in its head.

  Voss gripped the ladder and climbed. Fingers clawed his legs. Teeth sank into his calf and ankle, tearing fabric, tearing flesh. He yelled in pain and anger. He kicked himself free.