by Bryan James
To my left, the Abrams was moving, its treads creaking and rolling against bodies as it moved parallel to the wide opening. It couldn’t plug the hole—it was too small and the gap too large—but it could funnel the flood away from me and keep the odds more even. It blocked the center of the flood and bodies started to stream to the sides, several enterprising corpses even going over the front of the tank until the gunner took care of their ambitions.
Sweat poured from my pores as I became a flaming emissary to the undead, fire blasting into the bodies ahead, gun speaking steadily as I waded forward. Teeth were finding soft spots in my armor, now. I used the heavy metal plating as a bludgeon, swinging my arms and engaging the long blades as I thrashed around. Bodies pressed into my own, and I sprayed fire again.
This had been a bad idea.
They were everywhere.
I was surrounded and I couldn’t blind them fast enough. I was still twenty feet from the gap, and they poured through steadily.
The gunfire was popping steadily, bodies dropping inconsistently around me. It was keeping me from getting overwhelmed, but it wasn’t keeping me clear.
I stopped moving forward, the press of bodies too much for even my strength. Flames were my only weapon, now, and I flooded the bodies around me with fire and death. My eyes burned from the heat, and I looked away, as the faces of the undead loomed in my narrow line of sight.
Mouths open. Eyes leaking from ruined lids in a watery drizzle of whitish fluid. Flames leaping to the sky.
I stumbled once, going to a knee in the press of arms and legs. Hands grabbed my arms and I flailed, one blade breaking against the ground as my arm was driven down.
My leg collapsed underneath me. There were at least twenty of them on me now. I couldn’t press them off.
Somehow, in the moment, I could smell their death.
I felt the snap as the bone in my leg broke. I cried out in pain as a set of teeth found my neck.
Another found the soft tissue of my inner elbow.
“Stand by, six—” the comms began to squawk, and then the balaclava was ripped from my head.
All I saw were rotting, flaming heads.
And teeth. In the confusion, I thought I could feel their burning incisors as they found flesh.
I fell back, bodies on top of me, pressing me into the bloody, flaming earth.
Their stench was overpowering, their energy inexhaustible.
Urged on by their hunger, frantic with need, they were everywhere.
I was one, and my strength was not enough.
It was over.
And then, somehow, humanity took over.
As a set of teeth pushed slowly into my neck and I felt the tendons pulled up, to the surface of my skin, bodies suddenly disintegrated around me and chunks of flesh and flaming hair and bone exploded into the air in a mist of torturous violence. My arms were free, as the heads attached to my attackers disappeared. I stayed prone, back to the ground, blood leaking from multiple bites.
My left arm wasn’t working right, and I knew it was dislocated, pulled by several of those things until it had almost detached.
A stream of tracer-infused minigun fire was clearing the space around me, and I heard the soft whisper of the rotating barrels pause. No comms left, I heard the voice of an angel over the melee of the crowd.
“Michael, if you are alive, get your ass off the goddamned ground and finish what you fucking started! Because when you get back, I am going to kill you until you fucking die from it!”
Okay, a slightly vulgar angel.
Kate stood next to Rhodes who held a small minigun in his massive hands, turrets still whirling fifty feet away as he rotated slowly after panning through the horde. I pushed myself from the ground as Kate rushed forward, a whirl of blades and concern as she tore through the flood of creatures that rushed to fill the gap that the deadly minigun had made in the press of bodies. I fired the flames in a circle around me as I watched the tank take its final position. Limping forward, the decreased press of bodies flooding in allowed me to neutralize their attack more effectively, and I pulled my broken leg behind me as I reached the mechanism in the side of the wall. I leaned against the front of the tank, firing another jet of flames into the crowd of creatures moving toward me.
This wouldn’t work. I can’t keep them off me and move the bodies out of the way at the same time.
I fired the last round from my pistol and didn’t bother reholstering, simply dropping it to the ground.
My characters had always done that, and I had never thought it to be realistic. I never understood why the writers thought someone would do that.
But now I knew. I needed my hand, and I needed it now.
My machete came up as my flamethrower died, flames sputtering and falling flat. Cursing, I tried to reach the three mangled bodies that were obstructing the rollers from moving the double-stacked containers down to the ground. The thick, ten feet of steel above me was oppressive as I had to jump back, a crowd of creatures filling the void, flaming heads and sightless bodies stumbling forward.
Then, Kate was there. Blades whirling, she spun to face me and tossed me two small items, which I snagged from the air as I fell back against the tank.
“Throw them.” She said simply, and I looked down.
Grenades.
Lovely.
See? A fucking angel.
I pulled the pins quickly and tossed them ten feet beyond the horde at our feet. They hit the ground, rolling to a stop in the bloody dirt beneath the press of hundreds of shambling feet. A curious creature bent over, seeing the movement and identifying the culprit. Dressed in a suit and tie, face drawn and horrid in the light of the flames and the sound of the gunfire, he cocked his head.
Then the grenades exploded, disintegrating his body and throwing several more into the air.
Bodies fell forward and shattered and I didn’t pause. Together, we shot to the rails, blades making short work of those that came between us and the wall. We had only seconds to remove the jammed and mangled corpses.
The gunner on the tank fired at the narrow angle, trying to relieve us from the press of bodies already surging past the point of the explosion, where mangled bodies crawled on the ground or lay prone, bloodied and damaged masses of flesh.
I heard Rhode’s minigun speak again, and the sputtering cascade of small arms fire. Even the hissing roar of a flamethrower. Voices were raised. More voices. More men and women, surging to the gap, eager to stem the tide.
Kate and I reached up, heedless of the bloody, pulpy, mass. I found a bone and pulled, bringing an entire body down to the ground, and whipping it into the coming bodies as the gunner from the tank fired again, slamming several more to the ground. In the flames and the spotlights, I could see the bodies pressing through the hole in the wall outside, the backstops now useless and broken.
Kate brought down an arm, and she cursed as it detached from the body that was jammed into the narrow track of the roller. I dug my hands into the pulpy mess and pulled, a shoe and a wadded up pair of gory jeans coming loose and falling to the ground.
A final body, the skull pressed awkwardly into the angled space between roller and metal track, waited as Kate turned to cut down several approaching forms. I reached the huddled form, both legs having been snapped by the crushing weight, and pushed out at odd angles. Wincing, as I put weight on my broken leg, I pulled the creature away from the mechanism, noting the movement of the wheel several inches as I moved the skull away.
“Let’s go,” I screamed, limping to Kate’s side, taking a stumbling form through the top of the skull with the thick blade. She turned and grabbed me under the arm and pulled me away, even as the machine gunner on the tank opened up again.
We pulled ourselves into the killing ground behind, and I balked as Kate put both hands under my arms and threw me up, onto the angled front of the large tank. She followed suit, and pressed the transmit button on her comms.
“Drop the gate!”
she yelled, as two flamethrowers opened up from the top of the wall, pressing fire and flame into the gap beneath the containers. The crane shuddered once, and we heard the creaking of ropes and pulleys.
Flames blasted from underneath the metal as the tank moved forward, and the double-stacked containers came down in a rush of hot air. A crush of flaming creatures, caught beneath the containers, were slowly flattened as the containers met the ground, and as the heavy metal met the earth, the flames sputtered and died, leaving several outstretched, twitching hands the only memory of their existence.
I sighed and fell back against the cold metal, the tank moving slowly forward as bullets and flames still fell to our right, the assembled humanity inside making swift work of the surviving creatures, who shambled aimlessly, stumbling over the crumpled bodies of their comrades, sometimes several bodies deep in blood, metal, and flames.
Kate put a hand on my chest, scanning my body and noting the multiple wounds, finally resting her eyes on my leg, which I held in one burned and blackened hand as I met her eyes.
“So… wanna grab a burger?” I asked, smiling through the agony.
She appeared ready to return the smile, until she pressed her hand to her ear and cursed, listening for a moment and then looking back to me.
“It’ll have to wait. We have a situation.”
I shot her a glance.
“Okay, fine. Another situation.”
FORTY-EIGHT
“We’ve got the Doc on the horn with D.C. now, relaying the new serum, and giving their scientists the info. As you know, they’ve already pushed out the vaccine, as far as the Midwest now, but they’re going to have to push out the updates and the new stuff really fast. Doc is working with them.”
“How are the napalm supplies?” Kate asked, as I flexed my shoulder, rotating the arm again in the socket. It had taken only twenty minutes for the bone in my leg to set.
No surgery, no curative action. Just time.
I was still amazed—and more than a little freaked out.
“We have a supply line from the Coasties in the bay, and we have some more inbound from California. It’s gradually taking them down in numbers, but there’s a ton of ‘em out there. We’re dropping some sonic buoys behind them, trying to split them into more manageable groups. High explosive ordnance works okay, but we really have to burn them to the ground. That just takes time.”
He leaned over a map of the fort, pointing his finger at the breached area, then at several red lines nearly a half-mile distant from the fortress on all sides.
“This is the depth of the creatures. They seemed to have stopped arriving, meaning that they could have drawn as much as eighty percent of these things from around the area. But we’re holding our own. They can’t get up the walls, and as long as we’re careful with our gunfire from now on, there’s no chance of a breach.”
“How about the other gate?” Kate asked.
He shook his head, and Gaffney spoke quickly.
“Locked and dropped. The entryway has been lowered, and the third floor gate is sealed. No way they’re getting in that way.”
I nodded.
“How long can you hold out here, like this?” I gestured to the walls, and the constant gunfire and flames. “You’re just a tad outnumbered.”
Gaffney and Finnigan exchanged looks, and the older man looked up from the map.
“With these numbers, we just don’t know. We have supply lines that are well supported, and we have good tactics. But we’ve got several million of those things outside the doors, and if they keep piling up, the sheer press of bodies could pose a problem very soon. We have moved most of the civvies offshore and to Bremerton, but we can’t surrender this base unless we’re prepared to surrender hundreds of much-needed ground assault assets, munitions, food and fuel. We have to hold, and we feel like we can do it. We just need to take some big ass chunks out of those godless twats outside the doors.”
“Hooah” whispered Gaffney softly, and Finnigan smiled in response.
“So we just have to worry about the scouting report?” I asked, glancing at Kate and back to Gaffney, who turned to Garcia.
“Yeah, well. That’s the new hitch in our giddy up, isn’t it? We always have two helos doing close air support and medium range scouting. Usually, they just do a slow circle of the larger metro area to make sure we’re not surprised by anything. About twenty minutes ago, they spotted an inbound train.”
“And it’s not ours,” I filled in, having gotten the quick back-story from Kate on the tank.
“It’s not ours, and worse, it’s not cargo containers. We think it’s militia, and at this point, we don’t think it’s friendly. It’s more than a hundred and forty cars, all filled with various combustible substances. Propane, kerosene, fuel… you name it, it looks like it’s carrying it. It’s all on the way here, and will be at that wall in about twenty minutes, if it stays on course.”
“Any contact with the driver? How do you know it’s not one of the friendly militias in this area?” Kate asked, her arm around Ky’s shoulders, both of them leaning tiredly against a stack of ammo crates.
“Negative. Total radio silence. We work with most of the militias in this area—shit, most of them are on the walls right now. No contact, no information at all. Only thing we hear from the train is a little odd.”
“What is it?”
Finnigan glanced at Garcia and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
“Music.”
I could feel my eyebrows lift, and I chuckled once.
“Music?”
Gaffney interjected.
“They’re blasting what appears to be the entire Spaghetti Incident album from Guns N’ Roses,” he said matter-of-factly.
Great album.
But what’s the point?
Why announce their presence more than necessary. For that matter, why outfit an entire train with external speakers?
The only point to that would be…
“Colonel,” the radio operator looked up, catching the older man’s attention.
“Colonel, we’re getting reports from Overwatch,” he said, referring to the airborne scouts.
“What is it?”
“The train sir. It’s slowing down.”
He looked up at Garcia and Gaffney then back to the operator.
“Colonel,” I began, wanting to convey my hunch. Kate spoke at the same time.
“Colonel, I don’t think—”
He interrupted both of us quickly. “Ask them to report location, and tell them they are not cleared to engage, understand?”
“Yes sir,” he said, speaking again into the boom microphone.
“Thoughts?” said Finnigan, looking up.
Ky spoke up before Kate and I could.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said, voice exhausted and slightly edgy. She looked from face to face, then to me. As I caught her earnest expression, I smiled.
“They’re friendly,” said Gaffney, also catching on.
“Duh,” said Ky, leaning back against Kate, who ruffled her hair and smiled.
“Sir, Overwatch reports that there’s a small crew on board and they’ve come to a stop approximately two miles away. Nearly a mile from the edge of the horde outside.”
“Are they…” Finnigan began, but the young man held up a finger, listening to the radio.
“Sir, they’re trying to communicate.”
“How?”
The kid chuckled.
“Poster board, sir.” He spoke into the microphone again and flipped a switch, putting the scout’s reports on speaker.
“Overwatch, you’re on with SeaTac actual. Please repeat last, over.”
“Copy that. Message reads: ‘Take men off walls. Bring the bastards to us.’ End of message,” the pilot relayed, the dull thump of the blades in the background.
Finnigan looked up, and I spoke quickly.
“They’re trying to help, Colonel. They’re going to blow the train. Or ask you
to do it. Think of it. If you got even half of these bastards to get close enough to that kind of explosive power… it’s perfect!”
He smiled briefly, and his eyes lit up.
“Gaffney, pull the men from the walls ASAP, turn off the spots and shut down the flame throwers. Pull the men from the walls, and have them monitor via infrared cameras from inside. Kill the internal lights and switch to emergency lights only.”
Gaffney sprinted from the room and Finnigan turned to Garcia.
“Get six helos prepped, and load the C-130’s with napalm and any other damn thing that will burn. If we’re going to get an assist, let’s make the best of it. Get me the CAP commander and the Cav commander on the line. And make sure my six helos have PA systems, and let’s see if we can honor our friends’ music selection,” he said. Garcia nodded and left.
“Folks,” he added, shrugging into his jacket and looking at us. “Feel like a barbeque?”
*
Kate and I grabbed our packs, laying forgotten next to the doorway. A nice corporal, noticing that we had had the shit beaten out of us, and were now officially without firearms, brought us replacement pistols, a pair of simple M-5 carbines, and a decent stock of ammo. Without time to go to our tent, we had no choice but to stick the materials into our packs and shoulder the weapons as we made our way to the airstrip.
“Who do you think these guys are?” Kate asked, stepping quickly as we walked through the lines of tents, soldiers running past, dousing lights and prepping the camp for a blackout.
“Got me. But if they weren’t friendly, they wouldn’t have stopped.”
She grunted once in agreement.
We reached the line of waiting birds, and Ky clapped once for Romeo, as we boarded one of the helos. Rhodes, joining the military command in the other bird, ruffled the dog’s head as he leaned down between the two choppers and whispered something to Ky. Smiling, she bolted to our helo as Rhodes lifted a hand to us before following Gaffney and Finnigan to the chopper next to us. The crew chief followed us inside and slammed the door.
“What was that about?” I asked curiously, watching Ky strap herself in.