by J. W. Vohs
David dug in his heels. “So this is how it all ends? Everything we struggled and fought for, all of it led to you and our baby being devoured out on this ice?”
Christy dropped David’s hand and pointed toward the hunters in the distance. “Those monsters out there don’t control our fate. General Barnes doesn’t control our destiny. So I’m pregnant, so what? Who do you think I’m carrying in here? The offspring of David Smith and Christy Carboni, two lawyers who learned the hard way that they were born warriors. Our baby is a warrior. Our destiny waits at the end of our final battle; we live together, and we die together—all three of us.”
David looked as miserable as he felt; he had no more words to use. Christy pulled him close and whispered. “The hunters are strong now; they destroy before they eat. Just one quick moment of pain, after I’ve slaughtered those bastards until my arms can’t move anymore, and we’ll be safely away from here. We’ll be with Dad, and Luke, and Andi, and everyone else waiting on the other side.”
David could only hold her, knowing that she was right, but hating the thought of defeat. Christy read his mind. “My blood still lives on Manitoulin. Millions live in Utah . . . they all need inspiration, and they will avenge us. Now, I just have one question, my love. . .”
She stepped back and sadly smiled. “Can we go back to the convoy now?”
David wiped angrily at the tears on his cheeks and replied, “I’ll follow you and our little soldier all the way to the next world if that’s what fate has in store for us. Until then, we fight side-by-side—I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
The early-afternoon winter-sun bathed the entire area in a brilliant light that stood in stark contrast to the darkness creeping along the ice toward the humans awaiting the inevitable attack. Jack had quickly organized a make-shift laager using snowmobiles and ATVs as the base of a wall that was reinforced with thousands of pikes strapped to the vehicles so that their gleaming points presented a hedgehog of death to the approaching flesh-eaters. The humans also had the advantage of good footing on the ice; their crampons easily gripped the slick surface that so obviously hampered the movements of the hunters. Jack positioned most of the veterans in key locations directly behind the laager—Marcus, Bobby, Tina, Chien and his men—along with Hector and his war dogs.
The inescapable disadvantage was the numerical disparity between the two opposing forces. Jack figured that he had maybe one hundred true fighters, with a couple hundred more who might be able to hold their ground with a spear if paired with a veteran. In the middle of the tight circle stood over four hundred refugees too old, young, sick, or otherwise disabled to do much more than wave a pike in front of the hunters. Jack knew that many of these people would fight much harder for their lives than they’d ever dreamt was possible, but that effort would only come after the defensive line was overwhelmed, and the flesh-eaters reached the soft middle of the formation.
Jack estimated that at least twenty thousand infected were now shuffling toward the trapped humans from every direction, maybe twice that number. Many of the monsters were something less than the prime hunters faced during the Vicksburg campaign, but there were still thousands of the fully evolved beasts mingled among the others. All of them had teeth, and one bite was fatal. Even if the horde contained nothing but the zombies seen in the early days of the outbreak, the humans would run out of the strength needed to resist before all of the creatures were dead. The laager would help protect them for a time, but again, the mounds of corpses from the monsters killed would eventually allow the hunters to attack the defenders from high ground.
The fighters gathered together near the people they loved the most. Jack and Carter would stand shoulder to shoulder once again. The tough survivors of David’s Journey were checking over one another’s armor with an easy familiarity that demonstrated the love they held for each other. Even Sal was fully decked out in the fighting gear David and Christy’s dad, Jim, had helped design after first rescuing the young Martinez family. The giant, formerly pacifistic professor, smiled and joked with his friends, but his eyes were deadly serious as the monsters drew closer.
Brittany and Roberto were standing in the center of a line of islanders they’d mostly trained and equipped. When they had a moment of semi-quiet, Roberto had something to say. “I’m sorry about what happened, I mean, Red was an S.O.B., but I hate to see you hurt.”
Brittany smiled sadly. “I was an idiot. You were right about him all along.”
“Actually, I think I was just jealous. I didn’t have a clue that he was working for Barnes; I probably would have hated any guy you hooked up with,” Roberto confessed.
“For the record, I probably would have left him for you even if he wasn’t a traitor. I mean, if you would have had me.”
Roberto looked surprised, “Seriously? I never thought I had a chance.”
“Well, just so you know, I probably fell in love with you when we were taking turns telling Father O’Brien stories as he was dying. I felt obligated to Red, so I tried to ignore what I was feeling. You’re a great guy, Roberto, and I wish we could have had more time.”
“I love you, Brittany, and when we die today, I will die a happy man knowing that you love me too.”
Brittany snorted. “Doesn’t it bother you just a little that I killed my previous boyfriend?”
“Only because I didn’t get the chance to do it myself.” Roberto took off his helmet and lifted the visor on Brittany’s before pulling her close and kissing her passionately. “You kick ass, Brittany. I’m honored to stand with you here. I do have one last request, though.”
Brittany grinned. “No time for that, the bastards are almost here.”
“No, I’m serious.” Roberto lowered his eyes and replaced his head gear. “Will you find me, on the other side?”
Brittany’s breath caught in her throat, and she nodded before promising, “My parents, sister, and you; then we go find your family. Deal?”
“Deal,” Roberto agreed. “How many should we kill first?”
Brittany shrugged. “I’d like to kill ‘em all.”
The months of training and fighting across half a continent had fine-tuned the killing-ability of many of the soldiers standing between the infected and the vulnerable center of the defensive circle. The humans withheld their fire until the monsters were at can’t-miss range, which for most of the shooters was inside of ten meters. When the first of the flesh-eaters crossed that imaginary line, hell was unleashed on them. Surviving a zombie apocalypse meant that the people still alive knew how to prioritize when it came time to run, so ammo had been maxed out on the supply loads at the expense of everything else. Shotguns, pistols, rifles, and revolvers were locked and loaded, lying in hands that knew how to use such deadly implements with lethal precision. The creatures slid toward their prey with hunger and hatred, but what they found was fire and hot lead.
Jack knew that throughout history, nobody had fought harder or better than free people with profound incentives. Today, with their families and loved ones huddled behind their thin line, this band of humans fought with an intensity and ferociousness that surprised even the most battle-hardened among them. Hundreds of infected were dead in the first minute of fighting, but thousands waited to climb over their still-warm corpses. As gun barrels turned red-hot, and the ice grew slippery with an ever-expanding puddle of warm, steaming blood and gore, reinforcements for the horde continued to leave the sure-footed earth on the Michigan side of the river in large numbers. Overall, there were still thousands more hunters working their way across the frozen lake from the south in pursuit of the fleeing humans, but the northerly assault was building up steam faster than anyone had anticipated.
Jack started the battle with an AR-15, and he’d emptied twelve thirty-round magazines in less than five minutes. Combined with Carter’s fire on his right, and one of Chien’s soldiers on his left, the mind-numbing fusillade had left over five-hundred hunters dead on the ice. Many others were stumbling arou
nd with wounds to the face and skull. All three of the fighters had switched to using their .22s once the growing wall of shattered corpses created enough pressure on the defensive pikes to force the trio back to the main line of soldiers.
Through the detached focus of his combat-sharpened mind, Jack was processing information from several directions at the same time as he was gunning down the infected. He could hear the booming crash of the .50 Caliber BMG from behind, realizing that Todd Evans was doing his best to keep the Blackhawks at a distance. Barnes’ pilots had learned to be very careful around Jack’s forces, and these aviators were exercising great caution as they directed the assault. The helicopters flew low and fast over the heads of the monsters they were controlling, never approaching within five hundred meters of the small circle of targeted humans. Todd wasn’t aware of any scoring hits on the Blackhawks, but forcing them to keep their distance was his primary goal.
Waves of hunters had begun pouring across the abandoned laager as soon as enough bodies collapsed the once-deadly wall of pikes. Howling with anticipation, they gained easy access to the next line of human resistance. The circled ATVs and snowmobiles now provided launch platforms for the monsters, and the troops were forced to backpedal several meters in order to avoid an immediate collapse. Jack was fairly certain that most of his fighters were still alive and engaged, but the rapidly diminishing sound of gunfire indicated that hand-to-hand combat was beginning in earnest. He realized that the humans’ ability to continue resisting was now reduced to a macabre formula involving weight of weapon used, fitness of the wielder, and the willingness of the creatures to continue with their suicidal frontal assaults. The only certainty in the formula was that the infected would not stop coming; many more hunters had survived the hail of bullets than had fallen to them.
David’s crew was down to halberds, deadly instruments of destruction that they were intimately familiar with after countless hours of use in both training and actual combat. Their movements were precise and lethal, with very little wasted motion involved in the process. Once again, David was reminded of how mechanical the killing had become since the early days of the outbreak, when he and Christy had still been learning how to use the equipment Jack had managed to send them as the world was collapsing. He watched as the sharp tip of the spear at the end of the eight-foot shaft penetrated a small, wiry hunter’s forehead, then barely noticed how he expertly turned the weapon with a flick of his wrist and buried the axe-head on the side into the skull of a second creature. As he pulled back for another thrust, the cruel hook caught another flesh-eater by the back of the neck, slicing through a vertebrae and dropping the monster in its tracks.
Christy was just as deadly as her husband, but she could feel her energy flagging. Being in a fight of this nature in her sixth month of pregnancy was especially taxing. She was carrying a lot more weight under her armor than normal, and eventually the inevitable happened: she missed a strike, and a big hunter tackled her to the ice. David was on her left, but it was Sal, a massive presence on her right, who grabbed the creature and tossed it back into its advancing pack-mates. Christy quickly regained her feet and resumed her position in the circle, but she couldn’t quite catch her breath after the incident, and she knew her time was running short.
Unlike many of the islanders who’d worked to strengthen the fledgling community on Middle Bass following their deliverance by David’s people, Brittany had taken her medieval weapons training seriously. Father O’Brien had witnessed the effectiveness of such tools of war numerous times during his trek from Cleveland, and he’d done his best to convince the people on the island that they needed to develop skills to back-up their firearms. Unfortunately for Brittany, standing strong in what was essentially a shield wall required trained fighters who knew how to use edged weapons. Except for Roberto and a few others, the part of the line held by the platoon-sized contingent from Middle Bass consisted of part-time soldiers who knew how to shoot, and little else. When the ammo gave out, they began to fall back under immense pressure.
Brittany had no choice but to withdraw along with everyone else, knowing from experience that she wouldn’t last thirty seconds without flank protection against the horde of infected. When the retreating fighters reached the huddled refugees, there was nowhere else to go. As Jack had predicted, the sick, weak, and old found strength they didn’t know they possessed as soon as the snarling hunters bore down on them. Brittany suddenly found herself standing amid dozens of pikes pointed toward the advancing monsters. The people holding them weren’t warriors, but they knew how to hold the shafts and jab with the gleaming tips.
Of course, plenty of the folks inside the fighting circle were simply incapable of defending themselves. A handful of infants and toddlers were being held by their mothers. Some of the elderly were ambulatory, while a number of people were too ill with pneumonia and other ailments to do anything but pray. This group screamed. Brittany didn’t blame them; the hunters were terrifying, and knowing what would happen if they got a hold of you was the stuff of nightmares. So, with screaming humans behind, and snarling, howling infected in front, Brittany hoarsely shouted her defiance as she continued to kill with her halberd. Roberto effectively guarded her left with a spear and war-axe, while Pete Henderson used a shield and long sword on her right.
For a time it seemed as if they might hold after all: the hunters had stopped advancing and their dead began to accumulate. As always, the problem was that their dead were accumulating into mounds. Before long, many of the piles of corpses were five-foot high. Sometimes, as the monsters scrambled over the grisly mounds, their final sight was of cold steel plunging into their faces just as their heads poked over the peaks. Others were managing to reach the top, a perch from which they would try to leap over the defenders to get at the obviously weaker prey gathered behind the deadly weapons being thrust at them.
Brittany didn’t know how long she’d been fighting off the jumpers, only that she was fatigued beyond thinking; her actions, for the most part, were now based on muscle memory. Eventually she was jarred out of the near-trance she’d slipped into as something heavy and powerful slammed into her right shoulder. Falling into the people trapped behind, she watched through her visor as Pete stabbed the huge monster that had knocked her down just before he was grabbed by three more of the creatures. He smashed his fist into one of the hunters’ faces while stabbing another in the eye socket. Then more of the flesh-eaters reached through the scrum and pulled the brave fighter into their midst, where he was quickly torn to pieces as the powerful beasts ripped his arms from their sockets while others began to eat.
Brittany prayed that her friend’s neck had been broken or he’d been knocked unconscious before he was dismembered, even as she regained her feet to resume fighting. She could sense a breakthrough to her left, and quickly peeked in that direction to see a mother and toddler being pulled through a gap left by a fallen soldier. Brittany screamed in frustration until the monsters holding the two humans collapsed to the ice in spite of the fact that no fighters were close enough to reach them. Then she saw the leather-clad war dogs standing between the advancing hunters and the woman with the baby. Several refugees pulled the lucky mother and child back into the center of the circle. Kyra and Digger stayed where they were, sensing that this section of the formation, manned by the islanders, was the weakest. The opening created by the dead soldier was closed as the circled fighters instinctively sought the shoulders of the people next to them, but Brittany knew that the end was close, very close, and it was going to be worse than any nightmare she could have imagined.
As hunters pressed in from all sides, Trudy stood on an ammo cart a few meters above the place in the circle held by Christy and David. She was armored, and held a spear in her hands that she knew how to use. After watching her husband be torn apart by the monsters during the journey to Fort Wayne, she was determined to give a good account of herself if the day ever came when she was hopelessly surrounded by the flesh-eaters.
Twice in the last few minutes, she had used the eight-foot shaft of the weapon to reach the faces of hunters grappling with her daughter and son-in-law, but mostly she was still watching the battlefield from her elevated position on the cart. She saw the breaks in the section of the circle held by the Middle Bass fighters, holding her breath in fear until the gaps were closed and the resistance continued. She was very glad that somebody had brought a couple of war dogs north from Vicksburg.
Jack, Carter, and the veteran group from the Castle were still some meters away from the civilians gathered in the center of the defensive formation, but everywhere else the refugees had now added their pikes to the fight. Trudy could see that untold thousands of the monsters had been killed in the hour-long battle out on the ice. The advantages of good footing, lots of ammo, extensive training, and experience had allowed the humans to wreak a great slaughter on the horde. Still, she knew it wouldn’t be enough to save them. They were surrounded by thousands of infected whose numbers never seemed to dwindle no matter how many were killed. Trudy wondered how the humans had managed to hold out this long; she’d witnessed enough fights to recognize exhaustion when she saw it. David, Christy, and the warriors battling at their sides were all slowing down. There were more close calls, and spent fighters were being steadily caught and pulled into the crowd of flesh-eaters. She accepted that the end was near, determined to jump down and die fighting beside her daughter and son-in-law.
Suddenly she felt so close to Jim, her fallen husband. She almost smiled, even in the midst of such carnage and imminent death, as she considered the reunion about to occur. Jim must be here, she thought; why else would she find herself thinking about him at such a time as this. She lifted her face to look up at the heavens, wondering if she’d see angels waiting to carry them all from this place of suffering. Her gaze never reached the sky. As Trudy’s eyes rose from the fight by Christy and David, she saw a line of more hunters running toward the battle from the north. For a brief moment she wondered why the creatures were approaching along the river instead of using the nearby landmasses. Then, she realized she was looking at humans.