by J. Thorn
Aben was full of stories, and eventually I just asked him if he knew anything about where the last battle had taken place.
He grinned at me, that old man, a wry and knowing grin that told me he had already guessed that I was looking for something.
"I know right where it was, young one...right where it was."
"Can you tell me? Where was it?"
"I can tell you, but you got to do something for me if I do."
"Name it."
"You got to come back and tell me what you find there. See, my ancestor was there and saw everything, and I want to know more. I want to know why they all just stayed and died when they could have run away."
"What do you mean?"
The old boy shifted and stared out of the window. He was miles away in his head.
"The ones that stayed and fought, they had miles and miles of land behind them, and they didn't have the numbers to fight against the Horde. But for some reason they chose that place, after weeks of moving masses of refugees around, they chose to die in that city, every last one of them. Why did they do that? If I tell you where, will you come back and tell me why?"
"I will, if I can find out, I promise."
"Then head east. To a city called Rove. Right in the middle of that city you'll find the ruins of a building much taller than the rest. It's the only high rise building in that place. Near there you will find the remains of the defences they set up to make their stand. I only went there once, and it was so haunting a place that I couldn't bear to stay there very long. It's a dark place, and littered with the dead and that which should be dead. Watch yourself out there. I really do believe that Rove has most of the remnants of the Horde in it, at least the ones that they left behind."
I had my place to look. Finally after fifteen years of travelling, I had found somewhere to start.
I still had questions for him before we set off.
I asked him how anyone in that city could have lived to pass on the tale. There was no Balesoul in the city of Rove.
"No, not in Rove, there were very few survivors, but it would seem that up in that single high-rise building were just a few refugees that hid themselves away and managed to stay hidden, and amongst those was a small boy, a tiny little fellow called Ruben Hoxley. That would be my ancestor. Whilst everyone else was hiding, he crept out to the window and watched the battle raging in the streets below from ten floors up. He saw it all."
Bailey and I set off the next day, heading east, just as Aben had said, he'd only been able to give us rough directions, but Bailey had some old maps stashed away in the truck, and he found what he thought might be the city of Rove. It was a long journey, a week on the road and over a thousand miles. We stopped off along the way to look in some of the abandoned towns out that way and found quite a lot of good stuff, old stuff, like batteries, that could be cleaned up and re-fizzed. That's what Bailey called it, re-fizzed. He had a machine at the back of the truck that he would use to bring batteries that had long since died back to working again. That old boy really was a master technician.
As each day went by and we travelled further east, the land changed. Slowly, day by day and mile by mile it died. At first it was just some of the fauna thinning out a little. Ever since the invasion, the plants had taken over the world, there was no civilisation to hold them back and only the sparse wildlife that fed on them to keep them at bay.
But something was different along that road and across the land that spread out before us.
The trees began to recede, the grass was dry, the bushes and shrubs and flowers looked sickly. By the time we got to Rove, the land was just grey ash as far as the eye could see. We took to wearing old breathing masks that Bailey had found in the ruin of a chemical factory way in the south. They didn't work that well but it was enough to stop us choking on the dust smog that covered the land.
I had never seen a place so burned and void of life. Look around you son, and tell me if there is a place more desolate on this world. I don't think you can.
So, we found the high-rise, yes, that one right over there. It was taller back then. I think a huge chunk of the top of the building collapsed in on itself at some point. I've not looked up there, wouldn't dare for the fear of the damn thing just falling apart with me in it.
We found the high-rise and we found what was left of the fort they had thrown together. Oh, don't bother looking for that. Over the years I've been coming here it's been gradually falling to pieces.
We also found one of the things I brought you here to see. You see that square building right over there, the one with the huge gate all broken up and the sandbags piled in the gap? Well, there's something special in there that I need to show you. Come on. Follow me. We'll go look in there, but I need to show you something else out the back of the building first.
When we got here there were still thousands of bodies strewn all over the streets, they were even piled up as high as the tops of doors and windows in some places. I'm not talking about the men that stayed to fight and die here, I mean the Horde. Thousands and thousands of destroyed Shamblers and creatures that were even worse. You know there are many types of Shamblers? Yeah, there are the ones that I told you about, the ones that are like walking dead people, all rotten and falling apart. In a way they are the worst, because if one of those things gets its hands on you and bites you, then the next day you wake up as one of them. Not that you actually wake up. At least that's how it is for normal folks, folks who don't have the serum in their blood.
Bailey told me all about them and Joshua had given me some descriptions. There are also these creatures that look like they were made. I don't mean out of metal or wood, I mean they were made out of other people. Twisted and stuck together in all manner of shapes and sizes. Bailey used to call them Constructs. He said that someone, probably Nua'lath himself, had done wicked experiments on people, and sometimes he even believed that some of them were still conscious and aware of what they had been turned into. I don't know if that is true, because they seem to hate the living just as much as their deadwalker allies.
Well, I had seen some of them on my travels, but that day when we entered Rove I found something that chilled me to the bone, much more than anything I had seen so far.
Its burned remains are still here, long dead, just round the back of the building.
Like I said, when we got here there were a lot of bodies, but I hadn't seen many of the defenders up until we went round the back of that building and climbed over the metal fence that had been put up there. Of course we had gone the wrong way round. If we had gone the other way we would have seen that the fence was torn apart and smashed and that right in the middle of the compound, lying on the broken concrete was a thing that must have been made out of hundreds of people.
Yeah that's it, just looks like some horrific funeral pyre doesn't it? Well, here's the worst son. See, when we got here, decades after the battle had taken place, the thing was still alive. They, whoever they were, had chained it to the ground with huge metals chains attached to concrete blocks. They hadn't killed all the defenders at all. They had melded them together whilst they were still alive, made them into some monstrosity, then left them there chained to the ground for what could have been all eternity, never to die.
An endless punishment for resisting.
When it saw us it made the most god-awful screaming sound that I had ever heard and it rose up from the concrete and tried to rush us. It must have been fifty feet high and nearly as wide, one massive heaving mass of tortured souls. I could see arms and legs and heads poking out of it all over the place. It was just a jumble of body parts melded together. Most of those faces staring at us and screaming at us looked like they were in the most horrific pain imaginable.
Of course it didn't get very far, just pulled on those massive chains and bellowed at us in a hundred tortured voices all in sync. You see Constructs aren't just stuck together or sewn, they are rebuilt, and stuck back in their skin, like some strange a
nd nasty mutated thing.
Bailey and me, we stood there for about an hour plugging away at that thing, shot after shot after shot. Fortunately we both had Shredder guns that almost never run out of shots, otherwise I reckon a few thousand bullets would have gone into it before we realised that it wasn't going to stop moving unless we hit it with something bigger. Bailey ran back to the truck and fetched his chain-gun Shredder and then spent ten minutes cutting the thing to pieces. Since the day he found me on that road fifteen years ago I had never seen him use that gun, not once. That day I found out why. If you pointed that thing at a target of any kind and pulled the trigger it was end of story. I swear that gun could probably tear a hole in the fabric of the universe.
Eventually the thing stopped moving, but not before Bailey had pummelled it with that gun for a good while.
Then we burned it.
Come on. Let me show you inside that building.
I found it whilst we were searching. We never split up when we searched, always stuck by each other as we went from building to building methodically, so that we didn't miss anything. I found a lot of answers in this place and it was all down to my spending fifteen years on the road with Bailey. If I hadn't had that experience I would never have known how to look for things that were hidden away. Bailey always carried a weapon that was like a handgun when we searched the buildings. His chain gun was only for outside, where there was space. It was far too big and cumbersome to haul around inside a building.
I always took point, my shotguns could tear something apart at close range, but they didn't have the accuracy of a handgun when it came to firing past someone. If I opened up on something that was attacking Bailey and I wasn't careful, I'd have blown him away too. So, that was how we worked. I went in first, one shotgun in a holster and the other pointing ahead of me. I had this little rigged torch that I could attach to the end of the shotgun so that I could see in the dark places.
Before I take you in here I need to explain how it happened back then, we changed this a lot since then, cleared the place up, for reasons that I will get to, but when we got here the place was all blocked up from the inside and covered in dust and cobwebs from decades of being left to rot.
We never did figure out what the building had been used for before it became the depot. It looked like some kind of hotel, but without the rooms above it, just a foyer and a steel gate smack at the bottom of a wide set of stairs. There was nobody in the entrance area, which surprised me, but then the building was shut up. So I guessed that even the defenders in there hadn't stayed put. Well, we soon found out.
The stairs went down about fifty feet and ended in a metal door that was locked and covered in a mesh like frame. Bailey's eyes were nearly popping out of his head.
"Oh, buddy, we found ourselves a monster haul I bet. We have to get this open." He was like a child that had just found a secret stash of sweets.
We went outside and fetched the truck, and Bailey backed it up so that it blocked the entrance, but still allowed us to open the side doors, and then Bailey hit the suspension button.
Did I ever mention the suspension button on that truck? Oh my, well that was one of the neatest things of that truck, I'd say. When he hit that button, the whole underside of the truck would slowly lower to the ground with this long and drawn out hissing sound, until eventually the wheels disappeared inside the hull and the body of the truck just sat itself down on the ground. Once you did that, nothing in the world was going to move that monster.
So, we parked up by the side of the building, so close that even a rat wouldn't have been able to crawl through the gap, and then we set about getting through that door. We hadn't found anything in the foyer that would be useful except maybe the metal from some of the chairs, they were steel alloy for some reason and we were always on the lookout for that.
It took us two days with heat cutters to make our way through. Finally the whole thing just about collapsed in on us as the metal gave way. I was inches from getting a broken leg or worse. The noise and the dust as it fell was tremendous. I was so glad for that breathing mask as the two of us ran back for the truck, shut the doors and waited for the dust to settle. Bailey was cursing the whole time about having to clean up inside the truck. Everything was covered in it.
The next day we went down the stairs all armed and armoured up. By that time I had used all sorts of scrap metal and leather that we salvaged to turn the gear that Joshua had left me into an armoured suit, yep, just like what we're wearing now, except back then my kit was like a battle dress, you know, I wasn't getting torn up by no Kre'esh again. Damn things soon found out that they couldn't get their teeth through it.
I went first, as always, torch and shotgun pointed ahead of me and my pulse thumping with anticipation. We had only ever found vaults like this one a couple of times before, and both of them had had some nasty surprises waiting inside them.
This one didn't, at least not at first.
What we found was a huge and nearly empty warehouse with an underground train track, which disappeared into a tunnel that looked like it was going deep into the earth. Oh, there was plenty of stuff in there to keep Bailey happy, a lot of radio equipment and a huge stash of other military communications gear, but the sheer size of the place indicated that this could have held so much more.
A day later, I found out exactly what it held.
Just at the back of the warehouse, over near where the train depot was, was a small room, which I had presumed to be some sort of control room, and I wasn't far off right, but there was more. Another door led into an office that had boxes stacked up as high as the ceiling, I mean hundreds of boxes, and in each box were packs of these small cards, each of them with a person's name, gender, age, some kind of identification number, and blood type on them. That was all, no more. I only opened one box and there had to be a five or six thousand cards in it. Well, there were easily two hundred and fifty boxes in the room, which meant these cards for a million people or more.
I called Bailey and we looked them over. I was right. The boxes were all filled with them.
"Do you think they were the detail cards for all of the people in the army or something?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "Wouldn't the cards have the soldiers rank on them as well if they were?"
Then Bailey found the officer's journal in the draw. A lot of it was faded, but a few pages were pretty clear. He read it out to me. I've still got the log here. I kept it with me all this time.
Daily Log 2137 September 15
The enemy is but a day away and moving swiftly towards the city. The General has commanded that we are to start to empty the upper vault into the storage spaces in the main vault. I hope that the doors are secure enough to hold.
2137 September 16
First contact on the outer edge of the city. Camp Gateway is holding out at the moment but I hear that the casualties are high. Supplies out to the front are a constant stream and it's difficult to keep up. There is also the civil unrest to deal with and people are trying to leave the city in droves. Most of them head back to their homes to wait when they reach the outer defences and realise that there is nowhere to go, but many have been lost to the Horde or to the defence grid. The General says that the grid will hold for only a couple of days. Preparations for the evacuation have already begun.
2137 September 17
Camp Gateway has fallen and now all that lies between us and the Horde is the grid. They managed to pull most of the troops back from Camp Gateway but some were lost. We were only able to leave a small strip of the grid switched off and the Horde followed those retreating through the gap. The smell of electrified and burned creatures now fills the air in the city like putrid smog. The evacuation began at 12.14 (midday).
2137 September 18
The evacuation is in full swing now. As I write this there is a column of people constantly flowing through the depot and onto the mono trains. I'm very impressed with the efficiency of the system. Serge
ant Colson and his engineers have done an amazing job with the system's reliability. I only hope that operations at the other end are running smoothly. Alice came to visit me before taking the train, her mother and father and both of her brothers were there and we said our goodbyes before I saw them onto the train. I miss her already and look forward to following them as soon I can.
2137 September 19
The outer grid system has failed. It was to be expected. That much build-up of dead and burning Horde was too much for the system to withstand. Fortunately, we still have three more lines of grid defence to go and I hear they are fully operational so long as the power station remains online. Twenty miles...that's how far the Horde is from the city.
2137 September 20
One of the first failures of the train system happened this morning. The engineers got the system up and running again but we lost an hour. I dread to think how many lives will be lost because of it. If we are to evacuate everyone, the system must stay operational constantly. Colson estimated that it would take five entire days to complete the full evacuation if the entire quota is to be met. It's strange to think that already nearly half a million people from the city and the refugees have already gone down that tunnel.
2137 September 21
I was awoken in a hurry this morning at exactly 3:27 to find that we had a full system failure on the train lines. The evacuation had ground to a halt and would not be resuming quickly. I ran to the control box and checked the lists. We are still nearly one hundred and eighty thousand people under quota. To make things worse another line of the defence grid has failed.