Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  People thrust clutches of money into the air, trying to buy their safety. Fights broke out as terror turned the crowd savage. Women threw rings and heavy gold bracelets. One middle-aged woman held her infant child over her head. The baby was pink and wriggling in the sunlight, squealing wretchedly.

  “Take my baby!” the woman pleaded. “Save my son!”

  The crowd surged and people closest to the walls got crushed. One woman stumbled to her knees and the press of terrified bodies drove her underfoot in the stampede. The air filled with the infectious greasy tang of fear.

  LeCat stood at the ramparts overlooking the chaos and held the megaphone to his lips.

  “You must disperse!” his voice blared. “Return to your homes. It is your best chance to survive the approaching infection. No one will be allowed inside the walls.”

  A wail of despair went up from the crowd. They surged again, as if their weight could somehow shift the crushed buses that barricaded the road between the two high towers. Someone threw a rock. It smacked off the wall near LeCat. A beer bottle followed, shattering on the stone and showering the crowd with glass.

  “Return to your homes,” LeCat repeated the order. “If you do not disperse in an orderly fashion, my men will be forced to shoot.”

  LeCat signaled across to the opposite tower where three armed soldiers stood watching the crowd nervously. The soldiers raised their weapons and aimed between the crenellations. They were uneasy. There was a feeling of dread on them all. They moved with mechanical restraint into firing positions, and they did not meet their Colonel’s eyes.

  Centuries before these same jagged gaps atop the walls had allowed archers to defend the city against raiders, firing a hail of arrows into an advancing army. Now the battlements bristled with the barrels of automatic weapons.

  “Disperse!” LeCat demanded.

  The woman holding her squirming baby aloft suddenly cried out and fell. The child in her arms slipped from her embrace. The woman howled her horror, but the sound was drowned out by a thousand other wailing voices. The baby was crushed to death under trampling feet.

  Tremaine watched the unfolding drama, helpless and heart-sick. His mouth felt dry, and the skin along his forearms crawled with prickling insects of horror. He turned away, tears stinging his eyes, and did not see another pack of people running across the wide road that ringed the old city. A dozen figures drenched in blood and baying like wild beasts charged into the crowd outside the gates.

  Their faces were ravaged by disease, their eyes huge and crazed by madness, their lips and cheeks swollen with ulcers, and their bodies slashed with wounds and running sores. Their ruined blood-streaked faces leered and contorted as they attacked, flailing arms that were gnarled and knotted as tree branches.

  LeCat saw them, and understood immediately.

  The undead had reached Avignon. The fight for survival had begun.

  The infected tore into the crowd, mauling and savaging the people that were crammed against the walls. Some people turned, screaming, and fled for their lives. Others were torn to shreds where they stood, their hands pressed to their faces, cowering. A middle-aged man heard a howl close behind him and when he spun around, he came face-to-face with a snarling rabid ghoul awash in fresh blood and staring with wild-eyed madness. The man’s bladder voided, and he died in a puddle of his own piss.

  “Open fire!” LeCat gave the order.

  The three soldiers atop the opposite tower began firing into the crowd. LeCat drew his sidearm and shot one of the snarling infected in the chest. The figure was hurled back by the savage punch of the bullet, but stayed on its feet. It growled and hissed – then mauled a teenage boy who had been trying to flee the chaos. The boy went down in the milling madness and did not get back up. LeCat fired again and again.

  “More men!” the Colonel waved his arms urgently. Along the wall overlooking the mayhem, stutters of automatic fire punched the air.

  LeCat threw aside the megaphone and snatched at the radio on his hip. His hands were shaking. He prayed there would still be time.

  “Gireau! Captain Gireau!” LeCat stared eastward in the direction of the university. Somewhere beyond the walls, buildings were ablaze. A thick pyre of black smoke roiled into the blue afternoon sky.

  “Gireau!”

  The radio crackled.

  “Sir.” Captain Gireau’s voice sounded strained and breathless.

  “Get your men back behind the walls and seal the gates immediately, Captain. There is no more time to remove any more trees. The undead are upon us! You must seal the Porte Saint-Lazare gate now!”

  * * *

  Captain Arnaud Gireau was a seasoned soldier who had once served in Iraq. Two years earlier he had worked as part of the Republican Guard that protected the French President’s offices in Paris and the Elysee Palace.

  He was a veteran… and he was terrified.

  He had eight men stripped to their waists and working manfully with chainsaws outside the gates to cut down the trees that grew close to the high stone wall, while up on the parapets ten more soldiers stood anxious guard. Half-a-dozen trees had already been felled; there were three more targeted for cutting. Gireau paced the roadway outside the steel barred gate impatiently, his eyes searching the nearby buildings for signs of danger. The surrounding suburban streets beyond the old city were eerily quiet, but he could hear a rise of noise coming from further to the west, gradually becoming louder, and seeming to come closer.

  When the radio on his webbing belt hissed with sudden static, he snatched for it, just as a two-story office complex across the street suddenly exploded in flames and smoke.

  “Mon dieu!” Gireau gaped, then flinched and ducked as a second explosion tore through the building sending bricks and rubble and glass in a deadly hail across the pavement. The ground beneath his feet shook. A few stunned seconds later, the intersection directly across the street became choked with a running horde of screaming people, rampaging towards the old city’s gate, as if fleeing for their lives.

  Hunting within the crowd were the bobbing snarling heads of blood-drenched ghouls, slashing and tearing at the press of living flesh all around them. The infected undead attacked like wild animals, throwing themselves onto the back of a running figure and lunging for the neck with gaping, gnashing jaws. When the person collapsed under the jarring shock, three, four or even five undead would swarm over the body, tearing it to shreds and howling their crazed triumph.

  It was a scene of savage brutality and horror unlike anything Captain Gireau had ever witnessed.

  The radio in his hand crackled a second time. Gireau held it to his ear. He heard Colonel LeCat barking urgent instructions.

  Gireau had just time to acknowledge the order before the crowd of terrified people and the infected undead amongst them came rioting and screaming towards him. He threw down the radio and shouted the order for the men on the parapets to open fire.

  “Shoot!” Gireau snatched up an assault rifle and fired at the edges of the crowd where the undead had brought down a young woman. The girl had been thrown onto her back. She thrashed her legs and flailed her arms wildly. She lay in a spreading pool of blood. Her dress had rucked up around her waist, spattered with gore. Two of the undead hunched on their knees, leaning over the woman and clawing at her. Gireau shot one of the infected in the shoulder. The ghoul spun, flung backwards by the impact. It had once been a woman, Gireau saw. The ghoul had long black hair disheveled and matted with blood. It rolled away from the struggling girl and then pounced back to its feet. Gireau stared aghast. He could feel his heart crashing wildly against the cage of his chest. He fired again and felt the assault rifle buck hard against the muscles of his shoulder. He shot the infected ghoul in the head and its skull collapsed in a thick grey cloud of custard-like gore that splattered across the blacktop.

  The woman’s second attacker shrieked and snarled. It clawed its fingers into the soft flesh of the girl’s neck and ripped out her throat. The girl’s
legs began to spasm uncontrollably and then her heels drummed against the road. The ghoul thrust a handful of warm wet flesh into its mouth.

  “Retreat to the gateway!” Gireau’s voice cracked, hoarse with horror. The gendarmes with chainsaws had already fled, discarding their uniform coats and running for their lives. The sliding steel-barred gate began slowly closing, powered by an electric motor. Soldiers posted at the university had come running the wall. They were pushing at the gate, trying to force the barrier shut before the undead reached them.

  Gireau backed away from the crowd, swinging the barrel of the assault rifle in an arc and firing at the nearest threat. The sound of the riot came like a crashing turmoil of shouts and terrified screams. Two panicked men threw themselves at the gendarme captain, wailing with their fear. They clung to him, screeching for his help. Gireau had to club them down with the hard stock of his weapon, catching one man full in the face and smashing in all of his upper teeth. The man bellowed and reeled away, howling in pain and spitting gouts of bright red blood. The second man staggered backwards, his arms pin wheeling, until he crashed against a street sign and fell. The undead pounced upon the victim and tore his chest open while he flailed and whimpered beneath them. Blood sprayed in a fountain and Gireau saw the gaping mush of the moaning man’s guts. The undead were like wild dogs. One of them buried its gnashing face inside the open body cavity. When it lifted its head, the ghoul was gnawing on a tangle of the dead man’s thick ropy entrails.

  “Run!” Gireau heard his men on the parapets urging him to break for the gates. “Run for your life!”

  Another of the undead broke from the horde and charged at the gendarme captain. Gireau spun towards the threat and fired instinctively from the hip. The muzzle was almost pressed against the belly of the disfigured undead wretch when the assault rifle bucked in Gireau’s hands. The clattering roar drummed against his ears and the blood-covered beast flew backwards. Its arms flailed and it fell.

  “Run!”

  The troops along the top of the wall fired into the melee indiscriminately, trying desperately to clear a path for their Captain to retreat to the closing gate. A dozen more soldiers inside the walls knelt in the entrance, firing through the gate’s bars. Bodies littered the pavement, twisted in the gruesome agonies of their deaths. Blood washed across the sidewalk in rivers and ran dripping into the gutter.

  Gireau felt someone lash a fist at him, and the strike of the blow to his shoulder was so violent that he staggered off balance. He teetered on the sidewalk, just twenty short paces from safety, and then tumbled backwards over the gnarled branch of a felled tree. Gireau hit the ground hard on his back and stared up, dazed and stunned, into a blue sky slowly filling with smoke. He heard the assault rifle go clattering across the concrete path and then his vision filled with a demented, terrifying face that dripped blood and smelled of putrid corruption.

  He kicked out and drove his boot at the figure. It spun away but came back snarling. Gireau cried out in pure fear as the undead threw itself at him. He tried to roll away but there were bodies and kicking legs in every direction. The crushing impact as the undead ghoul fell upon him drove the air from the gendarme captain’s lungs and cracked the back of his head hard against the pavement.

  Gireau heard a flurry of far-away gunshots. He heard the terrified cries of the dying all around him. He saw the steel bars of the gate close at last through a tangle of legs, before black fluttering shadows wheeled through his vision. The pain came then; the terrible torture of being mauled to pieces. He lay on the concrete pavement and felt down across his chest, sensing there was something dreadfully wrong. He groped towards his stomach and felt the hard jutting fragment of a broken rib – and then nothing. His hand fluttered like a dying bird. His guts had been torn from his torso, leaving wet flaps of flesh and a gaping hole of warm stinking mush. Blood spurted hotly over his fingers. Gireau’s mouth fell open in a silent groan, and the shadows at the edges of his vision grew dark. He blinked and gasped with shock. He felt suddenly cold. Another of the undead came to crouch over him, its eyes wild with infected madness.

  Soft treacherous lethargy spread through Gireau’s mauled body, and then a serene sense of calm washed over the gendarme. He felt no fear, and his pain turned into chilling numbness. He felt suddenly overwhelmed with a vast sense of sorrow. He thought about his young wife, staying with her parents in Toulouse, and he wondered whether she had fled the infection, and if she was safe. His mouth moved in a quick, whispered prayer for her survival, and then looked up into the hideous ravaged face of the ghoul. Its eyes were wild, its cheeks blistered with running sores. The virus had withered the figure’s lips, exposing bleeding gums and blackened stumps of teeth. The ghoul’s bottom jaw hung open and the tongue lolled lecherously from the side of its rotting mouth. He could smell it; the stench of carrion long dead and festering with corruption.

  Captain Gireau smiled. It was a benign expression of forgiveness and melancholy and resignation.

  “Finish it,” he said.

  For a few moments more Gireau suffered through fresh savage waves of unholy agony before the dark relief of death.

  * * *

  Camille pressed her face close to the glass doors of the hotel’s front entrance and stared in wild eyed shock and confusion at the scene unfolding before her.

  The road outside the hotel teemed with crowds of people. Some had abandoned their cars. Others had appeared in rampaging hordes from nearby streets. They were massing around the Porte Saint Roch gates a hundred yards to the east. The noise became deafening; people screaming and shouting, wailing in fear. It came through the glass in waves. Then, the muted echo of an explosion had rattled the windows. It sounded far away but the tremor made her flinch. A thick pall of smoke grew in the sky, rising like a black cloud beyond the nearby buildings.

  Camille drew a deep breath and turned, forcing a tight smile.

  Twenty terrified ashen faces were pressed close about her, their eyes filled with alarm, their expressions fearful. They were all elderly. Some were propped up with walking sticks.

  “Be ready,” she told them. “When I give the word, we go out through the doors and straight across the road.”

  The angry horde around the Porte Saint Roch gates had turned violent. Camille saw men on the fringes of the mob hurling rocks and abuse at the soldiers standing guard on the battlements.

  Eve pushed her way through the elderly group. Her face was pale. “You can’t wait any longer. You must go now or it will be too late.”

  “Let’s go!” sang out Camille, and she flung the hotel doors wide open and stood aside as the group of elderly tourists came awkwardly down the steps. They milled there for long moments, seemingly dazed and overwhelmed by the violent protests around the nearby gatehouse. Rocks flew like hail and the voices of the horde were rabid and snarling.

  Camille ran to the sidewalk and took an elderly man by the arm. “Follow me, gang!” she beckoned them. The man was a Jewish gentleman in his eighties, wearing a voluminous heavy black coat and a hat. His face had withered with age; the flesh hanging in freckled and spotted little pouches, and his Van Dyke beard and moustache were pelts of silver. “Stay with me, Mr. Goldstein,”

  The man tottered unsteadily into the road with the aid of his walking stick and with Camille clutching his other thin arm. His body was gaunt and stooped, riddled with arthritis.

  “Leave me,” the old man protested. “Help the ladies.” His voice strained, rusty with pain.

  The rest of the hotel guests in the group followed, clinging to each other for support, their faces stricken with grief and fear.

  The road was choked with abandoned cars, some still with their engines running. In places they were jammed bumper-to-bumper and Camille had to navigate a ragged winding course across all four lanes. She called to the rest of the group as they wound their way closer to the great wall. Over her shoulder she could hear heavy sobs of panic and exertion.

  “Just a little furth
er, gang!” she hoisted Mr. Goldstein onto the grassy verge of the opposite sidewalk and turned back to the others. There was a bus shelter on this side of the road. Camille sat the elderly man down and went back into the middle of the traffic jam to herd the rest of the group to safety.

  The rioters at the Porte Saint Roch gates had banded together out of fear and desperation and were trying to batter their way into the old city by heaving against the side of the blockading buses. Troops on the top of the gate’s tower were leaning over the battlements with their weapons raised. Shots rang out – fired into the sky as a warning.

  Somewhere in the distance there came another noise. No, it was not an actual sound, but rather a sensation like a vibration in the air. Camille frowned and turned her head, bewildered and puzzled. She stood like that for three precious seconds before the tremor turned into the growling rumble of a heavy engine straining. It came louder on the breeze and then seemed to fade. Camille had an ominous, instinctive sense of foreboding. She looked about wildly, searching for the source of the sound. It came again; the howl of an engine being revved beyond its limits, growing louder but still lost from her view by the buildings that surrounded the hotel complex.

  She took the arm of a middle-aged woman in a floral dress and dragged her across the street.

  “Quickly!” Camille steered the woman towards the bus shelter. Three more old ladies from her group were clutching each other for support as they ran. They were weeping. Camille took the closest woman by the arm and pointed at a gap between two abandoned cars. “Go that way!”

  Suddenly, from behind a nearby office building, a huge eight-wheeled truck appeared, spewing black diesel smoke as it raced towards the intersection jammed with abandoned cars and the rioting crowd around the ancient gate. It looked like some kind of dump truck, Camille thought. The engine roared as it changed through gears, building dangerous speed. Behind the wheel she could see a man, hunched and shouting. In the back of the truck’s steel tip-tray, a dozen people clung on for their lives.