Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  Chuck was catapulted clear of the car, shot out through the shattered windscreen by the plunging force of the impact. He felt himself falling in a swirling vortex of space and then something cracked brutally into his ribs. The air thumped from his lungs. He had time to cry out a bellowing roar of pain before cold dark water enveloped him in a choking swirl of bubbles.

  Sherry was trapped in the wreckage of the car as it lay on its crumpled roof, teetering against the steel guardrails of the bridge’s center span. The sudden silence after the collision and howl of the car’s engine seemed deafening. Sherry heard cooling metal pinking and a sound like hissing steam. She hung, pinned upside down, pressed into her seat by the crumpled front end of the car. She was bleeding badly, a piece of steel embedded in her chest. She cried out in weak dazed confusion, and then coughed. The car seemed to be filling with smoke.

  It took twenty seconds before the undead swarmed over the vehicle. They tore the young woman’s broken body from the wreckage of the Fiat and then savaged her to death. They fell upon her like a howling pack of wild wolves, using their teeth to sever each limb before eviscerating the torso.

  Sherry Wilson died screaming and choking on her own blood.

  * * *

  Chuck Gudinski plunged forty feet into the icy depths of the Rhône River.

  He struck the water hard, with his mouth open in an agonized scream of pain. The cold water smothered him and his heavy clothing dragged him deep below the surface.

  His lungs caught fire. The cold seized his chest. He thrashed madly at the water as panic overwhelmed him. He had heard people say that drowning was a peaceful death. He didn’t believe it. Chuck kicked furiously with his legs and flailed in the water until he slowly began to rise. He felt himself choking and his lungs began to spasm. He had swallowed water and the pain of it was excruciating.

  Above him he could see the rippling surface, glinting sunlight in bright shards. There were dead bodies there too; dark shadows like logs that drifted past, filled with gases and floating slowly downstream.

  Chuck’s head broke through the surface just as panic overwhelmed him. His limbs began to thrash in uncontrolled paroxysms. He made one last surge, beginning to feel himself blacking out. A sense of disorientation flooded through him and a moment of reckless, giddy abandon almost overwhelmed him.

  He gulped greedy mouths full of fetid air, letting the meandering current carry him down past the pylons of the bridge before he began to strike out painfully for the western bank. Each time he stretched his arm to sidestroke closer to the muddy reeds along the water’s edge, a fierce stab of pain seized his chest.

  He reached the shore, gasping and exhausted, and lay face-down in the mud and slime of the reeds. He felt with trembling fingers down across his body, taking inventory of his injuries. He was bleeding. He could feel slow sticky blood spilling from between his fingers when he explored the left side of his torso. He held his breath and tried to probe the wound. White-hot pain struck like a knife. He stifled a groan and rolled onto his side.

  He looked back to the span of the bridge fifty yards upstream. He couldn’t spot the wrecked Fiat, but he could see the side of the abandoned delivery van. He could see too, dark swarming shapes roaming in packs along the nearest guard rail. They were moving towards Avignon.

  Chuck knew Sherry was dead: she couldn’t possibly have survived. The despair and heartache that overwhelmed him felt more painful than the bleeding injury. He wept, trembling and shaking with cold and fear. Every nerve in his body had stretched to snapping, and his fatigued, exhausted body threatened to fail him. He had to cling stubbornly to consciousness to avoid falling into oblivion.

  Moving one careful, agonizing inch at a time, Chuck clawed his way deeper into the concealing reeds, and the only sound in his ears was the sawing noise of his own labored breathing and his soft whimpers of agony. The warm oiliness of his fear swirled in his stomach so that he shook uncontrollably.

  The initial plan he had shared with Sherry had been to steal a boat and sail to safety. But all the boats were moored upstream of the bridge. He knew he didn’t have the strength to swim back against the tug of the current. Instead he crawled into the reeds and lay in the wet mud on his stomach with his eyes fixed on the high stone walls of Avignon. There were people inside the city who were still alive. He could see men walking along the high battlements carrying weapons. He could see one of the city’s wide gates barricaded by the overturned hulks of several buses. Then he noticed a small door set inside a stone gateway. The door had been boarded up, but a man stood guard on the nearby wall. Chuck made a quick calculation and guessed he was seventy yards from the small arched gate. To reach safety he would need to cross an open area of grass, then four lanes of road littered with crashed and crumpled cars. On the far side of the road stretched another narrow strip of grass.

  If he stayed patient – and if he could stay alive until nightfall – he could make it.

  * * *

  The bleak decision made, Camille turned and re-crossed the road, running back towards the sanctuary of the Grande Hotel. Her senses were overwrought by her terror, so finely honed that every sight and smell seemed enhanced. She pushed the elderly tourists on ahead of her, herding them like cattle, and she ran with the icy hand of her fear clutching at her chest.

  In the middle of the road she shouted for Eve’s stranded group to follow her, then paused for the briefest moment over Eve’s dead body. The corpse lay spattered in its own blood, the young woman’s eyes wide open and staring in sightless surprise. Flies crawled over the flesh. They swarmed around the dark sticky bullet wound and crept inside the cavity of her gaping mouth.

  Camille ran on, sobbing silently until a sudden roar of noise made her pause again on the sidewalk outside the hotel’s glass doors. It was a sound like the rustle of a million locust wings, ominous and menacing. She turned wildly towards the river.

  A hundred yards away, a howling shrieking tide of undead rounded the street corner and surged towards her, and the baying maddened shrilling in their throats was the most terrifying sound she had ever heard. She felt the hair on her forearms prickle, and her bowels turned to liquid.

  The infected came on, pouring from over the bridge and then around the corner at the end of the block. The sight of fleeing people seemed to enrage them with wild lust. A growl came out of the throng, a beastly inhuman growl of bloodthirsty mayhem.

  “Run!” Camille cried at the gaggle of elderly tourists, clustered and trembling around her like lost children. “Get back inside the hotel!”

  They went through the doors screaming and sobbing. Camille stood at the rear of the group, watching the undead surge along the street. They were climbing over cars, howling and screeching. The stench of their rotting corruption made her gag. She had a glimpse of their grotesque faces; mouths open and gnashing teeth contorted in a cruel rictus, the wild insanity in their glazed eyes.

  “Move!” Camille barked at the last of the elderly vacationers.

  She sprinted for the door just as the nearest undead ghoul came racing towards her. Its face was bestial, consumed by the killing madness. Camille screamed a high shrill cry of dread and twisted away an instant before the ghoul’s outstretched arm would have seized her. She felt a clawed finger hook into the thin cotton collar of her blouse. The fabric tore loose. Camille could hear pounding feet close behind her. She flung herself through the hotel door in a shuddering paroxysm of terror.

  “Block the entrance!” she cried out, flat on her back in the foyer, her chest heaving, her heart about to explode through the cage of her ribs.

  Several of the tourists reacted instinctively. They barricaded the entrance with pot plants, tables and stuffed sofa chairs until the jumble of furniture had been piled almost to the ceiling.

  A mob of howling undead quickly gathered outside the hotel. They pounded their fists on the glass, smearing blood and gore. They pressed their faces to the thick panes and their eyes rolled insanely in their bloods
hot eyes. They snarled and hissed. Through the hammering horrifying madness on the street, Camille saw two men being dragged from an abandoned SUV. One of the men was a rotund figure in a rumbled suit and tie. The ghouls had him backed up against the side of the vehicle. One of the infected pinned the man by the throat and plunged its clawed fist into the man’s bulging guts. The man shrieked a bloodcurdling cry of unimaginable pain, staring down at himself with a look of pure astonishment as his entrails bulged out through his shirt in long slippery ropes.

  The second victim somehow managed to break free, and he ran blindly towards the hotel. His head was down, panic wrenched across his face. He howled with raw terror. He seemed to be moving in slow motion through the swirling skeins of smoke.

  The terrified man reached the sidewalk and realized the undead were all around him. He slipped in a pool of blood but stayed on his feet. Then Camille heard the wicked retort of a gunshot and the man spun around, thrashing at the air with his arms. The bullet had struck him in the shoulder and he swayed like an artiste on a tightrope teetering for balance. The undead surged over him. He went down in a horror of snarls and high-pitched screams.

  Camille stared in wide-eyed dismay, and shook her head as though trying to deny the horror of it all. Her hand clutched at her throat, fingers splayed. She caught a last gruesome glimpse of the man, soaked in his own gushing blood, as the infected began eating him alive.

  “Get upstairs!” Camille shut out the gruesome sight and forced herself to think. The Grande Hotel was a six-story complex with twenty rooms on each floor, serviced by an elevator and connecting stairs. She knew it would be just a matter of moments before the glass doors or one of the windows exploded from the violent pounding fists. “Quickly!” Camille raised her voice. “Everyone up to the first floor!”

  They ran.

  Camille kicked off her shoes and used them to wedge the first-floor fire doors open. She stood at the end of a long carpeted corridor with rooms on either side. At the far end of the passage was a storage closet. The elderly hotel survivors had packed into the hallway, clinging to each other and weeping openly. Their faces looked like ghastly masks of fear.

  “We need to barricade the stairwell that leads up from the foyer,” Camille spoke urgently. “Bring everything you can find from each room; chairs, mattresses, suitcases – anything you can carry!”

  They came back to the stairwell like wise men bearing gifts, their arms loaded with pillows, handbags and carrying bedside cabinets. Groups of elderly men appeared, staggering and sweating under the strain of corner tables and sofa chairs. Piece by piece the stairwell began to fill with a jumbled tumble of obstacles, while from somewhere below them there came a sudden sound like a gunshot.

  “The hotel doors!” Camille gasped. “They’ve broken through. The undead are inside the building.”

  The realization put fresh panic into the terrified survivors. They banded together to heave single bed frames, televisions and small refrigerators down into the stairwell until it became as formidable an obstacle as a corridor of barbed wire.

  Camille posted two hotel guests as guards with orders to fetch her the moment the undead appeared, then went into the nearest hotel room that faced the street and Avignon’s wall.

  The room looked like it had been ransacked. Cosmetics and personal items were strewn across the floor. Every closet door had been flung open, and clothes lay in discarded piles. Camille strode across to the window and swept back the curtains.

  Hotel safety regulations meant the window would only open a few inches. Camille snatched up a discarded boot from the litter and smashed the window to pieces with an almighty heave. Glass sprayed the street below and warm fetid air filled the room.

  Camille leaned out through the window and stared in horror and the scene on the street below.

  The undead numbered in their thousands, criss-crossing the wide street in running roaming packs. Crumpled bodies lay like broken toys in spattered puddles of gore, and the hotel next to the Grande billowed thick grey funnels of smoke and fire from several broken windows. Sirens and building alarms still wailed in the background, but it was the sound of the undulating wave of undead that was most chilling. It was the noise of a million bees and thousands of running, shuffling feet. It was the noise of shrieking, peppered by sporadic gunfire from the old city.

  Camille snatched a rumpled bed sheet off the floor and sent one of the elderly guests to the storage closet. They came back clutching a thick black laundry marker.

  Camille dropped to her knees and worked quickly, with the sheet spread out on the carpet, holding the marker pen in her fist like a knife. It capital letters she wrote:

  50 souls. Trapped. Send help!

  * * *

  “Christ!” Tremaine cursed with bitter futile frustration, riding the waves of his dismay. He did not need binoculars to read the message on the fluttering bed sheet draped from the hotel window, nor to recognize the slim figured woman who stared across the infested roadway with a pale white pleading face.

  Camille had promised him over dinner the night before that she would not leave the old city. She had lied to him, and now she was trapped in the hotel, surrounded by thousands of undead.

  “Damn it to hell!”

  Tremaine raged silently around the top of the gatehouse like a caged lion, his hands clenching into futile fists, and then finally turned back to the gendarme Colonel, his face set, seemingly carved from stone. His eyes were ferocious and his jaw tightly clamped.

  “We have to rescue them,” Tremaine said.

  “Monsieur?” LeCat looked startled.

  Tremaine pointed at the white bed sheet, flapping from the hotel window. “There are fifty people stranded across the road. We have to rescue them.”

  “Why?” Colonel LeCat’s own expression slowly hardened. His eyes turned flinty black.

  “Why?” Tremaine looked astonished. “Because if we don’t rescue them, they will be killed by the infected!”

  LeCat shrugged. “We were all aware of the consequences for anyone left outside the old city’s walls, Professor Tremaine,” the Colonel’s words were thickly accented and in his eyes there was an unsettling rigidity of purpose. “Indeed it was you who made that perfectly clear in the mayor’s office yesterday.”

  Tremaine fumed. He knew damn well the French soldier was right, but he persisted stubbornly.

  “Camille Pelletier is the mayor’s daughter…”

  “So?” LeCat remained devoid of emotion. “We have all lost loved ones in this apocalyptic nightmare, monsieur. My wife and son were in Paris when the infection swept through the city. I have not heard from them since. And corporal LeBouf,” he pointed to one of the nearby gendarmes and shook his head sadly, “has a wife and baby daughter living just ten kilometers away. They too have not been heard from. This tragedy has destroyed millions of lives and killed millions of daughters. One more will count for little, I think.”

  “You cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch,” Tremaine exploded, his voice rising indignantly. “You won’t even try to rescue them?”

  “Why? What makes the lives of these refugees any more valuable than the lives of the thousands who stood outside the Porte De La Republique gates just a short time ago, holding their babies in the air and throwing money over the wall as they begged for rescue?”

  “It’s Camille, damn it!”

  “So what would you have me do?” LeCat spat fiercely. Behind the Colonel’s hostile stare, Tremaine sensed some indefinable emotion in the soldier’s eyes. It might have been regret, or sadness, or perhaps an unspoken guilt.

  Tremaine shrugged his shoulders with exasperation. “You could send a heavily armed patrol of soldiers,” he said impulsively. “We can cover their movements with machine guns from this gatehouse and put every spare man armed with an assault rifle along the wall.”

  “The undead are too many. The rescue party would all be killed. You know this, I think.”

  Tremaine pursed his lips until they were
a pale bloodless line. “Then maybe there is another way,” he said stiffly.

  “Maybe,” LeCat said, and let a glimmer of compassion soften his eyes. “I know you are fond of Camille,” he leaned close and spoke in a confidential whisper. “But I cannot consider any plan that endangers the lives of anyone behind these city walls. Tens of thousands – maybe millions – have died today. It is the end of the world, professor. We must preserve every life we have already saved, and not risk them in a reckless gamble.”

  As if to reinforce the Colonel’s cold warning, the undead horde suddenly seemed to surge around the smoldering gates directly below where the two men stood. They swarmed in their thousands. They could see the white-faced soldiers standing with their weapons on the battlements, and the tantalizing lure of living flesh sent them into frenzy. They tried to use the wreckage of the big truck to scale the barricades, but the sheer height of the escalade made it impossible. Gunshots rang out, and the infected were plucked from their precarious footholds and hurled back into the milling, seething mass below. The ancient fortifications were like a bulwark against the surging tide of grotesque bodies that moved in eddies and flows the same way a crowd at a musical concert rushes towards the stage when the band first appears.

  LeCat leaned on the battlements and watched the undead gather until they crowded the surrounding streets for as far as he could see. He slapped his palm against the hard stone, satisfied.

  “We are safe,” he said, as much to himself as to Tremaine, allowing a moment of smug relief. “The undead cannot scale the walls, so we are safe. So long as these old fortifications stand, and as long as the barricaded buses remain fixed, monsieur, we have nothing more to fear from the infected undead.”