Tremaine grunted miserably and stared past the Colonel to the bed sheet hanging from the hotel window.
Camille Pelletier had no walls and no weapons.
And there was nothing Tremaine could do to save her.
* * *
It took almost two hours before the undead in the hotel foyer were able to smash down the heavy ground-floor fire doors and begin to clamber over the obstacles that barricaded the stairwell. They were frenzied with insane madness, driven wild by the nearness of flesh. They could smell the sweat and the fear of the living. They could hear their screams of fright and their quiet sobs of terror.
Camille abandoned the first floor, locking the doors behind her before retreating with the rest of the survivors to the second floor. A new barricade of furniture had to be built, but the elderly tourists were lethargic and exhausted. Camille, too, felt drained of resolve. Her throat scratched and she swayed sickly on her feet. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten.
A dark fatalistic pall fell over the group as they moved numbly through the second-floor rooms, gathering furniture to barricade the next section of stairwell. Despair sapped the energy and urgency from them. It weighed on them like an insidious disease. Death, they began to realize, seemed inevitable. It would only be a matter of time.
An elderly Austrian couple sat down next to each other in the empty stairwell and refused to follow the rest of the group. Camille pleaded desperately with them.
“Leave us, please,” the old man pleaded. His eyes were kindly.
“Help is coming from the city!” Camille crouched down close to the elderly husband and implored him. “The soldiers have seen the sign on the bed sheet. I know they have. We just have to wait for them to rescue us.”
The man was in his eighties, with a face whose features had been ravaged and blurred into soft pouches of sagging flesh by fatigue and strain. He smiled benevolently into Camille’s eyes, and then put his arm around his wife’s shoulder in a tender embrace. They had been married for almost sixty years.
“Help is not coming,” the old man spoke with a thick accent. He was not bitter. He was resigned. He spoke in a whisper so the rest of the group would not hear him. “You know that, my darling. And we are simply too old and too tired to go on fighting. We have had a wonderful life. Now we are ready to let it end.”
“Help will come,” Camille said with confidence she didn’t truly feel. She took the old man’s hand. It felt cold and had a texture like putty, the knuckles of each finger gnarled and swollen with arthritis. The elderly woman’s eyes filled with soft glistening tears. She rested her head on her husband’s shoulder like she was ready for eternal sleep.
“Leave us, dear,” she spoke with quiet lethargy. “We’ve made up our minds. Do what you can to save the others.”
* * *
Tremaine stood at the battlements above the Porte Saint Roch gateway and swept the binoculars across the skyline.
Beyond the ancient walls of the old city, the outer suburbs of Avignon were burning.
It was dusk; the last rays of the day’s light were fading in the west, but the view through the lenses of the binoculars was made stark by bright leaping flames. Tremaine could see thousands of grotesquely disfigured undead roaming the streets. They were moving in packs, agitated and restless. He tried to estimate their numbers but it was impossible. There were simply too many to count.
They ran through the flickering light and disappeared into dark shadows. They plunged into burning buildings, mindless with the insanity of their infection. They bickered and snarled, and turned savagely on each other like wild dogs, and they threw themselves at the high stone walls he stood behind, baying and howling for blood.
Tremaine heard glass shatter followed by the violent noise of an explosion. A fireball leaped into the darkening sky from the abandoned police station across the road.
Then a sound like someone being tortured cried out in the night. It was a shrill, agonized scream that climbed high and gasping into the smoke-filled darkness, screech upon wheezing, blubbering screech, and Tremaine felt himself cringe as he tried to imagine an unholy torment so vile that could give voice to that blood-chilling sound.
He felt himself shudder. The terrible cry came again, incoherent and high-pitched, becoming frantic and crazed. It sawed across Tremaine’s nerves and brought a hot sickening flush to his cheeks. The agonized scream was followed by a roaring howl of triumph from a hundred inhuman throats that descended into snarling savagery.
The sudden silence came as a guilt-stricken relief. Tremaine took a deep breath, his hands still shaking, and focused the binoculars on the façade of the Grande Hotel.
The lower floors of the building were destroyed. Tremaine could see shattered glass and broken furniture tumbled onto the sidewalk. He saw smoke billowing from the lower floors, and then – from a smashed window on the third floor – he noticed another bed sheet with a desperate message scrawled on it.
Help!
Tremaine tried to focus the glasses into the open window, hoping to see Camille, but the entire hotel stood engulfed in ominous darkness. Shadows flitted through the room, but they were indistinguishable as individuals. Tremaine set the binoculars down and rubbed his eyes.
“There must be a way to save those people,” he muttered.
He stared up into the night sky and saw a full moon rising behind ragged shreds of black smoke. The dark silhouettes of birds wheeled in the air.
Suddenly the hint of an idea came ghosting along Tremaine’s spine, making the hairs on his forearms prickle. His brow puckered in a frown as he tried to block out the mayhem rising from the chaos all around him. He kept his head tilted back and watched a flock of birds fly low overhead. He could hear the great beat of their wings through the air…
The idea was there, stirring in his subconscious, but lurking just below the surface of his conscious mind, like the shadowy shape of something swimming up from the depths of the ocean. He closed his eyes and let his mind go blank.
“Christ!” he exclaimed, shouting so loudly that he startled two nervous gendarmes posted to the nearby section of wall. They snatched at their weapons in alarm, and a bright yellow flashlight beam swept across the gatehouse wall, looking for danger.
Tremaine apologized to the gendarmes with a sheepish, embarrassed smile. But new flashlight beams sliced through the darkness, criss-crossing in sweeping patterns over the city’s southern fortifications as the alert was taken up. Barked orders were shouted and repeated. The men defending the battlements were exhausted and on edge. Tremaine cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “False alarm!” He heard men mutter darkly.
He went down the crumbling stone steps at a run with the idea still taking shape in his imagination. At the bottom of the ancient gatehouse, a sergeant stood by the open door of a P4 jeep, talking quietly on the radio. Tremaine thrust his face close to the soldier’s, his expression worked into agitation and impatience.
“Where is Colonel LeCat?” Tremaine demanded. “I need to speak to him urgently. It’s a matter of life and death.”
* * *
Pain roused Chuck Gudinski, and he woke with a gasp of confusion and a sickening, panicked lurch of his heart. He hadn’t meant to sleep, and his first alarmed thought was for his safety. He blinked grit from his eyes, turning his head wildly. He lay on his stomach facing the walls of Avignon with his chest and torso amongst the reeds, and his legs still immersed in the shallow water that lapped at the edge of the river. Masses of milling undead roamed the nearby road, hunting between the rows of abandoned cars. Dogs ran with them; mangy blood-spattered hounds with stiff bristled hair and tongues lolling dementedly from their mouths. Chuck stifled a sob of terror. The infected were grotesque silhouettes, flitting between shadows against a glowing firelight backdrop. Night had fallen and the entire world seemed to be burning.
Then the pain struck him and he had to bite down on the urge to cry out. He was stiff and cold, yet his chest felt lik
e the flesh beneath his ribcage had been scorched by a blowtorch. The ferocity of the stabbing pain made him draw his knees to his chest, and sweat broke across his brow as nausea overwhelmed him.
He rode the waves of pain, clenching his jaw and panting short sharp breaths until the worst of it had passed, then dug his fingers into the muddy riverbank and clawed forward. He had lain unmoving, half-immersed in the icy water of the Rhône, all day. The cold had permeated his entire body so that even his bones ached, and spasms of shivering gripped him like the symptoms of high fever.
He dragged himself to the fringe of the reeds and paused, gasping and tight with cramp. The effort exhausted him and left a snaking trail of blood in his wake. From his new vantage point he could see the ground ahead more clearly.
There were bodies in the grass between the river and the road. Just a few paces to his left he saw the crumpled half-eaten remains of a woman, and nearer to the road slumped the shape of a man who had died sitting upright with his back propped against a tree. Two dogs growled as they sniffed closer to the corpse. Chuck watched on in cringing horror and held his breath.
One of the hounds skulked close to the dead man, its head hanging, its shoulders bunched, and then suddenly bounded onto the body, straddling the cadaver’s chest and latching its teeth into the flesh of the face. Chuck thought he heard the gruesome sound of the man’s skin being ripped from one cheek. The dog growled and snarled, and the dead man’s head jerked and twitched. The second dog went for one of the outstretched legs. The dogs savaged the body with gnashing jaws, then retreated into the deep shadows of the night, their mouths full.
Chuck gagged with a sickened shudder of revulsion and tore his eyes away.
Most of the infected were gathered outside the walls of the city. He could hear them howling. Flashlight beams swept the battlements and occasionally he heard a burst of furious gunfire that sounded like popping firecrackers.
Chuck took a deep breath and counted down from five, tensing every muscle, screwing his nerves tight. The grassy verge between the riverbank and the road seemed suddenly still. Nothing moved.
Chuck reached through the reeds and grabbed at a handful of grass, then dragged himself forward on his stomach, wriggling and straining like a maimed caterpillar.
* * *
“I have seen the face of God,” Kane declared solemnly, and then paused to let the significance of his words sink in to the congregation gathered at abandoned warehouse.
The cavernous building was lit by a hundred burning candles that threw leaping shadows up the walls and cast everything in a golden glow.
Kane sat on the edge of the small platform that was his stage. The young girl sat obediently close beside him. Kane had his arm around her waist. Her face looked pale and serious.
“I have seen the face of God,” Kane said again. “But I could not hear His words. He came to me in a moment of rapture, and beckoned me. He waits for the right time and place to reveal His plan to us.”
He stood up then and lifted the girl to her feet. She seemed small and frail and fragile in the shadow of the preacher’s huge bulk. She had changed into a fresh white dress and wore a blue sash of ribbon around her narrow waist. Her face and hair had been washed. She stood silent and serene. Kane clutched her to his side and discreetly let his hand drift down her back until he possessively cupped the firm round cheeks of her buttocks.
Kane faced the crowd standing tall above the glowing candles so the flickering flames lit his features from below, turning the deep cavities of his eyes into black caverns.
“God wants you to make your choice,” the preacher kept his voice restrained, letting the words rumble from his throat as he addressed the gathering. “You can stay cowering and hidden from the Almighty’s wrath, or you can walk in the divine sunshine of His love at my side. But the time to declare your heart is now.” He paused dramatically and his listeners seemed to crane forward where they sat. The warehouse was eerily silent as they waited for more.
“Tonight we must place ourselves at His mercy and into His service. Only those willing to accept our Lord will be saved.”
He saw fear flash across the faces of those followers who were gathered closest to the stage, and he seized the moment.
“We are God’s children! We live to serve His will. Each of us has been called, and I have personally felt the brush of His hand and the whisper of His breath. I have seen His magnificent countenance. I have been chosen as His messenger on earth, and you have been chosen as God’s flock,” he lashed the gathered congregation, his voice rising with the zeal of a prophet.
A soft sigh rose from the audience. They stirred like the leaves of a tree in a gentle breeze, captivated by Kane’s compelling presence and the impassioned power of his voice. One of the women in the crowd nodded her head sagely and began to mutter prayers. Another man quietly clapped his hands then cried out, “Praise to God!”
The call was taken up by fifty other voices. Kane let the chorus ring around the room, his eyes glittering.
“But where?” Kane began again, his gestures rehearsed and stagey. “Where can we hear the exalted voice of God? Where can we perform a ceremony of such magnificence that God would be pleased and compelled to bless us with a clear message?”
It was a rhetorical question. Kane let his words hang in the air and the crowd leaned forward, quivering with anticipation.
“The Palace of the Popes!” Kane declared. “It was once the house of God and his most beloved messengers on earth. Tonight… tonight it will become that holy place again.”
Kane fell dramatically silent and swept his eyes over the faces that glowed in the firelight. He had them entranced, captivated.
“We must break into the palace and perform a ritual to connect me with the Almighty through the sacred vessel he delivered,” Kane looked wolfishly down at the girl’s face and drew a hiss of breath. “For only in the moment of rapture can the word of God be evoked, and only in a holy place can it be heard.”
* * *
The ancient city was enveloped in the deep dark of night when Jacques Lejeune left his apartment and went creeping through the narrow cobbled streets of the western quarter. Electricity into Avignon had finally failed, and the only light came from four huge arc lamps standing at the edges of the town plaza, powered by military generators from the gendarmerie barracks.
The arc lamps seemed as bright as the sun, but their reach into the labyrinth of streets was limited. Jacques had no difficulty clinging to the shadows.
The military had imposed a curfew on all civilian movement throughout the old city after dark and the side roads were deserted. Police cars patrolled the main thoroughfares, and Jacques kept a careful, cautious watch for the sweep of their headlights.
When at last he reached the unlocked door and pushed it open, he was lathered in nervous sweat.
Candles burned in the cramped hallway, lighting threadbare carpet. The building had a musty airless smell, mingled with the odors of stale cooking and cigarette smoke. There were more candles on the staircase. He took the steps two-at-a-time, drawing deep breaths to settle his nerves. At the top of the stairs he turned right and then paused, suddenly overcome with anxiety, outside an apartment door.
He fumbled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. A trickle of sweat ran down from his brow, over the unshaven stubble of his jowls, and dripped from his chin. He took three jerky steps back towards the stairs, then turned back with a sickness in the pit of his stomach and the sweat of his shame running down his sallow cheeks.
The door was faded blue, the paint peeling in flakes to expose leprous patches of another color underneath. He turned the worn knob and the unlocked door creaked open.
Jacques stepped into a room thick with incense smoke. The walls were covered with cheap posters in ugly frames, and in the corners were two stuffed, worn sofa chairs. There were two doors on the far side of the room and the floor was thick with a mish-mash of imitation oriental rugs.
Jacq
ues went quietly across the floor towards a door that had a stained glass picture of an owl lead lighted into the top panel. The bird had been fashioned through a mix of transparent and brown segments of glass to represent the head and feathers, and a riot of bright colors to form the wings.
Jacques’ hand shook. He tapped lightly on the door and then pressed his face close to one of the small clear glass panels to peer into the room beyond.
Jacques could see a bed, and there were burning candles on a chest of drawers nearby. They lit the walls with a soft muted glow so that it took him long puzzled seconds to interpret and understand what he was watching.
Amidst a mess of tangled sheets, a couple lay upon the mattress. The woman was on her back with her legs splayed wide apart, clutching at a naked man’s hips between her knees. The man was thrusting in a wild erratic rhythm, grunting like a boar as his naked buttocks clenched and bunched with each new drive of his pelvis.
The woman lay gasping, speaking in husky breathless groans, urging the man above her to greater effort as she theatrically tossed her head from side to side and strained her body up to meet his.
Jacques felt an insane rush of hot jealousy and then an equally intense perverse voyeuristic fascination. He gulped in a ragged breath of air. His whole body shook with feverish thrill.
“Paulette!” he gasped, his voice bruised by a sense of betrayal.
He reached to push the door open, but timidity froze him. He stood, vacillating while the sounds from within the bedroom rose towards their inevitable crescendo.
Suddenly the other door into the waiting room opened and a slim blonde girl with a tender pale body appeared. She was naked. She saw Jacques and her expression became knowing. Her lipsticked lips curled into a whore’s smile.
“Hello, monsieur,” her voice was throaty. She stayed shamelessly in the doorway but changed her stance, shifting her weight onto one leg so that her hips tilted at an enchanting angle. Her smile became small and sly. She saw a flush of color bloom in Jacques’ cheeks. “Can I be of service to you tonight? Are you lonely for companionship?”
Last Stand For Man Page 17