Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  Mr. Davis came stepping across the roof.

  “Where are the others?” Camille frowned.

  “Still down in room 612,” he said casually.

  “Why. They must come up to the roof.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But we all had a vote, you see. And everyone decided that you should be the first to test the line, Camille. You’re the lightest and the fittest. And when you make it across, you can ask the soldiers to send over extra rope. We’ll need more to harness everybody.”

  Camille felt herself bridle. There was something offensive about the Englishman’s reasoning. It might have been her sense of chivalry, or perhaps her sense of duty. The elderly and frail should be the first ones saved. If the hotel had been a sinking ship, it would have been women and children first…

  “Mrs. Witterstein is a small woman. She would be lighter than me. She should go first. And then Mrs. Hartigan…”

  Mr. Davis looked pained with embarrassment. “I agree,” he said diplomatically. “And they’re the next two ladies coming up the ladder. But they’re old and scared, Camille. They want to see this rope harness first. I told them I would fit it to you.”

  Camille stayed tense, her expression dubious. She stared into the elderly Englishman’s eyes and saw nothing but polite innocence. Camille nodded her head.

  Mr. Davis drew the line from the gatehouse taut and tied it off around a six-inch steel pipe. He hacked the remaining rope free with the knife.

  Camille stood with her legs apart and her arms stretched wide. Mr. Davis looped the rope around her narrow waist and tied two half-hitch knots in front of her belt buckle. He let the loose ends drop to the ground then fed them between her legs and tied each piece to the loop around her waist. When he was finished, the harness was a pattern of knots across the front of her body and looped securely under both her buttocks. The Englishman looped the remaining rope over the zip-line and tied it off securely.

  He stood back admiring his work. Camille felt tightly trussed. Mr. Davis tugged on the knots, looking pleased.

  “What do you think?” he propped his bony hands on his hips. His trousers and shirt were rumpled and sweat stained.

  Camille tried to bend at the knees. The rope that looped the zip-line was too short. Mr. Davis led her to the edge of the roof and sat her sidesaddle on the low wall.

  “Okay,” he stepped back. “Can you wait for a few minutes until I fetch Mrs. Witterstein? I’m sure once she sees the harness, she’ll be confident it will hold her for the crossing.”

  Camille nodded. She had her bottom resting on the low wall and her feet dangled. Instinctively, one hand clutched the rope that tethered the rig to the zip line.

  “Quickly,” Camille said. “Soon the infected will break through to the sixth floor.”

  The old man smiled sadly and suddenly his whole demeanor changed. Gone was the spritely step and the sparkling jaunty eyes, and in there place stood a tired, exhausted old man. Something heartbreakingly tender crept into his expression. A shadow of deep regret passed across his eyes, and then Camille saw them fill with glistening tears. Emotion seemed to twist the shape of Mr. Davis’ mouth.

  “They already did,” the elderly man whispered.

  “What?”

  “The infected broke through the last fire doors, Camille. They’re in the corridors now. They’re on the sixth floor.”

  “Non!” Camille’s voice was a hoarse croak. She shook her head slowly in a gesture of numb denial and incomprehension. Her lips parted and began to quiver. Grief welled up within her, and she felt the world lurch giddily. “But… we have heard nothing. No screams…”

  The elderly Englishman began weeping unashamedly. His lower lip trembled and his hands fluttered at his side like trapped birds. “They broke through a moment after you reached the roof. We agreed we would hold them off and die without crying out because we wanted to give you the chance at life you deserved. Your bravery kept us all alive, sweet Camille. We decided we wanted to save you in return.”

  “Non!” Camille cried again. Now she understood why the Englishman had taken so long to reach the roof. The rest of the survivors had gone to their death without screaming their terror so she might have a chance to survive. The enormity of their sacrifice struck her. She reached up impulsively to untangle the tight knots of rope.

  Mr. Davis made a face of tender compassion and farewell – then pushed Camille off the roof.

  Camille felt a sensation of falling for a split-second, and then there was just the wind in her face and a cry of wild exhilarating panic in her throat as she slid down the zip-line.

  The rope sagged under her weight as she plunged towards the wall suspended by just the makeshift tether. She felt herself beginning to swing from side to side. She started to scream her panic. The undead saw her and a ravenous howl went up. Camille flashed across the road and hurtled towards the Avignon battlements. She lifted her feet instinctively, still clinging to the rope. Momentum carried her over the gatehouse wall and straight into the arms of the three burly gendarmes who had fired the mortar.

  * * *

  “I oughta kick your silly, sneaky ass!” Steven Tremaine raged at Camille.

  She sat slumped against a stone battlement atop the gatehouse; her face flushed crimson red and her whole body trembling from a maelstrom of emotions. She had her knees drawn up to her chin, and her mouth hung open, lips quivering. She was on the verge of tears.

  “I’m sorry…” she apologized in a small whisper.

  “You lied to me.” Tremaine heard the berating harshness in his own voice. Anger and relief gave his words the scornful tone used by a parent to a child who has stepped into a road full of traffic. “You promised me you wouldn’t leave the old city.”

  “I’m sorry,” Camille muttered again. Her chagrin brought big glistening tears to her eyes. Her shoulders heaved and she began to cry.

  Tremaine’s anger evaporated into a sense of dismay. He clamped down on his lip, aware that the horror of Camille’s experience and her sudden humiliation under the lash of his tongue had pushed her over the edge… and alienated her. He clawed his hands through his hair and paced a slow circuit of the gatehouse.

  Colonel LeCat stood with the binoculars pressed to his face, staring at the roof of the hotel. An elderly man was waving. It was a sad, listless gesture; the wave of someone fare welling a friend they will never see again.

  “Where are the other survivors, Miss Pelletier?” the Colonel kept the glasses to his eyes and the elderly man in focus.

  Camille drew a deep shuddering breath. Her face was slick with tears.

  “There will be no others, Colonel,” she said softly. “They sacrificed themselves to save me. By now they will all be dead.”

  LeCat said nothing. The elderly man on the rooftop stopped waving to look urgently over his shoulder. The Colonel kept the binoculars focused on the man’s face. He saw shock, then weary resignation register on the gaunt wasted features. The old man climbed stiffly onto the hotel’s ledge and settled himself on the precarious platform like a high diver. Undead appeared on the roof behind the man. They were howling with savage triumph. They lunged for the man, clawing at his arms and back. He teetered for an instant, then launched himself into space and plunged to his death.

  LeCat set the binoculars down and ordered the rope zip-line untied.

  Tremaine lowered himself down on the ground beside Camille. She looked very small and frail, crushed by her sadness and the trauma of the long hours of desperate survival. He could only imagine the horrors she had seen.

  Tremaine felt a sudden awkward wave of compassion wash over him. He put his arm around her shoulder like a shield, and Camille collapsed against him with her eyes closed. He groped for the words of an apology but before he found them, he heard her break down into shuddering sobs of grief. Tremaine squeezed her shoulder and stared sightlessly into the smoke hazed distance, not daring to speak. It would be too easy to say the wrong thing now, and so he held her in
his arms and let her tears wash away her pain.

  It was Camille who spoke first. She turned to face Tremaine and lifted her eyes to his, fortifying herself with a determined act of courage. The movement of her head loosed a tear from her eyes; it trickled down her cheek.

  “I am sorry.”

  Tremaine let out a long breath. He was too tired to be angry any longer. “Forget it. The most important thing is that you’re alive and safe.”

  “All those people…” Camille broke off, thinking again about the elderly tourists who had sacrificed themselves for her. When she closed her eyes, she saw their faces and a fresh wave of grief overwhelmed her.

  “You kept them alive for almost twenty-four hours. You gave them hope. Without you they would have died in the first moments of the attack.”

  It was cold comfort, but it was all Tremaine could offer.

  Camille sniffed back fresh forlorn tears and was about to say more when a sudden garble of panicked voices on LeCat’s two-way radio broke the melancholy sadness.

  The Colonel seized the radio and clamped it to his ear. There were multiple voices, urgent and frantic, reporting over the net in breathless rushes of French that Tremaine could not understand.

  * * *

  Kane left the men in the patisserie’s storage room at the rear of the building and crept stealthily through to the shop front’s shadowed doorway. He stared up at the sky, watching the day’s new light spread slowly behind the building façade on the opposite side of Rue De La Republique. He sucked his teeth and peered carefully down the length of the long straight road. It was empty.

  He went back to the storage room. One of the waiting men was standing in the rear doorway urinating noisily into the service laneway behind the shop. He came back into the little room zipping the fly of his jeans and yawning.

  “I am changing the plan,” Kane announced.

  The six men in the room became wary. The one who had come in from the laneway narrowed his eyes.

  “Preacher, we have spent all night working on this plan. The men are in place in the upstairs windows.”

  “I know,” Kane said irritably. He had chosen the firing positions himself when they had broken down the back door of the shop.

  “The patrol will come along soon. There is no time to make new arrangements.”

  “There is – if we act quickly,” Kane insisted.

  “But why would you change a good plan?”

  “Because I don’t want Mary hurt,” Kane growled, “and those fools upstairs are not experienced with their guns. Mary could be caught in the crossfire if the soldiers resist.”

  “Mary is one of us, Preacher,” the man said with respect that was edged by fatigue and irritation. He had been one of the robed followers who attended the ritual in the Pope’s Palace and he had not slept since. “She would gladly give her life to serve the Almighty, as we all have committed to do. Her life is no more special than any of our lives. We all work in the name of the Lord, and we all sacrifice ourselves for His greater glory.”

  Kane’s face worked with agitation and then turned into a look of such burning malevolence that it struck fear into the man who had dared challenge him. Kane’s lips clamped tightly together and a rush of merciless cruelty flared in his eyes. It lasted for just a terrifying instant – and then Kane choked down his temper and nodded his head. It was a good plan, and it was too late to make changes.

  Mary’s fate – like his own and the rest of his followers – rested in God’s hands now.

  Kane began to pray…

  * * *

  Sergeant Bitou ordered his driver to stop the APC as it passed the imposing grand façade of the Post Office. The driver swerved into the carpark at the bus terminal and left the big diesel engine running.

  Bitou unfastened the hatch overhead and stood up behind the vehicle’s machine gun to survey the length of Rue De La Republique with binoculars.

  The sun’s first light painted the buildings that lined the thoroughfare with eerie light, but the boulevard itself remained hunched in deep shadow.

  They were coming to the end of their patrol – making one final circuit of the ancient city before returning to barracks. Bitou yawned, and then choked on a lungful of thick smoky air. He was impatient, but too rigidly disciplined to take shortcuts. He finished his routine scan of the street ahead, then slid back down into the seat beside the driver.

  “Forward,” he ordered.

  The interior of the armored personnel carrier sounded like being trapped inside a big empty drum. In a combat situation the vehicle was capable of carrying ten fully-armed soldiers in its elongated rear compartment. Without those troops it became a noisy hollow shell full of nothing but engine noise and rattles. The driver crunched the vehicle into gear and turned the corner, trundling down the wide empty street at fifteen kilometers per hour.

  Bitou stifled another yawn and glanced at the darkened shops that lined the sidewalk. There were black bags of rubbish piled beside some of the doorways and glittering chips of broken glass in the gutter. The heavy-lugged tires jolted through a pothole and the whole vehicle rattled.

  Then sudden movement caught the corner of the French sergeant’s eyes and he turned his head frowning. From the darkness of a doorway a figure suddenly appeared, running diagonally into the empty road, waving its arms desperately.

  Bitou made a chopping motion with his hand, waving the driver to slow.

  “Merde!” the sergeant swore. It was a young woman. She had long hair and wore a pink nightdress. The garment clung tight around the slender body and was torn around the collar, revealing tantalizing flashes of the naked flesh beneath as she ran closer. Her mouth gaped open and her eyes looked hunted. Bitou felt himself tense with the first stirrings of alarm.

  The driver braked to a halt and let the diesel engine idle. The girl reached the middle of the road and stood, gasping for breath, in the beams of the APC’s headlights. Her hair hung in wild disarray and she was barefooted. As Bitou looked on, the girl suddenly sagged and dropped to her knees in the middle of the blacktop.

  Bitou heaved himself up through the overhead cupola and called out.

  “What happened to you?”

  The girl looked up. Her chest heaved. “A man attacked me,” she sounded close to tears. “He tried to rape me. I ran from him but he chased me.”

  “Where is he now?”

  The girl looked over her shoulder, then back to the soldier. “I don’t know. I am scared.”

  Bitou’s face became a scowl. He dropped back inside the vehicle’s cockpit to wrench open the heavy passenger-side door. Lawlessness became inevitable in a siege situation. People turned desperate, and pretty young women became prey for brutes.

  He jumped down onto the roadway. His heavy boots crunched on a sprinkle of broken glass. The girl in the glare of the headlights pressed her hands to her face and her shoulders began to heave. Sergeant Bitou’s frown deepened. The girl looked about eighteen; a pretty slim thing wearing nothing but the threadbare nightdress. The sergeant had a niece about the same age. He bent to offer a helping hand to the girl – and felt the sudden cold steel of a gun’s barrel press hard against the back of his neck.

  “Do not move, or do anything to raise an alarm,” the man’s voice in his ear sounded harsh as gravel.

  “What is this?” Bitou turned. “Who are you?”

  He heard a scuffle of sound and a short cry of pain that was cut off abruptly. Two dark shadows appeared over his shoulder and there were other men, moving urgently towards the APC on the periphery of his vision. He heard the engine note of the APC suddenly change.

  The armed man in front of him thrust his pistol under the sergeant’s chin. He wore a crude mask, fashioned from some kind of paper shopping bag. Through the two eye-holes, Bitou saw the glittering gaze of a fanatic.

  “What do you want?” the sergeant lowered his voice. Two other armed men dragged his driver into the middle of the road. The young soldier had his hands trussed tig
ht behind his back and his head lolled drunkenly on his shoulders. His face was awash with fresh dripping blood.

  “We’re taking the vehicle,” the masked attacker said. “You will come to no harm.”

  Sergeant Bitou’s face screwed up into an expression of derision. He spat his contempt. He heard quick steps behind him and then a searing white explosion of pain detonated in his back. He cried out and his legs buckled beneath him. He fell to the ground and felt a heavy foot between his shoulder blades.

  “Tie him,” Kane’s voice behind the mask rasped, hoarse with urgency. He called Mary to him and hoisted her through the passenger door of the APC, then stood in the arc of the headlights and waved his arms. The men positioned in the upstairs windows of the patisserie shop abandoned their posts and came running out into the street. “Get in the back,” Kane gestured.

  He was gasping for breath when he settled himself behind the vehicle’s steering wheel. He snatched the paper bag off his head and jammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The APC leaped forward with a sudden jolt, the engine bellowing like a wounded bull and belching black oily exhaust into the morning sky.

  Kane shivered, his body pumped full of adrenalin. His features were swollen and flushed with triumph. He flicked a glance sideways at Mary. The girl smiled back at him.

  The heart of the ancient city was the plaza adjoining the Town Hall, but the roads radiating out from Place De L’Horloge were a warren of lanes so narrow that the Council had barricaded them to all vehicle traffic. Kane reached the next intersection and turned right, jouncing the heavy armored vehicle over a pedestrian sidewalk and past a church to find a connecting road. The APC picked up speed down a gradual incline, its engine snarling loudly along a built-up street of old apartment blocks and gift shops. Ahead lay a sharp jinking turn and a sign for the university.

  Kane changed down through the gears and put the big vehicle to the turn. It seemed to sway on its suspension then righted itself. Kane drew a deep breath. At the end of the street he could see a wire mesh fence and a white gatehouse that marked vehicle access to the university. Kane tightened his grip on the steering wheel and crushed the gas pedal under his foot.