Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  “Nine months, Colonel,” the boy’s voice squeaked. His belly felt full of oily fear. The sour taste of it coated the back of his throat. “My uncle served in the Congo.”

  “Aah!” LeCat seemed genuinely intrigued. “So soldiering runs in your blood, yes?”

  The young man blushed bright red. He was uncomfortable and awkward. “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Good!” LeCat said. He stared ahead at the intersection, with his eyes narrowed. A thick haze of grey smoke blanketed the end of the road, cutting visibility. “Then I can count on you?”

  “Sir,” the gendarme stiffened with pride.

  “Good. Then keep your eyes on that smoke,” he gestured with the pistol in his hand. “And notify me when the enemy appear. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  LeCat straightened and holstered his weapon. He had a frown on his face as though suddenly distracted by a vexing problem that proved difficult to solve. He wandered away from the shelter of the APC and strolled across the road with his hands clasped behind his back and his head down, deep in thought.

  “They’re coming,” Colonel LeCat muttered from the corner of his mouth as he drew level with the American hunched behind the P4 jeep. Tremaine’s skin crawled with the insects of his fear.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oui.” The Colonel said. He continued walking without pause to the Captain he had delegated to command the machine gun post on the opposite corner of the road.

  “They will soon be here, Captain Falviur,” he said conversationally.

  The Captain stood leaning against the wall of a building with his weapon aimed into the distant bank of smoke. Two of his men lay behind the machine gun that had been set up on the footpath, and two more were kneeling in the shade of a small roadside tree with steel boxes of spare ammunition.

  “Do not open fire until I order you,” LeCat kept the tone of his voice calm and casual. “Let the machine gun on the APC do its work first.”

  “Sir,” Falviur nodded. There was nothing more to say.

  LeCat turned on his heel and now he had the look of a man enjoying a summer’s morning stroll, knowing that all eyes were surreptitiously upon him, and that under such anxious scrutiny he must maintain the pretense of confident assuredness. In the face of terror and almost certain death he had to set an example to the frightened young gendarmes around him.

  A high-pitched squeak of sound broke the spell. LeCat turned. It was the young gendarme. His face looked white as bone china, his mouth open wide, slack jawed and lips quivering. He pointed with a shaking hand.

  “There they are, Colonel.”

  LeCat turned and stared into the obscuring bank of smoke that shrouded the intersection.

  The road lay blanketed in a thick haze, and the air seemed to vibrate with the sounds of rioting and horror, rising to a chaotic crescendo. Dark swirling shapes emerged within the veils of smoke and then, dramatically, the wind stripped the haze away. A horde of growling undead erupted into the crossroads. Their wild frenzied roar rattled the air.

  LeCat filled his lungs to bark orders to the nervous gendarmes around him. “Stand to your guns! Stand to your guns!”

  There was a fidget of final movement and the mechanical clatter of weapons being checked and loaded.

  “Fire!” LeCat roared.

  The length of the boulevard erupted in a juddering roaring maelstrom of noise and howls. The machine gun mounted atop the APC proved lethal, cutting a swathe through the front running ranks of the undead and piling the bodies across the road. The gendarmes on either side of the armored vehicle added their weapons to the deafening chorus as bullets twitched through the smoke, and the vast tide of infected lost momentum. They milled in the middle of the road, trapped in a quagmire of hideously rotted bodies and dismembered limbs. The hail of concentrated fire being thrown down the narrow road churned the infected undead into shattered pulp.

  But after fifteen seconds of furious fire, the tempo of resistance lost its unified voice and degenerated into a broken staccato of noise as individual soldiers stopped to reload. Relentlessly the undead pushed closer, driven by their insatiable blood-lust and the weight of the undead bodies still spilling into the street, pushing them on to the guns.

  The carnage became gruesome. Broken bodies, flailed and flensed of their flesh, lay like discarded litter on the blacktop. The gutters ran thick with gore and brown oozing blood. A blue haze descended over the troops behind the barricade and the world became a numbed, deafening nightmare of noise and savage shrieks.

  Many of the undead were thrown to the ground writhing and twisting. They crawled away from the crushing weight of the horde to the sidewalks, bones shattered and rotting flesh punctured by multiple wounds.

  LeCat leaped up onto the top of the APC and surveyed the battleground. From his elevated position he could see that the massed column of undead reached all the way to the end of the street; thousands upon thousands of infected funneling into the narrow boulevard, as endless as the ocean. He slitted his eyes.

  “Aim higher!” he punched the machine gunner’s shoulder to get the gendarme’s attention. The shuddering roar of the weapon overwhelmed his shouted voice. He stabbed his finger at the side of his head and fixed the gunner with a baleful stare. “Head shots!” LeCat shouted.

  The machine gunner seemed to understand. He traversed the weapon in a slow sweep of the boulevard, elevating the barrel just an inch or so. A soft pink mist hung in the air as a burst of well-aimed fire decapitated three of the undead and turned their skulls to pulp.

  LeCat grinned fierce appreciation. His face had been grimed with sooty dust, and his eyes made bloodshot by the smoky haze. He tapped the gunner on the helmeted head to signal his approval and leaped from the top of the vehicle to the road. Tremaine stood there, hunched behind the broad bulk of the vehicle and staring wide-eyed at the gruesome carnage.

  He saw a gendarme track a charging figure that emerged from out of the smoke and then heard a bark of gunfire. The ghoul had been a teenage girl. One of the bullets caught the zombie in its open, snarling mouth. The contents of its head blew out through the back of the skull. It dropped to the ground and got trampled beneath the feet of the rushing stampede.

  “They’re getting closer,” Tremaine shouted at LeCat. The Colonel nodded grimly. The sheer weight of numbers would overrun the defenders eventually.

  In a normal combat situation, such heavy losses would have a devastating effect on morale. If the undead were a regular army they would have fallen back, broken by the guns. But the undead were made mindless and blood-thirsty by their infection. They would not retreat.

  “It is inevitable,” LeCat said. “Unless we can kill them all, we cannot hope to survive.”

  The battle became a series of moments for Tremaine, like frozen images captured by a camera. He saw two of the undead stagger, punched full of bullet holes, to the gutter then drag themselves back to their feet. A moment later they went down again, this time fatally as the sweep of the machine gun took off the top of one ghoul’s head and severed the other undead beast’s head from its neck. The contents of their skulls splashed against a window and dripped down the glass like thick sauce.

  He heard men calling for ammunition, and noticed Camille hunched on the ground with her back against the jeep. A soldier standing beside her stumbled and his gunfire went wild, accidentally shooting another gendarme in the back. The shot soldier fell forward, his arms cartwheeling in the air. He slumped, dead on the blacktop in a bright puddle of his own blood, limbs thrown wide and his trunk twitching convulsively.

  “Christ!” Tremaine swore. He scampered to the body and snatched up the dead gendarme’s assault rifle. He didn’t know how to fire the weapon. He aimed it at the surging wall of undead and it bucked ferociously against his shoulder. The shots went wide and then the weapon clicked on an empty chamber. He had no idea how to reload. He threw the weapon down and saw Camille scramble for it.

  “It ran out of bulle
ts,” Tremaine shouted lamely.

  Camille fumbled a magazine from the dead soldier’s webbing and reloaded with deft skill. Tremaine looked on, stunned. Camille handed him the weapon back, but Tremaine shook his head. Camille shoved herself into the line of men behind the jeep and opened fire. Tremaine scuttled across the road and saw a trenching spade and an axe clamped to the side of the APC behind steel brackets. He knocked the lugs aside with his palm and seized the axe. He felt better with a weapon. The weight of the crude blade in his hands was reassuring.

  The undead pressed closer to the guns, like a relentless tide. There were so many dismembered rotting corpses on the ground now their broken bodies formed a gruesome wall that the following horde were forced to clamber over. Still they pressed forward.

  LeCat drew his sidearm and fired into the swarming torrent of hideous rotting creatures, aiming at a zombie who had once been an old man. The ghoul opened its mouth to howl, but before the sound came from the rotting hole of its throat, it was punched backwards, flung down as if from an invisible fist. LeCat’s bullet had blown through the ghoul’s eye socket and torn off the back of its skull. The ghoul fell to the ground into an oily pool of guts and vomit.

  “Now!” the Colonel gave the order, roaring to make himself heard above the staccato of deafening gunfire. Captain Falviur had been waiting impatiently for the command. He kicked the boot of the machine gunner lying prone on the sidewalk beside him, and the street erupted in a fresh hell of deafening fire.

  The second machine gun caught the undead in a thunderous crossfire and they edged away from the threat, piling bodies deeper and narrowing the front of their attack. The nearest ghouls were within forty feet; close enough to see the mutilated faces, close enough to see the insane frenzy burning in their eyes, to see the flaps of rotting flesh and gruesome open wounds, to see open howling mouths of black rotting teeth, to see the bite marks and the strike of each bullet. The undead tide began to stall and falter, though still they seethed and snarled like wild animals.

  “Keep firing!” LeCat could sense the pendulum of momentum swinging slowly in favor of the defenders. The mound of bodies strewn across the street reached head high, piled like hideous rotting garbage. Bullets tugged and plucked at the smoky haze and then for a brief moment, the battlefield seemed eerily silent. Both machine guns needed reloading and the men behind the APC were running low on ammunition. The gunfire became halting and sporadic. LeCat knew the fight for survival teetered on the next few seconds.

  He clambered up the side of the APC and stood squinting into the haze. The horror spread before the barricade caught him in the chest like the punch from a fist. The mounds of undead were skeletal rotting tangles of stringy grey flesh and gore, slaughtered in their hundreds and thrown down in careless tangles of limbs and bones. The carnage was holocaustic, and the putrid stench overwhelming.

  In the no-man’s land space between the piled wall of bodies and the barricade, some of the infected still crawled, clawing themselves closer to the soldiers with bony bloodied hands, trailing stinking slicks of brown blood. Their tongues lolled maniacally from the sides of their mouths, and their jaws snapped on broken jagged teeth. They were barely recognizable as once being human, so withered was their dead flesh. They barked and grunted, and the flies swarmed over their rotting corpses, feasting on the corruption.

  LeCat shot the closest ghoul as it lifted its head to roar, while behind the barricade men scrambled for fresh magazines of ammunition.

  The illusory lull lasted just a few moments – and then the next wave of infected came pouring over the mountain of bodies.

  They came clambering over the broken corpses like WWI soldiers springing from their Somme trenches, howling and roaring and flailing their arms in wild madness. The clamor became deafening, rising on the air like furious surf on a storm-lashed beach. LeCat felt his blood chill in the face of the fresh relentless horror.

  “Fire!”

  The machine gun on the corner juddered a furious blaze of enfilade fire, tearing into the horde as it crested the hideous wall of bodies, but shots went high, flailing the building opposite and biting off chunks of debris. It added to the dust and smoke so that the field of battle became a swirling haze.

  “Fire!” LeCat’s voice rose above the maelstrom. He shot one of the running ghouls between the eyes, then swung the pistol onto another hideous figure jinking diagonally across the face of the barricade towards the street corner. LeCat’s bullet took off the top of the ghoul’s head and flung him down on the blacktop.

  Tremaine watched on in growing horror, his hands flexing and clenching at the handle of the axe with rising apprehension. It seemed the tide of undead would surge to overwhelm them at any moment. He turned to look for Camille and saw her still behind the jeep. She had thrown down the assault rifle when it had run out of ammunition. There were no more magazines to spare. Tremaine started to run towards her when something caught in the periphery of his vision.

  He spun round and felt his guts seem to drop from his body.

  At the opposite end of the boulevard a second phalanx of undead appeared through the tendrils of hazy smoke, like monstrous apparitions drenched in blood. Tremaine felt himself sag in defeat and despair.

  The three gendarmes posted behind the makeshift wall of sandbags opened fire but the sound of their defiant fusillade sounded puny compared to the triumphant savage howl of the undead throng. LeCat somehow sensed the new threat and turned to see the shape of the second attack. He threw his head back and roared his frustration, as though furious with God. Across the smoke and chaos of the street, Tremaine locked eyes with LeCat and watched the French Colonel shake his head in mute surrender.

  The last shreds of resistance went from the gendarmes. They saw their imminent death through a bowel-churning blur of smoke. Only LeCat refused to give in the fight. He bellowed over the fury of noise defiantly.

  “Captain Falviur!”

  “Sir?” the officer on the far side of the road looked up. His face had been caked with dust and grime.

  “You will shoot the first man who takes a backward step!”

  The Captain blanched but nodded. “Yes, sir!”

  Satisfied, LeCat drew himself erect and reloaded his pistol. He climbed unhurriedly over the APC and stood in front of the barricade. Only the relentless hail of fire from the two machine guns pinned back the surging tide of undead. LeCat turned to face his men. He stood in an inch deep layer of thick sticky blood and guts. He raised one arm into the air and looked along the ragged line of young faces that stared back at him. They were sweating and pale with fear.

  “Men of the French gendarmerie. We are going to charge,” LeCat declared. “One final charge for the glory of France. Who is with me? Who will fight to the death alongside their Colonel?”

  An insane, reckless and ragged cheer went up from a dozen hoarse parched throats. Men began clambering over the barricade.

  “Then follow me!” LeCat cried.

  He turned to face the horde of undead and charged into the swarming mass of bodies. Behind him, the gendarmes followed in a ragged line, firing from the hip as they ran. The undead seemed to melt before them as the French soldiers cleaved a pocket of space into the front ranks of the infected. The defiance lasted just a few glorious seconds. The zombies surrounded the gendarmes and they went down, still firing, their valiant shouts turning to breathless, desperate screams of unimaginable torture. They vanished from Tremaine’s sight like drowning men disappearing beneath the surface of a plunging storm-tossed sea.

  “Run!” Camille Pelletier seized Tremaine by the arms and dragged him to the APC. They had just seconds before the undead tide overwhelmed them. The gendarme behind the machine gun kept firing, tragic tears streaming down his cheeks, cutting runnels in the grime that caked his face. Camille threw herself in the driver’s side door and the big engine howled to life in a black belch of exhaust. Tremaine crammed himself in the small space beside the gunner’s booted legs.
/>   “Can you drive this thing?”

  Camille was sweating. Her hair hung in lank tendrils down over her forehead. Her brow puckered in a frown of fierce concentration. She slammed the APC into reverse and rammed the jeep aside.

  “Yes.” She said.

  A ghoul flung itself against the vehicle, slamming bloody hands against the passenger-side window. The noise inside the closed APC was a deafening drum until the machine gun fell suddenly silent, the last of the ammunition spent. Tremaine seized the soldier roughly by the belt and tugged him down into the cockpit. The cupola hatch slammed shut. Camille put the APC into low gear and it leaped forward.

  “Where are we going?” Tremaine had to shout. The undead were pounding on the steel walls of the vehicle with their fists, drumming their fury and frustration. One of them threw itself onto the long nose of the armored car and clung there, snarling and snapping at them through the glass. Camille pushed the gas pedal to the floor, and the APC lunged forward like a steel battering ram. The undead fell beneath the chassis, ploughed under by the vehicle’s weight. The armored car jounced and rocked, swaying from side to side. Camille gripped the wheel with bleak resolve. Her face was flushed, her eyes enormous with fear and fierce concentration.

  “Where are we going?” Tremaine shouted again as Camille changed gear. The big diesel engine bellowed and the undead were battered aside by the APC’s momentum. Broken bodies crunched under the huge, heavily-lugged tires. Later on, Tremaine understood, there would be time for remorse; to ponder his survival and to regret that he had never said farewell or thanked LeCat for his dour bravery. But that time was not now, for survival still seemed far from assured.

  “I know a place,” Camille said urgently, then wrenched hard on the wheel to turn the corner. “A place we can defend and survive.”

  “Where?” Tremaine had to shout past the gendarme who sat squeezed between them. He was a young soldier, barely old enough to shave. His pale face dripped with sweat under the heavy weight of his helmet. His eyebrows had been singed away, giving his face a bland, startled look. He gaped at the phalanx of undead beyond the windscreen.