Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  “Just a few minutes,” Camille spoke without taking her eyes off the road. The bridge was an obstacle course of burned out cars. One hatchback hung precariously over the steel guard rail. They reached the middle of the bridge and saw a roadblock ahead. Camille felt a sudden chill of apprehension.

  She flicked a glance at Tremaine.

  He checked the rear view mirror. Undead were following but had been left behind by the APC’s steady speed. He guessed a horde of over a hundred ghouls had massed on the threshold of the bridge and were gradually closing. He focused on the roadblock.

  It was a barricade of steel drums, with sandbag emplacements on either side. Two of the barrels had been rolled aside, and a third lay, knocked down like a tenpin. The APC would not fit through the narrow breach.

  Tremaine made his decision.

  “Stop!”

  He flung open the heavy door and dropped down to the blacktop. He glanced over his shoulder and figured he had just thirty seconds before the undead would be upon them. He sprinted to the barricade and threw his weight against the barrel lying on its side. It had been filled with concrete. He braced himself and began to push. Suddenly there were three more men around him; a teenage boy, maybe seventeen years old, and two middle-aged men. One of them had a pistol tucked inside the waistband of his torn and stained trousers. They had come from the rear compartment of the APC. Together, Tremaine and the youngster rolled the barrel aside while the other two men grunted and strained to move another drum clear.

  Tremaine’s brow blistered with beads of sweat. He heard the strained rasp of his own breath. The undead were closing quickly; a dozen of the ghouls had streaked ahead of the pack, baying and snarling. He heard Camille gun the big engine in rising panic.

  With another drum rolled aside, the gap had been made wide enough for the APC. Tremaine ran back to the armored car with the others following. Camille sat hunched at the wheel, her gaze fixed on the rear-view mirror. The undead were close enough that she could hear their ragged snarls and see the fierce frenzy in their hideous expressions.

  “Quick!” she cried out. Tremaine’s fingers fumbled for the door handle. He saw the rear doors of the APC swing wide. The teenage boy and one of the men scrambled into the back of the troop carrier, but the man with the gun stood facing the undead with the pistol drawn.

  “Get in!” Tremaine saw the drama unfolding in the mirror. He doubted the shooter could even hear him. He was an overweight man with a short stubble of beard and a fleshy round face. He stood side on to the undead like an old-fashioned duelist, with one hand propped on his hip and his feet a shoulder’s width apart.

  Tremaine cried out in rising horror.

  The retort of the gun sounded deafeningly loud. The shooter’s hand was thrown high into the air by the recoil. One of the stampeding undead went down in a hideous tangle of limbs and three more ghouls following close behind stumbled and fell over the corpse. The respite lasted just seconds. The rest of the undead reached the shooter and overwhelmed him. Tremaine heard terrified pitiful screams from the back of the APC. The rest of the survivors could only watch on in impotent horror as the man was brought down like a buffalo being attacked by a pride of lions. He went down on his haunches, screaming. The gun fired again, but Tremaine guessed the shot went wild. The shooter died in a flurry of howls and blood.

  “Drive!” he pounded his fist against the side of the door in frustration, then stared over his shoulder and watched the teenage boy lean far out of the rolling vehicle to pull the two swinging rear doors shut.

  The APC shot the breach in the barricade with inches to spare on either side. Camille let out a sigh of relieved breath she had been holding throughout the tense seconds of the attack. Tremaine stared fixedly ahead. On the far side of the bridge were the burned out remains of a village. Black puddles of dried blood criss-crossed the road. A street sign at an intersection showed a route north to the left. Camille turned right onto a narrow secondary road and the ground beneath the big wheels began to slowly rise.

  Tremaine wrenched himself around in his seat and peered hard at the white shocked faces of the passengers in the back of the vehicle. Apart from the two children, the teenager and the man who had survived the attack at the barricade, there were four women huddled close together along one of the long bench seats dressed in ragged blood-spattered clothes. They were aged in their twenties and thirties, their faces powdered white with soot ash and dust. They stared blankly with unseeing eyes, underscored with the heavy dark bruising of grief.

  “Does anyone have a gun?” Tremaine asked. “Any personal weapon at all?”

  The middle-aged man who had survived the attack turned his head slowly. He looked like the victim of a ravaging terminal disease. His face was very pale and gaunt, the features indefinite and blurred. His mouth hung slack and spittle rolled from the corner of his mouth.

  “I have a gun,” he said softly. To Tremaine’s ear the man’s accent sounded vaguely Italian. He touched at a bulge in his pocket but did not reveal the weapon. Tremaine nodded. He regretted throwing down the axe when they had fled the gendarmerie barracks.

  A sudden abrupt change of course brought his attention back to the road. Camille had turned again and the APC began cruising through the burned out shell of another village. Many of the buildings were stone. Their roofs had collapsed and internal walls had tumbled down. Their broken windows looked like black vacant eyes as the armored car growled along the narrow street. At the end of the road was a round-about with signs. Camille turned right again and changed down to low gear.

  “This road takes us up to the fort,” she said. “But I don’t know how far we will get. We may have to run the final kilometer.”

  Tremaine stared stupidly through the windscreen. The road was narrow and winding, rising at a steep gradient. Along the shoulder of the road were waist-high stone walls. There was nowhere to maneuver. He felt a new surge of panic well up from deep inside him and it took all his will to crush down on the fear and keep his voice calm. He had seen the fort and knew it sat high on a hill that overlooked the surrounding countryside… but he had never considered the possibility that the fort could not comfortably be reached in the APC. Now the reality struck him and tied knots in his guts.

  “Go as far as you can,” he said. He started to search the sides of the road as each new twisting bend leaped out at them. There were houses here, but they had been built into the face of the rising promontory. The scene was dramatic and eerie. The hillside looked utterly desolate.

  The incline up the hill grew steeper and the road narrowed. The APC slowed to a crawling pace as the engine came under strain. At the next tight twisting bend, the side of the vehicle scraped harshly against a rock barrier – and stuck fast.

  “Christ!”

  Camille killed the engine and everyone clambered out of the armored car. Tremaine had to exit through the cupola because his door had wedged tight against the wall. He paused for a moment on top of the steel beast and turned in a slow circle. Fort Saint-Andre stood at the crest of the hill, almost a kilometer further up the steep incline. Tremaine could not see the road beyond the next bend because it was shrouded by a small stand of trees. He looked back along the narrow path they had driven up. From this height he could see over the village they had passed through, all the way to the bridge and beyond. Avignon lay hidden behind a billowing pyre of black smoke that columned high into the sky.

  He jumped down to the ground. Camille had herded the small knot of survivors into a group. They set out on the narrow path towards the summit.

  The gradient became so steep that they had to lean forward into it. The road was dusted with loose stones and drifting dirt. Tremaine felt himself break out in fresh blisters of sweat. One of the women began to lag behind, limping heavily. Tremaine’s head was never still, turning and twisting like a fighter pilot looking for threats.

  They smelled it first; a cloying over-ripe stench that hung heavy on the air and painted the back of their
throats. It was the sickening odor of putrefaction. Tremaine felt himself stiffen with tension. He stopped in mid-stride and turned with a wide-eyed warning of alarm to the rest of the group.

  The gaunt man with the gun went into a crouch and fumbled in his pocket for his pistol. It looked like a relic from the last World War.

  Tremaine and the man locked eyes and silent understanding passed between them. Together they crept warily forward to the next bend.

  Fifty yards away, two figures were squatted on their haunches at the side of the road. Between them, lying prone on its back, twitched the corpse of a woman. The creatures were naked and covered in filth. One of them reached into the cavity of the dead body’s guts and rummaged around for a handful of bloody organs. The man beside Tremaine gasped his revulsion – and the undead heads turned in malevolent unison.

  The man with the gun stood rooted to the spot. He raised the weapon, extending both his arms. The ghouls came to their feet and hissed. One of them clambered over the wall and began to circle through the nearby stand of trees. It was small; in life it had been a child. It moved like a wraith in the shadows, snarling through bleeding lips.

  The taller of the two ghouls charged, driven by instinct and blood-lust. Tremaine felt his guts turn to hot liquid.

  “Shoot!” he shouted at the man beside him. “Shoot the bastard!”

  The ghoul was a ferocious apparition of blood and fury. It howled in screeching madness.

  “Shoot!” Tremaine could hear the rising panic in his own voice. “Shoot!”

  The gun roared in a deafening explosion of violent noise and blue smoke. The recoil caught the man off guard and flung him backwards so he staggered to keep his balance. Tremaine’s ears were ringing. His heart leaped into his throat and threatened to choke him.

  When the haze cleared, the ghoul lay sprawled on its back in the middle of the narrow lane, the top of its head blown away and the contents of its infected skull flung across the asphalt. Its heels drummed on the blacktop. Its fingers twitched then stopped.

  Tremaine let out a gasp of breath and turned back to where Camille stood watching in alarm.

  “Quickly!” Tremaine shouted, throwing the last vestiges of caution to the wind. “There is another one somewhere in the trees. Run for it!”

  A panicked sound like a wailing moan went up. The group began to run for their lives.

  Tremaine led the way. His legs burned and his chest heaved like a bellows. The gradient became steeper and the loose dusty gravel beneath his feet more precarious. He slipped and threw out his hands to break his fall. He felt giddy with fatigue and exhaustion.

  The teenage boy reached the top of the rise first and stood breathing deeply with his hands on his hips. The rest of the group had strung out like the peloton of a bicycle race. The man with the gun had lost ground. His face was twisted in pain.

  Camille and Tremaine ran side by side. Camille’s steps were still light while Tremaine labored. Behind them the limping woman suddenly hobbled and swayed heavily. She cried out in anguish and panic. Her tattered clothes clung damp with sweat to her body and her hair hung in ratty tangles over her face. Her mouth hung open, gasping for air, and there was a helpless, desperate appeal in her tortured eyes.

  The undead ghoul sprang from the shadow of the trees and knocked the woman off her feet.

  Tremaine saw the ghoul attack and knew he could do nothing to save the woman. She went down with a cry of terror choked in her throat. The zombie rolled her onto her back and went for her face. The woman screamed hysterically. She flailed with her fists and kicked her legs. The ghoul was like a savage dog, snapping and snarling. It lunged for her neck and buried its teeth into the soft pale flesh. The woman gave a last hoarse gasp and then went very still. Tremaine reeled away, trembling and seized Camille by the arm.

  “We can’t help her,” he croaked. “Run!”

  The woman was still conscious, still breathing shallowly as the ghoul gnawed its way up from her mauled throat and feasted on the delicacy of her eyes. Her hands fluttered weakly and she tried to gasp for help. No sound came. For long gruesome seconds she was alert and aware that she was being eaten alive, cringing in unaccountable agony but paralyzed by the weight of the beast that squatted on her chest and the debilitating trauma of her injuries.

  She died in a slow, excruciating nightmare of pain.

  Tremaine and Camille reached the top of the rise. Fort Saint-Andre stood at the end of the road. It was a vast imposing bastion; two huge round stone towers crowned with battlements and between them the yawning dark hole of an open gatehouse. The western wall stood over thirty feet high and ended in another stone tower. Tremaine swayed, breathless and gaping in wonder, while Camille and the others ran on. The fort was a preserved medieval masterpiece.

  “Keep going!” Tremaine shouted. He felt the first faint stirrings of renewed hope and it put fresh strength into his legs. He ran along the path with the breath sawing in his ears, getting louder and louder until he realized it was not the sound of his strained breathing, but something more sinister.

  The knot of survivors were fifty yards away from the gatehouse, with Camille leading the group, still running comfortably despite the taxing incline. The rest of the survivors were swaying and stumbling with fatigue. Tremaine had fallen behind. Now he sensed his own vulnerability. He flashed a look over his shoulder and saw nothing until he turned back towards the fort and sensed movement to his right.

  There were houses hidden from the path by a high row of trees. The homes had been built facing a view across the river to Avignon. All Tremaine could see were rooftops. He stared, fretting anxiously. The noise in his ears grew louder and took on a menacing tone.

  “Christ!” he swore.

  He started to run.

  A dozen undead burst through the dense line of trees, drawn by the sounds of pounding footsteps and Tremaine’s shouted voice. They were newly infected, he realized; their clothes were blood-spattered and their bodies ravaged with gruesome wounds, but the flesh had not turned grey, had not begun to rot. They came howling like beasts and ran to intercept him.

  Ahead, Camille and the others passed suddenly into the deep shadow of the fort’s gatehouse entrance. Tremaine ran on with sweat streaming into his eyes and a stabbing stitch of pain cramping his side.

  The nearest undead ghoul sprinted ahead of the baying pack. It lunged for Tremaine when he was just seconds away from safety. Tremaine felt his legs ripped from underneath him. He went down in the dust with the ghoul clawing at one of his feet. Tremaine rolled onto his back, screaming in fear and blind panic. He kicked out with his free foot and connected with the ghoul’s blood-streaked face. Tremaine lay sprawled across the gatehouse entrance. The following undead saw him go down and a triumphant howl of anticipation snarled in their throats.

  The ghoul clawing at his leg howled ferociously. Tremaine dragged himself into the shadows of the great gatehouse on his elbows, still kicking out and cursing. Frantic shots rang out. The man with the gun knocked down two of the ghouls and then the weapon fell silent.

  Standing in the deep shade of the archway, Camille lunged for the safety latch that raised and lowered the fort’s gate. A thick loop of chain tethered to a hook hung by her head. She slipped the chain free of the hook and the vast gate plunged down from its holding rail within the stone wall. It dropped like a guillotine blade.

  The gate was a latticework of thick tempered steel bars. It fell with a deafening rattle of chain, like a warship’s anchor as it spills through the hawsehole. The gate crashed to the ground and crushed the ghoul’s skull under their massive weight.

  Tremaine stared wild-eyed with fright. He was panting for breath, lathered in sweat and trembling like a man in the grips of fever.

  But he was alive.

  And they were safe inside the fort.

  Epilogue:

  The moon rose slowly over the far horizon, and creeping nightfall painted out the horrors of the world.

  Sitting
pensively atop the battlements of Fort Saint-Andre, Tremaine stared down across the valley and tried to count the fires. He felt impossibly tired; overwrought with tension and fatigue.

  The fort was impregnable; defended on three sides by high walls and on the western side by sheer cliffs that rose above swampy marshland, and in the abandoned caretaker’s residence they had found food, water and the beginnings of a small vegetable garden.

  They were safe; a handful of survivors who had endured the apocalypse. Tremaine felt no relief. The days ahead would be filled with hardship.

  Camille came quietly up the stone steps and sat beside him. She stayed very quiet and thoughtful, watching the fires in the valley with exaggerated attention. She did not look at Tremaine, but it was impossible for her not to be aware of him.

  “We found buckets and set them to catch any rainwater,” she said at last. “And there were cans of soft drink in the room they used as a visitor’s center.”

  Tremaine grunted. Food and water; they would be the next two great challenges. Tomorrow, he would extend the caretaker’s vegetable patch and search the residence for tools – and weapons.

  But at least there would be a tomorrow.

  “Do you think we’re the last people alive in the world?” Camille’s voice sounded small in the darkness.

  “No,” Tremaine said, and believed it. “There will be others, Camille. There are other places like Avignon across Europe and there will be people hidden in underground bunkers and high in the mountains – individuals and small groups like us.”

  “Then we’re not alone?”

  “Only temporarily,” Tremaine tried to sound optimistic. “But one day the infection will burn itself out and the world will be wiped clean. Then we can leave here and look for them. Mankind will survive. Tonight is a night for remembering loved ones and remorse. Tomorrow morning, we start afresh.”

  Camille’s thigh casually brushed Tremaine’s as they sat close together, alone in the night. She made no move to pull away.