by C M Hoffmann
Cane slowly turns the knob and flings the door open, a long dark hallway is seen with doors on either side of the hallway running the entire length.
Trey whispers, “This is a shit show. This is a bad place, little brother.”
Cane, “Yea, but looks like we got a break, the stairs are the first door on the left. Wyatt and Wade, move up just passed the stairwell door, we’ll cover you.”
They slowly make their way into the building. Wyatt and Wade stop just passed the door, one on either side of the hallway, their hearts pounding ferociously. Trey and Cane work their way up to the stairwell door. Cane steps passed and catches the door handle, standing on the hinge side. Trey smirks realizing he adjusted his tactics to set himself up for success and nods to show he’s ready. Cane slowly opens the door and Trey quickly steps in and clears as much of the stairwell as possible.
Trey whispers, “Clear.”
Cane taps Wyatt and Wade and motions them inside the stairwell. Once inside Trey keeps his weapon trained higher up the staircase. Cane gives orders in a definitive tone, “Wyatt, you’re rear guard, you need to watch our six. Wade, you’re behind me make sure we don’t leave Wyatt behind. Trey you’re on point. Lead the way, brotha.”
They slowly start to ascend the stairs as quietly as they can. More than a few times Wade bumps into Cane when Trey suddenly stops to listen. They make it all the way to the roof without any unnecessary and potentially deadly interactions. At the rooftop access door they pause, Trey grabs the handle and dips his head to tell Cane to take point. Trey opens the door and Cane steps out into the sunlight which momentarily blinds him after walking in the dark for so long. Five lurkers turn to face him as his vision adjusts. Seeing no other threats, Cane softly whistles to call the rest of Recon to him.
Recon steps out onto the roof and draws their hand to hand weapons, quickly dispatching the steves on the roof. They clean their weapons on the corpses’ clothing and tuck them away. A quick check of the rest of the rooftop reveals the reconnaissance team to be alone.
Trey on the radio, “Recon to Support.”
Gavin, “Go for Support.”
“Ten-ninety-seven. Code four. Taking a peek now.”
“Ten four.”
Recon makes their way to the edge of the roof which luckily has a three foot wall around the perimeter. They slowly peer out as they approach the ledge. At first it seems like the whole expanse is nothing but blackened, charred urban decay. Until the whole black mass appears to pulsate and breathe as if the ground itself fills its lungs.
Trey, “Fuuuck.”
Wade, “That’s a bad day.”
Below them a short distance into the city, a massive ocean of steves are roaming about. They number in the thousands. The smell of their putrefying bodies can be detected even five stories up. The streets are packed with walking corpses wandering aimlessly.
Wyatt, “They all seem to be lurkers.”
Cane, “Look closer, Big, you can see the hunters and ravagers standing out. They’re the only ones not doing the classic zombie shuffle.”
“Damn, there must be thirty thousand of them fuckers. Not counting the ones we can’t see.”
Trey, “We need to get back. They’ve got to finish the wall. If they start moving, I don’t know if we’ll be able to stop them.” He keys up the radio, “Support, we’re coming back down... with bad news.”
Pops, “Roger, stay low and get back.”
They go back to the stairwell taking all the same precautions even though they have already cleared the corridor. When they make it just passed the third story door, muffled shots ring out from outside the building and Wyatt’s radio screams with Ronson’s voice, “RECON GET YOUR ASSES DOWN HERE! WE GOTTA MOVE!”
Cane snaps his head around to face Wyatt with a furious look, “Turn your fucking radio down...” and with a loud bang the third floor door flies open and Wyatt at rear guard immediately begins to unload his magazine as Trey starts to take the stairs down two at a time. Cane screams over the reverberating report of the rifle, “Wade, when he’s dry you take over. We’ll leapfrog down. Trey keep that front clear!”
The rounds echo through the cavernous stairwell of cinder block walls and steel steps deafening them all. The muzzle blasts consistently ruin their vision in the otherwise dark and obscure area. They forgo trying to coordinate with hand signals and settle for yells and touch. When Wyatt runs dry he spins to take the stairs down and reload touching Wade’s shoulder as he passes. Wade spins and keeps up the rate of fire. Wyatt grabs Cane’s arm as he rushes passed so he can be ready to change up. It seems like the placid ocean of steves outside had become a tsunami that flooded the building as they flow like a broken dam out of the doors and into the stairwell. Trey jams his body against the second floor door and the others rush passed him. When Wyatt and Cane pass Trey, Trey grabs the back of Wade’s vest and yanks him back allowing the second floor steves to crash into the third floor steves creating a temporary pileup of bodies. They bound down the stairs as fast as they can and Trey takes up firing at the steves in pursuit.
Cane jumps over the railing of the second to last set of steps and kicks the door open into the hallway satisfyingly crashing into a steve face. He pushes against the door with all his might and Wyatt soon joins in the push to hold off the steves storming the hallway from deeper in the building. Wade swings his rifle around the door and begins to fire faster than he ever thought possible down the hallway.
Trey leaps down the last few steps with a shout, “MOVE!”
Recon crashes out of the exit door and sprints for the vehicles. Support is quickly firing into the mass of steves with seemingly no effect, as the steves in back simply trample their fallen counterparts.
Pops, “Get IN!”
They jump into the vehicles and quickly throw them in reverse. They speed backwards far enough to spin the vehicles around and crush the accelerators willing themselves to stomp the pedals through the floorboards.
Pops over the radio, “Recon, you good?”
Cane, “Ten four, we’re good. What about you?”
“We’re good too. Two-Six, Headquarters.”
Scarlett, “Y’all got a code?”
“Ten four en route back to the city, tell the chief we need him at Gateway. Resume normal call signs, direct?”
“Direct. Chief will be standing by at Gateway.”
After a few minutes of break-neck velocities the convoy finally slows down to safe maneuvering speeds. They arrive at Gateway and the two APCs open to allow them passage. Once inside the relative safety of the wall, Chief comes jogging into the roadway.
Chief, “What the hell happened?”
Pops, “We’ve got a serious problem. There’s a few thousand steves heading this way. It’s like the whole city brought all of them together.”
Fitz, “Probably because the entire area was in flames for a few days.”
Chief, “Possible but the ‘why’ doesn’t matter. The ‘when’ does. How long do we have?”
Gavin, “Hard to say, they’ve got all three stages intermixed. If they all stay together we may have forty-eight hours the way lurkers move. If they split, we may have less than twenty-four.”
“Dammit, as if there aren’t enough problems. Two-Six, I’ve counted on y’all through most of this crap sandwich. Find me a solution.”
Cane, “Chief, there’s no easy way to say this. We’re going to have to fight them head on. We can take some of these trucks with protected fronts and try and plow through them. But there’s too many.”
Wade, “That might slow them down though. Put people like Trey up on the roof tops. Take out the fast movers.”
Coll, “Have a huge force on the east side of the city. But we don’t have the personnel to line the wall.”
Beau, “No, but we could have staging areas. Fortified positions with a sizable force. Then have reaction forces spread out in case they breach the wall.”
Rapp, “We can also put some faith in the
wall. We built it for a reason, time to put it to the test.”
Chief, “All very good ideas. Unfortunately it will have to be a last minute decision because we don’t know where they’d be coming from.”
Ronson, “Well we might. Think about it, path of least resistance. They may stay away from the residential sections at least until they get into our open field of view. Distance shooters will probably be able to take out the hunters if not the ravagers. Plus what we saw is on Vets, so they’ll most likely just keep plodding along.”
Fred, “And we did get some nice heavy artillery from the base in Laplace. We could set demo charges out on manual switches. Take out a thick group at once.”
Chief, “Give me two hours to assemble every person who can wield a firearm and be willing to use it. Legacy you’ll be the lead, I need the plan organized. Ninja and Guard you’re in charge of reaction forces. Basher you’re on distance shooters, get me positions and distance markers out there before I get back. Addition you’ve got the staging areas, same details as Basher. Spartan, I need you on the front lines and you’ll be the ones to carry messages when the shooting starts, do whatever it is you can do; think outside the box. Get to work, gentlemen, it’s going to be a long night.”
Two-Six assembles again, pouring over a map of the city. The burn-out-destruction is marked heavily with a black sharpie, the wall a stark but thin blue line, indicating the division between safety and danger. They decide to focus the largest forces on four major south side roadways: W. Metairie, W. Napoleon, Veterans, and Interstate 10. The interstate only because it divides the city in half, and outside the city limits the interstate is surrounded by brick walls and chain link fences; hopefully enough to stem the tide.
Addition begins to discuss the staging areas set just inside the wall. They need to be high enough to view over the wall but still need to be safe. Quickly they decide on fortifications, instead of the ever present sandbag emplacements and bunker style kill houses, they choose to move similar height pickup trucks with open beds and park two next to each other and two more tailgate-to-tailgate. To alleviate some risk of steves simply reaching over the bed, they park SUVs next to and around the trucks blocking most access to the beds but still giving the defenders room to move.
Basher moves to start marking distances for the precision shooters on Veterans Boulevard. Wade climbs a ladder up to a nearby building just inside the wall and reaches the roof. Trey begins to count off paces while Wade awaits his signal. When Trey reaches one hundred meters, give or take, he holds up his arm. Wade lasers Trey with an electronic rangefinder. Confident of the estimated distance, Wade gives him a thumb up and Trey plants an eight foot flag into the ground and immediately begins to pace off again. The process repeats until Trey is a full six hundred meters out, a flag stationed every hundred, and he double times it to the other side of the road and begins to match the flags on either side, still keeping a relatively accurate count.
‘Now that I think about it,’ Trey ponders to himself, ‘should have color coded the flags too. Probably in straight forward rainbow fashion for the people who will inevitably lose their ability to count. Oh well too late now. Shit, was that fifty or sixty? Guess I’m starting over.’
Ninja and Guard discuss options for the Quick Reaction Forces. They unanimously agree to put that issue to rest for the moment until the demands for the front line, staging areas, and distance shooters are filled; the remaining able bodied persons will become the QRFs. Until the information comes back, they begin to plot out chokes points for the explosives charges. After quite a bit of back and forth referring to the danger-close issue, they determine the best course of action to have a useless vehicle, defunct or immobile, and use them as markers for the pre-set, manual detonation explosives. The manual charges will be set off first when a sizable crowd has moved passed the marks; followed intermittently with volleys of explosives, hand held or otherwise. The truck carrying the ‘HE’ goodies arrives at the designated areas and Fred instructs the ones in charge of detonating the crowd-ruiners on their basic functions. They gather their charges and jog off to plant them.
Spartan puts on their thinking caps and dreads viewing the map and the longest stretch of a skirmish line they have ever seen.
Wyatt, “Dude that’s a lot of area, what the fuck are we going to do?”
Cane, “Not the slightest so far, with the staging areas, distance shooters, demo crews, and QRFs it seems superfluous to even think about a real front line. Hell they will be the first and last line of defense.”
“Sooooo... what are we going to do?”
“How about we commandeer one of these pickups and go to Home Depot. We’ll get some rebar or four by fours and string up some razor wire. We’ll make an unmanned front line. Trip ‘em up and buy us some time and hopefully some stationary targets. We can also pick out the trucks we’re going to use to plow through steve. But we’ve got to find a way to secure them for when they inevitably break down because steve done jammed them up. Gotta protect the operators. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why can’t it ever be easy?”
“Haha, just another day in paradise, right?”
Cane nods, “You know it, now go find us a big ass truck to haul all the material. I’ll get the chief to double time those extra bodies.”
“Word.” He runs off and quickly returns with a truck and Spartan races towards the Home Depot store. After selecting quite a few four by four beams and as much rebar as they can carry, they begin to transport hundreds of feet of razor wire and standard twisted metal barbed wire. They also grab a couple of gas generators, extension cords and portable circular saws. When they return to Gateway the gasoline they ordered and the idle hands are waiting for them and they fill up the generators. The extra pairs of hands see all of the four by fours cut on one end to form a spike of sorts to plant each one of them. Realizing they are going to need a lot more supplies, they requisition more vehicles and more empty hands to make another trip to the store shopping lists in hand.
Wyatt, “Hey you’ve always been an impromptu medical guy right?”
Cane wipes sweat from his forehead and passes a four by four to waiting hands, “Yea, so?”
“If steve breaches the wall and we’ve got people on the ground... or even if for some other reason they’re injured, shouldn’t we have some kind of medical force to come drag their asses out? I mean we’ve only got one running ambulance, but we’ve got miles of front lines.”
“You’re a genius, Big. Get on the radio and tell the chief we’re going to need some non-combatants for med teams. Preferably with open bed pickups.”
Wyatt smiles at the praise, “You got it, boss.”
Cane calls after Wyatt as he walks off, “Non-combatants for sure, but they need to be armed in case any injured decides to go steve on us.” Wyatt waves back over his shoulder in response.
_
The rest of the day is filled with moving vehicles to form fortifications, then siphoning the gas to use elsewhere. Derelict vehicles are pushed into position for demo charges, thankfully set a good distance away from the wall to avoid flying debris damage. Elevated shooting positions are marked and the bottom floors of the buildings are secured. Doors are welded shut, leaving a single entrance and exit. A vehicle with a small amount of gas is left nearby to secure the sole entrance and exit door once the distance teams are in position. QRF teams are assembled and drilled and areas of operation are established. Civilian pickup trucks are converted into medical trucks and med teams are chosen. Concertina and barbed wire are strung across the roadways and across the burn-out-destruction areas in random patterns to hopefully bottleneck steve. The wall is also lined, spaciously at first until enough time is available to fill in the gaps with improvised French ‘chevaux de frise,’ or ‘entanglements,’ a medieval defensive anti-cavalry measure made of spikes to hopefully impale encroaching steves.
The last order of business to possibly prepare for the incoming horde, the vehicles to be used to decimate steve cluster
s. It is decided to use them sparingly as even dead bones and organs tend to disagree with car axles, tires, and delicate undercarriages. Some will be retrofitted with cage style window protectors and others with metal shutters. In lieu of real welding to firmly secure the protective shields, most are screwed directly into the chassis of the vehicles. Others are simple three quarter inch plywood with slits cut in it to provide view ports, small enough to restrict access, and again screwed directly to the body of the vehicle. To protect the front ends, makeshift wedges are installed with the intentions and willpower that the wedges will simply push steve out of the way instead of the vehicle taking a head on collision. The vehicles chosen, while heavy duty in their design, are still man made and susceptible to damage. Given the chance of survival as the driver of one of the vehicles, nicknamed ‘Splitters’ by the construction crews, is slight, the drivers would be strictly voluntary. Much to the chief’s surprise, there was no shortage of volunteers.
With most of the preparations done and the wall as complete as can be, the workers head home for the night, praying for a few solid hours of sleep before the fight for their lives commences. A skeleton crew of observers is left in their wake ready to signal the beginning of the end.
_
After a restless night for everyone involved, a few thousand workers return to the wall to await orders in the early dawn light. The threat is imminent, they shuffle back and forth nervously fearing the worst. The wall is complete. The defenses are stationed. The magazines are loaded. Demo-charges prepped. Medical personnel are on standby. Traps are positioned. The only thing left is to wait. A mild fog swirls at their every movement, the humidity is thick and makes the waiting all the more uncomfortable.