Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  Chapter 1

  THE VILLAGE MUST have had a name at some point, but it seemed there was no one left alive who remembered what it had been. Now it was a withered husk of a place, a few ramshackle buildings still standing and the rest just piles of rubble, marked down with a reference number and a set of coordinates in an old survey map that the squad had been issued at their last briefing. They’d been working their way across the map for the last three weeks, crossing off one reference number after another as they went, and this was the last spot on their list.

  “Looks quiet to me,” Jun said, peering through the scope of her T-99 bolt action at the ruins from half a mile south of the village.

  “Isn’t that what you said two days ago?” Sergeant Josiah said as Jun lowered her rifle.

  “Yes, sir.” Jun admitted, then spun the cap off her canteen and took a long swig of lukewarm water, gazing north past the ruined village at the looming Alps which crowded the skies beyond.

  “Well…” the sergeant added as he turned to her with a lopsided grin. “Those bastards were pretty quiet, I’ll admit.”

  Jun rolled her eyes as she tightened the lid back on the canteen. Sure, the last village had been quiet enough, before a half-dozen Dead burst out of a burned out farmhouse right as the squad was passing by. One of the damned things almost managed to take a bite out of Sibyl before Jun put it down with a lucky headshot from her T-99.

  “Okay, team, look alive.” The sergeant slung the Springfield over his shoulder and motioned for the others to follow him in. “Let’s get this one crossed off and we can head back to base camp and put our feet up for a bit.”

  “Maybe they’ll even pin a medal on us,” Curtis Goodwin muttered under his breath while rubbing the stubble on his narrow chin. “Hail the conquering heroes.”

  “Oh, cheer up,” Sibyl Beaton scolded, and wagged a finger at the young American slouching along beside her. “It’s like my Chester always used to say, a job well done is its own reward.”

  “Yeah?” Curtis glanced back over his shoulder at Werner Sauer bringing up the rear. “Is that how you fellas handled things on your side of things back in the war? I seem to recall a fair number of German brass with a whole lot of hardware hanging off their chests.”

  “I think Frau Beaton is right, in essence.” The German shrugged noncommittally. “One does one’s duty. What else matters?”

  Jun could see the ghost of a scowl flit across Sibyl’s face, her jaw tightening momentarily, eyes narrowing darkly. In the next instant, Sibyl’s features were as composed and placid as always, the proper Englishwoman once more. It was clear that Sibyl didn’t much care for Werner, though whether it was simply because they so recently had fought on the opposite sides of the last war or because of something more personal, Jun didn’t know.

  “I ever tell y’all about the time I got a medal from the king of Siam himself, back in ’41?” The sergeant grinned, and gave Jun a wink. “On account of me wrestling a pair of alligators that otherwise would have gobbled him up whole.”

  “Does Siam even have a king anymore, sarge?” Curtis rubbed the back of his neck, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Oh, don’t spoil the fun, dear boy,” Sibyl answered with a sly smile. “Josiah is just spinning another of his tall tales, surely.”

  “In no particular order,” Jun began, ticking off points on one finger at a time, “it hasn’t been called ‘Siam’ since 1940, Thailand does have a king but he was a student in Switzerland after he was crowned in 1935, and I’m pretty sure that neither Thailand nor Switzerland has any alligators roaming free. So unless the sergeant was on a field trip to a zoo with the young king, I very much doubt that…”

  “All right, all right, missy,” the sergeant held his hands up in mock surrender. “So I misspoke.”

  Jun couldn’t help but smile. To be able to stop just one of the sergeant’s nonsensical yarns before it spun too far out of control was, in the words of Sibyl’s late husband, its own reward.

  “So maybe I misremembered, and it wasn’t alligators,” the sergeant corrected, “it was a pair of crocodiles I saved his majesty from, okay?”

  Jun started to protest, but the sergeant held up one hand in a fist at shoulder height, motioning the squad to halt. He had a look on his face that was strictly business, but he snuck in a quick wink in Jun’s direction before addressing the others.

  “Y’all know the drill,” he said as he unslung the 12-gauge shotgun that hung at his back and racked the pump to chamber a round. “House to house, and if you come across any Dead bastards…?”

  “Put those bastards down,” Jun and the others replied in unison, their traditional call-and-response, as they shouldered their rifles and switched to close-quarters arms.

  Back on the Eastern Front she’d once had to fend off one of the Dead with nothing more than a hammer to hand, so the twenty rounds in Jun’s Thompson submachine gun felt more than adequate for the task at hand. There were definitely advantages coming west and joining the Resistance.

  “And if there are any survivors, sarge?” Curtis asked as the team fanned out through the ruined street.

  “Won’t be none,” the sergeant answered, his voice low. “’Cause if there was?” He shook his head, his mouth twisted into a scowl.

  Curtis didn’t answer, but Jun could tell what he was thinking from the look on his face. If there had been any survivors in the village to begin with, there wouldn’t be any more.

  The way it had been explained to the squad in their briefing back at base camp, in the early days of the Dead War the village had been overrun, and the ground forces of the Resistance in that part of Italy were too outnumbered to be of much help to the town’s residents. In the end a bombing run had been ordered and the zombies in the village were wiped out of existence with a sustained aerial bombardment, on the understanding that all of the living residents of the village had already fled or died at the hands of the Dead. But if by chance any of the villagers had somehow managed to survive to that point, maybe by holding up in an attic or locked in a closet somewhere…?

  Jun looked around. There were scarcely any walls left standing in the village, and the few that were bore the brutal scars of the bombing and scorch marks from the firestorms that raged in the aftermath. If the rotting and dismembered bodies of the animated Dead could not survive that kind of inferno, it was impossible to imagine that a living person could make it through in one piece, either.

  Still, there had been that time the previous week when Jun had been sure that a scuttling noise she heard from a barn was a group of Dead inadvertently trapped inside, only to find that it was actually the farmer and his family trying desperately to keep their only surviving sheep from alerting any passing Dead of their presence. If Jun had fired too fast, had acted on instinct rather than waiting and confirming her suspicions before acting, then the blood of that farmer or his wife or either of his two children might well have been on Jun’s hands. And they would have been left buried in a mass grave along with the victims of the Dead, instead of transported safely to a secured compound to the south where the Resistance was safeguarding a growing population of survivors and refugees.

  And if any of the villagers had still been alive when the Resistance’s bombing run had begun, then their blood was on the hands of Jun’s superior officers as well. The same people Jun had crossed a warzone to join, to help push back the Dead menace and protect the living—humanity’s best chance of survival—would have been responsible for the death of the very innocents that they were charged with protecting.

  It didn’t bear dwelling on, Jun told herself. She knew that Curtis harbored his suspicions about similar aerial attacks on other Dead-infested villages and towns, as he voice
d his concerns several times in recent weeks. In fact, Curtis had discussed it increasingly as they made through way across the Italian countryside checking on the villages marked in the old survey map as having been already cleared of Dead infestations, many of which had been subjected to bombing campaigns like the village they now found themselves in. They were ostensibly a deadhunter squad, but Curtis had insisted that they were really “batting cleanup,” an Americanism he had used to describe their mission and that Jun hadn’t really understood.

  All Jun knew was that they had spent weeks going back over sites where battles against the zombies had already been won and making sure that ground had not been lost. And while it was important work, she was sure, it did sometimes feel more like they were groundskeepers making sure that pests had not gotten back into a garden than steely-eyed deadhunters out on the battleground protecting the living from the Dead. They did encounter the enemy from time to time, like the one that almost took a bite out of Sibyl in that village a couple of days earlier or the shambling horde they found in that silo the week before. But more often than not these villages and towns they were crossing off the survey map proved to be devoid of all interest and any threats, living or Dead.

  “Anybody got anything?” the sergeant called from the other side of the road.

  “Nein,” Werner answered from the rear. “Nothing here.”

  Curtis just grunted, but Sibyl sang out, “Not a thing, Josiah, dear.”

  Jun shook her head when the sergeant looked her way, but he arched an eyebrow and motioned for her to speak up.

  “No movement here, sergeant,” she answered. “But I wonder if maybe…”

  Before she could continue her attention was snared by a sound right on the edge of hearing.

  “Well?” The sergeant gave her a quizzical look.

  “Hold on,” Jun said in a quiet voice, and held up her hand for silence. “Do you hear that?”

  There wasn’t much to the nameless village but the one main road with the piles of rubble and the occasional freestanding wall to either side. To the south along the road, about a day’s hike away, was situated the base camp from where their squad and other teams of deadhunters had been operating since they first moved into this part of Italy earlier in the year. To the north of the village the road cut back and forth as it travelled upland through the foothills of the Alps and presumably even higher. There had been no one and nothing on the road the way that they had come from the south, so where was the source of the sound that Jun was hearing…?

  “There!” Werner was already slinging his MP40 over his shoulder and taking hold of his Karabiner 98K, changing up from close quarters to long range firing options. He brought the stock of his rifle to his shoulder, left eye squeezed shut and right eye narrowed as he peered through the scope at the distance. “Approaching from the north.”

  Jun spun around and looked in the direction Werner was facing, and sure enough, she could see movement on the road winding down out of the foothills towards them.

  “Your orders, sergeant?” Werner asked, his finger hovering close to the trigger as he took sight.

  Jun unslung her T-99 from her back to use its scope for a better look while the sergeant and the others followed suit. She counted ten, fifteen, maybe even as many as twenty bodies altogether, a frenzy of chaotic movement heading downhill towards the village. And a moment later another cluster of bodies following a short distance behind came into view around a bend in the road.

  “I make two groups of hostiles, one following a few hundred yards behind the first,” the sergeant said, surveying the scene.

  “Orders?” Werner repeated.

  Jun trained her sights on the forward most of the bodies rushing towards them. At the rate they were moving overland, they would reach the village in a matter of moments. But something about their movements seemed off to her.

  “Pick your targets and fire on my command,” the sergeant said.

  It had been a while since they’d last run into a roaming horde of the Dead, but Jun could swear…

  “Sir!” she shouted, lowering her rifle. “They’re not hostiles!”

  The sergeant’s eye darted for the briefest moment in her direction, his eyebrow arched quizzically, and then he turned his attention back to his scope.

  “Damn,” the sergeant said under his breath after taking a closer look at the group hurrying downhill towards them. He could now clearly see what Jun had noticed; that the people rushing towards the village were living, breathing men and women, not the reanimated corpses of the enemy Dead. “Hold your fire, everyone. Looks like we’ve got another group of survivors on our hands.”

  “Something’s got them pretty damned spooked, though,” Curtis said, narrowing his gaze through his own scope.

  The wind had shifted, and now they could more easily hear the shouts of alarm that had caught Jun’s attention only moments before. And there was something else on the wind as well, a scent of death and decay that was all too familiar.

  “Be a dear and take another look at the pack bringing up the rear, won’t you, Josiah?” Sibyl’s spoke in clipped syllables, the overt courtesy of her phrasing belying the urgency of her tone. “Quickly?”

  The sergeant swung his rifle around and trained his scope on the second pack of bodies heading their way, and Jun did the same. It was difficult to see past the group in front, whose expressions of terror and exhaustion were now clearly visible through Jun’s scope, but as the forward-most group descended a steep rise in the road the group behind them momentarily came into view.

  “Just when I thought we were going to have a relaxing day of it,” the sergeant sighed, just as the group in front once more obscured the bodies behind them from view.

  The group in the rear were most definitely hostiles, a group of a dozen or more Dead wearing the tattered remnants of SS uniforms. They were not simply following the group of survivors heading down out of the foothills: they were pursuing them. The screaming mass of living men and women racing towards the nameless village were fleeing in terror from a squad of the Dead.

  The deadhunter squad was the only hope that the fleeing survivors had of escaping imminent doom, but Jun and the others couldn’t open fire on the pursuing Dead without running the risk of hitting the survivors with an errant shot.

  “Orders?” Werner repeated.

  “You, Curtis, and Sibyl get to higher ground and start taking out those Dead bastards at range as soon as you’ve got a clear shot.” The sergeant slung his rifle on his back and took hold of his 12-gauge shotgun. “Jun, you’re with me.”

  “What’s the plan?” Jun asked.

  “Come on!” Sergeant Josiah took off running directly for the approaching mass of bodies, and motioned urgently for Jun to follow along. “Let’s go put those bastards down!”

  Chapter 2

  HEADSHOTS WERE BEST.

  Jun had first learned to shoot a rifle on the Eastern Front, where she’d been serving as an attaché to a Chinese diplomat when Hitler activated Plan Z. She had joined the other surviving member of the delegation in defending the embassy, and she’d quickly understood that sniping at the Dead at long range with a rifle was far preferable to dealing with them in close quarters. And the Dead had the annoying and extremely dangerous habit of shrugging off anything but a clean headshot, and potting one with several shots in a row dead in their center mass wouldn’t do much more than slow them down for a second or two. Jun had seen Dead with both legs and most of both arms blown off still dragging themselves across the ground towards their intended victims, jaws working furiously with a ravenous hunger for the flesh of the living. She’d even seen a headless Dead flop along for longer than expected after going down, but without a mouth to bite and chew they were more a curiosity than a real threat.

  During Jun’s time on the Eastern Front there were times when the ammunition ran short, and they’d had to resort to close-quarters fighting with the invading hordes of the Dead. And while an axe to the head usual
ly did the trick as well as a sniper’s bullet, there was the chance that the axe might get stuck in the skull while a still-shambling Dead attacked from another direction, so you always had to be careful to be mindful of other potential threats in close range. Aim all of your shots, hits, and strikes at the enemy’s head, keep scanning for incoming, and never stop moving.

  Jun could feel those old familiar instincts kicking into gear as she and the sergeant raced towards the panicked horde of survivors racing down the road.

  “Move aside!” the sergeant shouted in English.

  The survivors were replying in a babble of voices in a confusion of languages and accents, and Jun mostly just got the sense of panic and fear. And for the briefest of instants it appeared that the survivors thought that she and the sergeant were intending to attack them, fearfully eying the sergeant’s pump-action shotgun and Jun’s own Thompson submachine gun. Their fear of the Dead pursuing them was clearly greater, as they hardly slowed down, a few of them shouting out “Don’t shoot” in heavily accented English.

  “Out of the way!” the sergeant shouted, and then repeated similar sentiments in Italian, French, and German, waving his hand in a sharp gesture as if sweeping something ahead of him aside.

  Understanding dawned on the terrified faces of the survivors, who immediately dove to either side just as the sergeant barreled through their ranks.

  “Go on to the village,” Jun said to the survivors as she passed by, and turned and pointed back the way that they’d come. “We’ll hold them off.”

  She wasn’t sure how many of the survivors understood what she was saying, but it seemed that her intent was clear enough. As she caught up with the sergeant, Jun chanced a quick glance over her shoulder, and saw that the survivors were already continuing down the road towards the ruined village.

  “You sweep left, I’ll go right,” the sergeant shouted over to Jun as he skidded to a halt on the side of the road. The descending horde of Dead were only seconds away from reaching them.