Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  “The Nazi officer who I should have killed when I had the chance is in command of the secret army in the hidden Alpine Fortress, and if the villagers’ suspicions are correct, he possesses some unknown power to control the Dead and force them to do his bidding.”

  The rest of the squad exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Or maybe,” Curtis said out of the corner of his mouth, “and I’m just talking hypothetically here you understand, maybe the villagers are talking out of their hats and the whole thing is just a coincidence?”

  Werner turned and fixed the young American with a hard stare.

  “Is that a gamble you are willing to take?” Werner said, eyes narrowed and jaw set. “Are you willing to stake your life on that certainty?”

  Curtis opened his mouth to answer, but then closed it again, and instead sat in uncomfortable silence while he reconsidered his response.

  “Okay, let’s get this train rolling again, y’all,” the sergeant said, pushing himself up onto his feet and picking up his rifle. Then he turned to look back over his shoulder at the German shoulder. “You sure about all of that, Werner?”

  “In truth? No, I harbor doubts.” Werner shouldered his own Karabiner. “These poor unfortunates have known nothing but terror and uncertainty since their ordeal began, and I don’t know that they have the most objective view of their circumstance. Our young American friend might well be right, and this could all be superstition and coincidence. But I also fear that ignoring the possibility that it is true would be too great a risk to take.”

  Chapter 7

  WITH ONLY A couple of hours left until sunset, and about that long to go until they reached basecamp, Curtis tempted fate.

  “Pretty countryside,” he said, glancing around at the surrounding countryside, placid and serene. “Quiet, too. Guess we’ve seen the last of the Dead for one mission…”

  And at that moment, a skeleton burst out of the ground directly in his path.

  “Dammit!” Curtis spat, fumbling to unsling his Slyskawica submachine gun from his shoulder as he took several staggering steps backwards.

  “The devil…?” the sergeant began, glancing back over his shoulder upon hearing the commotion. His eyes widened as he saw the skeleton lurching towards the young American, and he swung up the barrel of his 12-gauge shotgun. “Incoming!”

  Jun, Werner, and Sibyl reacted immediately, moving into defensive positions around the refugees who huddled fearfully together in the middle of the road.

  The sergeant’s shotgun fired with a deafening blast, knocking off the top third of the undead fiend’s skull, but still the skeleton lurched forward, bony hands out and grasping towards Curtis.

  “Dammit!” Curtis spat once more, and raised his own submachine gun to fire.

  Jun watched as a rapid-fire burst from Curtis’s Slyskawica blew off bits of bone and gristle from the animated skeleton, but still it advanced. She could see the burning heart of the fiend shining from within the rotting ribcage, pulsing with unholy life and energy.

  She raised her rifle to her shoulder and peered through the sight, training her fire on the glow of the heart within the chest. With the skeleton only one shambling step away from reaching Curtis, she squeezed off a round, hitting the fiend dead-center in its burning heart.

  With a thrumming boom and an outrushing of air like a sudden wind gust, the skeleton’s heart exploded into flames, reducing the fiend’s bones to an expanding cloud of splinters that shot outwards in every direction.

  “Good shot, kid. Got so caught up in the moment that I forgot my own training for a moment.” There was an undercurrent of tension to the sergeant’s voice. He turned to the others as he worked his shotgun’s pump and chambered another round. “Remember, y’all. Headshots for your garden-variety shamblers, but for these damned skeletons you want to direct your fire at the glowing heart in the chest.”

  Sibyl and Werner nodded in unison, though Jun was sure that neither of them realized it, while Curtis’s own response was a little more frenetic.

  “Where the hell did that thing come from?!” he shouted.

  “From beneath the ground it would appear, dear boy,” Sibyl replied casually.

  Curtis rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “Well, obviously, but what the heck is an undead Nazi skeleton doing in the ground here to begin with?”

  Jun and Werner were both scanning the road at their feet and the surrounding countryside, watchful for any further sign of subterranean Dead.

  “Come on, now, Curtis,” the sergeant said in a slightly scolding tone. “We’ve all run into these bony bastards from time to time. No need to get wrapped around the axle about it now.”

  “But sarge,” Curtis shot back, pointing with the barrel of his submachine gun at the divot in the ground from where the skeleton had erupted only moments before. “It’s like it was just lying there, waiting for us.”

  “Maybe it was just waiting for anyone,” Jun called over, her eyes still roaming the ground all around them. “This is the main road into the basecamp from the north, after all. Any number of squads on patrol would pass this way when heading back in from making inspection tours.”

  The sergeant nodded, rubbing his lower lip with the tip of his index finger, thoughtfully. “Could be,” he finally said, “could be, kiddo.”

  “But were that the case,” Sibyl said, “it would stand to reason that there would be more than one meager skeleton lying in wait then, surely?”

  Werner cleared his throat, a short guttural sound, drawing the squad’s attention. When Jun and the others glanced in his direction, he simply nodded towards the south.

  “You may be more right than you realize, Frau Beaton,” Werner said, the stock of his Karabiner at his shoulder, his eye peering through the sight, finger poised over the trigger.

  Even without the aid of a telescopic lens Jun could see exactly what Werner was referring to. A cloud of dust was billowing up into the air directly south of their present position, stretching in a wide arc from one side of the roadway to the other.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Curtis deadpanned.

  “Not hardly,” Sibyl said in a low voice, without any trace of humor.

  Jun raised her own T-99 to her shoulder so get a better look through the rifle’s scope, and in the midst of that dust cloud she could see figures moving, and here and there lights could be glimpsed through the gloom.

  “They are closing on our position,” Werner added, unnecessarily.

  Not only did the dust cloud grow larger as it neared, but sounds from within became increasingly audible. Inhuman whispering in unintelligible tongues. Shrieks that sounded like the screams of a person dying in a raging fire. The clattering of bone on bone, and of rotten flesh slapping against the ground with every footstep. It was an unearthly symphony of decay and death on the move.

  “Okay, people,” the sergeant called out, “we need to get these refugees to safety at base camp quickly. We don’t have the food, water, or supplies for a long slog, even if we could manage to get clear of that mess of the Dead without them closing in around our flanks. So the only clear path to base camp is straight through those bastards…”

  “Not all that ‘clear,’ sarge,” Curtis muttered.

  “The only path that gets us there at all in short order, then, does that suit you better?” The sergeant glared in the young American’s direction until Curtis broke eye contact and stared at the ground beneath his feet. “We’ve got to fight through their lines, keeping the refugees safe and in one piece, and soon, and if there are any of the Dead bastards still straggling along behind us when we get to base camp, the defensive emplacements there will keep them off our backs.”

  “Why not just draw the line here and put them all down before we continue?” Jun asked. She didn’t much look forward to the notion of escorting a group of terrified refugees through the teaming ranks of a horde of the enemy Dead.

  “Because of them,” the sergeant said simply, and nodded back i
n the direction that they’d come.

  Jun glanced back, and saw another dust cloud to the north.

  “They’ve been slowly advancing on us for the last quarter hour,” the sergeant said, his voice level and restrained, but with an iron resolve beneath his words. “Didn’t see much point in drawing y’all’s attention to the bastards when it looked like we’d be easily outpacing them, but with this other group of bastards now blocking our way in front…”

  He trailed off, with a vague shrug. His point was clear enough. The longer that the squad delayed in dealing with the horde of the Dead who were blocking the road to the south, the closer the horde pursuing them from the north would get to their rear flank. And wait too long, and they would run the risk of being completely surrounded and cut off.

  “Very well, Josiah,” Sibyl said, nodding in the sergeant’s direction. “How best do you think that we should proceed, then?”

  The sergeant slung his shotgun over his shoulder so that his hands were free. Then he held his arms in front of him, with his fingertips steepled together and his elbow held wide, forming a wide inverted “V” shape.

  “Vanguard formation,” he explained, motioning upwards with a quick movement of his arms, his steepled fingers driving upwards like the tip of a spear. “We don’t have time for subtlety and nuance, so we need to hit them hard and fast and push through before they’ve got time to react. I’ll take point. Sibyl and Werner, you flank me on either side, and Curtis and Jun, you two bring up the rear to the left and right. The refugees will stay inside the vanguard, huddled as close together and moving as fast as possible. Shotguns and submachine guns are the order of the day; rifles while there’s still daylight between us and them, then switch to close quarters when we engage, mow the Dead down, and keep on moving. It doesn’t even matter so much if you put the bastards down for good, so long as you slow them down long enough for us to drive these refugees through their lines.”

  “Shouldn’t we close up the rear in a diamond formation?” Jun said after raising her hand like she was still back in antinecro training at the Woolwich barracks. “To cover our retreat once we’re through?”

  The sergeant thought for a brief moment and then shook his head.

  “I like the shape of your thinking, kid, but time and speed are of the essence. Once we’re on the other side of their lines, keep an eye on our six just in case any of those fast-moving suicide Dead are tailing us, but otherwise we should be able to outrun any of the garden-variety shamblers or skeletons that come our way.”

  As if to emphasize the sergeant’s point, a scream broke forth from the roiling dust cloud in front of them, and one of the Dead came into view. It had a grenade clutched against its chest in one bony hand, and was sprinting towards the squad as quickly as its rotting limbs would carry it.

  “Watch out!” the sergeant shouted as he unslung his Springfield in one quick motion, raised the barrel, and fired from the hip without having a chance to draw a bead on the target.

  Long years of experience and well-worn instincts clearly won out, as the shot from the sergeant’s rifle drove straight through the charging zombie’s head, stopping it in its tracks. It staggered back, bony arm dropping to its side, the grenade slipping from its undead grasp as it began to fall. The pin pulled lose, seconds ticked by, and…

  The grenade exploded, sending shrapnel hurling in every direction.

  Jun and the others recoiled instinctively, even though they were just outside the blast radius of the grenade, thanks to the sergeant’s timely shot.

  “Nice shooting, sarge,” Curtis said, after a low whistle.

  The charging “suicide” Dead always unsettled Jun. And it wasn’t just the inhuman shrieking sound they made as they charged, or the threat of imminent explosions that inevitably followed within moments of one of them making their presence known. It was the fact that they moved so much more quickly than the “shamblers” which the squad more commonly encountered, which the suicide Dead otherwise closely resembled. Even the anti-necro specialists who had trained Jun at Woolwich hadn’t been able to explain precisely why ever since the start of the outbreak the one variety of Dead was able to move so much more quickly than the other, despite the overall similarities that they shared. It had been speculated that there was somehow a finite amount of movement that a reanimated body was capable of performing, a limited amount of energy that it could expend, and that the relatively slow pace of the typical shambler was conceivably a means by which to extend their usefulness on the battlefield as long as possible. By contrast, the suicide Dead were capable of moving at much greater rates of speed in order to deliver blindingly fast and unexpected attacks, but at the expense of long term viability. There had even been some debate amongst the more scientifically minded of Jun’s instructors about potential experiments that could be performed in the field, for instance removing a grenade unexploded from the grip of a suicide Dead before they’d had the chance to complete their attack, and then see how much longer the undead remained upright and mobile afterwards. At the time, Jun had agreed that it was an interesting thought experiment…

  But once she had gone first gone out on patrol with the deadhunter squad, it was clear to her why none of that type of hypothesis had ever been tested in field conditions. The first time a suicide Dead had charged at her, she had been only too eager to see the damned thing explode from as far a distance as she could manage, if only to put an end to its unearthly shrieking. The notion of disarming the fiend and then performing experiments on its subsequent mobility was the farthest thing from her mind.

  Like at the moment, for example. Her thoughts were occupied by relief that the sergeant’s shot had taken out the grenade-wielding Dead before it had closed on their position, and wary vigilance as she kept careful watch on the roiling dust cloud to make sure that another suicide zombie did not come charging towards them.

  “Form up,” the sergeant said, after Werner had translated his instructions for the refugees, who now huddled together even more tightly-packed at the center of the roadway. “It’s now or never.”

  Jun took up her position on the trailing right flank of the vanguard, a few paces behind and to the right of Werner, who himself was behind and a few paces to the right of the sergeant who was at the forwardmost point of the arrow-head-shaped formation.

  She glanced past the backs of the refugees in the rear of the pack, at Curtis who was in the mirror of her position on the trailing left flank of the formation.

  “Somehow, I’m convinced this is still all your fault,” Jun called out to him. “You were the one who said that we’d seen the last of the Dead on this mission, after all.”

  Curtis sighed wearily as he checked the magazine of his submachine gun and then raised its stock to his shoulder.

  “You’re probably right,” he answered with a slight smile. “I should have known to keep my damn fool mouth shut, for once.”

  “Move out,” the sergeant called from the head of the formation, driving towards the horde to their south.

  “Cheer up, Jun,” Curtis called back to her as they began to jog forward, keeping pace with the huddle of refugees. “I’m sure this’ll be a piece of cake!”

  Jun swore in Mandarin beneath her breath, hoping that Curtis hadn’t tempted fate yet again…

  Chapter 8

  JUN KNEW A little bit about fighting battles against conventional forces. She grew up hearing stories about the massive battle for the provincial capital of Taiyuan, that put all of Shanxi province under Japanese occupation. She could remember the day that the Japanese forces first arrived to take control of her hometown of Datong, and the pitched battles that broke out as the Japanese fought to gain control of the few neighborhoods of holdouts that resisted their authority. She’d heard the old men quoting passages from Sun Tzu in intense conversations late at night in clandestine meetings in her parents’ home, strategizing how they might regain control of their homes from the foreign invaders, as if reading a book could prepa
re them for waging an actual war.

  But everything she knew about fighting against the living could be summed up in just a few key points, the most important of which was the principle of self-preservation. That is, that any enemy, no matter how devoted they might be to their cause, no matter how willing to put their own lives at risk, is still driven to one degree or another by the desire to survive the battle. Fighters who were so selfless as to throw themselves into combat without the slightest concern for their own well-being were so rare that they might as well be a dragon or phoenix or some other kind of mythological being, as the chances of encountering such a fighter in the world were just as likely as coming across a talking fish or a giant in your daily travels. The Japanese had trained fanatical pilots willing to crash their own planes into the sides of ships in order to sink enemy vessels, but that kind of devotion was carefully engrained, and the typical foot soldier in the Japanese army that Jun had observed growing up had not exhibited anything like that degree of zealousness. The Japanese forces who occupied Datong had all been clearly eager to return to their homes and families back in Japan when all was said and done. Sacrificing their lives needlessly in order to extend the occupation of an enemy territory for a day longer than was feasible was not high on the list of anyone’s priorities.

  That was the principal difference between fighting the living and fighting the Dead. The living fought to win, but also to survive. The Dead fought simply to destroy and to consume, whichever came first, and if the attempt came at the cost of their own destruction, then so be it. The Dead could not be intimidated by an overwhelming enemy force; they would continue to lurch and shriek towards the enemy so long as the ability to move forward remained in their rotting forms. No matter the odds in their favor the Dead would continue to follow their insatiable drives, come what may.

  So if a horde of the Dead would not be deterred if facing an enemy force that outnumbered them by orders of magnitude, how much less concerned would they be by a squad of five deadhunters defending a dozen-and-a-half tired and terrified civilians?