by Ben Reeder
As I racked the first round into the Mk 19 and pulled the charging handle again, I took stock of things. I hadn’t expected to be able to reload, but I had hoped to do more damage by the time I ran out of ammo for the mounted weapons. The first of the soggy ghouls emerged as I primed the M2, and I let loose on them at closer range. This time, I could see the rounds hitting two and three of them at a time, the overpenetration knocking more of them back as they started to come across the rocky shoreline. But the line of them was too broad, and I couldn’t stay ahead of them.
In the space between switching from the machine gun to the grenade launcher, they charged again. This time, Mother Earth herself was my ally. The spot I’d chosen made a deep V shape the further up the trail you went. Instead of spreading out, the terrain forced them back together into a wedge shape. Below, the rest of the ghouls were stacking up in an attempt to push their way into the narrowing ravine. Gravity worked against them, slowing their advance enough that I could take my time and walk my shots down the middle and along the sides.
When the first of them was about fifty yards away, I flipped Bach’s case back over.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Without a word, I traversed the turret right. The last notes of Hell’s Bells faded, and the opening riff of Thunderstruck started playing. Just to be dramatic, I waited until the first chorus of “Thunder!” belted out of the speakers before I pulled the trigger. Four HEDP rounds slammed into the side of the mountain, tearing chunks of rock from beneath a sharp ridge. The cliff face seemed to shift, but not enough to satisfy me, so I pulled the trigger again. A low rumble started, and I turned the turret left. Once more, when AC/DC called out “Thunder!” I pulled the trigger, pounding the nearer cliff face with a longer burst. Chips of rock rained down on the Guardian as the belt ran out.
“Bringin’ down the house!” I yelled over the growing rumbles of my artificial avalanche. Then I ducked into the vehicle as the left cliff face dropped more my way than I’d figured it would. Boulders rocked the armored sides of Guardian as the mountain fell down around me.
As soon as the world stopped rocking, I tried the upper hatch. It wouldn’t move, so I tried the driver’s overhead hatch. It slid aside with a shower of rock dust, and I emerged into the sunlight. The side of the mountain was now at the base of it, extending halfway through the lake. Most of the ghouls were buried under tons of rock, but that was a problem. Most of the ghouls still left a shit ton of them still up and walking around. The turret was bent all to hell, both guns pretty thoroughly destroyed.
It was time to get personal. The Asura-fueled aggression raging through my blood made that seem like the best idea I’d had in a long time. I ducked down into the vehicle and grabbed my guns and my sword, then crawled out of the hatch. As I slid the Deuce into its scabbard across my back, I heard rocks shifting nearby. I looked over the side to see Bach floundering beside the Guardian, her box shattered a few feet away. Long red scrapes ran down her exposed flesh, and I could see areas of dead flesh turning a mottled black on her arms.
“That’s gonna leave a mark,” I told her as I climbed along the top toward the rear of the ruined turret.
“Laugh while you can, Survivor,” she snarled. “You’ll be screaming sooner than you think.” I didn’t say anything as I crouched down on one knee and brought the P90 up.
Even after the avalanche, I had a target rich environment. Squeezing off short, controlled bursts, I went through the first magazine too fast for my taste. Ghouls dropped with every touch of my finger on the trigger, though. That brought a smile to my face. I changed out magazines in a few seconds and went back to shooting ghouls. They had advanced a little further than I’d wanted, so I flipped the selector to full auto and sprayed all fifty rounds in a sweeping, sustained burst that dropped most of the ones closest to me. Sure, they were going to get up again, but that wasn’t happening for a little bit.
I dropped the last of my spare mags onto the P90 and tried to keep it more controlled, popping off short bursts into groups and bringing down four and five at a time. By the time that magazine ran dry, they were within a few yards of the Guardian, and it was time to get tactical. I dropped the first P90 and pulled the second one up from my side. I’d set this one to single fire, and every squeeze on the trigger sent blood flying and put another ghoul down.
When they got to the front of the vehicle, though, they didn’t try to swarm up. Instead, they moved around to the side, and I realized too late what they’re real objective had been. They weren’t coming to get me.
They were after their boss.
Bach’s cackle was like an ice pick on a chalkboard to my ears as they dragged her away. I stood up and shot as many of the ghouls nearby as I could, but I already knew it was too late. Several had thrown themselves on top of her, and even from more than twenty feet away, I could smell something putrid as the flesh slid off their bodies. Just to make her life difficult, I pulled one of the grenades from the pouch on my vest and flipped the safety, then pulled the pin and threw it at the writhing horde on top of Bach.
Once the spoon went spinning and Mr. Grenade was no longer my friend, I hopped off the left side of the Guardian and ducked down. Seconds later, there was a loud boom! and I could feel the pressure of the blast rock the Guardian. For what felt like an eternity after the grenade went off, my vision grayed and I couldn’t tell up from down. As soon as I could regain my feet, I stumbled toward the front of the vehicle and checked my right side. Two ghouls, or at least most of them, came stumbling out behind me, and I emptied the last few rounds in the P90 into them, then let it go and unslung the M4. Bach was screaming behind me, and I really wanted to put as much room between us as I could. Downhill seemed to be the fastest way to do that.
Three ghouls scrambled up in front of me, and I brought the rifle up. One- two, three-four, five-six I counted as I popped two rounds apiece into them. They flailed as they went down and I kept going. A fairly healthy looking one jumped onto a car-sized chunk of rock in front of me, and I squeezed off three rounds to make sure it stopped being so healthy. It fell behind the boulder and I ran up the slight incline of the nearer face. About a dozen were climbing up out of the lake below me, but I could hear the slap of feet on stone from a lot closer behind me. I spun to see three more bloody ghouls trying to catch me, two on legs that bent in a couple of extra places. For those three, I took my time and put a round center mass in each one. Then I turned back forward and started shooting the ones getting out of the lake after their morning swim. At that range, I hit about half my shots, finally dropping ten of them by the time the firing pin hit an empty chamber. I changed mags as quick as I could while I looked for more infected to shoot.
An inhuman screech from behind me stopped me before I could go further, and I turned around to see what Sarah Bach had become. Her newly regrown arms and legs were a pinkish red color, and her hands were long and clawed. Her torso was a blackened monstrosity with open holes and gashes of red that were slowly sealing themselves. And set atop the abomination she had made of herself, her face was once again perfect and almost human except for the expression that stretched it into a rictus of hate. Shooting her wasn’t going to do anything, but I still had one or two other options. Besides, she was out of ghouls on the upper slope.
I turned and jumped off the boulder I was on, then half-slid, half ran toward the lake shore. Only my gloves kept my hands from being shredded by the edges of the rocks that I used to keep my balance. A ghoul in an ICP T-shirt ran up to me as I stopped to regain my balance, and I gave her a shot to the face with the butt of the M4 before I spun it around and put a handful of rounds into her chest. Another was right behind her, this one a big guy in a garish fast food uniform. He was at point blank range by the time I got the barrel turned on him and pulled the trigger. More were coming up out of the lake, so I started on the ones closest to me, pulling the trigger as fast as I could, only sparing a single round where I could. When the mag was empty, they were too close
to bother with reloading, so I dropped the M4 and drew the Five-seveN with my right hand and flicked the safety off. Firing right handed, I had to take three shots to hit the closest ghoul, even at thirty feet, so I moved it to my left and dropped the one behind it on the first shot. Shooting with my good hand, I made better use of the next sixteen rounds, firing, lining up the sights on the next target and pulling the trigger again. I only had to track back on a couple of them, and they dropped with the second round. Rock grated on rock behind me as the slide locked back, and I moved right while I dropped the empty and pulled a fresh magazine from the holster. The solid ground of the shore was only a few yards away, but those few yards were still covered in loose rock. I didn’t dare take my eyes off my footing as I made my way to the smoother ground. I could hear water sloshing behind me as ghouls tracked my movement, and over that the snarls of the politician struggling to make her way to me.
Once my feet were on damp earth, I broke into a run for a few steps before I turned to see what was behind me. It was better and worse that I thought. Bach was forty or fifty yards up the slope, stumbling along on her new legs. But between her and me were dozens of ghouls, most of them in the water slogging at me. Decision time.
I flipped the safety and shoved the pistol into my pocket, then pulled the second and last grenade from its pouch. My head was pounding as I flipped the safety clip away, then pulled the pin with a yank that sent sharp pains up my right arm. I really wanted to fuck the alpha zombie’s day up hard, but even with minutes left on my game clock, I wasn’t about to give up a single second I didn’t have to. The first of the ghouls made it to the shore ten meters away from me, and I threw the grenade a few feet in front of it, then turned and ran.
The kill zone on a standard issue fragmentation grenade is about five or six meters. The fragmentation zone is about three times that wide. I figured I needed to cover at least five or six meters in four seconds or less to have a snowball’s chance in Hell of keeping my ass relatively intact. Ten steps would probably get me to a safe distance.
I made it eight before Mr. Grenade went boom.
On screen, explosions somehow send the heroes into this graceful looking dive. I just fell down hard on my face. My vision went white and I couldn’t breathe for what felt like an hour, but when I rolled to my side, debris was still raining down around me. My ears started ringing as I staggered to my feet and reached for the Five-seveN, only to find my pocket empty. My hand dropped to the tactical holster on my left leg and found the reassuring grip of my SOCOM. As my eyes learned to focus again, and the blurry images in front of me went from a hundred or so ghouls to just fifty or so, I flicked the laser sight on and brought the gun up.
“Take my love, take my land,” I belted out as I pulled the trigger the first time. “Take me where I cannot stand. I don’t care, I’m still free!” I pulled the trigger with every word, for once making every shot count. “You can’t take the sky from me…” I sang as the slide locked back. The reload felt smooth as silk as I took a few steps backward. Twelve newly dead ghouls lay in front of me, and several more were running up to take their place, some tripping over the half dozen or so floating in the water. As I brought the pistol up again, I started with the next verse.
“Take me out to the black, tell ‘em I ain’t comin’ back,” I sang as I pulled the trigger and dropped ghoul after ghoul. “Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me!” The slide locked back again, and I dropped the mag. As I slammed the next one home, the rest of the verses of the Firefly theme song came to mind, memorized and sung off key among a bunch of other Browncoats while I’d been in Iraq. There were five total, but most people had only heard the first two and part of the fifth that were played during the opening credits. A few of the dedicated Browncoats in my squadron, however, knew all five when we first deployed. By the time we came home, anyone who dared call themselves a Browncoat could sing them all on cue. I hadn’t sung them in years, but it came back like it was yesterday.
“Leave the men where they lay,” I bellowed as I started shooting the next group of ghouls. “They’ll never see another day…” The knee deep water slowed most of them down enough that even at a full run, I was able to pick them off before they got to the shore as I walked backward along the muddy waterline.
I ran out of mags for the SOCOM before I ran out of verses to the song, so I finished with the 1911, dropping nine more as I reached the curve of the lake. A few steps later, I was at the eastern edge of the water, with ghouls wading through waist deep water on one side, and another group running at me along the southern shore. Bach was keeping her distance, and if my time hadn’t been running out fast, I would have been a little worried. The last echoes of gunshots faded into the distance along with my defiant “And you can’t take the sky from me!”
I released the slide on the forty five and holstered it. The first ghouls from the south side would be a little bit getting to me, and Bach was only now coming up with the idea to bring the ones already in the water to the northern side of the lake. Now that I was standing still, a world of hurt caught up to me. My head was pounding, my right arm felt like it was on fire from my fingertips to my shoulder. My right glove was torn, and I could see blood on my hand. For that matter, my right sleeve was dark almost all the way down. Sweat dripped from every inch of exposed skin, and I ached all over. Every breath felt like I had an anvil on my chest. My time was almost up.
If I had to go out, I was going to go out like a boss. My left hand went up and over my shoulder to the grip of the Deuce, and my blood slicked right hand pulled the Tainto into a point down grip. As the blades hissed from their sheathes, I tried to decide what song I wanted to sing for my last stand. Queen’s Princes of the Universe seemed oddly appropriate, but it was better to listen to than to sing. No, if I was going to make my last stand with a sword in hand, there was only one song to go with.
“I sing here of a brotherhood as sharp as any spear,” I sang. As the opening verse of “Bare Is the Brotherless Back” fell from my lips, I started to my left, running back along the northern shore of the lake. Bach stopped, and even from a hundred yards away, I could tell she was confused. With the bulk of her ghouls on the opposite side of the lake, she’d probably thought she was going to flank me with a faster force. Now, they were going to have to go even further to catch up to me, and all she had on her side of the water was a dozen ghouls that were spread out along the shore.
I might have been infected, outnumbered and doomed to fail, but I was still Dave Stewart. The alpha zombies all called me the same thing, and I’d said it of myself dozens of times. I was a survivor, I was the Survivor, and I’d be damned if I gave up before I dropped dead. And I’d take as many ghouls down as I could in the process.
One of the lessons Willie had taught me back in Kansas City was that in a field battle, the best way to fight a group was not to fight the group. Most fighters weren’t as good at fighting in a unit as they were on their own, so they didn’t coordinate their attacks or defend each other very well. So, when you faced a group of opponents, you stayed mobile and brought them down one by one. It worked on people pretty effectively. Against the infected, it was even better. I skewered the first ghoul through the chest and shoved him aside as I sang at the top of my lungs. Another one was a few steps behind him, and I ran at him. His arms came up to grab me, and I ducked under, stepped past him and slammed the Tainto between his ribs. The knife came free with a sucking sound as I moved to the next one, slashing it across the neck. It slumped to the right, revealing another one standing behind it, so I let my follow-through bring the blade up and twisted it to bring it back down across its throat. Two more were a couple of yards away, so I ran up and brought the Deuce across the back of the first one’s leg, then stepped around it and chopped across the back of the other’s neck before it could finish turning to face me. The second one flopped like a marionette with cut strings, so I went back to its flailing companion and laid the edge hard acros
s its temple. Three blocked my way behind them. I flipped the knife for a better forward thrust and ran at them.
“Vivat the Blackstar!” I sang as I kicked the middle one, a tattooed hipster in the remains of a plaid shirt, square in the chest. The momentum of my kick left me standing between the other two, and I brought both weapons forward as I sang “Hurrah for Calontir! And Ansteorra!” Black gore sprayed as both points erupted from their backs. It took a moment to pull the blades free. By then, the last four were almost on me. I spared a split second to stab the hipster ghoul in the eye, then wiped the Tainto off on his shirt and sheathed it.
With the Deuce in a two handed grip, I ran at the last quartet. My first blow sheared the top of the lead ghoul’s skull away. I let the swing drop low as I took a step to close with the second one, and gutted it, twisted the blade in midair and slammed it into the face of the third, then pulled it free and spun it over my head to shear through the neck of the fourth one.
“The Lion and the Falcon stand together o’er the foe!” I finished, standing only a few feet from Bach. A line of partially liquefied ghouls stretched along the beach behind her, and her arms and legs looked less raw, but they didn’t look quite right. Her limbs weren’t the same length, and the shapes were off, like they’d been made by someone who didn’t quite know how human anatomy worked. As we faced each other, I crouched down and wiped the Deuce off on the last ghoul’s dress.
“You’re dying, Survivor,” she said with a hiss. Her voice sounded strange, like she couldn’t quite decide on a signature tone. “You did all this for nothing.” Her face creased into a smile.
