Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain

by William Allen

  “Tommy, break left one hundred feet. Ben, one hundred feet right. Dig in and set up to observe and report any large enemy movement your way. Don’t let anybody get around you. Everybody else, I want the big guns to open up at three hundred yards. Pick your targets. Everybody else, plug the leakers.”

  Setting up solo listening posts wasn’t much, and thinned his defensive line, but Scott couldn’t see an alternative. They couldn’t allow themselves to be flanked, and more men were already on the way. A lot of men.

  The next wave of attackers came at a trot, and Scott could make out at least fifty men approaching. Some were obviously supporting wounded and not all of them carried arms, but the trot exploded into a sprint as the rows of dead men came into view to their front.

  Several looked to veer wide around the clump of corpses, and Scott didn’t have to say anything as his men engaged them first, funneling the rest toward their line. Some of the unarmed men paused, clearly debating the merits of arming themselves from the ranks of the fallen, while others simply broke into a sprint for the gate waiting behind Scott’s force.

  Scott didn’t hesitate, knocking down men as they came into range. Like a metronome, he centered on a man-shaped target, and squeezed the trigger. Again, and again, and again. Ignoring the building return fire as best he could, Scott quickly burned through his first magazine, and then paused to assess the situation as his men continued to pick their targets and he reloaded.

  When PFC Wallace radioed the bus was fixed, he barely stopped transmitting before a call came from one of the other men requesting a medic.

  “Wallace,” Scott shouted into the microphone, “get your bag and check on Gordo. Crawl, son.”

  PFC Wallace wasn’t a medic, but he’d completed combat Lifesaver training, so he would fill in for now. He was the reason Yalonda was relegated to the rally point, since the traumatized women would likely respond better to one of their own after their ordeal.

  “On it,” came the reply, and Scott was soon focused back on the growing numbers of men trying to force their way through. Some of the newcomers took up positions to return fire, again using the dead in front of them as shields and in some cases, shooting rests. The largest clump of attackers, about a squad, managed to get guns up and Scott noticed the incoming was increasing precipitously.

  “Rodriguez? You still trying to hatch that last grenade?” Scott called on the team net.

  “You got it, Sergeant,” came the reply. A few seconds later, the ‘bloop’ of their last 40mm grenade sounded, followed by the sharp, angry bang as the small bomb exploded nearly dead center on the concentration of enemy troops.

  “Outstanding,” Scott barked, and he heard the SAW next to his hole fall silent. Risking a quick glance, he saw Arness wrestling with a new 200 round box for the weapon before the big soldier let out a small shiver and slumped to the bottom of his shallow hole. The M249 tumbled from the limp grasp of the young man as he fell. From the boneless pose, Scott instantly knew he was either unconscious, or dead.

  “Wallace,” Scott bellowed, not bothering with the radio, “Arness is down. See to the SAW.”

  It was a bitter order, but Scott gave it anyway. If Arness was dead, there was nothing the young PFC could do for him. But without that light machine gun up and firing, they might all be dead shortly.

  Rapidly turning his attention back to the fight, Scott saw more enemy troops beginning to filter into the area, and from the growing sound of fire coming from Tommy’s direction, more sought an end run as well. From the volume of fire between them, Scott couldn’t tell if Ben was seeing similar numbers, but he was the one situated closest to the fence. Presumably, fleeing troopers would hug the fence to reach the gate, Scott reasoned.

  As the M249 came roaring back to life, Scott emptied his magazine into the approaching crowd of men, knocking down several in the process and driving the others to take what little cover was available. Backlit by the flickering light of the burning buildings, the gunfire had a strobe effect that looked almost unreal as the men twitched and fell. And still more men came, fleeing the continued shelling of the central portions of the base.

  Switching channels, Scott called in another SITREP, quickly explaining how they were in danger of being overrun.

  He then saw what he took to be a whole platoon approaching at the double-time. Still over four hundred yards away, but moving with a purpose. That would do it, Scott thought. We can hold against rabble, but not a unit that size with proper leadership. He idly wondered if the lieutenant on the other side would split his force or simply rely on cover from the men already engaged. For the defenders, splitting their fire wouldn’t be enough to stop a determined charge.

  Removing two more magazines with his left hand, Scott kept the M4 busy, using just the pistol grip in his right hand and traversing from side to side as he fired, spraying bullets while not hitting much when compared to aimed fire. He could feel the barrel heating up and knew he was in danger of burning out the barrel, but he needed to keep their heads down on the other side. From the long bursts being fired by PFC Wallace, he decided the young man had reached the same conclusion.

  The defenders continued to pour out a heavy curtain of fire, but Scott noticed he was down another man. Three slots over from his own fighting hole, he saw another of the soldiers, distinctive in their own green pixilated camo, was sprawled out in a spread-eagle position. With the way his head was turned, Scott couldn’t even tell who it was.

  As he changed magazines once again, Scott thought about their original plan, to hold until the pressure grew too great before withdrawing from the fight in the Greyhound. Maybe, if they timed things just right, that was still an option. Or, at least, he still had enough time to get some of his men out. Take the SAW from Wallace and send him out with the others.

  He felt a sudden weight creep into his chest, a passing wave of regret for leaving his daughter alone in the harsh new world. And Sarah. She would not be pleased if he played Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Couldn’t be helped, though. Not if any of these men were going to survive.

  Then the platoon broke into a trot, and from a quick flash of steel in the dark, Scott knew the enemy soldiers were fixing their bayonets. They would all be coming, Scott realized, but then, by now they had nearly their own number again in soldiers already firing on the beleaguered force. Those soldiers would take losses, and Scott was willing to reap a butcher’s bill on these scum, but in the end, Scott knew the sheer numbers would overwhelm his tiny command. Time was running out.

  “Tommy, Ben” he said into his microphone, proud to hear the steadiness in his voice, “you men need to fall back to the bus. Wallace, I want you to drop the SAW next to me with all the extra ammo and get into that driver’s seat. Everybody else, prepare to give me a Mad Minute of fire and pull back to the Greyhound, over.”

  “I’m fine where I’m at, Sergeant,” Tommy replied in a relaxed tone. “I haven’t had shooting this good since Baton Rouge. Joe’s going to be pure jealous he didn’t stick around.”

  “Yeah, what he said,” Ben chimed in, and Scott could hear pain in the young man’s voice. “Plus, I don’t think my left leg will carry me, anyway. Just as soon stay here.”

  When the rest of the men, those still alive, responded in a similar fashion, Scott felt his eyes sting with unshed tears. He wouldn’t allow any more of these brave men to follow him to their doom. They should have just crammed everybody in that first bus and hauled ass.

  Except their plan wouldn’t have worked. Yes, they might have gotten free, but so would all these enemy troops pushing on their line. Because of the ever-present threat from drones, Colonel Hotchkins was forced to stage the bulk of his soldiers further back than was his desire, but thermal blankets could only conceal so much. Fortunately, he’d already started mounting his mortars on trucks, so moving them into range quickly was a gamble, but an acceptable one under the circumstances. Getting enough boots on the ground was another matter entirely.

  Risking
a quick glance back, gauging their distance to the bus, Scott was shocked to see men running in loose formation, approaching from the rear. He goggled at the closing force, and nearly swung his rifle around, until he recognized the man leading the unit. Sergeant Barden, with what looked like the rest of Team Baker, leading as least a company of National Guardsmen. Their relief force.

  “Where do you want us, sergeant?” Barden asked briskly, falling into the hole Tommy vacated earlier.

  “Right where you are is fine, sergeant. Now, let’s give these assholes a proper Arkansawyer welcome. Shoot these fuckers so we can go home.”

  When the charging platoon of Missouri National Guardsmen reached two hundred yards, the massed fire from over one hundred rifles tore the formation into bloody chunks of meat. The few survivors of the brutal initial onslaught tried to flee, but the soldiers with Scott would have none of that behavior and promptly shot them down without hesitation.

  “What next?” Scott shouted, then repeated himself over the radio. Waiting for Sergeant Barden to reply, Scott heard the youthful voice of Lieutenant Conners instead. Scott then remembered seeing the young officer claim a fighting position a few slots down. One previously used by the wounded biker Gordo.

  “After we beat off this attack, my orders are advance to contact, dig in, and see if we can push these murdering bastards back into the flames. You, and the rest of Team Charlie, are going to fall back to the rally point and get your wounds treated.”

  Scott thought about his new orders and simply looked out along the now sizeable firing line as the new troops continued to shoot down the soldiers running the other way. The LT clearly understood he could kill them now, or face them later. Thinking about the women and girls rescued by his team, Scott felt like these scum were getting off easy.

  “Save me a few officers, if you will. I bet I can get them to talk before you can.”

  With that, Scott wriggled back from the hole and backed away in a low crawl. Coming to each man from his team, he tapped them on the boot and then helped them extricate themselves on legs grown numb. Too many times, the fighter failed to respond and Scott ended up having to pull them out of their hole. When he saw one of them was his old friend Kevin Perkins, he felt his pulse quicken as he opened his mouth to shout for a medic. Then he made out the small entry wound over the man’s left eye and realized his barracks mate was beyond any help they could give him.

  Seeing what Scott was doing, Wallace crawled over and began to help pull the men out even as the LT gave the order for his men to advance.

  “Go check on Ben,” Scott said simply. “I know he was wounded earlier. See if you can pull him back to the bus. I’ll get the rest of the men.”

  Wallace nodded, his face a numb mask, as he departed. The team, and Scott’s scouts, had suffered terribly for this piece of ground. Finding Keith amongst the living, and unwounded, helped the older man’s mood, but too soon he realized the reason Lieutenant Conners ordered them back. Of the thirteen men who’d been there for the short battle, only seven still lived, and three of them were wounded. Only Scott, Wallace, Tommy, and Keith escaped without physical injury. Working together, they managed to carry Gordo, Ben, and Corporal Rodriguez back to the aid station now set up at the east gate. As the medics went to work on these new wounded, the four shuffled on exhausted legs back toward the Greyhound, returning for their dead.

  As the sounds of battle moved steadily further away, Scott took a moment to pause with Kevin’s weight pressing down on his shoulders. He turned to survey the battlefield. The light of the fires burned low by now, and a cloak of darkness seemed to descend on the twisted windrows of enemy dead.

  “Who’s going to tell Yalonda?”

  Keith voiced one of the questions that had been weighing on Scott’s own mind. Everyone in the scout unit knew of the fragile relationship growing between the Branson survivor and the lady who’d showed up with no past, but none dared guess how deep the feelings ran.

  “I will. Pass it on to the others. My job, and my responsibility.”

  “Boss, I…”

  When Keith’s voice trailed off, he knew the young man was suddenly overcome by emotion, but he ignored the words as if he’d never heard them. If Keith wanted to talk later, Scott would be glad to lend a compassionate ear, but right now, the grief was still too fresh.

  No, Scott reasoned, let him alone for now.

  “Counting the cost after is never easy,” Tommy said softly as he passed, cradling the big, still form of Corporal Arness in his arms as if he carried a sleeping child. He paused before continuing. “But if you don’t let yourself feel the pain, then you will eventually stop feeling it. Or anything else. You just go dead inside.”

  Scott nodded. He understood, but that understanding didn’t make anything better.

  “Let’s go home,” he said instead, and stepped a little faster to catch up with his men. The living, and the dead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Two days later, and Scott was laying on roof of the burned-out guardhouse at the entrance to the camp in Lowell, glassing the interior of the cannibal camp. He was flanked by Keith on a spotting scope but so far, neither had noted much activity.

  With most of the allied communities focusing on the last-minute attack on the War Eagle camp, James Pearson, Bobby Accord, and less than twenty defense force members fought a constant battle to keep the monsters bottled up inside their own fence. Scott learned that at one point, nearly five hundred of the surviving cannibals tried to rush those fences at multiple points. They were desperate to escape the deathtrap the camp had become when the surviving killers found themselves stuck with no more fuel for the few vehicles left in the camp. So they tried to break out on foot. And failed.

  Now, the desecrated ground of the doomed camp remained littered with the bodies of the fallen, and Scott gave one last check. Still no movement. Finally, he signaled the heavily-armored National Guard troops to breach the main gate. They expected the gate to be booby-trapped and the four brave soldiers used Explosives Disposal suits as they cut away the wires securing the gate shut. Surprisingly, the metal barriers swung open without incident, but the soldiers backed away as the entry point became clear.

  They could have breached the fence elsewhere. Or simply entered through the opening leading to the creek, though that route was jammed with the corpses of hundreds of dead foot soldiers of the ill-fated Liberation Army. They’d tried to use that small gate as an escape hatch early on, and between the home-made mines placed by the Kellerville contingent and the relentless sniping by dozens of long range shooters, the attempt turned into a spirit-breaking massacre for the cannibals. The survivors retreated into the compound to lick their wounds, eat some of their fallen brethren, and drink from the still-half full water tank.

  Now, Scott and Sergeant Barden led the remnants of their scout teams, including a heavily bandaged Mike Evans, into the camp the small group had once vowed to utterly destroy. The only sound Scott heard was the croak and caw of carrion birds, and the rapid beat of their wings.

  The men filed in with their heads on a swivel, aware that even one holdout could be a threat. They stepped over the fallen bodies, some recently killed while others presented at least a week’s worth of advanced decomposition. Scott, for one, was thankful for the respirators despite how they distorted the speakers’ voices. They also wore bulky biohazard suits produced by the colonel when these men politely demanded the right to enter the camp first.

  “Think there are any still left alive?” Mike asked, his muffled voice barely above a whisper.

  “If there are,” Sergeant Barden replied, “we’ll probably find them in the headquarters building. That’s where James said most of the surviving ghouls were forted up.”

  “We’ll use grenades,” Scott added, his voice steady and seemingly unaffected by the gruesome spectacle around him. After the battle at War Eagle, he remained withdrawn and even less talkative than usual. Despite scoring a sweeping victory over the reneg
ade DHS forces, the losses suffered by the combined civilian and military alliance had been cutting. Forty-seven dead from the National Guard, and another seventeen civilian fallen in the combined defense forces from the allied communities, meant days of funerals at the newly-established cemetery in Gentry. However, that the soldiers and civilians were buried together, in neatly laid out rows on what had once been a Little League baseball field, meant something that went beyond simply symbolic. The fallen from Kellerville, the Porter farm, and half a dozen other small survivor groups were all laid to rest with Arkansas National Guardsmen from all over the state.

  And there were the hostages rescued. In addition to the comfort women saved by Scott’s team, the larger force of Max and Aaron managed to rescue over forty family members of mostly FBI and a few U.S. Marshals being forced to work with the rogue soldiers and the Homeland thugs. They lost even more men than Scott, including five of the hostages, but managed to get the rest out. Including Max’s brother and the rest of his family.

  Colonel Hotchkins, appearing at the hastily-organized memorial ceremony held in the streets of Gentry the day before, managed to strike a chord in the listeners that seemed to galvanize all who heard his words. These were all true patriots, he’d said plainly, renewing the tree of liberty with the blood of their sacrifice.

  Scott now looked around and saw the small group of investigators from the Colonel’s office as they entered quietly and began to document some of the more troubling scenes found within the fenced-in area. Starting with the cooking pit, and the adjacent pyramid of stacked, severed human heads, now reaching nearly seven feet in height. Despite his righteous anger, Scott found himself looking away from the grotesque spectacle.

  Scott wanted to burn it all. Actually, if he had the resources, he would detonate a hydrogen bomb on the site to insure all of the evil that seeped into the earth here was also somehow vaporized.