by RW Krpoun
A murmur ran through the firing line as the crazies came into view, moving in a linear rank about four deep and maybe a hundred-fifty men across; six to eight hundred all told, I guessed. I looked sharp for Green Coat but couldn’t spot any sign of him.
Making my way back to the ruins, where Billy was deep in conversation with the Colonel, I slung my Krag and climbed up the side of the great field-stone fireplace to perch on a stone collar that marked where it had passed through the second floor. As I had guessed a burnt but still fairly solid cross beam made a decent rest for my carbine once I had worked out the best way to sit.
The crazies were moving into the sunken road which crossed our front about five hundred yards out, and staying there; the road was only a few feet below ground level, but with the tall un-grazed grass it effectively hid them as well as any trench. Even if the Colonel had a howitzer he would have the devil’s own time of doing them much harm.
That bothered me, and I checked to make sure that Sanchez wasn’t going to do something stupid like order a charge to roust them out, but he was simply watching through a pair of field glasses. I checked the flanks and rear: as I expected, the mule handlers were glued to the potential for action out front, but there wasn’t a hostile in sight. I was pretty certain that the crazies couldn’t ride horses and I doubted that they had enough Chuj to waste them on a cavalry action, especially with the wastage we had caused over the last couple days, but I was still nervous.
Maybe I just couldn’t get past the idea that irregulars could fight well, although Sanchez was going pretty much by the book; or maybe I was just getting accustomed to the crazies pushing us around. We had chopped them up pretty well in the last few days, but we had done a fair amount of running from them, too.
The crazies were stirring in the road, and now and again a head popped up over the grass and studied our position-human handlers, I guessed. I slid the noses of .30-40 rounds into a crack in my beam so they jutted like a row of brass fence posts, ready for fast reloading. Directly in front of me an older rebel with the bearing of NCOs everywhere had sent a man back to the horses to fetch hay scythes, which were now being used to clear away the tall grass while his men settled into prone firing positions and adjusted their firing rests. He caught my eye as he paced behind his section of the firing line, and we exchanged the nods of men who knew their business better than most.
A knot of bodies moved twenty yards beyond the sunken road, away from us, and huddled for a bit; then a half-dozen crazies lurched back to the sunken road, and finally the last two figures turned and ran, clearly unaffected men.
Moments later there was a terrific explosion where they had huddled; it kicked up a fair plume of dust and shook the chimney stones I was sitting on. I would be lying if I tried to claim it didn’t startle me out of a year’s growth.
“What the hell was that, Seth?” Billy asked, having trotted over while I was checking the flanks and rear.
“A signal,” I said uneasily.
“For who?” Billy looked around. “If they had a troop of cavalry laid up they could have just fired a shot.”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Maybe they’re trying to spook us.”
“They’re doing a decent job,” I admitted. “Does this place have a cellar?”
“Yeah, but I checked it myself. Its empty.”
“Any sign of a tunnel?”
“A tunnel? No, not a chance. Why?”
“Probably a stupid idea,” I shrugged. “But that charge was tamped to fire down, which is why we felt it shake the ruins. I thought if they had a few people stashed in the cellar they might have done that to signal them. If they didn’t hear it they would have felt it.”
“Look…they can’t call the dead from the grave, can they?”
“No, they have to do something with the body. What, I’m not sure.”
“All right.”
Colonel Sanchez was unsettled as well, and as Billy and I were talking he was barking orders; around half the women soldiers were leaving the firing line and mounting up. That impressed me: when confronted by something he didn’t understand his first instinct was to create a reserve.
“Here they come,” I jerked my chin. “Good luck, Billy.”
He glanced towards the sunken road, where clumsy figures were scrambling out to advance upon us. “Yeah, good luck Seth.”
The crazies were emerging in what I would call a skirmish order: a dozen feet between each one, both to the sides and deep as well. They weren’t moving all that fast, in fact slower than I would have said was usual for them. I supposed all that meant they were under the control of handlers, rather than just in their usual mindless rage.
A rifle barked to my left and officers shouted; they were too far out of range. I watched as they deployed out of the sunken lane and began to see the wisdom of their handlers: six hundred bodies in skirmish order on a frontage about two hundred yards wide is an extremely deep formation. To the rebels sitting or lying under the dull fall sun it looked like a tide was coming at us, like the entire population of Mexico was on the move. The lead rank was a hundred yards closer and still they emerged from the road.
I was less impressed than the rebels: the Boxers had put great faith in masses of soldiers, but repeating rifles and Maxim guns had taught them the folly of such heathen beliefs. Pickett had learned the hard way in ’63 that rifles, even muzzle-loaders, can break any infantry force trying to cross open ground. In these days of bolt-action weapons and smokeless powder no regular army would ever send infantry in a frontal charge, and if these rebels kept their nerve they would demonstrate that fact here.
The front rank was three hundred yards from us when they finished deploying out of the sunken road; if I had a Krag rifle such as I had carried in my Army days I would have tried my luck, but my carbine’s barrel was eight inches shorter. Flipping up the adjustable rear leaf sight I set it for two hundred yards and waited.
A few more shots popped off as the front rank crossed the three hundred yard mark but once again officers shouted the line into silence, and again I was favorably impressed with Sanchez. At two hundred fifty yards a bugle call sounded and then the Maxim’s opened fire-I figured the bugle was to warn the infantry to hold fire, which to their credit they did.
The Maxim gunners were skilled and found the range quickly. The crazies were too spread out for long bursts, but the Maxims were swiftly knocking them down like ten pins, the .303 rounds often passing through and hitting targets in the rearward ranks.
Morale perked up at the rattling fire of the Maxims, and then took a severe hit when the targets lurched back onto their feet. That was the point I was waiting for: if the rebels broke, this would be one of those times. But Sanchez rose another notch in my estimates: he had staff officers moving up and down the line, and from their gestures I could establish that they were repeating the ‘aim for the head’ mantra.
Then one of the gunners adjusted his aim and blew a couple skulls apart with a well-controlled burst, and the firing line steadied again. To say the rebels were tense was an understatement-their nerves were stretched like a fiddle’s high-note strings, but they were holding their places and their fire, and that was as good as you can expect under circumstances such as these.
The enemy formation was compacting a bit as the Maxims knocked down the lead crazies, who had to clamber back onto their feet and resume their lurching advance. I wasn’t watching them, however: I was watching for the handlers. They didn’t need a head shot to put down and their loss would be felt more than any dozen crazies.
Except that they had coated every male crazy’s face with tar or axle grease, turning them all into expressionless masks. The handlers must have done likewise, and were imitating their charges’ shambling walk in order to blend into the group as a whole. The two or three figures standing at the edge of the sunken road were certainly not crazies, but I wasn’t going to hit them with a carbine.
The enemy line reached the two hun
dred yard point and still Sanchez withheld the order to fire, certainly a wise move given his men’s likely standard of marksmanship and their limited ammunition, but it took nerve, which apparently the fat man had in quantity.
But right or not he wasn’t my Colonel, so I adjusted my leaf sight again and settled my carbine solidly against the beam after stuffing wads of cotton into my ears. When the first crazy reached the one hundred seventy five yard mark I squeezed the trigger and put a soft-nosed .30-40 Krag, what the book said was a .30 Government Caliber, into the brain pan of a lurching peon downrange. Working the bolt I settled the sights, breathed carefully, and squeezed again, hitting a little high but still into the skull of a second crazy.
Glancing to my right as I worked the bolt I caught Sanchez staring coolly at me. He turned back to the enemy, his face giving away nothing.
My third shot I over-corrected and put the round through its neck, which didn’t kill it but left it thrashing helplessly, so I supposed I had clipped the backbone. Billy, sitting cross-legged with his Winchester braced against a stub of a door fame fired as I was working the bolt, dropping a crazy with a head shot. Obviously not everything the Army had taught him had gone to waste.
The Anglos demonstrating superior marksmanship put the rebel’s pride on the line, and also demonstrated that the enemy were just flesh and blood.
Snapping open the latch after the fourth shot, I loaded from the cartridges in the timber-crack, adjusted the leaf sight down to one-fifty and resumed fire. I fired eight more rounds and scored six headshots in the time it took the range to close to one hundred yards. Firing off a braced tripod the Maxim gunners were starting to get more head hits as the range closed, although they apparently had lost or discarded the elevating mechanisms and were free-handing the guns on the pivot mounts, reducing the accuracy.
Sanchez gave the order to open fire as I was loading, a ragged volley crashing out the instant the order was given. Only a couple dozen crazies went down, and no more than a half-dozen had head hits, but you could feel the relief wash across the line as the rebels went into action. The green, the poorly-trained and the reckless sent rounds crashing out as fast as they could work the actions or reload, but at least a third of the rebels set about making accurate shots rather than just blazing away.
Setting my leaf sights to seventy-five yards, I got three head shots with four rounds and loaded the last four from the beam. The firing line was a steady roar of rifle fire and crazies were being chopped off their feet three and four ranks back, with head shots coming in every second as the marksmen amongst the rebels got the range and the rhythm down.
Four rounds got four head shots and then I reloaded from my belt, acting by touch as I took in the fight as a whole: the crazy line was stalling at around sixty yards. They weren’t losing as many as I would have liked, but the rifles and Maxims were knocking them down faster than they could advance, and the middle ranks were getting entangled in the front ranks who were trying to get back upright. The ‘death toll’ was climbing well past fifty and heading steadily towards a hundred as the mule-skinners began to range along behind the firing line distributing the reserve ammunition.
Focusing back upon my work, I made ten head hits with my next twelve shots as the enemy line crept forward, many crazies choosing to scuttle forward on all fours rather than bother getting back onto their feet after getting knocked down. They had lost well over a hundred of their number but unsurprisingly they were completely undeterred.
Snapping the rear leaf sight flat as the range eased below fifty yards I took another look around: the flanks and rear were clear, nothing in sight, not even dust. Sanchez was ordering his small mounted reserve to dismount and join the firing line, but things were not going too badly for us. The crazies wouldn’t break, but accuracy was increasing as the range closed and there was a finite number of zombies in front of us, a number that was declining by the second.
Returning to my firing and reloading with all the absorption I could manage, I lost count of the hits and even the times I had reloaded, although I had to hitch my cartridge belt to bring more filled loops under my hand as the enemy front line crept to twenty-five yards over a litter of downed and shattered crazies.
The first explosion knocked me off my perch-if I hadn’t been leaning into that beam I would have gone flying; as it was I grabbed the beam in a bear hug as my legs flailed wildly for footholds that weren’t there. For a second it must have looked like I was riding an invisible bicycle, had anyone been watching with time to indulge in flights of fancy. Then the beam I was hugging gave a crack that cleared the confusion from my brain like a bucket of cold water hitting you on a hot day. Kicking back I got my heels wedged against the sooty field stones of the chimney and took some weight off the beam, which had taken on a slight sag towards my right. Working fast I moved my center of gravity back until I was able to push back and lean against the stones, free of the beam.
Only then did the realization sink in that it was an explosion behind and to my right that was responsible for the several heart-pounding seconds of activity, and I turned in that direction as the word ‘howitzer’ formed in my rather stunned mind and I slid my left foot down to the next projecting stone.
What I saw was no impact crater, but rather a crazy coming up from the rear, trotting a bit faster than most, dressed in a dirty business suit with canvas satchels slung on its sides, both heavily loaded bags smoking and spitting sparks as it headed straight for Colonel Sanchez’s command group. Beyond it a couple more satchel-bearing crazies trotted forward purposefully, and a herd of twenty or thirty more common zombies were lurching towards the rebels in the firing line.
No one has ever called me a smart man, but I have a workable memory and under pressure I can think and act well, and sometimes better than most. I recognized that spraying of smoke and sparks and was scrambling to get down and put the chimney between me and the crazy even as revolvers began barking from the command group.
Although the charges weren’t tamped, there was likely around twenty-five one-pound sticks of dynamite in each satchel, and I was lucky that when the spark-spitting fuse burned down to the blasting caps slotted into the individual sticks I was fully behind the fireplace proper.
The stone structure absorbed the blast, although the shock was enough to knock me two staggering steps to my right; if it hadn’t been for the cotton in my ears that explosion would have been the last thing I ever heard. I went to my knees in the grass, shaking my head and trying to get the world to stop swimming around on me. Slapping my own face a couple times helped me get things into focus, and moving woodenly I set the Krag’s safety and slung the carbine as I climbed back to my feet. A second blast swept the top half of the chimney into a hail of rocks; I dove and rolled against the rear of the fireplace as they rained down, but none came close.
Staggering to my feet, I drew my Colt, blinking in the dust cloud that now enveloped the ruins. An oddly silent dust cloud. Moving around the side of the fireplace I saw that the blast had turned the ruins into an abattoir: one satchel-carrier had shredded Colonel Sanchez, his officers, and those of his bodyguards who hadn’t been in the firing line, while a second had gotten onto the stump of the second floor, wiping out both Maxims and their crews.
I saw Billy’s crumpled form off to the side, one leg twisted like a pretzel and most of his head gone. He wasn’t going to see the century of peace that was coming, but at least he wasn’t going to be joining the ranks of the enemy.
Staggering away from the ruins in search of cleaner air, still half-dazed, feeling drunker than I had ever been in my life, I suddenly found myself face to face with a dark-skinned man whose green work shirt and dungaree trousers were liberally coated with dirt. He was visibly startled to see someone coming out of the dust cloud, and I wasn’t thinking at usual speed, so we stared at each other for an eternal second.
Then my eyes fell to the black stone statue he was gripping in his right hand like a shot glass just as he re
leased it to reach for the holster on his hip. Without thinking in any coherent sense I shot him twice in the chest, shooting without any sense of urgency, two good center chest hits that folded his legs up like a well-oiled jackknife. He landed on his back and I stepped over to shoot him squarely between the eyes, then fired the last three in my revolver into the statue still tethered to him by a braided horsehair cord, the heavy rounds shattering it.
The last couple shots made muffled thumps, the first real noise in my world since the explosion that ended Colonel Sanchez’s career. Yanking the cotton from my ears I could hear shots and screams from behind me, and as I moved forward the fresher air seemed to pull some of the dust and fog out of my brain.
It was quickly apparent that the first explosion, the one that had nearly made me fall off my perch, had detonated in the picket line, killing a half-dozen horses and scattering the rest to the winds. Moving woodenly past the shredded animals, mechanically reloading the Colt, I found a narrow, wood-lined trench that had not been there before, a trench with a scattering of saws and pry bars and one stinking bucket at its bottom. It took a moment but I realized that this was the mass grave we had seen: a long narrow box with benches and a plank roof covered with dirt, and inhabited by the man I had just shot and a crew of crazies.
That first explosion, before the attack began: I had been right, it was a signal. They couldn’t be sure the buried crew could hear anything, but the explosion of a tamped charge could easily be felt, alerting the handler that it was time to get his charges to work sawing through the line of roof supports and then forcing the roof sections apart or levered out onto the ground. We never saw the flanking force because it was below ground. They buried their force at the best place for Sanchez to deploy.
I sneezed explosively three times, spitting and gasping as I blinked away tears and flicked away a string of muddy snot, and felt better, more clear-headed; for one thing, my ears had popped and my hearing had improved.
