by RW Krpoun
They weren’t head shots, so the crazies didn’t stay down, except for the odd broken backbone, but it slowed them and it damaged them. They might not feel pain or lose blood, but the 7.92mm rounds shattered bone and severed tendons, and about every third crazy who went down lost the tool it was carrying in the awkward struggle to get to its feet.
I ceased fire after chopping up the second rank to let the water in the jacket around the barrel cool down and to help Raoul and Chabo reload the fabric belts that fed the weapon, as we only had ten belts. Nhi poured water on the planks as the vibration from the weapon’s recoil was kicking up dust.
Captain started firing not long after I ceased, knocking down crazies with his rolling block, getting the occasional head shot. When the crazies reached the six hundred yard mark the Judge opened up, and while he wasn’t getting head shots his Springfield let him fire twice as fast as Captain.
At five hundred yards I opened fire again, and held the bursts lower, going for pelvis and leg hits. While it took a head hit to put a crazy down for good, it still needed bone structure in order to walk. Before Nhi, who was feeding the gun, had to link up the second belt a third of the first rank were crawling, still determined but little danger to the wall.
Shifting to the second rank I started working on their ambulation as the Judge and Captain used the shortening range to score more head shots. Sibley fired a half-dozen ranging shots and then started knocking down the crazies on a regular basis, albeit without many head hits.
In a dime novel that would have been the way the battle went, with the noble, two-fisted heroes crushing the enemy methodically and with great spirit. The trouble that that it was like killing ants with a hammer: easy to do, but hard to impact the whole.
The ranks moved forwards without hesitation like clockwork and the handlers started radically deceasing the intervals between lines, realizing that they would have to get across the open ground any old how. Their control would slip as the crazies intermingled, but there wasn’t any real choice.
I shortened my range to four hundred yards, blasting pelvises and legs apart while the Mexicans hastily refilled belts. Then I dropped the range down to three-fifty, dimly aware that several of the Judge’s boys had started shooting.
At three hundred yards I stayed put-the first three lines were nothing but crawlers and single crazies who were trying to survive the closing range in the face of steadily increasing rifle fire, but there were plenty of ranks behind them and I needed groups as targets.
It was methodical skilled labor; the gun was finely built, well-mounted, and on a stable platform, so all I had to do was choose the targets and hold the little slack in the gun’s mount steady as I pressed the trigger. The machinegun fired as long as the trigger was held, and I had the timing down for six round bursts to a science.
Then the belt ran through Nhi’s carbon-stained fingers and she didn’t have another to replace it. She joined Raoul and Chabo in reloading the belts while I used a rag to open the water jacket’s fill cap and poured more water inside as steam wafted out the threaded hole and the jacket vent. The jacket held just over a gallon of water, and ten belts would generate enough heat to turn all of it into steam. I poured oil into the well-heated action and worked the bolt back and forth to distribute it cleanly; a great deal rested on this gun remaining in action.
The entirety of our firing line was engaging the crazies as the shredded first four ranks were closing on the wall in no semblance of order, head shots dropping several zombies with each passing heartbeat. But the following lines were still lurching forward like clockwork, and the battle was hardly begun.
The flanks and rear were secure, I noted gratefully, and brought my Krag into play while the water hissed away the barrel heat and my three assistants turned their hands black with cartridge grease and carbon from the belts. I got off twenty shots before Nhi slapped me on the shoulder to indicate that the belts were ready. Screwing the plug back into the water jacket, I sloshed a dipperful across its outside for luck and resumed my seat.
I dropped the range down to two hundred yards, damn near precision firing with this weapon, and went back to crippling crazies, getting more hits per burst because the range was closer. My world was the thunder and vibration of the gun, Nhi’s head bumping against my left bicep as she leaned close to feed the belts, the lurching bodies over the sights, the smell of hot metal and hotter oil, the haze of heat over the water jacket. As Nhi changed a belt I slopped oil into the action and cranked the range down to one-fifty as they were closing faster than I could knock them down.
If they had been all the same height I could have gotten head hits, but leg and pelvis hits were doing good work. I concentrated as I had seldom concentrated before-until you have been in combat you will have no idea of how the mind can slough off all worries and cares and utterly focus. My goal was to insert every round in the belts into the body of a crazy, and while machineguns are somewhat wasteful in that regard on this day I was doing damned well.
When Nhi slapped my shoulder to indicate that the belts were empty I added more water to the jacket to replace that which had boiled away, which was most of it, and more oil to the action. The first three ranks of the crazies had reached the wall or had nearly crawled there, but only a few tools had arrived with them, and their numbers were dropping fast. For the close work Captain had switched to a lever-action carbine we had captured in our travels and was dropping them as fast as he could load and fire. Head shots were the norm under the wall, and the bodies were piling up.
However there were hundreds still lurching towards us at best speed-it had been a while since I had seen a thousand people in one restricted area, and it is not a sight to steady your nerves when they’re united in the desire to kill you. I plied my Krag and fired through sixty rounds, deliberately staying with the carbine for one box of cartridges after the loaders were done to give the barrel a chance to cool down. Nhi and the Mexicans followed my lead and fired upon the advancing ranks for what good it would do.
Returning to the machinegun I cranked the sights down to seventy-five yards and returned to firing. We had ten belts, each holding two-hundred-fifty rounds: I had fired off five thousand rounds, and as I opened fire Chabo was heading down the ladder to manhandle more cases of ammunition up to our position. Raoul was shoveling expended brass over the side as fast as he could toss them.
As the range dropped my accuracy improved, but there were still a seemingly endless supply of crazies and the belts seemed to fly through Nhi’s fingers. She had donned gloves to protect her hands, and the leather was already stained black.
Five belts in I stopped to let Raoul pour water into the jacket and to crank the sights down to fifty yards. The press at the wall was building back up as the crazies arrived faster than our men could shoot them, despite my best efforts. My trouble was that a crippled zombie will crawl with the same determination as it walked.
As the minutes ticked by it became evident that we were losing, that they were getting to the wall too fast in too great of numbers for us to stop. They were achieving the critical mass of bodies needed to defeat the physical structure of the wall, and once they breached the wall we had serious troubles.
Then one of Brother Lar’s squad of orphans sent a small package tumbling end over end into a knot of advancing crazies, and a second later the group was shredded by a savage explosion. They had a scaled down version of some sort of siege engine, I saw, obviously a working model, and were using it to lob sticks of dynamite strapped to chunks of firewood (to give the projectile enough weight). As a second explosion shattered crazies the tide swung back into our favor; the insane mathematics of battle started calculating in our favor again.
The gun jammed midway through the seventh belt, the extractor ripping through the heat-weakened metal of a cartridge case. Thankfully, the Chuj had kept the canvas case containing the specialized tools for such work with the weapon; cursing profusely as I struggled with the blistering hot action I extr
acted the case after a couple minutes of desperate struggle. Nhi was firing her Luger carbine while the two Mexicans reloaded belts; I poured oil into the action and topped off the water jacket, hissing in frustration over the delay. But there wasn’t anything to be done-the weapon was overheated, and nothing but time would change that, time we didn’t have.
The orphans had two dynamite-throwers in action and four of the ‘kid strapped to a boom’ devices dropping black powder bombs down onto the crazies at the base of the wall, and for the moment we were holding. As I shouldered the Krag I wished I had grabbed more dynamite.
The crazies were ignoring everything we threw at them; if knocked down by a bullet or a blast, they scrambled back up to their feet, or crawled if their legs no longer worked, although if they had a tool they often lost it when knocked down. They struggled to the wall like it was a fountain and they were dying of thirst, and when they reached it they attacked the wall as if it had done them personal harm. If they had a tool they used it, usually clumsily and often inappropriately-I saw several armed with spades slamming the flats of the blades against the wall. If they had no tools they pounded and clawed at the wall, pulling down chunks of plaster and digging at the mortar and stone beneath.
Worse, their numbers at the wall were starting to increase again. Dropping a crazy with the last shot in my Krag I returned to the machinegun and resumed fire. Fifty yards from a heavy, stable mount was no distance at all, and I raised my point of aim to the upper-torso on a man of average height, getting head hits off the women and short men, staying within the rib cage of the taller men. At fifty yards there was little point in making them crawl, but damage to the muscles and tissue of the chest and shattering of the rib cage should reduce their ability to damage the wall, and if nothing else it knocked them down and cost them tools lost in the struggle to get upright.
Seconds dragged into a minute and the equation started slipping back into our favor as the mounds of dead and the number of crazies maimed beyond any use grew even as more struggled forward into the fray. I didn’t know how long we had been fighting, and didn’t care-time did not matter except how it pertained to delivering fire and cooling my weapon. My shoulders and arms ached from the slamming vibration, my lower legs were bruised from kneeling on shell casings, and my head throbbed with pain from the sheer volume of noise that was slipping past the cotton in my ears.
The belts ran out again, and I rose gratefully to my feet, sweeping aside casings from my position with swipes of my boot before pouring more oil into the action and more water into the overheated water jacket. Although the gun had been nearly new when the battle started, it was going to be nearly worn out by the time we were done.
The crazies were fully committed: the last lines were less than four hundred yards out and shambling at their best rate, every one of them bearing a tool of some sort. They would have saved their most spry and able crazies for the last ranks, and as I shouldered my Krag I wondered if more time as a crazy made them more effective, or if it had something to do with the person they had once been.
We were losing the equation again: the crazies were piling up at the wall faster than we were killing them. As I reloaded I guessed that we had put down between three and four hundred, with nearly that many at or near the wall, and the rest on the way.
And our bombs and dynamite were finite, sharply so-from the haze of smoke and the way the orphans were gleefully raining the gravel-filled pots into the enemy ranks I suspected we had only a few more volleys left. Still, there was no point in holding back-the enemy was committing his all, and so should we.
Returning to the machinegun with no more cartridges for my Krag than were in the weapon and my half-empty belt, I was stopped by Nhi, who pointed urgently: an orphan was waving a blue flag from the north tower. The six guards from the other walls were racing to join the fight at the west, and the Chinese were moving into position.
The four of us hurled ourselves onto the gun and manhandled it ninety degrees so it was positioned for fire down the side of the west wall. This was it, the final effort of our defense, our strongest counter-action. Here we would break the enemy.
Poring oil over the water jacket, I knelt behind the gun and disengaged the traverse and elevation mechanism as Nhi loaded a full belt. As I swung the MG.08s muzzle to bear the defending fire halted as men hastily reloaded. For a second there was no noise but the chorus of moans and hissing of the crazies and the sounds of their attack upon our wall.
Then the fireworks started. Flaming balls shot forth, gouts of sparks bright enough to be seen clearly in full daylight vomited out from the walls, dragons of fire screamed in insanely fast circles, rockets shot in every direction, and strings of firecrackers shredded themselves into drifting blizzards of paper.
Below us the crazies froze in place, mesmerized by the display, staring transfixed even as the rifles began to bark, bomb-pots fell, and dynamite arched into their ranks.
The MG.08 roared and I rode the recoil, guiding the sights across the inert ranks of the crazies as skulls exploded and bodies dropped beneath the pounding weapon. I ran the bursts long, not caring about the heat, pausing only when recoil vibrated my sights completely off-target, running through a belt and another as fire and light roared from the fort into the afternoon sky and gunfire rattled in murderous counterpart.
Then the crazies lost their fascination, stirred themselves, and assaulted the wall afresh, and the lines that had straggled to a halt picked up the pace again. The magic was used and gone, a last ploy against the overwhelming numbers, leaving nearly two hundred more crazies dead for good in the light of the Mexican sun. Over half were gone, and scores more too maimed to be of any danger, but still they threw themselves at the wall.
I slowed my rate of fire as moving crazies required more accuracy; the last of the bombs were dropped and the cranes secured; as the final line of zombies closed the last of the dynamite soared out to meet them, and the taller orphans began dropping rocks down onto the crazies, pulping skulls and shattering torsos.
There were at most three hundred crazies attacking the wall as Nhi hooked up the last belt, but the wall was taking serious damage. We were down to minutes here: if we could hold out a bit longer the numbers would fall firmly onto our side.
I was unscrewing the water jacket plug to pour in more water when I saw a crazy lurch forward as if leaning into a window: the rock it had been beating on had given way, falling back into the fort. The wall had a breach, however small. Grabbing up my Krag I flung myself to the nearest firing port and opened fire, Nhi joining me as a bugle rang a fast, high-pitched call into the dust and smoke hazed, noise-filled air over the presidio.
It was the signal for the Chinese and orphans to fall back to the church, and for the six wall sentries and two Mexicans from Captain’s position to respond to the breach.
The breach itself was just a window-sized hole in the school building, barely large enough for a crazy to wriggle into, and there was a barricade of furniture on the other side, but the sight of it seemed to energize the crazies, and they appeared to gain a new level of frenzy in their attacks.
I concentrated on the area of the breach, dropping crazies as fast as I could work the bolt. I saw a gout of red from one impact and realized I had killed a controller. Nhi concentrated on another breach that was created in the same building a moment later, and did good work with her carbine.
The eight men responding to the breach were inside the building now and the crazies in the vicinity of the breach were not attempting to widen the holes, just shoving their way to the breach, eager to get inside. Had the controllers been active it would have gone worse, but they were dead or still behind in places of safety.
The crazies scrambling through widened the breaches a bit, but the men on the other side of the barricades seemed to be holding. I told Chabo to go assist them and got back behind the machinegun with only four belts filled. We were at a crucial moment, and four belts fired now would do more good than ten
belts in a couple minutes’ time.
Keeping the bursts at torso level for fast accuracy in order to keep them from entering the breaches faster than the men inside could kill them, I gripped the gun’s handles and sweated through the seconds. If we could hold them for just a little while longer their numbers would melt away under the rifle fire from the wall and the day would be won.
The gun jammed mid-way through the second belt. Cursing, I wrestled another damaged casing from the overheated chamber, wishing I had five minutes to change out the extractor. Nhi sent Raoul to reinforce the wall and loaded cartridges into belts from the last case of ammunition; there was no time to bring up more, even if hands were available.
Clearing the weapon, I loaded a full belt and Nhi joined me even as I opened fire. The rounds swept out in bursts of eight or nine and steam hissed out in a steady plume from the water jacket’s vent, but we were too far gone to worry about the condition of the barrel. Even if it held together we were almost out of ammunition on the tower, and the fight was drawing to its final key moments.
The rifle fire was slackening a bit–rifles were overheating and jamming, or men running out and having to go refill their pockets with fresh rounds. It was not good, but it was inevitable. Both sides were committing limited and expendable resources, our side ammunition and explosives, the necromancer his zombies, and the side which ran out first would lose.
Nhi was linking another belt when I saw what I thought was smoke jet from the wall of the children’s quarters and began to raise the muzzle to bear on the crazies there. In the busy seconds that followed I realized that it wasn’t smoke but powdered mortar I had seen, as the frenzied attacks combined with age caused the top two-thirds of a thirty-foot section of the wall to break free of the rest and topple majestically to the ground, crushing a score of crazies in its stony embrace.
