Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV

by J. W. Vohs

  Harden banged a hammer into a stack of wood blocks and called the meeting to order. After Carter’s report, the command group decided that they had six to eight days before the horde arrived in Vicksburg. They all agreed that they would be ready for the hunter-army in less time than that. Much work had already been done, and even though they were exhausted almost to the point of passing out, Carter and Luke both felt they’d sleep better after being given a tour of the town’s defenses. Jack was happy to oblige, and Carlson decided to tag along as well.

  As they walked toward the eastern walls, Carter finally asked Jack a question that had popped into his mind during the long drive back. “Hey, how’re we any different than the rebel army that got trapped in this city when Grant and Sherman showed up?”

  Jack hitched his thumb backwards without bothering to turn around. “The Union Army controlled the western bank, and the Navy controlled the river, at least strongly enough that supplies couldn’t be brought in from Louisiana. Once Pemberton’s army was penned up in their trenches, Grant just starved them out.”

  Carter nodded his understanding, “We got the river and a railroad.”

  Jack smiled, “And twelve thousand soldiers from Utah.”

  “Yup, that’s damn important too. So what else is new ‘round here?”

  Jack stopped the small group and pointed eastward along the road leading to the bridge. “We’ve strung the woods on both sides of the highway with more concertina wire than I saw in all of Afghanistan. Twenty-feet high into the trees, four rows deep. We’re gonna catch a lot of hunters in that wire. The railroad cut between us and the woods has been mined with over two thousand propane-bombs, which we hope are spaced far enough apart to prevent them from detonating one another. The creatures that make it through those obstacles are gonna find our best shooters waiting at the top of the cut with autos and a lot of ammo. Behind them will be a six-hundred meter crescent-shaped phalanx with both flanks anchored on the river. If any of the bastards are still alive after that, they can try to attack the walls.”

  Luke stared at Jack in disbelief, but the allied leader was purposely avoiding his gaze. Finally, Luke raised his hand and cleared his throat, so Jack had to acknowledge the question.

  “How will the fighters on this side of the wall escape the horde?”

  Stephen Carlson interrupted, “Do you really think . . .”

  Jack lifted his hand to stop his Utah ally in mid-sentence. “I’ll have barges with ramps leading to the bank along the riverfront, enough for all of us if necessary.”

  Luke could sense that Jack was keeping some of his cards out of sight, and decided to follow his mentor’s lead and seek him out later. The tour wrapped up with an explanation of how the walls would be manned and defended, after which the survivors of the fight at Pickwick enjoyed a hot meal and a tepid bath. By then Luke was far too weary to seek out Jack, let alone try to make sense of the Vicksburg defense plan. Although his watch showed that the time was only noon, Luke decided to retreat to his quarters for a short rest. A cabin had been set aside for the main leaders from Fort Wayne, and even though the bunks were stiff, the blazing fire kept the rooms comfortable and warm. Luke was literally asleep before he could pull the covers over himself, a task that David took care of when he checked in on his young charge after dinner. Jack peeked in to see his little brother tenderly caring for the teen they both loved.

  “Is he okay?”

  David shrugged, “He’s like the Energizer Bunny, but sometimes I worry that even he has a breaking point.”

  Jack stepped closer to David and whispered, “The train from Fort Wayne will be here around midnight. I think that might bring the boy some comfort.”

  David nodded, then turned to stare at his brother.

  “What?” Jack mouthed, not wanting to risk waking Luke.

  David put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and led him toward the door. “Come on,” he said in a low voice, “we need to talk.”

  Luke re-fought the battle of Pickwick Dam as he slept, much like an assembly-line worker might dream of his machinery passing by. For the most part, the images were of the soldiers at his side, and the camaraderie he shared with the warriors of the 1st Utah Battalion. As he stabbed and slashed at the faceless horde, he found comfort in feeling the shoulders and shields of the troops standing next to him in the line. Hours passed in this manner, until Luke suddenly found himself in a dark place. Only bits of light were shining through the immensely heavy weight covering his body, and he knew that he was dying. Death wasn’t arriving with the peace he’d thought it would—he was terrified. He was shouting and struggling, unable to reach any of his weapons, teeth began to viciously tear at the flesh uncovered as the monsters frantically tore at his flailing arms and legs.

  Then he heard Gracie’s voice calling to him softly; he could feel her hands on his face and the comfort her nearness brought to his teetering sanity. With his beloved’s presence flooding his mind, the nightmare faded as quickly as it had arrived, but Gracie’s essence remained through the night. Luke could smell her hair, and then he felt the wet-warmth of tears on her cheeks as she placed her face next to his. He had to remind himself that he was only dreaming, but the emotions he was experiencing were so powerful and peaceful that he pretended she was really lying beside him. Finally, he slept soundly and deeply, convinced that Gracie’s arms were protectively wrapped around his weary body.

  When dawn finally arrived and the sunlight shone through the small window of the cabin, Luke slowly roused from his slumber. Without moving a muscle, other than those related to eye-movement, he stared at a ray of light slashing through the air a few feet away. He was surprised at how much dust seemed to be floating around in what appeared to be a clean room. He smiled as he realized that he continued to feel Gracie’s arms around him, wondering if he was still dreaming. Then came a moment of clarity when he knew that he was awake, and definitely in someone’s arms. He quickly sat up and turned around to find Gracie lying there with her head on the pillow, her short, brown hair framing a lean but beautiful face in the growing light. Her eyes were open, staring lovingly into his own.

  “Am I dreaming?” he whispered, frightened that she would disappear at any moment.

  She carefully wrapped one of his hands in both of hers. “I arrived on a late train from Fort Wayne after you were already asleep. Your whole body was jerking when I got in here, and you were whimpering. I just decided to hold you till you calmed down.”

  She smiled, “I’m pretty sure you knew I was here.”

  Luke nodded happily, “I was having a nightmare and then dreamt of you touching me and putting your arms around me—I don’t want to be away from you this long again.”

  Gracie nodded, but there was a hint of sadness in her eyes. “I guess that’s something we can put on the back burner till after the coming battle; we might not have to worry about it.”

  Luke shook his head as he remembered where they were and why. “Forget what I just said. Please, Gracie, go back to Fort Wayne and wait for me there; this place isn’t going to hold.”

  Her brow knitted with confusion, “Everybody seems pretty confident.”

  “Few people here have seen what I’ve seen. Gracie, Barnes has an unstoppable force; their numbers create a tidal wave of bodies that we just can’t resist. I’ve seen the best fighters in the world fail to stop the horde.”

  He finally stood up and started packing his things, “Hell with it, you and me are going back to Fort Wayne, and then back to Ohio. We’ll spend the winter on Middle Bass Island.”

  Gracie quickly hopped off of the bed and grabbed Luke’s arm. “What’s happened to you, baby?”

  He stopped stuffing gear into bags and looked into her worried, brown eyes. “I won’t watch you die here,” his voice cracked as he declared, “I won’t.”

  She gently took the bag he was packing and laid it on the bed. “Look at me,” she ordered. “Whatever you’ve seen and whatever’s happened to you since you left
Fort Wayne, we have to talk it out. You and me, we laid it down a long time ago. We gave ourselves to the people, to the war against the infected. How did you become afraid? Our lives aren’t ours, and they’re the only things the hunters can take. You’ve let the bastards climb into your soul.”

  Luke set on the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands. Gracie pulled his head to her side and stroked his hair. Finally, the tears came, followed by racking sobs. After about twenty minutes he calmed down into hiccups and shaky breath, until he was eventually able to look at Gracie through puffy, tear-stained eyes and try to smile. “Mighty warrior, huh?”

  Gracie nodded, “The mightiest. In the Torah, David was the greatest warrior in the world he lived in, maybe of all time, and I can’t tell you how many times he cried. If you don’t let God attend to your heart once in a while, the breaking just goes on until it stops working, and then you lose faith.”

  Luke nodded. As a kid who intensely sought after God he knew Gracie was right. Maybe he’d secretly believed that he couldn’t lose a fight with the infected, and he’d learned to draw his courage from that false hope. The bottom line was that his life wasn’t his own, and he and Gracie had both given themselves to the war until it was won or they died fighting.

  “Somehow I forgot,” he murmured.

  “Listen, baby,” Gracie soothingly explained, “we don’t have to exterminate every flesh-eater in the world to declare victory. Kill Barnes, disperse the hunters back into packs we can deal with, and we’ll figure out a new way to live. I know you’ll go on fighting—in fact, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t. But we can marry and have a home base, and every now and then I’ll stay there for nine months and pop out a little Luke.” She smiled broadly and continued, “But we need to practice, a lot, before we make our first little Luke!”

  He laughed aloud. “All right, all right, you’ve convinced me to believe in the cause again. Now let’s go find some breakfast before I try to convince you it’s time to try that practice you’re talking about . . .”

  After breakfast Jack asked Luke and Gracie to go walking with him. Since the two hadn’t let go of one another since she’d arrived, Jack knew they would be a package deal for a while. They found a relatively quiet place on the bridge where the wind wasn’t so bad.

  “Either of you two have any idea what’s up with David?” Jack asked.

  “What do you mean?” Gracie looked from Jack to Luke. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s just weirder than usual,” Jack replied. “Last night, he says he needs to talk to me, tells me I need to be careful, that my life isn’t my own anymore, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Well, you are the leader of the resistance,” Luke pointed out. “You’re like the symbol of humanity’s stand against the infected. Maybe he’s worried that everything will fall apart if something happens to you. And he might be right.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I’m not planning on dying any time soon, but if something does happen, there are scores of strong, experienced leaders who can take my place.” Jack looked at Luke and cocked an eyebrow. “Wait a minute, are you holding something back? Are you having one of your feelings about this? Is that why you were so pessimistic yesterday?”

  Staring out at the wide Mississippi, Luke decided to be bluntly honest. “No special feelings, just reality. You were at Brandenburg, Jack, same as me. I was at Pickwick. Barnes used the same tactics there as he did in Kentucky. He has more than enough bodies to absorb every bomb we explode, strand of wire we run, bullet we fire, or spear we thrust. Then, when we can no longer resist, he sends tens of thousands more to finish us off. You have to know as well as I do that we can’t keep the horde from the wall, and once they get there, we definitely can’t keep them from coming over.”

  Jack pursed his lips and considered Luke’s explanation. “Sounds as if you and the 1st Utah made an epic stand at that dam. What if we had managed to get five thousand men up there instead of five hundred?”

  “The end result would have been the same, but the death toll would have been higher on both sides.”

  Jack took a moment to mull that answer over before he went on. “Okay, let’s say you’re right about that. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems as if there had to be some magic number for the humans to hold that dam. I don’t think we need to equal Barnes’ numbers, and I know you don’t either, so how many fighters do we need to destroy the horde?”

  Luke tried doing some math in his head, but there were other factors to consider in addition to numbers. “On the world’s largest football field, maybe a third of what he has. At a funnel zone like the dam, maybe a fifth—I know that seems high, but people tire and hunters don’t. Here at Vicksburg, no number can hold that wall indefinitely; the hunters will eventually have a wider platform than us and just push us off the top. Holding the ground according to your plan—which is a good plan, by the way—we need a fourth or fifth of his number if we fight hard and smart. But again, it’ll come down to the wall.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “That low?”

  Luke shrugged, “If I was Barnes I’d continue to round up thousands of infected. Send those forces in first to use up our bombs, wire, and bullets. Then send in his elite monsters, the ones he’s had the longest. We hurt that group at Brandenburg and Pickwick, but I believe he still has close to a hundred thousand prime hunters to attack Vicksburg with. And they keep getting smarter. They avoid our blows and grab for our weapons now, just like Carter said.”

  Jack stared at Luke intently. “So if we force him to use up the riff-raff getting through our traps and funnel-zones, we’ll still have to fight his best troops with our phalanx.”

  Luke nodded, “We’ll be outnumbered at least ten to one there, and even if every one of us dies in that phalanx, there’ll still be several tens of thousands to take the walls on the bridge. I just can’t see, after all the losses we’ve already absorbed, how the human race can afford to lose its strongest, bravest, and most capable people in this battle.”

  “So what would you have us do, Luke? We’ve all agreed that we can’t wait Barnes out—that he’ll only get stronger with time. I’ve got thousands of people from all over America here, now, willing to make a fight of it.”

  Luke just shook his head, “They have no idea what they’re volunteering to do, and you know it.”

  “How many soldiers do have a good idea of what they’re getting into, in any battle?” Jack argued.

  “Stop!” Gracie nearly shouted. “Just stop.”

  Both men looked at the furious young woman with open-mouthed shock, so she took a deep breath and continued.

  “We have to fight, Luke, so help Jack figure out a way to stop Barnes without getting all our soldiers killed. Jack, every time Luke mentions the possibility of stopping this horde of infected he might as well be talking about defying gravity or something. We both know he isn’t stupid or a coward, so what has him in such a defeatist frame of mind?”

  Jack was the first to gather his wits and reply. “With over a hundred thousand prime hunters pushing in a certain direction, we haven’t figured out a way to keep from being overrun. They smash into a wall until the bodies are stacked high enough for the others to climb over. They can run and fight almost indefinitely while we tire and weaken. They’re learning how to duck and avoid our blows, basically still evolving, and we don’t know how far they’ll develop. Even at Pickwick Dam, where the hunters were forced to funnel into a column six or seven abreast, they still eventually pushed a five hundred-strong phalanx into retreat. If we could take out all the helicopters, or if we had a way to use the ones we’ve captured to redirect the hunters, it might be different, but right now that’s not an option. The bottom line is, we don’t know how to stop them.”

  Gracie had calmed down, and she nodded once, curtly, before turning to Luke. “And you, how do we stop them without getting everyone killed?”

  Luke just looked at her helplessly until Gracie stomped her foot, grabbed h
is arm, and shook him gently. “No! Tell me how we can do this.”

  Luke bit his lip for a moment. “Build a series of berms on the open ground where we’re gonna use the phalanx. Every time we pull back we’ll have a shorter line to defend and continue to hold the advantage of higher ground.”

  “More,” Gracie demanded.

  “Make sure we have a viable retreat option available at the river’s edge—don’t make this an all or nothing fight. Hurt Barnes here, hurt him real bad, but don’t sacrifice all our soldiers to do it.”

  Gracie finally nodded, “There, was that so hard, boys? Now, I don’t know how high and strong your walls were at Brandenburg, but my limited understanding of physics leads me to believe that the hunters won’t succeed here just by doubling their effort. These walls are twice as high, right?”

  Without waiting for an answer she continued musing over the walls. “The higher the hunters have to climb, the more difficult it will be for them to use the corpses of their pack-mates as a stable ladder to scale the wall.”

  “So we shouldn’t necessarily give up on the walls yet?” Luke prodded.

  Gracie wasn’t listening; she was looking intently at the wall in the distance. Her brow furrowed in thought as Jack and Luke wisely decided to leave her alone for a moment. They had learned during their months together that Gracie was a literal genius, able to see through many problems other people just couldn’t seem to solve.

  Without taking her eyes from the walls she called out in a distracted tone, “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Picture a pyramid, just like the ones at Giza.”

  “Okay, I’m seeing a pyramid,” Jack played along.

  Gracie finally looked at the two men. “Luke, you seeing a pyramid?”

  “Yeah, babe, I see one.”

  She turned back to her view of the wall. “Now turn the pyramid to the left, but stop the turn when the ridge is facing you.”

  “Okay,” Jack agreed, followed by Luke a moment later.