by Dirk Patton
Soon the sheer volume of the herd had pressed to the wall again and we had to repeat the napalm attack. The second stack reached the center of the wall and kept moving east as Jim Roberts and his crew worked without pause. As I watched the results of the napalm from atop a newly installed container I reflexively ducked when there was a thunderous explosion to my right and behind the wall. I spun my head to see the fire truck and trailer full of gasoline fully engulfed in a massive fireball. The defenders on the wall in front of and 30 yards to either side were immediately consumed by the fire, other shooters to the right and left of the fire were running for their lives along the metal containers. One of them slipped on the rain slicked metal and skidded over the wall into a thousand waiting hands.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked no one in particular.
“Lightning strike.” Rachel answered me. She had been standing to my left and facing that direction when the explosion had occurred.
I looked up at the sky, rain washing across my face and said a few choice words. Focusing back on the task at hand I called ready reaction force Delta and sent them to help plug the whole in the defensive line the explosion had created. To my left the other truck finished spraying its load of gasoline and out of the corner of my eye I saw another flare arc across the heads of the infected before igniting a large swath of the herd. I only watched the fire for a moment before looking back in the direction of the explosion. Not only had we lost a lot of shooters caught in the fireball, we’d lost the lights on the fire truck. That quadrant of the battle was now barely lit by light from the fires and what little spilled over from the larger truck directly to my rear. I sent Rachel to tell the firemen to move that truck 50 yards to the right. She passed one of the football players that was an ammo runner and he came directly up to me, panting, soaked and looking exhausted.
“Major, Mr. Hawkins asked me to tell you that we’ve only got about five minutes of ammo left, then we’re out.” I nodded, thanked him and turned back to watch the herd press forward as he raced off. Fuck me, was there ever going to be any good news?
I got on the radio with the NCOs and told them to pull half their shooters off the line to conserve ammo. They weren’t happy about it, many expressing their displeasure the way only an NCO can, but they did what I told them to do and there was a noticeable drop in the volume of fire. More napalm was mixed and used and more gas was sprayed from the fire truck and ignited. Without the fire we would have fallen long ago, but even with it we were only delaying the inevitable. The infected continued to press in and pile up at the base of the wall. Leaning out to check I was not happy to see they were above the point where the upper containers sat on the lower, which meant they were more than 10 feet off the pavement. The rain was finally slackening and the thunder was moving away, now more of a rumble than a sharp crack from every lightning bolt.
A few minutes later Jim Roberts and his crew placed the last container to make a full second row and he drove his forklift over beside the larger fire truck and honked the horn to get my attention. I turned to see him gesturing with a walkie talkie and dug the one his kid had brought me earlier out of my pocket.
“…last one. What’s next? Want us to start a third row?” I caught most of his transmission. Turning to Rachel I asked her to call Sergeant Jackson on the police radio she had to check on the status of the evacuation. It took her a couple of tries to get a response.
“We need another hour.” Jackson shouted over the crowd noise on his end. I had Rachel tell him he had half an hour which she did then stuffed the radio back in her pocket.
“Let’s start a third, Jim.” I said into the radio. “This time split your crew and start at the ends, working your way in. We’ve got to hold for at least another hour so that train can get out of here. Any way you guys can move faster? Are there more forklifts?”
“There’s plenty more forklifts, but I don’t have guys to drive them. I lost a lot of good people to this shit.”
“If I find you drivers that know how to operate a forklift can they operate these monsters, or is there something special about them?” I was starting to feel a glimmer of hope. Surely there were some guys here that had driven a forklift before.
“Nothing special other than just how damn big they are and how careful you have to be with a load this big and heavy, but considering the alternative I’ll take anyone that can drive.”
“Stand by.” I lowered the radio I was using to talk to Jim and raised the radio to put a call out to all the NCOs. “I need forklift drivers. Now. Find me 10 bodies that have driven a forklift before.” I repeated myself a couple of times to make sure all the NCOs heard the call over the weapons fire and screams and snarls of the infected.
Soon a handful of men were trotting towards me and I waved them down the ladder and pointed at Jim, still sitting in the idling forklift. Eight men wound up climbing on and clinging to the forklift as Jim hit the throttle and roared off back to the rail yard. One of them was the burly man I’d had the confrontation with earlier and I was glad I hadn’t shot him. I didn’t think we had time to build a third row the complete length of the wall, but if we could get sections of it raised to 30 feet and concentrate the infected into more of a choke point we might be able to hold them off a little longer.
Chapter 35
The extra drivers helped speed up construction of the wall, but not by as much as I’d hoped. Their inexperience with the sheer size and weight of the loads they were handling slowed them down. One of them managed to lose a container off his forks as he was driving to the wall and precious time was wasted getting the obstruction out of the road so the work could proceed. Despite the issues, 12 drivers still got more containers from point A to point B in the same amount of time and the wall quickly started growing to 30 feet from the far edges in. The infected kept pushing forward and piling up on top of the bodies of the ones we were killing as well as crushing other living infected under them in their frantic desire to reach us.
The second fire truck’s pump failed, most likely due to running something as highly corrosive as gasoline through it. We were now limited to filling jugs with our home made napalm and dumping it over the wall on the heads of the infected. This helped, but we no longer had a way to knock down any of the bodies farther out that were pressing in. As the wall rose and moved in I had the NCOs start pulling their shooter off and back to ground level. Ammunition was collected and redistributed to those that were still on the wall fighting. The shooters that came off the wall took the opportunity to drink water and eat some food that had been scavenged from a large grocery store a couple of blocks down the road behind us.
The forklifts finished placing another section of wall and roared off to bring more containers. We now had a 30 foot wall running in from each edge, but the center section was still 20 container lengths short of being raised. 800 feet of only 20 feet of wall. I stepped in between two shooters and could see the grasping hands of the infected only a foot below the edge. We weren’t going to make it. I had halted the napalm. It had become ineffective as we could only burn the infected closest to the wall and the herd had now piled up to the point that it seemed we were just making an easier path for those in the rear to climb forward on top of the burned bodies. I grabbed the police radio from Rachel and called Jackson to check on the status of the evacuation.
“One train is gone, Major.” We’re loading the second one. Had a problem when some people resisted being loaded into livestock cars, but I got them in and we’re loading up the last of the hospital right now. Ten minutes at the most.”
“Copy. I want you and everyone else on that train when it pulls out. If the last one is ready I’ve got one last trick to delay the infected so all the defenders can make a run for it and get out. Do you have an engineer that will be waiting with that third train for us?”
“10-4, I do. Rick Simmons is already in the engine and waiting. There’s half a dozen livestock cars hooked up, doors open and waiting for you.”
“Copy that. Thank you. Call when your train is pulling out.”
Handing the radio back to Rachel I looked around for the forklifts but they weren’t back yet. Glancing back to the front I saw fingertips brushing the top edge. We were in a bad spot now. If we didn’t shoot then the infected would grab on to the top edge of the containers and start climbing up into the midst of the shooters. If we kept shooting them we were just creating another layer of the pile for the ones in back to climb on and get closer to us. Not shooting just wasn’t in my DNA. Raising the radio I called for a couple of the units that had already come off the wall to come back up and fill in the open space between the shooters that were still fighting. They came running, and started plugging themselves into the line. The volume of firing increased and the infected were beaten back a few inches. Not much, but every inch we won was more time for our escape.
Horns sounded behind me as a convoy of forklifts rolled up. Another 12 containers arrived, ready to go into the wall. The NCOs coordinated moving their shooters out of the way as each new container went into place, but it was a slow process. We had a lot of shooters in a shrinking area, but the NCOs did a good job and in only a few minutes the 800 foot gap had been reduced to 320 feet. I watched with satisfaction as the containers thumped into place, several infected females that had made the leap onto the top of the wall when the shooters pulled back crushed under the massive steel boxes. That satisfaction quickly went away as I started hearing voices calling out that they were out of ammo.
Running up and down the remaining gap in the wall I started pulling the ones out of ammo off the wall and sending them to the train station. If they didn’t have any more bullets there wasn’t anything to be gained by keeping them here. Rachel was circulating through the volunteers on the ground below and sending everyone that was not actively involved in the defense to the train as well. Dog was still on the wall with me, shadowing my footsteps as I ran back and forth. Grabbing one of the shooters that was out of ammo and on his way to a ladder I sent Dog with him to get carried down. Dog was talented and a hell of a fighter, but as good as he was there was no way he could climb down a 20 foot ladder. He gave me a hurt look but allowed the man, with some help, to lift him up on his shoulders and secure him in place with a donated shirt that tied him to the man’s body. The guy probably thought I was a moron for having let Dog come up on the wall in the first place, but he scampered down the ladder without complaint, Dog tied to him and looking at me with hurt eyes that I was sending him away.
The infected kept pressing forward, and they now seemed to be surging like the tide. One moment hands would be over the edge and trying to grab on, the next they would disappear below. Like ‘the tide’ was a good analogy as the hands always came back and were a little higher each time. The shooters had slowed their firing and were now only shooting infected that made a successful grab onto the edge of the container. Unfortunately the number of them that were doing this was increasing and the number of defenders laying down their rifles when they fired their last round was also increasing. We needed five more minutes, but we weren’t going to get it. Two partial crates of grenades were sitting on the top of the wall and I started pulling pins and tossing them over the edge, hoping to disrupt the push against the wall even for a few moments. The effort was partially successful and we gained probably another 30 seconds. The damn things flowed into and over any space created by the explosions so quickly that the hundreds killed by my efforts weren’t even significant.
Out of grenades I did a quick count and saw that we were down to about 100 shooters that still had ammo. This was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The distribution of ammo had been fairly equal and these last 100 defenders had been shooters that picked their targets and made their shots count. They hadn’t wasted ammo on body shots that did little to slow or stop the infected, they had aimed and made every round count. I was willing to bet every single one of them was either ex-Army or ex-Marine. We had momentarily settled into a static battle, the defenders shooting the infected that were in position to breach our defenses as fast as they arrived. If only we had a few thousand more rounds of ammo we could hold static for a few minutes, but wishing wouldn’t get me anything.
A forklift horn sounded from the rear again and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I turned to look. That sigh turned into a scream of warning that no one could hear. A large pack of infected females was racing down Forrest Avenue from the east, heading directly towards the lead forklift driven by Jim Roberts.
Chapter 36
The females had apparently worked their way through the rugged terrain at the east end of the wall and with the defenders having been pulled off due to the wall being raised and an ammo shortage there had been no one there to stop them. I raised my rifle to sight in on the lead infected, lowering it with a curse a moment later. They were well over 400 yards away and moving fast. A 400 yard shot with an M4 rifle is certainly possible, but at night from a standing position at a fast moving target; I knew I couldn’t make the shots and would end up only wasting valuable ammo. Rachel had noticed me aiming the rifle and turned to look at what I had seen, also raising hers when she saw the infected. She quickly lowered the rifle and started running towards the approaching forklift, waving her arms over her head and pointing at the threat.
Jim finally got the message, but it was too late. I saw the forklift swerve as he tried to avoid them, but they were too close. Three of them leapt onto the side of the machine and swarmed the driver’s seat, but Jim wasn’t there. When they leapt he had bailed out the far side of the open cab. Unfortunately the swerve he had started was the new path the forklift followed. Despite a deadman switch for safety that applied the brakes automatically if a driver’s foot stopped pressing it, the giant machine with its massive load couldn’t stop on a dime. Slowing, but still moving at a good pace the forklift carried the container directly into a fueling area of the truck stop where we had been getting the gas for the napalm and fire trucks.
The lower leading edge of the 40 foot long container made contact with two islands full of fuel pumps at the same time, and even though the forklift was braking the forward momentum of all that mass was still great enough to shear all the pumps off their mounts and shove them along the ground in front of it before finally coming to a full stop. For a moment the scene was frozen in place, nothing happening, then I saw the first flames. I started to open my mouth to scream a warning but before I could even form a word the fire found the fuel in the underground storage tanks. The explosion was unbelievable. I’ve been on battlefields where both artillery and air dropped ordnance – bombs – were detonating, yet I’ve never experienced anything close to the force of this blast.
The entire truck stop, the container, the forklift and everything and everyone within a 100 yard radius just vanished in a searing ball of flame. This was probably comparable to the fuel explosion that had happened on the flight line at Arnold AFB, but I had been much farther away from that one. This one knocked me on my back and I would have slid over the edge of the wall and into the sea of infected if one of the defenders hadn’t grabbed me. Sitting up I stared at the column of fire and smoke shooting up from the explosion, then remembered to look for Rachel and Dog. The fire did a good job of lighting up the whole area and it didn’t take me long to spot them. Rachel was on her back, certainly having been knocked back by the pressure wave from the blast, Dog standing next to her. She wasn’t moving, but neither was anyone else.
When the explosion had ripped through the night all of the shooters on the wall had stopped firing and turned to see what happened. They were still staring at the inferno, but the infected hadn’t been distracted and were using the lull in our defense to push forward. Several females made it onto the roof and fell on the prone shooters, ripping into flesh with nails and teeth. They were quickly joined by more and I raised my rifle and started firing into faces only a few feet away. I was screaming for the shooters to get back in the fight, but t
hey were probably as deaf from the blast as I was. Slowly they started turning back to the front, but we had given too much momentum to the infected. More shooters were falling to female leapers and all along the gap hands were now solidly grasping the edge.
“Fall back!” I screamed, running up and down the line. Every few feet I was shooting an infected that was either already on the wall or about to clear the edge. Quickly the remaining shooters scrambled backwards and started rushing down the ladders, a couple of them slipping and falling to the asphalt below where their screams of pain were added to the overwhelming sounds of the fire and the battle. Soon there was only me and three other shooters remaining on the wall, clustered in a tight group at the top of one of the ladders, facing a swiftly growing number of infected. I looked over my shoulder at the fire captain sitting high in the air at the top of the ladder, saw him looking at me and made a slashing motion with my arm. Seconds later a tightly focused stream of very high pressure water started jetting out of the chrome nozzle that was mounted at the top of the ladder with him.
The water pressure was so great that it not only knocked the infected down, it sent them cartwheeling through the air and back out into the herd. The captain controlled the placement of the water jet like a maestro and even though we got a good soaking from water splattering off of infected bodies he never touched us. In a few seconds he had bought us enough room to start down the ladder. One by one the shooters disappeared over the edge until I was the last defender standing on the wall. Waiting for the ladder to clear, I didn’t want to push my luck by adding my weight to that of the three men already on it, I shot five more infected on one side while the water jet swept through dozens of them and sent them tumbling. Finally clear I stepped onto it, grasped the outside of the ladder and moved my feet outside the rails and started a fast slide 20 feet to the ground. I had forgotten about my damaged hands, and I had just started the slide when they reminded me that they weren’t one hundred percent. Somehow I managed to hold on, but descended way faster than I wanted and hit hard enough to lose my balance and fall flat on my back. Fuck that hurt.
