Their work went on hour after weary hour. As a plus, wielding melee weapons the way they were was hard exercise and they were able to bear the near freezing temperatures better than they had. As a negative, death was so, so close; at best it was just over an arm’s length away; sometimes it was inches away.
Grey shared the fate of his men. Wherever the fighting was thickest, he would charge into battle wielding the saber that had been passed from man to man, each quickly discovering that the blade was too dull for the job of killing in a quick strike. Whenever he took a break, Grey honed the blade endlessly.
The fight was deadly to friend and foe alike. Even on the sloping hills above the river it wasn’t easy. Each man had to rely on the man higher up on the hill as they soon grew too tired to strike at any angle other than downwards. It took nerves of steel to ignore a creature coming at them with their mouth agape and their teeth slashing in.
Still, nothing beat the river for outright terror. No fire could be built behind the line of men, and with the dark, the creatures were horrifying shadows that suddenly morphed into real terrors, always just within arm’s reach. Grey fought here, exclusively.
Hours went by and every stroke of the saber was a torture for him. His soaking wet uniform clung to his body, pulling tight to his arms and shoulders, restricting his swings and adding what felt like fifty pounds to his body. He slogged back and forth through the river, fighting until his muscles ached. By the time the moon finally peeked over the mountain, he was thinking he wouldn’t be able to go on much longer.
And then a scream erupted. So far, there had been a few angry shouts and some curses at near misses mixed with the moans of the undead, but they were infrequent. The scream was blood curdling. It snapped Grey’s head around. He was standing where he had thought the line was the weakest, where the men needed him most—he was wrong.
Chapter 8
Private First Class Paul Wesley
The battle at the River Styx became a test of human endurance, both physically and mentally. It was beyond medieval. It was an endless slaughter punctuated by what felt like the briefest respite spent in front of a fire. These respites weren’t long enough to make a dint in the exhaustion of the men. All the men were feeling the strain except, of course, for Captain Grey, who was in the thick of every battle.
He seemed to spend half his time in the river, swinging the saber until it went as dull as a butter knife and began to bounce off the skulls of the undead. He would then look at his weapon as if it were an old friend who had betrayed him by not keeping up with his inhuman pace.
PFC Wesley could commiserate with the sword. He was sure he wasn’t going to keep up the frantic pace of the fight. He had seen nothing like it. The stiffs slithered and crawled over the mound in a relentless wave of grey bodies and always they came at the soldiers mouth first, showing their cracked and fissured teeth; it was the stuff nightmares were made of.
Things had been bad when they had first started banging away with their M4s. The killing was ugly, and the red-brown water they stood thigh-deep in had been worse. Then the captain had ordered them forward so that the killing was up close in ‘living’ color.
That had been much worse.
What was much, much worse was when they had been told to switch out their guns for sticks and hunks of metal. “What the hell?” Wesley whispered to the man next to him, a tall ginger with a drooping nose like the beak of a parakeet. “They don’t expect us to fight with this stuff?”
The ginger’s name was Kaslowski; he stood a head taller over Wesley, who was built along the lines of a fire hydrant. Kaslowski, who went by the abbreviation: Kas, bent low to speak into Wesley’s ear: “Trust the captain. He knows what he’s doing. He’s probably conserving ammo.”
That was a scary thought; in Wesley’s mind, conserving ammo equated to a shortage of ammo. When it was his turn to pick from the remaining weapons, he jumped at the opportunity to take one of the table legs. It seemed to be the sturdiest of the rather pathetic weapons arrayed before them. His friend Kas grabbed an aluminum bat that seemed to have been made for a little leaguer and had asked in a beggy sort of whisper to trade. Wesley wished he had.
The table leg had been the better weapon…at first. It was so heavy that it could cave in a skull with ease. Unfortunately, the weight of it had a serious drawback—after an hour Wesley was gasping for breath and his arms felt like they were weighed down by lead. The five-inch screws jutting out of the head of the weapon had a bad habit of snagging either in the remnants of clothing or in the loose skin of the zombies, causing Wesley to have to expend as much energy pulling the weapon free as he did in the initial strike. On top of that, each time he hit home with his weapon, it bit into his frozen hands until he had blisters growing on top of his blisters.
His grip on the table leg grew weaker and weaker and he was forced, time and again to step back and ask his friend Kas to cover him as he readjusted his hands on the awkward hunk of wood. With its beveled edge and its gentle curve it was just not designed to be wielded as a weapon.
Kas didn’t understand. He would step up because they were friends, but he would do so with a look. It was a look that nagged at Wesley as much as his running blisters. They were Soldiers of the Valley and that was supposed to mean something. It was why Wesley went at it long after he should’ve asked to be pulled from the line. His pride was greater than his pain and weariness. It was so great that it ended up killing him.
“How much...longer...till...we switch?” he asked Kas through chattering teeth. Whenever they were in the river, it felt like time slowed to a crawl.
“Eight minutes,” Kas gasped before pounding a zombie in the head. The first blow stunned the creature and dented its skull. It took a second blow to send shards of bone into the thing’s near useless brain.
Wesley took his own swing at yet another zombie; the impact nearly jarring the table leg out of his frozen fingers. When he looked down at his hands, they seemed welded into the clawed position needed to hold the wood. He tried straightening the right one out but it wouldn’t bend. “Fuck,” he said as he waited on the next stiff. With the mound being so large now, they came every five seconds or so.
The next one; however, was fast and it was there in two. It was also a particularly virile looking zombie and yet Wesley felt no fear. Part of his lack of fear was exhaustion, which deadened his emotions and part was the knowledge that no matter how big it was it was just a stiff. It was nothing to fear as long as Wesley stuck to his training and his natural skills.
It crawled over the pile of bodies, crabbing eternally on, pushed forward by the relentless force of those behind and drawn by its greedy hunger. Wesley took aim and swung the table leg. The swing bore little resemblance to his first swing, which had been a Babe Ruth-like homerun swing. This swing was halting and because of the ache in his hands and his exhaustion, it lacked the finishing power. Worse, it was ill-aimed. The pile of corpses was uneven and a three inch drop was all the difference between a perfect hit square on the top of the cranium and a miss with deadly repercussions.
The leg glanced off the temple of the beast, tore its ear half off before the screws jutting from the varnished wood bit good and hard into the zombie’s shoulder. The strike hurt Wesley far more than it did the zombie. Pain zinged up his wrists, loosening his grip even more, and thus it took only a spasming buck from the beast to wrest the table leg from his hands.
For the moment he was weaponless; this didn’t cause the scream that had Grey lunging through the water as fast as he could push his exhausted body.
Unlike so many cowards outside the valley who wore the uniform but who owed their continued existence to running and hiding, Wesley was a real soldier, a veteran of countless battles against what felt like infinite numbers of undead. His main weapon might have been wrested from his grip, but he wasn’t close to being panicked. Quick as a wink, his right hand went for his Ka-bar. It was out, flashing silver in the weak light of the fires that th
e civilians were keeping alight just behind the lines.
With confidence borne of skill and experience, he sunk the seven-inch blade up to the hilt right into the temple of the zombie. It struck home with a solid thunking sound as bone gave way to the sharpest metal.
“Cover me, Kas,” he said with an almost casual air, to his friend, because why wouldn’t he be casual? Hadn’t he fought this fight in one of its many permutations a hundred times before? The icy river was different, but his exhaustion was familiar and the zombie with its grey skin and the foul, evil hunger in its eyes was ever unchanging. He had been here before and he expected to be here ten years hence, doing the same thing: killing so that others could live free.
Yet, this time was different and he was the last to realize it. Again, there was a casualness to him as his left hand went to the forehead of the zombie to pull the blade free, only as he extended his hand, he saw that he had, for the first time, missed his mark. By some quirk, or by some slight movement of the beast, or some unforeseen shift in the pile of dead or some evil intrigue brought upon him by the constantly moving water of the river, the blade had not pierced the thin bone of its temple. Instead it had traversed through the thing’s ear at a downward angle to come out below its jaw line.
What would have been debilitating to any human, barely fazed the zombie. For all intents and purposes, the blade had all the effect on the zombie as if Wesley had stuck a feather in its ear.
Where Wesley was slowed by confusion and the drag of many hours of fighting in the line, the zombie was just as full of its vile vigor as when it first woke in its undead state. It grabbed Wesley’s left hand with both of its hands and before Wesley knew it, three of his fingers were in the thing’s mouth, and ragged, diseased teeth were crushing down with unstoppable power. The pain was sharp, unbelievably sharp; however, the realization that he was now a dead man was what caused him to come unglued. He pulled his hand away, saw the raw stumps and simply lost it.
His mind blanked and he reacted.
Reacting was one of those things his captain had long preached against. A soldier reacting to his environment was a soldier one step behind, a soldier one second too late. Captain Grey preached making the enemy react to you.
Wesley was too far gone down the roads of panic and exhaustion. He pulled his hand away, inadvertently yanking the zombie toward him. It came down off the mound with a splash and promptly disappeared. The waters, once clear and clean, were now a murky soup of blood, chunks of zombie, and half submerged corpses.
“It’s in there!” Wesley screamed at the top of his lungs. “It’s in there somewhere!”
He tried to run but his foot slipped on the round, slimed-over rocks and he sunk up to his chin which only had his spazzing worse. He could think of nothing except getting away. The soldiers around him were also backing away from the thrashing man and the turbulent waters. A zombie under the water was a dangerous thing. It was likely turned around or upside down and would bite the first thing it came in contact with.
Four men backing from the line would doom their position if things weren’t fixed quickly. Just at that moment, Wesley didn’t care about the line. There was a zombie in the water and it was worse than any shark that had ever lived. As he struggled to get away, he ran into Captain Grey who picked him up out of the water with one hand.
“What the hell’s going on?” he growled.
“There’s a z-zombie in the w-water,” Wesley said. He went to point but the stumps of his fingers drew all of his attention and he could only gape at his hand, his mind tipping over. The other soldiers were pointing in the general direction of where Wesley had been standing.
Grey barked: “There’s going to be a dozen of them in the water if you don’t do your jobs.” Dropping Wesley, he stabbed his saber into the river bed, pulled the M4 off his back and shot it six times at the slithering undead crawling over the mound. Six more corpses were added to the mound. He then reslung the weapon and rearmed himself with the saber.
Boldly he stepped forward, running the sword through the water until it struck something meaty. “Here it is,” he said, lifting the zombie out of the water. He had speared it under the armpit and now it wiggled at the end of the metal as it tried to thrust itself further onto the sword to get at Grey. It was a hideous sight.
Wesley found himself unable to look away, unable to think past the terrible fact that the zombie had his fingers in its belly. He had the irrational thought that they were still good and that all it would take to reattach them was to snap them back in place.
“Kas!” Grey snapped. “What are you waiting for? Kill this thing.”
“Careful of its stomach,” Wesley hissed. Its stomach; that’s where his fingers were, of course. Kas stepped forward and brought the dented up aluminum bat down with one vicious stroke and stove in the thing’s head.
Without regard to the fingers that were likely still wriggling inside of it, Grey flung the now dead zombie into the river. “Get back in line, men. And let’s try to keep our heads on straight. We don’t want to frighten the civilians with...” He stopped in midsentence as he saw Wesley’s bleeding hand. Grey’s hard look softened at once and he whispered: “Oh, holy hell.”
“I’m so sorry,” Wesley said, suddenly realizing that not only had he lost his fingers, he had let his captain down. “I didn’t mean it, sir. I-I missed. The table leg got caught and...and then the knife...”
“Hey, don’t worry about that stuff now,” Grey said, gently taking Wesley’s arm.
He began to lead Wesley out of the water, but Wesley stopped and pointed at the corpse. “It still has my fingers. We should get them back.”
“Let’s get you to the fire, first and then I’ll go back and get them.”
“But it’s not yet time for the fire, sir,” Wesley replied, stopping again. Now that the finger-eating zombie was dead, Wesley was beginning to feel like himself again, all except for the shakes that had entered his chest and limbs. It was adrenaline at having such a close call, he told himself and not the virus. “I need to get back in the line. It’s not fair to everyone else that I get to go warm up early. In fact, I should be pulling a double for messing up. That’s what I’ll do.”
He started to pull back from Grey’s grip, but his captain was far too strong. “No, let’s get you to the fire.”
Wesley was propelled to one of the fires further back where the civilians rested when they had a moment. There was only a single girl at the fire and she seemed dressed in shadows. Only her pale face stood out from her dark clothes. She had been looking sleepy; however, when she saw it was Captain Grey coming, she perked up. “We’re going to be pulled out of the line in two hours and given a six-hour rest. 12th Company is going to take our place.”
“Our place?” Grey asked. “Since when did you join the Army?”
As he spoke, he helped Wesley down. Out of habit, Wesley stuck his hands out to the fire. The left, with its three little stumps dripping blood, fascinated him to such a degree that he could barely follow what was going on around him. The two spoke for a bit, then there was a long quiet and then the girl seemed concerned with Wesley, and his captain asked if he was in pain.
“I don’t feel anything, sir,” Wesley answered, hiding his hand close to his body. “It’s the cold water. I just need a couple of minutes to warm up, then I’ll be good to go.”
“Get him some food and water,” the captain said to the girl.
Wesley shook his head. “No food. I-I don’t want any food. And just a sip or two of water. I don’t need any more than that. It should last me until...” Wesley stopped speaking, abruptly. He was having the darnedest time coming to grips with what was happening to him. His mind was swirling with images of the zombie and its grinning mouth and the blood...his blood in its teeth. The image kept coming, over and over again. Then he would lift up his hand and wiggle the little stumps.
“How am I going to fight?” he asked his hand at one point. He felt like he was cracking
up. Time was getting away from him as well. At one point he looked up from his hand and found himself alone at the fire, at another point the girl was suddenly there with a water bottle filled with brown liquid.
“Hot cocoa,” she said.
He tried to push it away. “I have to go,” he told her. “I’m needed in the line.”
She shoved the bottle at him and there was an edge to her voice when she said: “Drink it. Those are your orders.”
It was good and the heat of it went right to his heart. He hid his mangled hand from himself by stuffing it into his BDU blouse. He thought he was ready to go and he looked around for Captain Grey in order to demand to be sent back to the line. There was a constant motion all around him. Civilians, long lines of them came and went. They carried heavy burdens: wood and wiring, boxes and crates. They were everywhere but, for what seemed like ages, there was no sign of Captain Grey.
He finally came back, carrying a man across his shoulders. When he laid the man down, Wesley leaned back away from him with a gasp. The soldier’s face was half-eaten away: his nose was nothing but a bloody hole, he was missing an eye, and his right cheek had been torn off so that an entire row of teeth were visible.
“Who is this?” Grey was demanding. At first Wesley thought his captain was asking him and so he tried to make out the mauled soldier’s features, but found it impossible. But Grey wasn’t talking to him. The captain was on the radio. “Horner? This is Red River Leader. Where’s the Goat Man? I need to talk to him.”
There was a pause in which the chewed up soldier breathed out bubbles of blood and then Grey was speaking again. “This is Red River Leader. I need eyes on my position ASAP.”
The radio crackled: “Four minutes.”
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 7
