by Karpa, Boris
- “The tube!” – the Advisor shouted – “Give me the tube!”
When Arthur did not react, he simply wrenched one of the tubes out of his arms. – “Open your mouth! Close your ears!”
“What?” – Arthur said.
“Your mouth! Open it!”
Arthur opened his mouth wide, as if he was trying to swallow an apple whole. He propped the second tube on the roof vertically, grabbed it with his knees, and put his hands over his ears – and just on time.
Martin held the tube on his shoulder, pressed a lever on it – and it extended forward, its front opening. Arthur realized now what it was – a rocket launcher. And even as the realization came to him, the advisor fired. Fire burst from both the front of the tube and its rear. The sound of the shot bludgeoned his eardrums even though his ears were covered. And, from the tube, a long smoky trail streaked out into the night, into the middle of Iron Street.
There was the sound of a powerful explosion. Those undead caught in its center were simply shredded, torn into dozens of tiny parts, and dozens more damaged or killed with the shrapnel.
“The other tube!” – Martin shouted out. Without even thinking, Arthur handed the advisor the second launcher. – “Go! Bring more tubes! Come on, Arthur, go!”
Arthur flew down the stairs – not so much running as merely letting his feet fall from step to step. Behind him, he heard the thumping sound of yet another rocket being fired, and then the distant echo of an explosion.
He ran into the armory once more. Again he grabbed two of the tube-shaped launchers, and again he rushed up the stairs.
“Leave them! Just leave them!” – Martin pointed – “Go run down and get more! Get three! Can you get three?”
Arthur rushed down, and grabbed three launchers. With a great effort he hauled them up to the guard nest – even as his friend was firing the second of the launchers he had just brought in. Three empty tubes lay at Martin's feet. As he saw his friend reach for a fourth tube, Arthur no longer needed any orders – he simply headed back down the stairs.
The rockets screamed over the fence, striking among the crowd of the living dead, tearing more and more holes in it. The loud explosions among their own rank confused the zombies – gunshots would simply attract them to the sound of the shot. But as the creatures came nearer to the sources of the explosion, they found food – not the best food but enough for the eternally hungry zombies to be somewhat distracted by it, easing the pressure off those that still held onto the roofs.
One of the crews were particularly lucky – the fire escape that the ghouls used to climb on their roof was facing the base – and therefore it faced Martin. Arthur saw it from the ground – just as he rushed off the tower for the third time – a flash on the tower, and the rocket impacting on the metal fire escape, its long trail like a glowing lance in the darkness. Then the explosion tore the staircase apart, throwing ghoul bodies and metal steps onto the ground.
A minute later, Arthur rushed back up the stairs, carrying only two of the rocket tubes. Martin looked at him, but before he could even breath out the first word of his question, Arthur already answered it: -”That's it! There's no more tubes!”
- “Ears! Mouth!” – Martin responded.
Arthur already knew what this meant. He simply crouched, getting out of the way of the tube's rear, opened his mouth and waited for the blast. A second later, the advisor simply dropped the empty tube off the tower and grabbed his apprentice by the shoulders. – “Arthur! Use your rifle! I'll be back!” – and before Arthur could say anything, Martin was already running off the tower.
The first magazine he simply dumped into the mass of ghouls teeming in the street – simply flipped the switch all the way to the end and held down the trigger. Three seconds of what sounded like never-ending clatter – and then a new magazine. And then he realized that the nearest ghoul as just a street away – just under his eye level, on a roof. A second more – and it would get at a Florentine soldier with its claws. It was the Florentine's luck that the creature was some kind of industrial worker in life. Its blaze-orange safety best was visible – even in the darkness. The first bullet tore up the vest. The creature jerked sideways, and then turned in the direction the shot had come from. Another shot – and its yellow construction helmet flew off its head. The creature collapsed like a sack of potatoes.
Another one – a woman in a long white night-gown – he shot in the leg. She fell over, and a Florentine soldier finished her off with a head shot. A third one was more difficult and took Arthur three shots before he got it right – but he had plenty of ammunition and was invulnerable on his guard tower. He fired and fired and fired, and the bolt locked back on an empty chamber, he simply dropped the magazine on the floor. There's a warehouse here with thousands of mags – all we need to do is win.
He no longer thought it could not be won. From here it was only a task for marksmanship – and he was of course not the world's best marksman but he had ammunition, and he was not alone. Already the Florentine soldier whom he's managed to save was standing at the edge of his own roof top, firing at whatever ghouls dared to approach comrades. By the time he emptied the second magazine, Arthur calmed down enough to unfold the bipod, resting it against the edge of the parapet.
And then there was light. He blinked for a second, abandoning the rifle scope. to look for its source – strange, brilliant-red light shining from above. It took him a moment to find it – a bright, red signal flare, descending slowly from the skies. And then another one lit up, right above the rooftop fighting. And another one.
“Yo-ho, Arthur!” – Martin shouted from the ground. Arthur turned around, looking down at the advisor – and saw him there, in front of the gate, wielding a weapon unlike anything he'd seen before. It was like a revolver – but a revolver larger than many rifles, with a muzzle that you could put a live hamster into. Martin raised its muzzle skywards – and it fired with a low thumping noise. Arthur looked skywards – and saw a fourth red flare appearing.
But Arthur wasn't alone in looking at the strange, bright lights. So where the Florentine Republic soldiers, distracted momentarily from their fight. And the ghouls – ghouls were looking at them, too – transfixed completely at the strange flicker, staring from street level and roof tops at the mesmerizing gleam of the rocket flares. But... what ghouls? They were clearly zombies now.
Arthur rushed for his rifle. Standing as they were, outlined in the red light – these were easy. The first one took merely a single shot. The second he missed – and had to shoot again. But by then it did not matter. The zombies took more time to recover their attention – and by that time the Florentines were already throwing themselves at the enemy.
In ten seconds, the undead had already recovered from the shock – but in ten seconds, a lot of things had happened. Everywhere, a storm of gunfire boiled up – pistols, rifles, shotguns, every form of weapon under the earth. Arthur could have even sworn he saw a zombie – never a ghoul again – being simply thrown off the roof, falling four stories to the ground with a sickening crunch.
And then the giant revolver thumped once more. Three times in a row – and this time explosions rung in the middle of Iron Street. They did little damage – only perhaps a few of the undead creatures – but with every shot, the men on every roof cheered. And, suddenly, Arthur cheered as well.
“Yo-ho, Martin!” – he shouted – “Yo-ho! I got your lesson from this morning, Martin! I get it now! Thank you!”
Epilogue
A Year Later
10:00
On that day, Advisor Martin Schmitt invited his two best friends over. Like a year ago, there would be Earl Grey tea and biscuits – the finest inventions of mankind, said Martin Schmitt. His friends, Advisor Arthur Campbell and Mayor Theodore Jackson, tended to agree – although for some reason they watched very carefully how he made it – tea was still somewhat a luxury, and besides, nobody wanted to drink the other sorts of tea he made
unless it was an emergency – and happily, there were less and less of these around.
With the weapons and tools they recovered it had taken them several months to retake the city. Zombies – this was what they were called now – were lured out with loud noises or simply drawn to the sight of human beings. When they came out of the buildings they hid in, they were shot. Once the Florentine Republic troops learned how the creatures worked – it became only a matter of technique and coordination.
There were still issues – the dead still needed to be 'put to rest' with a shot to the head – but hope remained that in some other outpost of civilization there would be scientists that were working on resolving the problem. In part this was the reason that Mayor Jackson had made a priority of capturing the city harbor and sending out several ocean yachts to seek out other survivors.
“Trade routes, trade routes, trade routes.” – he said, looking at his cup of tea – “The Great Silk Road, the Cape Route in the Nineteenth Century, the Northern Polar Route in the early twenty-first. They are what holds civilization together. If we are to have a civilization, we need trade.”
“Now look at you, Theodore!” – Martin laughed, raising his own cup – “What a trader you've become! Rebuilding civilization with trade boats! I don't remember you talking like this when we met a year ago. Do you remember him talking like that, Arthur?”
“I don't remember you being very talkative at all,” – Theodore replied – “And yet look at you. Are you considering becoming a schoolteacher again?”
“Maybe I should. Perhaps while I wait until you rebuild civilization to some kind of working standard so I can sell off some of this real estate.”
“See, Arthur?” – Jackson turned to the seventeen-year-old – “Your elderly, wizened sensei here, is quite the trader himself, for all his jokes on my expense. I thought he was just making a crazy request when he asked for all this land and supplies – but he was making an investment in the future. Just look at this posh nice home he got out of the deal. This would be rich even back in the day.”
“An educated bet.” – Martin bounced back, before returning to sipping his tea.
“Now, Martin, don't go all short-cuts on us, here. I like the talkative Martin Schmitt a whole lot more.” – Arthur shouted out. – “What is this 'educated bet' stuff?”
“Any investment is a bet, Archie.” – Martin explained. A year later, he was the only person allowed to call the young man 'Archie'. A Florentine soldier had insisted on it a few months after the Battle of Iron Street – and was promptly challenged to a duel. Nobody had insisted on it ever again. With his own home, weapons, and a trade – and most importantly a good name of this own – Arthur was as much a Florentine citizen as anybody else.
“Any investment is a bet.” – the advisor repeated – “Nobody can know the future – when you invest in something you're just making an educated bet – in days past people invested in a company because they had good knowledge it might succeed, but of course there was always a chance of being wrong. So I bet we would win.”
“See?” – the Mayor grinned like a Cheshire cat. – “He's a trader.”
“Or a humanitarian. An English teacher, I remind you.” – for a brief moment, Martin's speech acquired a faux Oxford accent, and he held out his little finger as he took hold of the handle of his tea cup – “An English studies major who has attended a very good educational institution.”
“Yes, and what does this have to do with anything?” – the Mayor shrugged – “What knowledge did it give you?”
“I am a humanitarian. I know a little bit about humanity. I've read my Tennyson. I knew, therefore, who we are and who the zombies are – and why we were going to win out. Now, you understand, I do not mean this in the sense we were going to win the specific fight – there was of course a risk of me dying, but risks are part of the deal – if you don't take risks, you don't drink champagne, as they say. But I always knew we were going to win. And eventually Arthur learned that too. That was part of the lesson.”
“What lesson?” – Theodore turned to Arthur – “What is he talking about?”
“Every day that I studied under Martin,” – the Apprentice began to explain – “He made sure I didn't just rehearse an old skill to be better at it, but learned some kind of important lesson. Sometimes it was a brand new skill, like navigating or shooting, but sometimes it was... more of a Zen thing.”
“Gods no!” – Martin exclaimed – “I do not do Zen. Do I look to you like I have great green floppy ears and am two foot long? If I start talking about non-violence and being in touch with the inner ki – shoot me, I'm clearly a zombie.”
“At least we're clear that Martin Schmitt does not do Zen. I'm not really sure what Zen is, but if Martin says he doesn't do it, then he doesn't do it. Well then, what does Martin do?”
“I don't know. Philosophical stuff. Life wisdom. It's as important to being an Advisor as knowing to shoot and navigate.”
“It's important to everything else, too. You're not going to be an Advisor forever. One day you'll-” – Martin started out, but was interrupted by his former Apprentice.
“He's right, you know.” – Arthur nodded – “When things calmed down Martin here introduced me to a reading program. It is a nice thing, now that there's no TV and no Internet...”
“Mayor Jackson, we're looking at you as voters now,” – Martin laughed – “When are you going to get to work restoring the DNS servers and giving us a proper Internet?”
“Make it future safe, too.” – Arthur laughed – “IPv6 or bust!”
Both of the older men stared at the junior Advisor in shock. “You know IPv6?” – Martin asked first – “I certainly never taught you that.”
“I was sixteen when it started. I was not stupid when it started, Martin. You of all people should know that.”
“Pace, pace, young Campbell, you are right. But do continue. You're explaining it all better than I could.”
“That day on the guard tower, I learned a very important lesson. The ghouls – they looked human, they looked scary, but they were animals in the end. Scary animals, animals that looked unnatural, but of course they were still animals. They still didn't think, they couldn't plan traps, they couldn't use tools. They were not any worse than a natural disaster – a plague for instance. They weren't even much worse than a civil war.”
“That's true.” – the Mayor nodded.
“And humans are built to contend with nature. We dealt with worse things. Remember Smallpox?” – Arthur got up, pacing the porch – “We've killed smallpox dead. Do you remember Rinderpest?”
“What is Rinderpest? An insect?” – the Mayor replied.
“See?” – Arthur pointed a finger at Jackson. – “You don't remember Rinderpest. You know why? Because it's extinct, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Like the megafauna. Remember Martin talking about the Megafauna? It doesn't matter how huge it is, what kind of claws it has – we can fight it and we can kill it. I am telling you – I felt more threatened by the Serenity Bay people than I was by zombies. These were worse and scarier in every way.”
“Right. Right.” – the Mayor nodded.
“And you know what's more important? After it all dies out, we can build the things up. Look at you and the work you've done. Look at all the plagues, the disasters, the civil wars – even when everything was torn down around them people got up and put their world back together. And each time it was slightly better than before. Not by much, I give you, but we've moved on. That's what we do. So when you realize that? There is no end of the world. If there are two human beings somewhere on Earth, standing back to back with rifles, there's no end of the world, ever. Dealing with the zombies is not the end of the world. Just find a good perch and a gun and shoot them in the head. The Bubonic Plague was worse.”
There was a brief pause, when th
e three men said nothing. They just smiled to themselves and sipped on their sweet Earl Grey tea and ate their biscuits. Theodore dipped his in the tea, and the two Advisors ate their dry. After a while, Martin grinned and said:
“Well, you've learned more than I've taught you, Arthur. Tennyson must have been good for your soul.”
“Tennyson?” – Theodore asked – “Who is he and what does he have to do with this?”
“A poet.” – Arthur chuckled.
“I know that. But what did he write that has any bearing on this stuff?”
“It has bearing on everything.” – Martin replied. He paused, placing the empty cup on the table, and spoke calmly, staring off into the distance:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
THE END
Glossary
Advisor – A mercenary or adventurer that helps train individuals in fighting ghouls, procures various supplies from ghoul-infested areas, or helps plan raids on such areas to secure supplies. Due to the nature of their work, advisors often bear messages or minor trade goods between different groups of survivors.
Dry Storage Facility – A military facility dedicated for maintaining great amounts of military supplies – from ammunition and fuel to vehicles and aircraft – for a large-scale emergency like a global war or epidemic. Normally a very small amount of troops (as little as a few dozen) can maintain a great amount of supplies, which are intended to be used in wartime by a large quantity of rapidly-mobilized reserves.
