A human scream ripped Mark’s attention back to the attacking Infected. The main body of the horde had arrived, ghouls crammed together shoulder to shoulder spilled over the edge of the moat, clambering over the fallen corpses like cockroaches. The gap between his force and the Infected disappeared in five heartbeats, and suddenly he was haemorrhaging soldiers.
Along the line, soldiers went to automatic, forced to spray rounds at head height in an effort to cope with the numbers attacking. Claw like hands ripped unlucky soldiers out of the line into the press. Agonised screams and jets of blood told of their fate. Fingertips of the Infected were used as knives, puncturing abdomens and eyes, tearing handfuls of steaming entrails and meat to shove into ravenous mouths. These unfortunate soldiers earnt only the briefest of reprieves for their colleagues, before the Carriers turned the attentions back to the line, ripping the next soldier into a murderous embrace.
Steph gave herself over to the hell of battle, allowing the demonic voices in her mind to sate their need for violence and blood on the bodies of the Infected. She had lost her rifle long before, and now fought on with her short sword. Steph’s sanity danced at the edge, just barely managing to direct her blade against the enemy rather than the soldiers at her side. She could feel a hunger growing, a need for blood to fill her throat and stomach that would soon overpower all reason.
Soldiers were running dry of ammunition, the last of their magazines empty. Rifles were repurposed as short stabbing spears. Razor sharp bayonets sought eyes and open mouths, sliding forward to puncture brains stems and skewer neural tissue. The arc contracted sharply, now less than forty metres in diameter and rapidly shrinking.
Behind them, the work was complete, fresh timber panels providing a seamless barrier for the swarm to break upon. It was time for Mark to evacuate his men. Knotted ropes hung down from the battlement, soldiers screamed from the top for his soldiers to grab them and retreat. Mark looked for the other Lieutenant to send her and her soldiers home first, but she was missing. He stepped back from the line and began ripping soldiers out, shoving them to the ropes and retreat. Seeing Heath, Mark grabbed the kid by the shoulder and yanked him out of the front line, forcing him to evacuate. The reduction in numbers accelerated the crush. There would be no way to evacuate everyone, he needed a group to hold a gap for the others to climb to safety.
He grabbed Steph by the shoulder. ‘Get yourself and half the soldiers up those ropes while we still have a chance!’
She shrugged free of his hand. Her eyes were manic, blood-soaked tendrils of hair stuck to her face as she breathed heavily. ‘I’m not leaving. I won’t be able to control myself up there. You go, the squad’s your responsibility – not mine.’
She stabbed her sword back into the press, re-joining the fight and abandoning him to decide on his own. Mark felt his gut torn, despair screaming in his mind as he knew that Steph had decided to die here beneath the wall.
Mark took a deep breath to shout over the hideous cacophony of battle. ‘Retreat!’
Chapter Forty-Two
Erin watched from above with growing horror as the small arc of soldiers contracted in under the weight of the Infected. Steph fought like a beast of hell, her sword working as a blur as she cleaved any Carrier within arm’s reach. At Mark’s order, a few men and women managed to extract themselves from the fight to climb the offered ropes to safety. She grabbed Heath’s hand as he neared the top of the rope and heaved him over the side, shoving a fresh rifle into his hand so he could turn and shoot again. Tears streamed down Erin’s face as she saw Mark and Steph ignore the option of retreat, knowing that she was doomed to watch both her friends die. One by one, the remaining soldiers fell, wrenched into the press and ripped apart in a welter of gore.
Abruptly, Steph stumbled backwards, collapsing to the dirt in the last metre of free ground held. She seemed to ignore the maelstrom around her, hammering at her own skull with closed fists, eyes tight shut as if she battled a foe within her own mind. Suddenly, her arms dropped, and she stood again. Emotion showed on her face for the first time in months, her features contorted with rage as she ignored her dropped sword and leapt onto Mark’s back.
‘No!’ screamed Erin, her vocal cords raw with horror, gut sick as she stared from above.
***
Mark ignored his own order of retreat and re-entered the fight at Steph’s shoulder. Empty of ammunition, he ditched his rifle and drew his sword, his fingers feeling at home around the coarse leather grip of the weapon. He wouldn’t let her fight alone, if Steph had chosen this fate, then he’d share it and carve a heavy price with his death.
A Carrier screamed in his face, ribs bare and standing proud. Mark took a grip about the corpse’s sternum and stabbed his Gladius sword up under the chin into its brain. Instead of allowing the body to drop, he retained his hold and used the body as a shield, shoving back at the press while stabbing with his sword.
Time disappeared. He had no idea if any of his soldiers had followed his order and taken the chance to escape. Screaming ghouls pressed in from all sides, hands ripping at his clothes. And still he fought, unware that his own screams joined that of the Infected.
A heavy weight smashed into his back, and then a burning ring of pain clamped onto the base of his neck from behind, teeth worrying at the muscle like a terrier with a rat. Mark couldn’t see the Carrier that had him in its grip. He stabbed blindly over his shoulder, feeling the blade enter meat again and again without effect until it fell from numbing fingers. Teeth ripped a third mouthful from his neck and Mark gasped at the agony, a pulsating jet of blood spraying his life blood across the Carriers before him. Grey crept in at the edge of his vision. His punches became weaker, and suddenly he was on the ground. A visage framed by clotted, blond hair leaned over him, crimson teeth bared as the monster descended to feed.
Erin watched in horror as Steph ripped mouthful after another from Mark’s throat, oblivious to the blade he stabbed blindly over his shoulder as she fed.
Erin lined her rifle sights onto the rear of Steph’s head, but before she could pull the trigger, her friends were gone. Buried beneath the heaving mass of Infected that surged over the last of the soldiers. Silent tears ran down Erin’s face as she forced her attention away from the death of her friends and picked out her next target. Erin fired, beginning a rate of fire with metronomic regularity.
One bullet per head. One shot each second.
Mark had taught her well and turned her into a soldier that knew her duty. She buried her pain deep and fought on. Mourning the lost would have to wait until the battle was over. Now was the time to fight for the living.
Chapter Forty-Three
Her whole body ached. A bruise where the stock of her rifle had rested through countless hours of battle, stained Erin’s right shoulder in shades of purple, green and yellow. Eventually, an officer had noted the wound at her ankle and forced her off the wall to seek medical care. She had argued and lost, and so ended up in Harry’s care.
Harry had infiltrated the deep laceration behind her ankle with local anaesthetic, before washing it out with a litre of saline and stitching the wound closed. Erin had numbly listened as he confirmed what she already knew – the helicopter had completely severed her Achilles tendon. Her ankle was shot for the moment, but the tendon would heal slowly over the coming months if she managed to avoid a wound infection.
Exhausted, a couple of pain-killers had been enough to send her into a tortured sleep. Erin’s eyes had eventually opened much later, forcing wakefulness to escape another nightmare. Something was odd, and she finally realised it was the relative silence. The artillery had fallen quiet. The constant rattle of small arms fire was now no more than an occasional crack in the distance.
Erin sat up, swinging her legs to the side of the stretcher. Her pants leg was cut away at the knee, but otherwise she lay in the same uniform she’d worn for the previous two days. Her lower leg was splinted in a back-slab of plaster, keeping her ankle in extensi
on to help the tendon re-join. A tingling burn prickled beneath her dressings from the wound.
‘How’s your leg feeling?’
Erin turned around to the voice and saw Harry walking over. He looked as tired as she felt. Eyelids hung heavy over sad eyes, skin an unhealthy shade of grey.
She ignored his question, pointing a finger upwards as she cocked an ear to the side. ‘The guns have stopped,’ she said. ‘Does that mean...’
‘Yeah. It’s over,’ said Harry, not volunteering any further information.
Erin looked around, spotting her boots, she snatched one up and started putting it on her remaining good foot.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Harry. ‘I’d prefer if you don’t rip open those stitches just yet. You’ve done more than your fair share, Erin. Let someone else deal with the clean-up.’
‘I want to see, Harry. If you don’t want to re-sew the wound, maybe you could help me up onto the wall?’
The doctor looked at his patient, and seeing a stubborn line form between her eyes, obviously decided it wasn’t a fight he was going to win. Harry sighed and nodded assent. ‘Just give me a few minutes to find some crutches.’
Erin took her hand off Harry’s shoulder and gripped the front of the battlement. Her foot felt warm and wet below her wound. Despite Harry’s help up the stairs to the top of the wall, she’d still ripped through a few of her stitches in the process.
‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Harry from beside her.
Erin just nodded, having no words for what she saw in front. The plain before the wall was covered in an undulating mass of bodies. It was a field of slaughter like no other. Corpses lay in drifts, head trauma their one unifying commonality. Most had faces obliterated, as the soldiers aimed for the nose to take out the brainstem behind. The surface of the plain was pockmarked where artillery shells had landed, exploding in showers of macerated body parts. At some point fire had been re-deployed, with much of the field a blackened, smoking mess.
The piles of corpses reached highest up against the wall, the thirty-foot height on the battlement reaching less than a few metres above the nearest Carrier. Erin looked down the edge of the wall, and watched with morbid interest as a fat blowfly crawled into an empty eye-socket to lay its eggs.
‘It must have been getting grim for them to risk fire so close to the wall. If it had reached the structure, the wood panels on the face would have gone up like kindling.’
Harry nodded. ‘Yeah, for a few hours, hope was starting to stretch a little thin. But the gamble worked. We made it through, that’s all that matters I guess,’ he said with a shrug.
Erin pointed a finger off to the right. ‘They’re buried somewhere under that pile.’
Harry winced as he followed her direction with his eyes. ‘Are you sure about what you saw?’
‘Fuck off, Harry,’ said Erin in a voice drained of energy. ‘They were like family, as if I’d make up a story like that.’
‘So, Steph really killed him?’
‘I saw her collapse for a moment, and when she got up again, she’d become one of them. Steph ripped his throat out and gagged down the meat...’
‘Alright, I don’t want to know every detail.’
‘Well maybe you should. I didn’t see her get bitten during the fight, and I watched them both from right here. She’s been odd ever since she returned from Canberra. The infected brain tissue she was forced to swallow back in Cob Hill finally turned her into a Carrier – there’s no other answer.’
Erin pulled out the syringe of vaccine Harry had smuggled out of the lab for her. ‘You helped create this vaccine with samples obtained from Steph. If I injected this – would I end up like her?’ Erin’s voice was beginning to rise, anger taking hold. ‘Would I become a monster and end up killing my mates like she did?’
Harry deflated before her. ‘I took for granted her mood changes were due to post traumatic stress disorder after surviving the Spartans. I should have listened closer...’
Erin didn’t let him off the hook, pinning him with a hard gaze. ‘Then stop it from happening a second time, Harry. Make sure that vaccine never gets released.’
Epilogue
‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ asked Harry, as he stood with a vaccine filled syringe beside a male volunteer.
‘I know what happened in the last study, and I’ve signed the disclaimer.’ The soldier licked his bottom lip nervously. ‘Someone’s got to do it, might as well be me. This trial will be different, I’m sure of it.’
Harry couldn’t help but feel awe at the man’s bravery. He screwed the syringe into the luer-lock of the intravenous line and slowly injected ten millilitres of clear liquid. Standing back, he hit a button on the monitor to take the man’s blood pressure.
‘You feel ok?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. You’ll be the first to know if anything changes, don’t worry Doc,’ said the patient.
Harry nodded and exited the room, locking the door behind him. He stopped and stared at the patient for a few moments through the reinforced observation window before sitting down at his desk to take some notes.
At Erin’s prompting, he’d lobbied to have the first vaccine trial ceased. General Black had been keen for full scale inoculation of his troops, but after two more primates began showing signs of instability, Harry had succeeded in convincing the establishment to downgrade the trial to a small group of volunteers.
None had survived longer than a month before going insane. Autopsy had found that the virus had eventually found another route into the nervous system, prompting a review of the tissue samples taken from Steph, where tiny numbers of virus were found to have penetrated nerve cells harvested during her last week in the research station.
The vaccine was subsequently scrapped, and work started again. In the meantime, the war effort had continued. Adelaide and Perth were back in the hands of the living, and now the General had turned his eye to Sydney. Harry only hoped that Erin was seconded to somewhere else for that campaign. In the subsequent months after the Battle of Little River, she’d formed a close bond with the other farm kid, Heath, so he knew there would be at least one person watching her back at all times.
Harry ditched his pen, sat back in his chair and looked up at his patient’s monitor, willing the heart and breath rate to remain steady. After a few minutes he got up and went to the adjacent room for his next subject.
It had taken a further year of work to get to the point of a second trial, and unsurprisingly, volunteers had been thin on the ground. To fill the quota of test subjects, the judicial system had leapt at the chance of emptying a few jail cells. His next candidate was one such person, transferred against his will to Canberra to exchange incarceration for the gamble of a needle’s contents.
The subject glared as Harry entered, eyes furious. Steel manacles were clamped about each wrist and ankle, holding him spread-eagled and helpless on the hospital mattress.
‘You can’t do this, I won’t allow it,’ said the man, speaking to Harry like he was a servant despite lying restrained in prison fatigues on the bed.
Harry ignored him while he drew up the vaccine into a syringe. He hadn’t the slightest ounce of compassion for this particular man, and if not for the ramifications of another failed study, would have been happy to see him die as an outcome.
‘How can you do this? As a doctor, this is hideously unethical!’ sputtered the man, starting to lose his cool as Harry approached with the needle in his hand. Harry paused, looking at the man’s face for the first time since entering.
‘Unethical? What, like blowing up a police station? Or maybe like sending your son to sabotage an army installation for your own political gains? Two of my closest friends were killed that day because of you and your boy.’
The patient squirmed against his restraints, trying in vain to get away from Harry. ‘None of that’s been proven, it’s all lies!’
‘Bullshit. A military policeman heard it from the mouth of y
our own son before he burnt to death. If anyone deserves to die today, it’s you.’
Liam Finart screamed as Harry screwed the syringe into his intravenous line and injected the medication.
THE END
Read on for a free sample of ZPOC: The Beginning.
Chapter One
The skies showed signs of clearing; the heavy, low-level cloud finally looking to be on the verge of retreat.
After six straight days of grey, the cracks started to appear. Sunline breaking through reminding them all that, while the world had gone to shit, the sun still existed. The reality they knew was dead––much like those who hunted them now––but the world itself remained.
The dead may have risen, but that does not mean all hope is lost.
Henry Graham repeated this line to himself over and over as he lay in the self-constructed shelter.
It had been several weeks since the shit hit the fan and the first real cases broke the national media. He could not say for sure, because, well, time no longer had any meaning. There was day and night, survival or death. He knew which one he wanted; for him, and his family.
Henry gave a grunt, rubbing his calf in an attempt to force away the cramp that threatened to eat through the lower half of his leg. He checked his watch just as the silent alarm sent a pulse through his wrist.
Unable to ignore it any longer, he placed his weapon, a Remington 700 .308, to one side, and stretched his burning limb. While not a professional by any stretch of the imagination, Henry knew what he was doing. He understood what it took to survive. His entire adult life and a good portion of his adolescence were spent preparing for days like this.
Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation Page 30
