by Jon Schafer
Seeing the logic of plan, Cage pushed the transmit button and said, “Correction, there will be five of us exiting the farmhouse. The two in lab coats are our prisoners. I want you and your men to provide a security perimeter. Doctor Connors, her new assistant and one other will remain behind. If they need anything, I want you to move heaven and earth to get it for them, over.”
“Acknowledged, sir,” The voice replied.
Hearing yelling in the background as the man transmitted, Cage asked, “What’s going on, over.”
In a reluctant voice, the man said, “We have someone here calling himself Brain that keeps screaming about saving someone named Tick-Tock. He showed up a few minutes ago telling us that he fixed the radio and was getting distress calls from Fort Polk about this place named Fort Redoubt that was about to be overrun. I was going to have the medics sedate him, but he had a communique from Polk asking for anyone in the vicinity to help the civilians trapped there, sir. DC still has all air traffic grounded, but I guess it’s not all air traffic though because we have three Blackhawks inbound, over.”
Perking up at hearing this, Hawkins said, “Those are for me and my people. The joint Chiefs sent them to take me and the Malectron to Washington. Your best course of action would be to release me immediately.”
Steve ignored him, motioning frantically for the handset as Major Cage told the radioman to put Brain on. Seconds later, the tech’s voice came over the speaker saying, “I got the radio working and heard that Tick-Tock’s in trouble. Fort Redoubt got hit by a couple big herds of Zs and they’re about to be wiped out. We have to help him and Denise, over.”
His mind spinning on how to save his friend, Steve flashed back to the plan he had concocted on the ride from the airfield. Turning to look at Hawkins, he felt an instant distrust for the weasel. Seeing where Jim was slowly sitting up and shaking his head to clear it of the blow he had received, Steve strode over to him and asked harshly, “Where’s the Malectron.”
Pointing with a shaking hand at a box strapped to the top of the control panel, he replied, “That’s it. Please don’t kill me. I was only following orders.”
“Just like the Nazis and the Liberals,” Heather commented with disgust in her voice.
Ignoring this, Steve asked, “Do you know how to operate it?”
Nodding, Jim said, “I do.”
Turning to Major Cage, Steve said, “I need that box, my new buddy, Jim, and one of those helicopters.” Looking at Hawkins with disgust, he added, “And I might as well take this asshole along for the ride. I have plans for him.”
Not used to taking orders from a civilian, Cage balked for a second until he realized what Steve wanted to do. Glancing at where Heather and Doctor Connors were checking Cindy’s wounds, he knew that they would have had little chance in coming up with a way to kill the dead if it wasn’t for Steve and his people.
Making his decision, he walked over to the biohazard alarm and pulled the handle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fort Redoubt:
Seeing one of the dead make it through the wall and past the spearmen, Tick-Tock fired twice into its snarling face as he wondered how long his ammunition would last. With fifteen major breaches in the past two hours, it was taking every bit of effort from those inside the fort to keep the dead from flooding into the compound.
Watching as a dozen creatures from hell squirmed through another gap where two telephone poles had been pushed in, he raised his rifle, but held fire when five men rushed in with long spears. With short thrusts used to punch holes in the craniums of the dead, they quickly eliminated them. More walking corpses moved forward to be dispatched by the spearmen, causing a logjam of lifeless flesh to stack up in the gap. Tick-Tock noticed that while the dead were plugging the hole with their bodies as they fell, the reanimated corpses behind them were clawing them out of the way just as fast in their quest to get in. Anxiously, he looked around for the men and women in the patching crew, but saw they were already busy on two other breaks.
Turning his attention back to the wall, Tick-Tock watched as one of the spearmen missed his mark, hitting his target in the shoulder when it moved at the last second. Trying to retract his spear from the creature, the man screamed when the dead thing lunged forward, pushing the shaft of the weapon through its own body as it sought to get closer to the food. In an attempt to kick it off, the spearman raised his foot just as three more of the dead squirmed their way through the gap, grabbing his leg and sinking their teeth into it.
Seeing he was a goner, Tick-Tock shot him once in the back of the head.
With only four spearmen to resist them, the dead slowly forced the living back.
Sighting in on the reanimated corpses tearing at the fallen spearman, Tick-Tock squeezed the trigger of his M4, firing off three rounds and downing all three of the dead. Reaching for his final magazine, fear ripped through him when he realized it was gone. Darting his eyes back and forth as he searched the ground, he spotted it lying near the breach in the wall where he had been standing when the dead started pushing their way in. Looking around for help, he saw that the other armed men and women had their hands full as they shot down the Zs that were on the verge of pouring into the compound. From all around the fort, he could hear the steady sound of gunfire, telling him that the dead were breaking in all over the compound.
With anger brought on by fear at what seemed to be a hopeless situation, Tick-Tock let out a bellow of rage before rushing forward. Twisting out of the grasp of one of the dead that had made it through the gap, he reached down and ripped the spear from the body of the creature he had shot and started punching holes in the skulls of the dead. Crazed by rage, his vision went red as he thrust forward again and again with the spear. As he reached the hole in the wall, he had the presence of mind to pick up the loaded magazine for his rifle before returning to his slaughter of the walking corpses.
The light around him dimmed as he advanced. He could hear nothing, but took no notice. Focused only on killing the dead, he lost sense of time and space, concentrating only on the twisted face in front of him before shoving the point of the spear through it and moved on to the next. His combat training took over, naturally directing him to climb atop the piles of dead bodies to keep the high ground as he advanced. His adrenalin pumping, he felt like he could go on forever, wiping out all the dead-asses by himself.
Suddenly feeling himself being grabbed and pulled rearward, he twisted his body and fought against the creatures that had gotten behind him. Thrusting backward with his spear, he felt himself immobilized as more hands grabbed it while also latching onto his arms and legs. With a bellow of rage that he couldn’t hear, his right hand slipped down to the pocket where he had secured his last magazine of ammunition, struggling against the buttons securing the flap over the cargo pocket. With his only thought being that if he was going down that he would take as many of them with him as he could, Tick-Tock hoped that the dead would first tear into his chainmail shirt before finding flesh. This would give him enough time to clear them off him. As he was pulled to the ground and dragged rearward, a face appeared directly above his, causing him to relax. In an instant, he knew it was over.
His hearing coming back as the killing fury left him, he could barely make out Rick Styles yelling, “You crazy son-of-a-bitch, you were almost ten feet outside the wall. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Smiling at what he took as a compliment, Tick-Tock let his fellow defenders pull him into the fort. Even when he was safely inside, they still restrained him, worried that his berserker rage hadn’t been spent. Knowing he had to get his head and his ass wired together, Tick-Tock tried to get his mind to shed the dregs of the insanity that had possessed him by focusing on the men and women hammering a patch in the hole they had just pulled him through.
The sight of dead arms and legs thrusting through the openings between the boards disturbed him for some reason, so he turned his attention to the sound of gunfire coming fro
m around the compound. Noticing that it seemed to be diminishing, he worried that everyone was on their last rounds or were fighting with sharpened sticks like himself.
When his hearing was fully back and his mind clear, Tick-Tock felt he had returned to reality enough to be released. Croaking out something that even he didn’t understand, he swallowed a few times to wet his throat and managed to say, “I’m fine, you can let me up.”
The people restraining him looked skeptical, but Rick stepped forward and said, “Turn that crazy bastard loose. We might need him again.”
Feeling his limbs freed, Tick-Tock rolled onto his hands and knees before slowly rising to his feet. While he was examining himself for wounds, Rick told him, “We already checked. I don’t know how you did it, but you didn’t get bit. You got a few tears in your shirt, but I think that armor you wear stopped you from getting infected.” Looking at where his people were securing the last board over the gap in the telephone poles, he added in a quiet voice, “I have to thank you though. From what the people here told me, they were about to be overrun when you went full Viking and pushed the dead-asses back so they could close the gap.”
After considering Tick-Tock for a moment, Rick asked in a slightly awed voice, “What came over you. I only got here in enough time to catch the last of it, but you were like some kind of crazed beast.”
Exhausted, Tick-Tock pulled the magazine of ammunition from his pocket, held it up and said, “I dropped my last clip and was trying to get it back from the dead-asses.”
Rick laughed and said, “Well, I’m glad you got it because you’re going to need it.” Handing him his spear, he added, “You also might need this. Whatever ammunition you have on you is your last. Do what you can with it, but use it only as a last resort. We’ve managed to stop all the breakthroughs, but it’s only a matter of time before we have more.”
As if in response, a large crack came from the far side of the fort. Tick-Tock only needed a split-second to realize which direction it had come from before he was off and running. Not feeling the pain in his back, arms and shoulders from wielding the spear, his only thought was where the latest breakthrough was happening.
Exactly where he had left Denise.
Reaching the parapets where Denise had been sleeping, and seeing it had collapsed to lie in a jumble at the base of the wall, Tick-Tock’s felt his stomach drop before it leapt back into his throat to almost choke him. Looking frantically through the wreckage, he was surprised when he couldn’t find any bodies. Spinning around at the sound of her voice, he found his love directing the crews rushing forward to close the gap in the wall.
Running up to her and grabbing her in his arms, Tick-Tock said with relief, “You’re safe.”
Looking at him like he was crazy, she replied, “Of course I am. We heard the wall start to break long before it caved in so we got the hell out of the way.”
Turning his attention to the split in their defenses, Tick-Tock saw that it was a major one, probably the worst since the dead first surrounded them. Seven of the telephone poles had been pushed in, one so far that it was almost standing straight up. When the dead had first hit the wall, hundreds of them had been crushed into the wedge at its base, and these now made a step that others crawled up to push their weight against the upper part of the barrier where it was weakest and they had more leverage. Although he knew if they had built the wall straight up and down that it would never have withstood the initial assault, he wished they had used something heavier.
Like steel beams.
Knowing this was fantasy, Tick-Tock reacted by rushing forward. Before he had taken two steps, he saw another 20 inch wide telephone pole being levered out of position by the dead as they forced their way in. With the constant sound of gunfire, the whining of the dead, and the screams of the defenders almost deafening him, he couldn’t make out any orders coming from the officers. Not slowing, he started slapping people on the back to get their attention as he passed them, calling out, “Follow me,” as he ran into the middle of the fray.
A few of the defenders he tagged followed him immediately, but most stayed frozen in place at the thought of rushing toward the dead now pouring through the wall. By the time Tick-Tock and his recruits reached the few defenders trying to hold the savage horde back, they numbered only ten. Without thought for their own lives, they used whatever was at hand to stop the flow of corpses coming at them. Clubs were raised and lowered onto dead skulls too many times to count as spears were thrust forward, twisted, and quickly retracted to be pushed in again to skewer the corrupt brains of the dead. Occasionally, one of the Zs would slip by them, only to be promptly shot down by one of the rifle men that covered them.
Tick-Tock looked neither left nor right as he repeatedly shoved the point of his spear into the craniums of the dead. Aiming for an eye, or the dripping, black orb where it had been torn out, he found this was the fastest way to drill into what was left of their brain and eliminate the dead. He could see that while he and his small group weren’t pushing the dead back, at the same time they were keeping them from flooding into the compound. Hope surged through him that with a few reinforcements, they would be able to push the Zs back. Realizing that he could see his targets better, he blinked his eyes rapidly in the first light of the rising sun.
Looking around wildly for more people to help them, Tick-Tock stopped when he saw the beginning of the end of Fort Redoubt.
With the dead scrambling over those crushed against the base of the wall in the initial assault, and with the thousands behind them clambering over each other in their unrelenting urge to feed, the dead had managed to build a bridge of dead flesh high enough to cross the top of the wall. At first visible in ones and two across a fifty foot wide swath, in the dim illumination of the light, Tick-Tock watched in horror as they became a flood of bodies scrambling between the wooden spikes to slide down the inner face of the wall and attack across a wide span.
Looking around for Denise, he spied her thirty feet behind him, frantically motioning to him to run. Glancing to his left and right, he noticed that everyone else was turning to flee the dead. Disgusted at their cowardice, Tick-Tock joined them, knowing that he couldn’t stand against the hordes alone. With the dead close behind him as he fled, his mind spun as he tried to think of a place where he and Denise would be safe. Coming up blank, he knew it would only be a matter of minutes before the Zs rolled over everyone in the camp and the feasting began. If they only had a few more people to defend this section, they might have been able to hold the dead off.
Out of breath as he neared where Denise was waving for him to hurry, Tick-Tock was about to vent his anger at the others giving up, when she cut him off by screaming, “It’s too late. Get down,” as she dropped flat on the ground.
Peering through the haze of gun smoke and dust kicked up by the defenders, Tick-Tock saw why everyone had abandoned their positions. They weren’t fleeing the dead, they were getting the hell out of the way. Lunging forward, he threw his body across Denise as the twang-thump of the porcupines filled the air.
As soon as the whistle of darts flying over his head dissipated, Tick-Tock jumped to his feet and hoisted Denise to hers. Keeping her hand clenched in his, he pulled her along as he ran toward the semi-circle of defenders that had set up around the breakthrough to push the dead back.
Reaching safety, Tick-Tock turned to see that while the dead who had made it over their defenses had been wiped out, more were pouring over the wall. As he heard calls of, “Fall back,” and, “Retreat,” mixed with the screaming of people running one way and then the other as they found the barricades of Fort Redoubt being breached in this manner all around the perimeter, he knew this was the end.
An aching in his left hand made him look down, and seeing the rifle still clenched in it, he turned to Denise and said, “Whatever happens, don’t leave my side.”
Tick-Tock’s heart dropped as he said this. He knew it wasn’t because he felt he could save his love, but whe
n there was nowhere left to run or back up to, he would finish them both.
Using the bodies of their brethren as a walkway, the dead poured over the wall into the fort from all directions. With so much fresh meat close to their grasp, they rushed forward as one to claim it. In their mindless haste, they ran into a phalanx of desperate, spear and club wielding humans to fall by the hundreds. Despite this, the unending wave of dead swarmed forward as they were pushed by the thousands behind them.
At first bolstered by the porcupines, the living defenders quickly found the archaic weapons too slow to reload. One by one, the strongpoint set up around them fell to the onslaught of rushing dead, leaving the living to destroy them with spears, clubs, and stones. As they were backed into a slowly shrinking perimeter at the center of the compound, the living found their only respite when one of their own fell to the dead. When someone was dragged down, it caused a swarm of reanimated corpses to fall on the spot, fighting each other for a mouthful of meat and giving the living a brief respite.
The bodies of the living and the dead that had been destroyed quickly piled up, pushing the humans into a steadily decreasing circle as more reanimated corpses crawled over the top of the gruesome heap and leapt at them in their attempt to feed. Old men and women rushed forward as the more able bodied fell, only to find themselves quickly exhausted by the fight and taken down.
When the man next to him was pulled into the mass of ragging dead, Tick-Tock used the pause to take a quick look around. After turning one way and then the other, he estimated that there were less than three hundred living being forced into a slowly shrinking ring. On his left, he locked eyes with Denise.
As he was trying to come up with something reassuring to say, she cut him off by shouting over the whining of the dead and the screaming of the defenders, “You’re going to have to do it for me. I won’t be able to do it myself.”
