Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  LeCat held up one hand, palm facing out, like a traffic cop halting vehicles. The crowd filled the roadway from one side to the other, and still they came on, pouring out of a narrow side road like a rushing wave. Ten feet short of the gendarme Colonel, they suddenly paused, strangely hushed to silence by the stern imposing figure that had strode forward to confront them.

  “What do you people want?” LeCat’s voice cracked like a whip.

  For a long moment there came no answer. The front ranks had been cowered by the Colonel’s stone-like defiance. Then, from within the milling mass, a man’s voice called out strongly.

  “We want to be free to leave the city!” the voice cried out. “You’re barricading us in. We have rights!”

  LeCat smiled but there was no humor in his eyes. “You do not!” he told the crowd. “Avignon has been placed under martial law, effective immediately. Gatherings like this are unlawful. You will disperse back to your homes, or you will be fired upon by my men.”

  A little ripple of uncertain movement washed through the gathered crowd. They swayed back from the intersection, and LeCat felt himself steal a small breath of relief. But then the voice from amongst them called out again, and the moment turned suddenly dangerous.

  “God is the only one who can judge us!” the voice shouted. It was a man’s voice, strong and clear.

  “I am not judging you,” LeCat snarled. He narrowed his eyes, trying to pick out the trouble maker but in a sea of faces it proved impossible. “We are taking these measures to barricade the city and seal it from the contagion sweeping the earth. We must fortify the city. No one will be allowed to leave. No one will be allowed to enter. It is for your own protection.”

  “The contagion is God’s will!” the voice cried out. “This is the Lord’s way of cleansing unbelievers from the face of the earth and creating a new Eden for those who follow His divine teachings! You have no hold over us, for we are all God’s children. We will walk amongst the infected and our righteousness will be our shield, our love and devotion our sword.”

  The sound of the crowd swelled in support and turned into a snarl. LeCat turned and glanced over his shoulder. His men were raising their weapons. They were drawn into a line in front of the overturned bus. Tremaine stood beside them. He came forward to join LeCat.

  Tremaine held up his hands in an appeal for silence, but the crowd’s angry noise jeered and swirled around him.

  “Listen to me!” he cried out. The rumble amongst the protestors became a roar. Then, suddenly, the mass of bodies seemed to peel apart and Tremaine saw a man pushing purposefully towards the front of the rioters. He was tall, dressed in a long black robe that hung baggy about his waist but was stretched tight across the broad of his shoulders. He had a great silver beard, a thick long grey mane of hair, and the burning blazing gaze of a zealot. His features were biblical – broad and gaunt faced with a large beaked nose and penetrating eyes; fanatical dark eyes that burned with fierce conviction.

  The man came out of the crowd and strode towards LeCat and Tremaine. He had a battered leather-covered bible clutched in one huge hand. His face was grim, his mouth a harsh slash. He turned back to the crowd and raised his arms high.

  “Do we trust our God to deliver us?” the man’s voice boomed.

  “Yes!” a hundred voices called back with devotion.

  “Do we demand the right to leave the city?”

  “Yes!”

  “Will anyone stop us from doing the work that is God’s will?”

  “No!” the crowd roared, gaining voice and determination.

  The black robed man lowered his arms and turned to stare implacably at Colonel LeCat. “This plague is God’s work,” he said, his voice low and quivering with restrained passion. “It cannot touch us for we are God’s children.”

  LeCat raised a cynical eyebrow and raised his pistol until it pointed into the stranger’s face. “What is your name?”

  “My followers call me Kane,” the dark man said.

  “Well, Kane,” LeCat spoke slowly and deliberately, “I don’t care whether you are your God’s chosen children or not,” he said. “This city is not under his law. It’s under martial law. No one enters. No one leaves.”

  “You’re making a mistake…” Kane’s voice became edged with dire warning.

  LeCat ignored the threat. “Tell them to disperse,” he ordered through clenched teeth. “Right now, or my men will open fire.”

  Kane turned back to face his followers, and his shoulders slumped. “They will not let us leave,” he said heavily. “Just as the Israelites were kept slaves in Egypt –”

  He got no further, for suddenly, from somewhere deep inside the pressing mass of bodies a piece of brick was thrown. It sailed in a high arc above the heads of the crowd and struck the soldier standing beside Tremaine on the arm. The man spun around, dropping his weapon, his face wrenched into a mask of agony.

  It was the spark that ignited the combustible temper of the crowd. In an instant they turned into a wild mob and came rushing forward.

  “Kill!” they cried.

  LeCat swung his pistol and aimed instinctively at a charging man in the front row who had a long wooden post in his hands, raised high above his head like a club. His mouth hung wide open in a hateful howl. LeCat fired, striking the man in the face. The bullet snapped the man’s head back, and flung him to the ground, dead in a spreading pool of his own blood.

  The crowd froze, the sound of the bullet’s retort loud as a giant bell, echoing off the city’s old walls and reverberating along the narrow alleyway. The silence was stunned; shocked. The rioters drew back from the body on the ground aghast with astonishment and seething fury. Then a wail of outrage went up, and the crowd rushed forward once more, lashed into a frenzy by Kane’s voice as he urged them on towards the guns. The air became thick with dust and the cloying stench of blood and sweat and terror.

  LeCat fired again, hitting a middle-aged man in the arm, the impact spinning him around in a tottering circle. The bullet struck with the sound of a solid meaty thump. The man’s arm was flung wide. He staggered and fell, and was instantly trampled by those who pressed close behind him. The mob overwhelmed the soldiers until suddenly a ripping roar of automatic gunfire tore the air apart.

  One of the gendarmes had dropped to his knees, white-faced with horror and blood gushing from his forehead. A young woman with wild crazy tangles of dark hair stood over him, her skirts clutched in one hand and an iron bar in the other. She wielded the cold steel like a sword, bludgeoning the soldier’s head and shoulders. She was screaming with fanatical madness, hissing spittle at the young trooper. The soldier threw up his weapon and fired instinctively. The range was so close that the muzzle flash seemed to join the barrel to the woman’s stomach, and the impact so fierce that she was flung back in the air, her body broken almost in half before she hit the cobblestoned ground. Two other men crammed close to the woman also went down, clutching at wounds to their chests. They reeled away from the melee, staggering in pain.

  LeCat clawed a hand for the tall dark-robed leader, but the man was lithe and elusive. He slipped out of the Colonel’s grasp and melted back into the mass of swarming rioters, still screaming at his followers, urging them to violence. LeCat snarled, and kicked out at a teenage boy who came running at him with his fist bunched. His boot caught the young man in the midriff, and he folded over in red-faced pain. LeCat spun around, the teenager already forgotten, and drove the stiffened palm of his hand into another man’s face. The man was dark-skinned with a scruffy moustache and black beady eyes. The blow snapped off two of the man’s teeth and he flopped to the ground like a landed fish, kicking and flailing his legs while blood gushed from his cawing mouth.

  For an instant there was a space around him and LeCat stole a quick fearful glance over his shoulder. His men were backing away, pressed up against the chassis of the bus that been overturned across the Porte Saint Roch gateway, with the rioters seething and heaving all aro
und them, throwing punches and lashing out with their feet. The two policemen were firing wildly into the edges of the crowd, their faces white shaken blobs behind their weapons. LeCat bellowed an order, his voice honed and hardened by years on the parade ground.

  “Open fire!” he shouted.

  The small wavering line of soldiers began shooting in short jarring bursts of semi-automatic fire that buzzed in the air like chainsaws. In just a few seconds more than a dozen rioters were laying dead or injured on the bloody ground, clasping at wounds and groaning in shocking pain. A woman and a young child lay on their backs beside each other. Their arms were flung out, the child’s eyes open and staring, unseeing, at the wide blue sky. The woman’s heels drummed a macabre tattoo on the cold stone ground.

  Tremaine saw a running man struck by two bullets as he charged towards the barricade. He was jerked back as though he had reached the end of a tethered chain. He tottered for a few staggering steps and Tremaine saw one of the bullets come out through the man’s shoulder blades. A vaporous puff of cloud erupted through his shirt. The man sagged to his knees, his eyes wide with shock and his gaping mouth wrenched in dreadful pain.

  At last the crowd broke, fleeing back down the narrow laneway, yelling and sobbing and gasping with fear. They turned on their heels and ran like hunted rats, disappearing into the shadows, through doorways and around corners, melting away from the intersection like mist. LeCat stood, shaking with anger and rage, the barrel of his sidearm still hot in his hand. His face was streaked with sweat and dust. He was standing in a puddle of sticky congealing blood. He didn’t seem to notice.

  A deathly shroud of silence draped itself over the intersection. The police officers came from behind their car, wandering through the carnage of bodies, dazed and dismayed, their weapons hanging limp in their hands. One of the soldiers, disheveled and still shaking, knelt over the body of the dead child. He saw the dreadful wound, the torn frail body punched open by the impact of semi-automatic fire, and he sobbed silently.

  Tremaine stood aghast amidst the bloody killing ground, numbed with his own horror. His eyes were huge and unblinking, cold sweat trickling down his spine. He stared down at his hands. They were trembling. His ears still thumped with the echo of gunfire. He turned in a slow bewildered circle, and all around him the cobblestones were drenched in blood, the dead and dying slumped like ghastly broken dolls upon the street.

  He saw LeCat standing in the center of the chaos, stiff shouldered and gaunt. The French Colonel’s face looked ashen, the sharp edges of his features blurred by the tragedy.

  “What do we do?” Tremaine asked, his voice made small by shock.

  “We finish barricading the gate,” LeCat said with grim resolve. “And we call for an ambulance and support troops – in case they come back.”

  * * *

  Camille Pelletier stood up, stretched her back, and stared dejectedly at the shelves of serviettes, blankets and stationery items on the walls around her that still needed to be counted. Her hands were grimy with dust, her bottom numb from sitting too long on the hard wooden chair. She went to the doorway of the hotel’s basement storage room and drew a breath of cool air.

  The sound of the elevator descending made her pause with curiosity. She switched off the light to the storage room, thankful for any excuse to break the monotony of the stock take, and went towards the end of the hall. Behind the stainless steel doors she heard the elevator yo-yo to a stop. The doors glided open and the woman who had greeted her when she had arrived at work was standing, trembling and wide eyed.

  Camille went to the woman. “Eve, what is wrong?” The woman was sobbing, the makeup around her eyes smudged. Under the touch of Camille’s hand the young woman’s arm trembled.

  “The city…” the young woman named Eve gasped in disbelief. “Camille, they are closing off the city!”

  Camille blanched, recoiled. Slowly a sense of fear stirred at the base of her spine, tingling up across her back. She stepped into the elevator and stabbed her finger at the ‘Ground Floor’ button. The elevator doors closed very slowly. Camille felt the first creep of her own alarm prickle the flesh at the nape of her neck.

  She took the young woman by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll. “Tell me!” she insisted. “Tell me what is happening.”

  Eve sobbed. Tears rolled down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. “They have blocked off the gates into the old city,” Eve blubbered. “The police and the Army. They have sealed the gatehouses with overturned buses. No one can get in, Camille.”

  Dread filled the pit of Camille’s stomach, a weight like heavy lead. The elevators doors finally glided open on the ground floor and she went striding through the hotel’s front doors. Eve scurried behind her, the sound of her shoes echoing loudly across the high-ceilinged lobby.

  “See!” she flung her arm out, pointing across the four lanes of traffic that were snarled to a standstill. “The undead must be close by. We’re all going to be killed.”

  A hundred yards east from the hotel stood the blocked and barricaded Porte Saint Roch gates. Camille stared in shock. She could see the crumpled yellow carcasses of two buses wedged across the gateway, cast in shadow by the vault of the high arch. She shook her head in slow dread and disbelief.

  “And there was shooting,” Eve gasped beside her. “I heard it, Camille. Machine guns were firing.”

  “When? Camille turned on Eve. Her eyes filled with her own fear. She felt a lurch of despair clutch her stomach and wring the tenacity from her. Suddenly her legs turned weak under her.

  “Maybe ten minutes ago,” Eve said. “It went on for several minutes.”

  Camille ran onto the street, weaving her way through the stalled cars, squeezing between bumper bars until she reached the intersection of roadway that lead through the gatehouse into the old city. She stood trembling with her hands on her hips, her head thrown back in disbelief. The gateway had been completely blocked. There were two buses, each of them overturned onto their sides, stacked and crumpled on top of each other. She could not see daylight through the barricade. It was a solid wall of yellow rumpled metal.

  Camille cupped her hands to her mouth and cried out as loudly as she could. It was no use. The wall and the battlement were deserted, and the sounds of her shouts were drowned out by the irritated clamor of car horns on the road right behind her. Her cell phone was in her handbag down in the basement storage room. She ran back across the street and into the hotel. She snatched up one of the front desk phones and crushed her finger at the numbers. She held the phone to her ear, listening to it ring out unanswered, while Eve stood fretfully beside her, weeping with fear, her shoulders heaving, her body beginning to shake.

  “What will we do?” Eve’s voice sounded small and filled with terror.

  Camille slammed down the phone and picked it up again. She dialed another number. Her lips were pressed together, her heart racing. She could feel fear tremble in her fingers.

  “Pick up the other phone,” she snapped at Eve. “Dial anyone you can think of who lives inside the old city. We must get a message to my father.”

  * * *

  The rioters scattered into the narrow alleys of Avignon’s old city, dragging their wounded with them as they retreated from the bark of the guns. Kane fled back to the abandoned warehouse that was his church, and with him ran a dozen of his followers, sobbing with shock and fear, their faces masks of stunned horror.

  Candles still burned in the dark cavernous warehouse. The lingering perfume of incense still hung in the air. Kane threw himself down in a corner of the building, his chest heaving, and the fire of his fanaticism fanned into a seething blaze.

  “The unbelievers!” he raged. “They have cast themselves into the pits of Hell with their defiance of God’s children.”

  It was a critical moment. The chaotic bloodshed at the city’s gates would shatter the resolve of the timid amongst them unless he could galvanize their allegiance. He snatched up his battered Bible and
forced himself to his feet, holding the book high over his head like a rally flag on a battlefield.

  Two years ago he had been Father Pierre Gullette; a lowly Catholic priest serving in the suburbs of Bordeaux. Driven from the church and excommunicated in the face of an adulterous sex scandal, he had fled south to Avignon and built a new flock of adoring followers who had been drawn to Preacher Kane’s hellfire sermons that foretold the imminent end of the world.

  “We won a great victory today,” Kane filled his voice with fervent passion and glared into the frightened faces around him, daring them to defy him. “We forced the unbelievers to declare and condemn themselves. We have won God’s favor, and this is only the beginning. As word spreads, more and more of the faithful will flock to us until, like a mighty battering ram, our will to do God’s work will force the city’s gates open!”

  A shaft of sunlight filled with moving dust motes spilled through a nearby window, illuminating the preacher as if he stood beneath a spotlight.

  Someone in the shadows gave a reedy half-hearted cheer. The sound was strained in the ominous silence. Then a second voice joined the first. It was just enough to drown out the sobbing and the muted painful groans of the wounded that lay bleeding in the shadows.

  Kane went amongst the survivors, talking to them all individually, putting booming confidence into his voice as he clapped a man on the shoulder and then hugged a woman who was still trembling. Gradually, more frightened followers returned sheepishly to the warehouse, seeking the comfort of other supporters, drawing strength from their zealous leader.

  “And who are you?” Kane came to a young girl in a white dress that was spattered with blood. She was sitting alone in a corner beside a cluster of candles. The flickering light painted the perfect features of her face golden. The girl lifted her eyes to his. She had been crying. Kane guessed the girl was eighteen or nineteen years old. She had long black hair and the serene beauty of a Madonna.