Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  “My name is Josephine, Preacher Kane,” the girl sniffed, awed to be so close to the man she revered. Her face looked pale as bone china, and there were bruise-colored smears beneath her haunted eyes. Her tears had dried, cutting streaky runnels down her cheeks. Her dress was torn.

  “Where is your mother, your father?” Kane looked down on the girl.

  “My father was shot,” the girl’s voice choked and fresh tears spilled down her face. “One of the gendarmes killed him.”

  Kane dropped to his haunches, so he was face-to-face with the young girl. She shivered with cold and shock. He caressed her arm from the elbow to her shoulder with his strong fingers, and then reached to grip her hand. The girl shuddered and squeezed her eyes closed.

  “Where is your mother?” his big booming voice turned obscenely soft and slimy with kindness.

  “She died when I was a baby,” the girl gnawed at her lip. The enormity of being left alone in the world was beginning to crash through the trauma of her father’s savage death.

  “You have no other family?” Kane surreptitiously ran glittering snake-like eyes over the girl’s body, lingering on her breasts. She was slim, and on the brink of blooming into womanhood. The tattered dirty hem of her dress had bunched around the tops of her slender thighs, so he could see the tantalizingly smooth skin of her legs. He felt a sharp bright rush of lust.

  “No,” the girl said, and then convulsed into a fresh outburst of heart-broken tears.

  Kane reached for the girl and pulled her into his arms, engulfing her with a bear-like embrace. He could smell the sweetness of her young flesh and the scent of apples in her hair. The girl pressed her innocent face into the long silver pelt of his beard.

  Through the coarse material of his black robe Kane could feel the girl’s tender body clinging hard against him. He closed his eyes as if in silent prayer, and felt a peverse brew of wild emotion bubble up inside him. His body engorged and stiffened almost painfully, but at the same time the reckless temptation shook him into trembles.

  “You are no longer Josephine,” when Kane spoke again his voice was suddenly thick and husky. “From this moment on, you will take the name Mary… and you will serve God through me, child, for you are the divine vessel I have been searching for,” Kane’s voice rumbled as he formulated the lie and told it effortlessly. “And it is God’s will that you have been delivered to me.”

  The girl went very still in his arms. He could feel the rhythm of her heart through the thin stuff of her dress.

  “I would be honored,” the girl whispered, her voice small and strained.

  “But you must give yourself to me completely,” Kane said, and made the warning sound like a dire threat. He felt a giddy thrill of arousal. “You must give to me your mind, your soul and your body so that through you, I can serve God’s will and lead our people to Him. To defy me in any way is to defy God Almighty.”

  “I will,” the girl promised fervently. Her face was up-turned to his and her expression solemn. She felt overwhelmed by her chance at salvation and completely trusting. Kane was God’s messenger on earth. That she had been chosen as his divine vessel was a profound miracle. She heard a roar of blood in her own ears and felt her heart hammering.

  Kane tightened his embrace and drew Mary away from the light of the candles. The girl went willing and pliant in his arms. He touched her breasts through the thin fabric of her clothing, and she did not pull away.

  “Good girl,” he crooned and licked his lips.

  Deep in the shadows, and far from the eyes of the others, one of Kane’s hands slipped beneath the hem of the girl’s dress.

  It was God’s will at work.

  * * *

  Ten o’clock.

  Right on time the radio on Colonel LeCat’s hip squawked.

  “Oui?” He turned from Tremaine and strode a few steps away with the radio pressed to his ear. The two men were standing in the old city’s leafy open plaza, surrounded by growing crowds of frightened people. Across the front steps of the town hall, a blue French VAB 4x4 armored personnel carrier had been parked, painted in the livery of the French Gendarmerie. The vehicle was a steel monster mounted on four huge tires. A nervous corporal stood hunched behind the machine gun mounted directly above the vehicle’s cockpit.

  “That call was from one of the teams charged with securing the city,” LeCat came striding back to where Tremaine waited. The French Colonel was grim-faced. “The last of the gates have at last been blockaded.”

  Tremaine nodded. “So that’s it then,” he allowed himself to relax. “There is no way for the infected to breach the walls.”

  “Oui,” LeCat confirmed. “But that does not mean the challenges facing us are any less insignificant,” he gestured with a wide sweep of his hand. The crowd was building in the plaza and voices became shouts that demanded answers. Tremaine cast an anxious glance along the Rue De La Republique. It was the main artery into the heart of the ancient city, lined on both sides by expensive boutiques, restaurants and curbside eateries. The pavements were swarming with people, all heading towards the plaza. Some of them were marching and waving hastily painted banners. Patrolling the road was a second VAB 4x4 and two police cars, their blue lights flashing.

  “The people are scared and confused,” LeCat said. “They are fearful… and fear leads to violence and rioting unless they are made to understand.”

  When the phalanx of people marching along the Rue De La Republique reached the plaza, the mood of the crowd turned ugly. There were shouts and pushing; violent scuffles broke out and the crowd turned on the patrolling troops to vent their frustration. They were like a surly horde of football fans. People got crushed as the crowd surged like an angry tide towards the steps of the town hall. The plaza became choked with a struggling mass of humanity. A glass was thrown and a woman fell to the ground with blood streaming from cuts to her face.

  LeCat waved his arm urgently and one of the police cars patrolling the route to the plaza braked to a halt nearby. The officers got out of their Renault with their handguns drawn. The second police car came racing towards the plaza as back-up. LeCat went to the closest vehicle and snatched up a megaphone from the back seat.

  Over his shoulder he heard a shop front window smash and then a wild roar of triumph as a looters broke in to a clothing store. LeCat turned and sensed the rumbling volcanic mood of the crowd was teetering on the verge of eruption.

  Tremaine broke from the swarming tide of bodies, gasping. He had almost been swept up in the crush. He was white-faced and panting. LeCat drew his sidearm from its holster and fired twice into the air. The shots were great deafening thunderclaps of sound that startled the crowd and caused them to back away in fear.

  The looters who pushed and shoved their way through the broken plate glass window of the clothing shop froze in sudden alarm. On the sidewalk a young man crouched on his knees in a puddle of blood, crumpled over and clutching at a jagged blade of glass buried in his stomach. The crowd in the plaza stopped surging towards the town hall. A woman gave a shrill, terrified scream and then fainted. Voices that had been raised in violent fist-pumping shouts suddenly fell mute.

  LeCat’s voice boomed in the fraught silence.

  “Attention citizens of Avignon. In one hour an announcement will be made from the steps of the Place of the Popes. You are to assemble and congregate in an orderly fashion. Police and armed gendarmes have orders to arrest anyone inciting violence against people or property. All your questions will be answered during the announcement. You must disperse from this plaza immediately.”

  From somewhere amidst the press of bodies a lone man’s voice cried out abusive defiance. LeCat snarled and sent the two armed policemen scything into the crowd. They came back frog-marching a handcuffed overweight man who wore a torn shirt spotted with blood. One of the policemen had lost his cap, and buttons had been torn from his uniform. He was disheveled and heaving for breath. The policemen threw the man into the back of the nearest patr
ol car. The handcuffed man’s face swelled with anger. He had a cut above one eye.

  “Rebellion will not be tolerated!” LeCat’s voice crackled with menace as he turned on the crowd, trying to cower them into obedience, and yet aware of how tenuous the thread of his authority was. If the mob turned violent, there would be nothing at all he could do to stop the rioting; the police and troops inside the walls would be overrun.

  “You will disperse the plaza now and move in an orderly fashion to the square outside the Popes Palace.”

  As if to reinforce the Colonel’s command the APC that had been patrolling the Rue De La Republique arrived and began to nudge its way forward at slow speed, forcing the milling crowds to separate. The engine of the second APC parked across the town hall steps roared into life. Like sheepdogs, the two thirteen-tonne steel monsters with ‘Gendarmerie Francaise’ painted on their sides went wading into the press of bodies until the crowd broke. They dispersed through the narrow streets towards the ancient papal palace that dominated the rising ground of the old city’s northern quarter.

  LeCat set down the megaphone and called urgently on the radio for reinforcements. Then he turned to Tremaine.

  “A near-run thing, Colonel,” Tremaine croaked. His voice sounded strained and hoarse.

  Colonel LeCat said nothing.

  * * *

  Hotel staff had gone from room to room, knocking on every door and herding all the guests downstairs to the lobby for an urgent announcement. Camille waited impatiently for everyone to assemble. She stood grim-faced, gnawing on her lip and fretting. She paced the lobby floor, wrestling with her own anxiety, but aware also that everyone watched her. She needed to remain composed. With a deliberate effort she forced a confident smile onto her face and smoothed away the edge of tension from her voice.

  “Quickly!” she waved her arm at a crowd of startled guests that had arrived in the elevator. “Don’t worry about your baggage. Leave it where it is.”

  The lobby was densely packed with people. Most of them were middle-aged tourists, huddled in couples or small groups. They were haggard and ashen faced. The stench of unwashed bodies mixed with cigarette smoke and the sweaty taint of raw fear to cloud the air a haze of blue. The news of the undead infection was being broadcast on every television and radio station. Under the murmur of rattled voices and the scuff of shuffling feet, Camille could hear someone sobbing softly.

  It was Mrs. Chantilier. Camille went into the crowd and put a comforting arm around the old lady’s shoulder. The woman had been staying alone in the hotel for the past two weeks, visiting grandchildren before a return trip to Lyon. Camille had grown fond of her.

  “Don’t cry, Mrs. Chantilier,” Camille smiled into the old lady’s face. Mrs. Chantilier wrung a damp handkerchief between arthritic fingers. Her eyes were shiny with welling tears. “Everything will be fine.”

  “I… I’m so afraid.”

  “We all are,” Camille admitted. “But you are a woman of France. You must show these foreign visitors that you are brave.”

  The elderly woman gave a last shuddering sob and then wrenched her mouth into a quivering smile. “I lived through the Second World War…”

  “I know,” Camille said. “And you will live through this too. You just have to be courageous.”

  When the last of the hotel’s staff had returned from the upper floors and all of the guests were crowded into the lobby, Camille blew out a deep breath to compose herself and raised her hands above her head to attract everyone’s attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please listen to me,” she stepped up onto a low coffee table. Every face turned towards her. She saw expectation and confusion in their expressions. She saw fear and uncertainty. They were scared.

  “We have no choice but to evacuate the hotel,” Camille began to speak, lifting her voice to be heard above the ripple of moans that rolled around the room. “As you have all seen and heard on the news, the infection has reached Paris and is quickly spreading south. This hotel will not be secure.”

  People began to protest and complain. Camille appealed for silence but the voices became panicked and bickering, drowning her out. One of the other hotel staff took off her shoe and hammered it against the reception counter like a judge’s gavel.

  “We have to take shelter behind the walls of Avignon,” Camille went on in a rush. “There is an American Professor inside the old city. He has been making preparations for such an eventuality. If we can get into Avignon we will be safe.”

  She saw heads turn and stare. Through the hotel’s high glass windows, the vast walls of the old city were visible beyond the lines of stalled traffic. People began suddenly to move, pushing others aside and using the suitcases they clutched in their hands as battering rams. A woman screamed in pain and a tall grey-haired man snarled as he shoved his way towards the hotel doors.

  “Wait!” Camille shouted. “The main entrances into Avignon have already been barricaded with buses. No one is being allowed in or out.”

  She saw the panic seize them. Just minutes before they had been startled and fearful. Now they were on the brink of becoming a savage horde.

  “What will we do? Where can we go?” a middle-aged woman near the elevators wailed. She was standing beside a portly man in a suit. The woman had an English accent. Other voices rose above hers, howling accusations and threats. The room erupted in uproar, and then two men in the crowd threw a flurry of punches at each other. Someone screamed and one of the men went tumbling backwards, knocking two elderly women over like bowling pins.

  “Stop it!” Camille cried out. “Stop it!” Hotel staff rushed into the group of guests, separating antagonists and helping the injured. One of the women who had been felled in the fracas had blood streaming from a cut to her leg.

  Camille glared at the crowd, a flush of hot temper rising up from beneath the collar of her blouse. She bunched her fists and propped them on her hips, seething with contempt.

  “You men behave like pigs!” she scolded. “This is the time we need heroes. But instead of being brave, you think only of your selfish selves. Shame on you,” she flung her arms at them and her words were clipped by her accent and bitterness. She was thirty years younger than them, but they hung their heads, embarrassed by the lash of Camille’s words. For a moment she had control again, and she went on quickly with blazing anger still in her eyes, daring anyone in the lobby to defy or interrupt her.

  “There are several small pedestrian gates along the west wall, facing the Rhône River. These gates were built to allow people to move in and out of the city at night in ancient times when the main gates had already been closed. These gates will be our way into Avignon. Soldiers or police will probably guard each of them. We can call out to them to let us in.”

  The crowd around her had settled into uneasy silence. She sensed the panic still upon them all, but now – with hope and a plan – they were calmer. But they remained anxious. Every few seconds heads would turn, or people would jerk and stifle a cry of fright at the sudden blare of a car horn. At any moment they expected an infected horde to come through the hotel doors like a crashing wave of death. They began to sway and shuffle restlessly, as if desperate to flee. Camille saw people hastily reach for luggage while others flung their suitcases open and began discarding anything unnecessary.

  Camille spoke over the top of the rustle of noise.

  “We will separate into groups of twenty,” she had to shout at the top of her voice to be heard. “I will lead the first group. Eve…” Camille turned and Eve came forward to stand on the low table at her side. The girl had been crying. Her face was grey, her mouth wrenched and twisted as though she fought back more tears. “… Eve will lead the second group, and Maria the third,” Camille pointed to another member of the hotel’s staff.

  “You will not take any luggage with you. It will slow you down and put your life at risk. Carry only the items you can fit into your pockets.”

  Maria had a clipboard clutched to
her chest. She was nineteen years old and training for a future management position at the hotel. In a quavering, faltering voice she read out the names of each hotel guest and the leader they were assigned to.

  The lobby fell into sudden stony silence as each guest listened for their name to be called. Camille drew Eve into the hotel’s back office.

  “Try your phone one last time, Eve,” Camille kept a brave reassuring smile on her face.

  “I did, out in the lobby. I can’t get your father or anyone from the town hall. No one is answering my calls.”

  “Then we must get all these people to safety in the way we have planned,” Camille said. “I will take the first group out through the doors and across the street. Have your people ready to follow, but let me get my people to the grass outside the walls before you leave the hotel. Tell Maria the same thing. If anything goes wrong, you must stay in the hotel and do your best to barricade the doors. Do you understand?”

  Eve’s eyes began to well and glisten with tears. She nodded and choked down a sob of terror.

  “I understand. Let’s hope it does not come to that.”

  “Oui,” Camille’s brave smile slipped. Her voice dropped to a hollow whisper. “Let us pray the soldiers at the gates hear us and let us in before the infected arrive.”

  * * *

  The Palace of the Popes was one of the largest and most significant remaining medieval buildings in the world; a towering, sprawling palace and fortress that had been the seat of western Christianity during the 14th century. It was the spiritual heart of the old city, built to face a vast open square and adjoined by ornate gardens that connected the promontory rock of Doms to the palace’s outer walls.

  Now the square was choked with a mass of humanity, milling, standing; waiting impatiently in the warm mid-morning sun. The sound coming from the square was the noise of a million buzzing bees.