Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  “Run!” Camille cried out in helpless despair.

  The stragglers in her group were still staggering their way across the road. They heard the bellowing engine of the truck and saw it careering towards the crowded intersection like a vast avalanche of steel. They froze in sheer horror.

  A hail of spitting gunfire roared from the battlements atop the Avignon wall. The windscreen of the truck starred and shattered.

  Camille started to run back towards the stranded elderly still in the middle of the road, but knew it was too late. The truck raced through the intersection without slowing, crashing into the litter of vehicles in its way and hurling them aside. A silver Fiat went under the truck’s giant wheels. The huge vehicle rocked drunkenly on its suspension, then righted itself. A Volvo was struck on the front right fender and hurled high into the air. Steel and glass flew like missiles. Two of Camille’s elderly group were killed under the overturned carcass of a red Renault. Four more were scythed down by flying debris. Their frail bodies lay broken on the road in pools of spreading blood while the huge truck jounced on, surging straight for the mass of rioters around the gate.

  * * *

  There were four gendarmes standing at the battlements of the Porte Saint Roch tower, and a dozen more men posted to positions along the high wall on both flanks.

  Below them, the scene around the intersection turned chaotic. Wild-faced protestors were pummeling their fists on the overturned busses that barricaded the entrance. The sound of the drumming mixed with the hysteria of their frenzied shouts became the clamor of nightmares.

  The gendarmes were rattled. Rioters started hurling rocks and one struck a young soldier in the head. He fell to the ground with a groan and threw his hands to his face, blood spurting from between his fingers.

  A gendarme sergeant standing at a nearby section of wall slung his assault rifle over his shoulder and came marching along the parapet. He stared down at the fallen soldier and snarled irritably at him, then leaned through the battlements with his sidearm drawn.

  “Get away from the gate!” the sergeant bellowed at the crowd. He had a deep voice that sounded like rolling thunder but the chaotic shouting of the rioters drowned it out. The sergeant aimed his pistol into the air and fired two warning shots. Instinctively the crowd pushing at the overturned buses that blockaded the entrance cringed and cowered away. They washed back from the gateway like surf receding from a beach.

  “Get away from the gate or I will order my men to open fire,” the sergeant repeated the command into the shocked silence. “Return to your homes.”

  The scene beyond the walls looked apocalyptic. The wide boulevard that ringed the old city had been choked with four lanes of abandoned cars, and the sky had darkened with smoke from a dozen nearby fires. People were pouring into the streets, running towards the old city walls with their arms full of belongings. He saw women pushing shopping trolleys packed with possessions, and others wandering, dazed and confused. Car alarms blared in the background, while from inside the city’s walls he could hear police sirens. And then another sound added itself to the swirling cacophony of bedlam. It was the unmistakable bellow of a truck’s engine straining. The gendarme sergeant narrowed his eyes and searched the skyline.

  For long seconds he saw nothing, but still the sound of the truck engine seemed to be coming closer. He looked right, towards a corner. All he could see were local hotels and a ragged line of people spilling into the stream of choked traffic. He looked left. On the opposite corner stood the abandoned local police station – a sprawling collection of low-rise buildings with full-glass windows that glinted the afternoon sun. Then he heard the truck’s engine noise alter, revving hard through a change of gear. The sergeant saw a gout of black exhaust smoke stain the sky, and a moment later a dump-truck appeared on the far side of the intersection, still a kilometer away, shadowed by an overpass.

  The Avenue Eisenhower was a wide service road that joined an outer ring route to the old city; a four-lane thoroughfare through an area of greater Avignon undergoing re-development that had been blocked to all civilian traffic for several months.

  The dump truck turned onto the avenue and surged towards the Porte Saint Roch gates like a charging bull shown a red matador’s cape.

  “Fuck!” the gendarme sergeant swore in English. He was a twenty-year veteran who had served alongside British Special Forces troops during operations in Yemen and Somalia. He snarled at the men around him and ordered them to take aim.

  The truck crested a low rise in the road, still gaining speed. The gendarme sergeant saw a big burly man at the wheel of the vehicle. The truck slewed from one side of the road to the other and smeared the sky with its belching exhaust.

  “Fire!” the gendarme sergeant snatched his assault rifle off his shoulder and took aim at the truck’s windscreen. The glass starred and then shattered but the truck reached the jammed intersection and ploughed on like a battering ram. Abandoned cars in the destructive path were crushed or flung aside. One vehicle was clipped on the fender and flung high into the air. Rioters at the gates who sensed the new danger began to flee the destruction, but they were trapped by the sheer weight of bodies pressed so close together beneath the arch of the tower. Women began to scream. Fists flew as men fought to break free of the claustrophobic trap. People went down under the crushing panic, dropping to their knees to be stampeded to death under the frenzied throng.

  “Fire!”

  One of the gendarmes stationed on the nearby wall took aim at a tight knot of rioters on the sidewalk. They had picked up pieces of metal from the strewn wreckage and began charging into the crowd, swinging the crude weapons. Some shots kicked up spurts of dirt. One caught a rioter in the back as he turned to swing a jagged length of iron. The man was thrown a staggering step forward and then he arched his back like a drawn bow and threw his face to the sky. His mouth fell open in a silent cry of pain, and then a second bullet knocked him to the ground. The rioters around him scattered.

  The truck reared up on one side as it crumpled over the top of a Fiat and then slewed sideways for a perilous moment before righting itself. The gendarme sergeant saw the driver heaving at the wheel. He fired into the truck’s cabin and saw the driver flinch then clasp at his shoulder.

  The truck swerved again, lining itself up with the arched opening of the gatehouse. There were people in the back of the truck, clinging to the lip of the tip-tray.

  “Fire!” the sergeant repeated the order and the air hissed with bullets.

  One of the figures crouched in the steel tray at the back of the truck got shot in the face as the truck bucked wildly over crushed wreckage. It was a young man who had been staring wide-eyed with fright over the rim of the tray and bracing himself for the approaching impact and collision. The bullet took off the top of his head and flung him backwards.

  “Fire!”

  The truck bucked over the sidewalk, rearing up like a wounded beast and then crashing down on its front tires, flattening a steel sign post and careering into the stranded rioters pinned by the press of bodies around them and unable to escape. The truck smashed into the rioters and the sound of crushing bones and breaking bodies was appalling.

  The truck was too wide and high to clear the stone arch of the gateway. It ploughed into the ancient sandstone tower at almost fifty kilometers per hour, crashing into the huge stone blocks before momentum carried the twisted mangled remains into the overturned buses barricading the gate.

  The vast stone tower shuddered and shook. One of the gendarmes was thrown off his feet. Dust and smoke roiled into the air and in the stunned silence immediately afterwards came the first agonizing cries of the dying.

  Bodies had been pinned between the front of the truck and the overturned sides of the buses. Others had been mangled under the eight rumbling wheels. The dead and dying lay in their dozens, flung like broken toys onto the pavement. The gendarme sergeant stared over the edge of the battlement and gaped in horror. He had seen two decades
of death and warfare, but nothing like this. Everywhere he looked he saw bodies and blood.

  Then, with a deafening ‘crump!’ the wrecked truck exploded into flames.

  “Get the Colonel here!” the sergeant turned and barked orders to his pale and shaken men. From the top of the tower he could see bodies in the back of the truck’s twisted tipper-tray. Some of them were children. One small figure was on fire, its head burning like a torch. The sergeant heard himself gasp and choke. His gorge rose in a hot flood of nausea that scalded the back of his throat. He gagged it down and scraped the back of his shaking hand across his mouth.

  The burning child began beating at the fire with its bare hands, shrieking in dreadful agony as the blazing flames burned off its ears, nose and flesh on its cheeks. The child collapsed into a pathetic bundle when the flames caught on clothing. The feeble wretched cries of agony were cut mercifully short.

  The sergeant blinked back stinging tears and tore his eyes away from the gruesome skin-crawling horror. But the stuff of screaming nightmares was everywhere he looked.

  Crushed beneath the tires of the vehicle were mounds of twisted limbs and mutilated bodies caught in the tangle of wreckage. Black greasy smoke billowed from the burning truck’s remains, and a wall of heat rose to singe the sergeant’s eyebrows. He swayed away, gasping and choking, hunched double and coughed smoke from his lungs. He heard more screams – tiny, tortured, child-like screams – but he did not look again. He did not watch them die.

  The truck burned furiously and the stench of burning rubber and human flesh became overpowering. Fire from the blazing vehicle scorched the façade of the gatehouse black, and a column of dirty smoke rose a hundred feet into the air before the breeze smeared it across the sky. The gendarme sergeant ordered his men back to the battlements and gave the nearest man orders to shoot.

  He thrust his craggy face close. “Anyone who tries to approach the gatehouse must be stopped. Do you understand?”

  The gendarme flinched, intimidated and shaken. “I… I can’t,” the young man whispered, appalled by the carnage.

  “Damn you!” the sergeant struck the man a stinging blow on the side of his face. “Until we know if the barricaded buses are still firmly in place, we are vulnerable. If we don’t kill anyone who approaches, we could be overwhelmed!”

  Some of the dead were incinerated as the truck burned, their bodies blackening to charred pulp as the corpses writhed and twisted in the furnace of leaping flames. Some of the survivors crawled, or staggered into the gutters to die, choking on ghastly rattling groans. People milled about in the dusty debris, wandering dazed and aimless.

  Minutes later LeCat and Tremaine arrived at the gatehouse.

  As he climbed out of the French jeep, Tremaine felt his legs shaking beneath him. A hard lump of foreboding knotted in his chest, making his breath saw. He went towards the steps to the tower slowly. He could smell burning oil and rubber, and there were thick wisps of smoke hanging in the air. The buses that were the barricade had been scorched with soot, but they remained firmly wedged across the gateway. His relief was tempered by a perilous fear of what he would see on the other side of the wall.

  The sergeant met the two men at the top of the tower. Colonel LeCat stared over the edge of the battlement and gaped down at the fire-blackened carnage for long moments.

  Within the killing ground below the gatehouse he could still see movement. A man lay on his back in a pool of his own blood, waving his arm weakly for help. Both his legs were missing, while close beside the man laid a woman tucked into a ball of agony with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms clutching at a gaping hole in her stomach. She made a soft keening sound as agony overwhelmed her. Others sobbed and staggered amidst the dreadful carnage, clutching at broken limbs, or with hands clasped over jagged wounds to stem the flow of blood. It was a charnel house of destruction and death.

  Already flocks of squabbling birds had gathered amongst the cadavers. Hopping and flapping raucously from body to body, they bickered and croaked, pecking at eyes and soft flesh, tugging at lifeless hands so that they twitched as though the corpse looked still alive.

  When the Colonel turned back to the waiting sergeant his face was tight and fixed.

  “Should we help the injured, sir?” the sergeant asked LeCat stiffly.

  “How?” the Colonel’s voice rasped, rough with his horror. “The barricades must stay in place.”

  “We could…” the sergeant searched delicately for the right words, “… put the dying out of their misery as an act of compassion…”

  “No,” LeCat said. “We cannot spare the ammunition.”

  The sergeant stiffened. The gendarmes nearby overheard the exchange and their faces betrayed their shock. LeCat lifted his voice so his words would reach the men stationed along the nearby walls.

  “Well done,” LeCat said thickly, struggling to contain his emotions. The bleeding bodies strewn across the road reminded him of the devastating car-bomb blasts he had witnessed in Iraq. “You all did your duty. And you must continue to do what survival requires. The undead are here. The infection has reached our walls. Thousands are already attacking the main gates and any moment the infected will appear here too. Do not lament the dead or the dying. There is no time for anything now but to fight for our survival.”

  * * *

  Camille drew the remnants of her little group into a knot around the bus shelter. Just a dozen frail and weeping faces stared back at her. The rest of their number had been killed during the terror of the truck’s suicidal collision into the nearby gatehouse. The elderly survivors were weeping, aghast at the horror they had witnessed, stunned into mute helplessness. They stood, trembling and shaken and gulping for breath.

  Camille slumped against the wall of the shelter and a shudder of reaction overwhelmed her. She began to shake uncontrollably. Despair washed through her in waves, and she began to weep thick, slow tears.

  Smoke from the burning truck drifted over the group in thick black clouds, and a half-human figure came staggering towards them, emerging through the choking haze. The man had been stripped of clothing and his skin hung in lacerated shreds of smoldering flesh; a disfigured gruesome thing with a ragged hole the size of a coffee cup in his chest and one arm dangling from its shoulder socket on a thin ropy sliver of gristle. He moaned in agony, his mouth gaping, his eyes blank and dazed. He stumbled blindly past the bus shelter and then collapsed, kicking feebly, in the middle of the road.

  Camille cuffed brusquely at her tears with the back of her hand and drew a short, sharp breath, turning away from the carnage surrounding the gatehouse and focusing all her attention on the faces pressed around her.

  The elderly tourists were almost child-like in their helpless appeal. Even old Mr. Goldstein sobbed, his rheumy eyes haunted with fear. His lips quivered, and the hand holding his walking stick fluttered with a fierce palsy. The old man seemed to have shrunk in the last few terrible minutes. The flesh seemed to have withered on his bones.

  “Come on, gang,” Camille sniffed back more tears and tried to put fire and promise in her voice. Her face had drained of all color so that her lips seemed rimmed with frost, and her skin had a waxen pallor. “We’re going to run to the wall, and then we will follow it alongside the river. The small entry gates into the city are on the western side. Stay close to me!”

  She went at a purposeful walk, and the elderly followed like a gaggle of baby geese. The grass underfoot grew lush and green with recent rain, littered with a carpet of autumn leaves.

  When she reached the shelter of the vast wall at last, Camille turned.

  Everyone was still with her. Mr. Goldstein lagged at the back of the line, struggling painfully to keep moving. Camille called encouragement out to the old man, and then her eyes were diverted back to the doors of the hotel by a sudden flurry of activity and noise. Eve’s group of tourists were emerging into the smoke-filled horror of the day. Over the sporadic crack of gunfire and the wailing of the
dying, Camille could hear the woman’s high shrieking voice, edged with panic, as she implored her group to run towards the road.

  “Come on, Mr. Goldstein,” Camille’s focus shifted back to the elderly Jewish gentleman. “You can do it. Just a little further.”

  She shifted impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for the old man to catch up, torn by the urgent need to press on. One of the women began plucking at the sleeve of her blouse for attention. Camille scraped her fingers through her hair and turned, her brow puckered with annoyance and her voice edged.

  “What is it, Mrs. Doolan?”

  “I… I’m sorry, dear. I don’t think I can go on,” the woman wheezed. Her eyes were wide with a look of astonishment. She was an Irish lady in her sixties, hunched by her age and by the weight of a heavy pink coat she wore. The garment was unbuttoned, and between the flapping lapels Camille saw a sudden red stain of blood bloom like a rose from between the woman’s breasts. Camille choked a gasp of alarm and gaped open-mouthed in horror.

  “I’ve been shot…” the elderly woman grimaced. Her expression became almost apologetic. She fell forward into Camille’s arms. Camille couldn’t hold her weight. The woman was dead before she hit the soft green grass.

  Along the high wall, Camille saw nervous pale-faced soldiers gesticulating down at the group and aiming their weapons. She shook her head in slow numb horror.

  “We’re from the hotel!” Camille cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted. “We need to get into the city.”

  The elderly around her were cowering in a huddle close to the body of the dead Irishwoman. They wailed in fear and panic.

  “Help us. Please!”

  There was a pause in the sporadic firing and for a moment the world seemed eerily silent. Then another shot rang out and Eve – standing in the middle of the road and waving furiously to the group of tourists she was shepherding – fell down, dead. The bullet caught her full in the chest. Its impact flung her off her feet and hurled her against the side of an abandoned car. Eve slumped there, her mouth gaping open, but her scream of pain trapped in her throat. She slid down the side of the vehicle, leaving a garish red smear on the door panel.