Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  “Eve!” Camille cried out. Her instinct was to run back into the road to help, but one of the women in her group snatched at her arm, holding her back.

  “Don’t leave us!” the cry was filled with raw plaintive fear. The woman’s face had blotched and stained with tears, and her voice rasped as though she were being strangled.

  Camille doubled over with a cramping pain of despair, and then suddenly the last vestiges of her brave façade collapsed. She began to weep openly, sobbing with fear, with sadness and with frustration at the cruelty of their situation. She was inconsolable as she stood helpless and directionless in the lee of the high stone wall.

  * * *

  Standing atop the tower of the Porte Saint Roch gatehouse, Tremaine swept his eyes across the skyline. Smoke scarred the horizon. It hung in the air from a hundred far-away fires like the great pall of a battlefield. He went slowly to the battlements, mindful of the carnage around the foot of the tower and moving with dread for what he might see. His legs felt rubbery under him. LeCat’s face was still ashen with shock, and Tremaine had to steel himself before looking down.

  The breath jammed in his throat. The intersection resembled a slaughterhouse. Around the stone gateway lay piles of bodies and dark smears on the ground where people had dragged themselves to die. The skeleton of the truck was a black mangle of twisted metal. Tremaine reeled away, struck numb by the ghastly trauma – and from the corner of his eye glimpsed a huddle of people standing about a hundred yards to the west in the shadows of the wall.

  Tremaine felt his heart trip, and then he was consumed by a moment of swirling outrage and fury.

  “Christ!” he gasped. He spun on his heel and spotted a gendarme with a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. He lunged for the man and snatched for them.

  “What do you see?” Colonel LeCat frowned. He stared west, scanning the line of the Rhône River through the trees and seeing nothing but dark, vague movement.

  “Down there!” Tremaine thrust a finger urgently. He stared unblinking until his eyes stung with smoke. “Look!” His hand became a white-knuckled fist, and a sickening sensation lurched in the pit of his stomach. “Against the wall near the bus shelter. It’s Camille Pelletier.”

  Colonel LeCat snatched the binoculars from the American and pressed them to his eyes. The mayor’s daughter was dressed in her work uniform, surrounded by a huddle of cowering elderly people. Then he traversed the binoculars until they were focused on that section of the high wall. Two uniformed gendarmes and one civilian man were defending the parapets west of the gatehouse. The gendarmes were aiming their weapons at a cluster of people running across the wide street. The civilian hefted an old double-barrel shotgun, and leaned out between the stone crenellations to fire on the milling elderly people directly beneath where they stood guard. LeCat threw down the binoculars and started to run. With dreadful certainty he knew what was about to happen.

  “Don’t shoot!” the Colonel roared. He had a barking voice that had been honed and trained on a thousand windswept parade grounds. As he ran he reached for his sidearm and fired a shot into the air. His face twisted with effort and rage. Droplets of spittle flew from his lips as he shouted.

  “Don’t shoot!”

  The section of wall between the Porte Saint Roch gates and the southwest corner of the ancient city was about two hundred yards of uninterrupted parapet, but centuries of wear had made the narrow battlements precarious. LeCat leaped a small gap in the crumbling stonework, still shouting.

  One of the gendarmes saw their Colonel charging towards them and blanched in shock. The civilian was a burly, unshaven man, with a dark curly mop of tousled hair. He was heavy in the chest and bulgingly obese in the gut. He had the shotgun wedged tight against his shoulder.

  LeCat was still fifty yards away when the civilian fired down into the knot of people standing beneath the wall.

  * * *

  Camille sagged at the knees, distraught and defeated. Her group was pinned against the wall, while Eve’s clutch of tourists stood stranded and leaderless, cringing in the middle of the roadway.

  Around them the madness seemed to reach a new level of chaos. Shots still spat from the wall high above them, and black roiling smoke swept along the street from the burning truck. There was other smoke too from nearby burning buildings and the blare of security alarms and sirens. Overlaying it all were the sobbing cries of fear and pain.

  Then old Mr. Goldstein suddenly flung up his cane and pointed towards the corner of the street with a shaking, trembling hand.

  “My God!” the old man croaked. His face seemed shriveled, collapsing in upon itself. Raw fear swirled in his eyes.

  Standing on the far side of the nearby river, a horde of grotesque running shapes emerged, streaming towards a bridge that carried traffic from the far bank to the old city. Even at a distance their voices could be heard; lustful wild ululations like baying dogs as they take the scent.

  Camille gaped in dismay.

  “It’s them,” Mr. Goldstein took a few tottering steps as if to see the undead more clearly. “The infected have reached us!” his cry croaked alarm in his throat. He started to say more when the heavy charge of a double-barrel shotgun blast caught the old man in the back and ripped through his spine. It tore out through the front of his pelvis, throwing him forward in the grass as if a hammer blow had struck him from above. The dead man’s cane went skittering across the ground and his hat was flung from his head.

  Camille saw the gentle old man’s body seem to break in half as a puffing pink feather of blood and tissue misted in the air and splattered gore across her skirt. She stood, rooted with shock for long stunned seconds, until a woman beside her began to cry mournfully.

  Slowly Camille’s expression altered. Her face became smooth and pale as a corpse. The last glimmer of hope faded from her eyes. She made her decision.

  “Follow me,” she seized the weeping woman and dragged her along. The rest of the survivors followed meekly. “We’re going back.”

  From the bus shelter she could not see the nearby bridge; it was blocked from her view by other hotels – but she instinctively sensed that they had only minutes to find refuge.

  There was no way forward. Their last hope was to barricade themselves inside the hotel.

  And pray.

  * * *

  Chuck Gudinski drove the hire car with inspired abandon, anticipating the bends in the road before they leaped out at him, and slaloming the little Fiat from one side of the blacktop to the other to avoid abandoned vehicles that littered the highway in both directions.

  He felt tired. His eyes were red and puffy. His eyelids itched – but unholy fear kept him alert. The journey had been a nightmare of tension and strained nerves.

  He had been driving for almost eight hours, and now the needle on the fuel gauge had dipped into empty.

  He flicked another sideways glance at his fiancé but didn’t smile.

  Sherry Wilson sat curled up in the passenger seat, her face pale, gnawing at her bottom lip. Her eyes were huge and haunted, her features drained with exhaustion. Chuck felt his heart squeezed with concern as he saw the deep lines of worry at the corners of Sherry’s mouth and the sickly waxen patina of despair on her skin.

  “It will be okay,” Chuck reassured her for the thousandth time. They had fled the city of Bourges in the small hours of the morning just moments before the infected had swarmed through the suburb where they were vacationing. “We’ll make it.”

  Sherry said nothing. She had cried through the night, weeping softly and pitifully, until she felt she had no more tears left to shed. Now she felt like a hollow shell, slipping deeper into a morass of despondency as the endless miles sped by until she became so numb and immune to the nightmare landscape that the horrors no longer registered.

  Chuck was the exact opposite. He was pumped full of adrenalin. He realized the lack of rest and relentless tension were corroding his physical and mental reserves, but fear drove hi
m on. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and saw a reflection of dry skin and bloodshot eyes, gummed with yellow mucus and underscored by smudges of fatigue.

  That they had driven so far before dawn had been a blessing. Most of the ungodly horror they passed had been blanketed by darkness. They had seen small rural villages on fire and dark shapes laying beside abandoned cars, but the ghastly details had been blessedly masked by night.

  Now morning had come, and the road south stretched before them like a winding python.

  A green signpost flashed past and Chuck grimaced.

  “Twenty kilometers to Avignon,” he spoke quietly out of the side of his mouth to Sherry. “It’s going to be touch and go. If the gas runs out we might have to walk a couple of miles.”

  Sherry said nothing. She sat, staring fixedly ahead.

  “There might be a boat we can board, or steal,” Chuck went on optimistically. “I remember reading the brochures about this place before we left Washington. The city is built right on the banks of a river. They do a lot of luxury cruises and stuff from here. There’s bound to be a boat. There’s bound to be.”

  They had arrived in France two weeks before the world had slid into apocalypse, and Chuck had proposed marriage under the Eiffel Tower. Their holiday in France had been planned as the vacation of a lifetime…

  Abandoned cars and trucks were strewn along the road as they drove further south, some of the vehicles simply left in the middle of the blacktop, while others had careered off the tarmac into ditches and trees. Under the bright morning sun, bodies had become distinguishable, and Chuck had seen the corpses of small children in the back seat of a Nissan wagon, the vehicle’s windshield smashed and spattered with blood.

  Five kilometers from Avignon the little Fiat surged and spluttered for the first time. Chuck eased his foot off the accelerator and slowed, trying to nurse the hire car the rest of the way. They passed another huge roadside sign indicating bridges ahead.

  Suddenly the road network west of the ancient city became choked afresh by a new chaos of abandoned vehicles. Some were crumpled and mangled from collisions. There were others that were smoldering black shells. A truck had overturned onto its side, spilling its cargo of boxed electrical goods across three lanes. Great flocks of squawking birds wheeled and hung in the sky, screeching raucously as the Fiat rolled past. The air became tainted with the smells of oily smoke, the stench of disease, and the thick choking tang of putrefaction.

  Chuck felt the gagging taste of it coat the back of his throat. He wound up his window but the stench permeated through the cockpit and made his eyes water.

  Just west of Avignon they drove slowly through the narrow cobblestoned streets of a small village, Chuck’s head turning from one side to the other as each horror was revealed. The whole village seemed on fire, and there was blood stained across the road. The side streets were littered with bricks and broken glass. As they neared the outskirts, the roof of one building collapsed in upon itself sending a funnel of flames and sparks spiraling high into the sky.

  “There’s the bridge,” Chuck pointed suddenly as the Fiat rounded a bend in the road and joined a four-lane straight stretch of tarmac. A kilometer ahead rose the hump of a bridge across the Rhône. Chuck dabbed his foot on the brakes.

  Between the car and the bridge stood a roadblock.

  The roadblock had been made from a barricade of steel drums, with a wide line of iron spikes laid across the tarmac twenty yards closer to the car. On either side of the drums were heavy sandbagged weapon emplacements. Chuck thought he could see the barrel of a machine gun between bags, the ugly long barrel pointing towards the sky.

  An abandoned delivery van teetered on the verge of the road, the driver’s door hanging open and the vehicle sagging to one side on shredded tires.

  “What do we do?” Sherry spoke for the first time in almost three hours. Her voice sounded tiny and afraid.

  “I think the roadblock has been abandoned. I don’t see any soldiers, and there should be some.”

  “Can we ram the barrels?”

  Chuck shook his head. “They’re probably filled with concrete,” he guessed, frowning and thinking hard. The little car coughed and surged again, wheezing for the last drops of gas like a man dying of thirst.

  He crawled the car forward until they were just a few feet short of the iron spikes. He looked hard at the sandbag emplacements. The barrel of the machine gun had not moved.

  “I need you to get out of the car and move the spikes,” Chuck said softly.

  Sherry looked straight at him. There was something fearful in her expression.

  “And then what?”

  “And then I’ll try to move a few barrels aside so we can get the car through. It’s either that, or walk the rest of the way.”

  For the first time, they peered through the car’s grimy windshield to the view across the river. They could see the western wall of the ancient city behind a drifting haze of smoke. Closer, they saw boats that had lost their moorings, drifting downstream with the current. Two of the boats were on fire and two more had collided and become entangled. The river looked about seventy yards wide, its bottle-green color silted with mud from recent rains, and its banks padded with low shrubs and muddy reed banks.

  “Chuck,” Sherry felt the panic well up inside her. Blood drained from her face and the words came in sobs. “I don’t want to get out of the car! I’m scared!”

  “I am too,” Chuck admitted.

  Chuck left the motor running and climbed warily from the car. Sherry took a last sobbing, shudder of breath and pushed open the passenger door. The stench of burning smoke and corruption struck them like a wall. Chuck spat the taste out of his mouth, then masked his nose with the sleeve of his sweater. The stench smelled oily and over-sweet. It coated his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

  Sherry gagged and dry retched on the tarmac. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She kept her mouth closed and covered her nose with her hand. She glanced at Chuck with one final look of appeal and fear.

  The iron road spikes were seated into a long strip of thick rubber. Sherry dragged the obstacle to the side of the road and made the mistake of peering into the cabin of the disabled delivery van.

  A man lay slumped over the steering wheel. He was dead.

  Sherry stared aghast and felt her skin crawl.

  The bloated corpse was still moving, seeming to heave slowly. Sherry took two steps closer and realized the dead man’s flesh crawled with thousands of fat wriggling maggots. They had entered through the man’s slashed throat, burrowing into the still-warm flesh to avoid the scavenger birds that had come swooping at dawn. The cabin of the van was fouled with feathers and droppings. The birds had plucked out the dead man’s eyes, then pecked at the tender flesh of his lips and ears leaving half of his face eaten away and his mouth and jaw exposed in a hideous grinning rictus.

  Sherry screamed.

  Chuck had started wrestling with a steel barrel in the center of the abandoned roadblock, the sweat of his exertion breaking out across his brow. He had already moved two pieces of the barricade aside. He was gasping for breath, trying to breath shallowly in the sickening air when he heard Sherry scream. He looked up, suddenly filled with alarm.

  He ran to where Sherry stood. Her bladder had voided. Her jeans were dark with the wet stains. She hunched doubled over with her hands clamped over her mouth as if to choke back her gorge. Chuck saw the dead, disfigured corpse in the front seat of the van and understood.

  “Get back in the car,” he took her by the shoulders and steered her back to the Fiat. She went numbly on rubber legs.

  Chuck sprinted back to the steel drums. He was frantic, his eyes wild and alert.

  A sudden new sound filled the air, building up to a far away roar, like the rushing waters of a flooding river.

  From the broken ground about the burning village, distorted figures appeared through the wreaths of smoke. Chuck counted a dozen. Then that number grew
to over a hundred. They sprang up from the long grass and appeared between the trees. They crawled and clambered up from the bushes along the riverbank and came running from the burning streets of the village.

  “Oh my God!” Chuck whispered. He felt paralyzed. His legs suddenly felt filled with concrete, and steel bands of terror clamped his chest so that for a long moment he could not breathe.

  Chuck ran. He ran back towards the car. He ran with terror in his legs and strangling his breath. He ran with his heart pounding and his arms pumping.

  The undead compressed into a solid horde as they reached the western approach to the bridge and came hunting towards the car. They filled the bridge from one side to the other, a howling, mutilated, terrifying throng that streamed forward like ants from a disturbed nest.

  Chuck reached the car and threw himself behind the wheel. The engine was still running, but beginning to wheeze and splutter. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the undead closing, then stomped his foot on the gas pedal and the hire car howled as it lunged forward.

  The gap Chuck had made between the steel barrels was precariously narrow. He lined the Fiat up and steered with one hand, reaching across the cabin to hold Sherry back in her seat, bracing for the impact.

  One of the undead appeared suddenly. It had climbed up and over a bridge railing. It threw itself in front of the hatchback. The impact sounded like the heavy swing of an axe against a tree-trunk as the front of the car hit the ghoul and dragged it under the chassis. There was a jolting bump a split-second before the Fiat reached the narrow breach in the barricade. Chuck wrenched at the wheel, trying frantically to keep the nose of the car lined up with the precariously narrow gap.

  He miscalculated.

  As it shot the gap, the front left wheel of the Fiat caught the edge of one steel barrel and the car went cartwheeling over in a rending screech of metal, flung viciously into the air through a crunching revolution that flung the doors open, shattered every window into a storm of glass splinters, and wrenched the damaged wheel clear off the vehicle.