Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  LeCat saw an obscene pale figure in the midst of the scrambling melee suddenly break free of the struggling knot in the doorway and come in a scampering charge towards him. The ghoul looked like a starved wretch from the horrors of a nightmare. Its skin was sickly grey, oozing puss from a dozen open wounds, and the flesh of its hairless head had shrunk and shriveled tight over the skull.

  LeCat ran forward to meet the attack, snarling a challenge. “Follow me!”

  He sprinted into the laneway, boots echoing loud on the ancient cobblestones, and fired at the charging ghoul on the run. The pistol kicked in his hand, the recoil pulsing all the way up his shoulder, and the sound of its retort loud in his ears. The shot struck the ghoul between the eyes and a perfect round hole appeared in the withered ugly flesh. The ghoul was flung on its back by the close-range impact and didn’t move again.

  “Get to the door!” LeCat shouted at two of the gendarmes who had followed him across the narrow lane. There were other men close behind, but in the confined space there was little room to move and no way that the support troops could find open fields of fire. It was up to LeCat and the men beside him to clear a path to the door.

  LeCat ran on, careless of the danger. He saw the ruin of a woman’s body lying on the ground. Her clothes had been shredded and her chest ripped open. Blood and guts ran across the cobblestones, slippery as oil. Beside the woman’s corpse he saw the thrashing boots of a young soldier. He had been flung onto his back. His throat had been ripped out. The gaping wound in the soldier’s neck was gruesome.

  A snarling figure suddenly turned and leaped at LeCat from beneath the stone arch of the gateway. It had been half-hidden from the APC’s bright search lights. Now it pounced out of the shadows like a wild animal.

  It had once been a middle-aged man; now it was a disfigured creature in a blood-spattered shirt that hung down over a swollen gut. The front of its ragged trousers were stained with gore and stank of stale urine. It howled fiercely at the soldiers. Thick brown blood bubbled in its throat and spilled from the slash of its rotting mouth.

  It lashed out at LeCat with its hooked hand. LeCat deflected the attack with his forearm and the soldier running at the Colonel’s shoulder was clawed across the face. The man dropped his gun and spun away with a high shriek of terror. He was not badly wounded and the cry was not of pain. But shock and black unholy fear tore the terror from his throat in a shrill scream.

  The soldier sank down on his knees, sobbing and gasping. “I have been infected!” the soldier gasped. The zombie pounced on the fallen man and bit his ear off before another gendarme following close behind shot the ghoul in the head.

  LeCat lunged desperately for the heavy open door. Through the open archway he could hear the thunder of approaching footsteps pounding through mud like the sound of racehorses as they turn into the finishing straight of a race. The ground seemed to tremble and the black night shook.

  Along the battlements overhead, gunfire erupted and the noise of ten thousand maddened voices suddenly rose to a frenzied crescendo. The undead had been drawn to the heavy fusillades of machine gun fire around the gateway. They were out there, LeCat knew, and rushing towards the open door.

  He threw his weight against the heavy door and it groaned on rusted hinges. The ground was slick with blood and someone’s guts. He couldn’t get purchase for his feet.

  Three undead figures swarmed in through the closing doorway. They were snarling, savage beasts. The insanity of their infection made them mindless. They lunged at the closest soldiers and knocked them tumbling from their feet. Behind the shield of the door, LeCat screwed his face tight with effort and dug the toes of his boots into the slippery stone cobbles. The door gave a last groan of rusted resistance, and then closed. LeCat threw his weight against the door and wrestled with the first bolt. His hands were slippery with sweat. On the other side of the door the first of the undead flung themselves against the barrier. The door kicked and bucked.

  “Soldiers!” LeCat barked. “Soldiers to me!”

  The fight in the laneway was close to getting out of hand. The three undead were wrecking havoc. LeCat could smell the stench of their rotting corpses and their foul fetid breath. He could smell the fear of his men and he sensed the fight was on the verge of being lost. The undead were mindless killing machines and the close confines of the lane gave his men no space.

  “Soldiers!” Two men were down on the ground, clutching at savage wounds and coughing, but one gendarme forced his way through the frantic madness and reached the doorway. He threw his shoulder against the rough wood and rammed home the ancient steel bolt. There was another bolt at the bottom of the door. The gendarme stomped at it with his boot.

  “Stay here!” LeCat shouted to the man. Then he turned and understood instantly that Avignon was on the brink of falling.

  A ghoul lunged at a gendarme and the man reeled back and fell over. The undead beast screamed like a banshee and clawed at the fallen soldier’s face. Another gendarme fired a snap shot that struck the infected ghoul in the arm and spun it around. The battle had degenerated into a brawling street-fight. Assault rifles were useless in the cramped space and the undead had the advantage.

  “Kill them!” LeCat came out of the darkened doorway with his pistol in his hand, gasping, his chest heaving for air. His eyes were cold and flat and merciless. He threw up the weapon to fire at one of the mud-spattered creatures but had to abort the shot for fear of hitting his own man. He swung his heavy boot at the ghoul instead and felt the weight of the impact smash in ribs and break bones. Automatic fire exploded close to his ear and he turned to see a nearby gendarme going to ground. Another of the infected was wrestling with the man, snapping at him with gaping jaws. LeCat put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of the zombie’s head and blew its brains out in a cloud of grey custard content.

  There were two still of the undead loose in the laneway and the gendarmes were falling back. The ghouls were like enraged bulls, maddened by their infection and their eyes filled with insanity.

  The cobblestones were slick with blood and the lane filled with the screams of the dying. Another gendarme went down as a ghoul lunged for him. The zombie latched on to the man’s leg and bit through the stuff of his uniform like a savaging dog. The soldier threw back his head and screamed in agony. There was naked terror in his eyes. He turned, pleading for help. The men around him shrank away, knowing he was doomed.

  “Behind the APC’s!” LeCat shouted over the madness and mayhem of the melee. “Withdraw!”

  The soldiers turned and ran, and the ghouls went bounding after them.

  LeCat filled his lungs, then called to the machine gunners aboard the armored vehicles.

  “Fire!”

  A straggling gendarme got caught in the blaze of fire that erupted from the two vehicles. His body was torn to shreds. Another man staggered from a bullet wound before he got clear. LeCat threw himself flat on the blood-soaked cobblestones and the flail of gunfire swept over him. It went on for thirty hammering seconds and then the guns fell suddenly and dramatically silent.

  LeCat lifted his face slowly. Smoke hung in the air and his ears were ringing from the heavy percussion. The two ghouls lay under the bright beams of the spotlights. One had been dismembered by the brutal fusillade. The corpse lay in broken pieces of bone and gore. The other had taken so many hits it no longer bore any resemblance to the man it had once been; it had been butchered by gunfire.

  When LeCat got to his feet, he felt a sudden rush of vertigo and relief. He glanced back at the door and saw it was still locked. The man he had posted there was pressed against the wall and grim-faced.

  LeCat let his gaze sweep slowly around the lane. His features fixed in a tight grimace, and his eyes narrowed to slits. There were a dozen dead bodies, sprawled on the cobblestones in tortured blood-soaked attitudes of death. Most of them were gendarmes.

  “Head shot them all,” his voice sounded raw and scratchy as he gave the order to the read
y reserve’s Captain. His heart raced as if he had run a long way, but his face was stony. “We cannot take the chance that some who died are infected and will come back to life. Then I want all the corpses and remains burned.”

  * * *

  The dawn’s light was still just a sickly pale glow on the horizon when Tremaine climbed to the top of the Porte Saint Roch gatehouse. Without a breeze to stir it, the air was oppressive; a miasma of rotting festering smells that rose from the undead hordes and hung like a languid blanket over the city. Tremaine wrinkled his nose and felt his eyes begin to water.

  Colonel LeCat was already standing at the battlements. He had a handkerchief knotted over his mouth and nose. The soldiers around him were subdued and bleary-eyed. On the ground between them sat a small modified mortar, several long coils of thick rope, and four steel grapnel hooks. The hooks looked to Tremaine like boat anchors. Each had four sharp claws. The mortar was set on a square base-plate weighted down with sandbags and elevated by a bi-pod. It had been aimed towards the Grande Hotel.

  LeCat handed the binoculars to Tremaine. The Colonel’s uniform was rumpled and stained with dark spots of blood. “There are no signs of life in the hotel,” the Frenchman said.

  Tremaine lifted the glasses to his eyes and ran them slowly over the façade of the building across the wide road. The lower floor windows were scorched and blackened, but the upper floors seemed undamaged. Tremaine scanned every window on the fourth and fifth floor, looking for telltale signs of movement. He saw nothing and a heavy sense of despair made his shoulders sag.

  “They might still be alive,” he handed the binoculars back to the Colonel. “They could be hiding in one of the rooms on the opposite side of the building.”

  LeCat shrugged. “We will soon find out,” he said grimly.

  One of the gendarmes came forward with a bullhorn. LeCat snatched the handkerchief from his mouth.

  “Camille Pelletier!” the sound from the speaker was monstrous in the still morning air. “Camille Pelletier, this is Colonel LeCat. Can you hear me?”

  For a long moment there was still silence. LeCat raised the bullhorn again. “Camille Pelletier!”

  Suddenly a window on the sixth floor blew outwards in an explosion of flying glass, followed by the dark bulk of a chair. A pale, exhausted face appeared in the jagged space and Tremaine felt his spirits lift with sudden relief.

  Under the magnification of the binoculars, Camille looked haggard with fatigue. Her blonde hair hung lank against her skull and her eyes had receded in her face, underscored by dark bruises. Her cheeks looked hollow and her skin had a tired waxen cast. She called out at the top of her voice but the words were drowned by the rumbling growls from the undead that filled the street below.

  LeCat nodded his own secret relief. Tremaine saw the ghost of a smile on the Colonel’s forbidding face.

  “You must go to the roof!” LeCat shouted into the bullhorn to carry his voice. “We are going to send ropes across.”

  Camille was leaning on the frame of the window, and there was something desperate and yearning in her posture. She waved her hand to signal her understanding, then disappeared from the window.

  LeCat threw down the bullhorn and turned to his mortar crew. “Do it now!”

  The three-man crew had been at the gatehouse battlements for an hour before daybreak, and had test-fired the pneumatic weapon three times at the barracks the night before. They fitted the first grappling hook into the narrow tube and after a long moment of preparation, fired.

  There was a sharp sound like a cough, and the hook shot from the barrel of the weapon and sailed high into the air on a steep parabola, whistling as it flew. The attached rope trailed like a gossamer thread. Tremaine watched with his heart in his mouth. The hook arched higher until it reached the zenith of its climb and then began to fall. The trailing rope whirred from its coil.

  For a sinking moment, it looked like the hook might overshoot the hotel completely. Tremaine held his breath. The hook dropped like a falling star across the sky and landed on the hotel’s roof in a cloud of dust.

  A ragged cheer went up from the men at the battlements.

  LeCat turned. His expression had not changed. “Now it is up to the survivors,” he said to Tremaine without emotion.

  * * *

  The roof of the Grande Hotel was a flat concrete maze of pipes and rusting air conditioning boxes that could be accessed from room 612 on the sixth floor. The room was on the opposite side of the building with a view across Avignon’s sprawling outer suburbs. Outside the room’s window hung a steel ladder, bolted to the building’s wall.

  Camille gathered the remaining survivors about her in the sixth-floor hallway. They were drooping with fatigue and nervous exhaustion, grey and ashen figures that seemed to have shrunk during the long torturous hours.

  “The army has sent rope across from the city walls,” Camille explained. Her voice croaked and rasped. She felt shaky. Her skin looked pale and felt tight as a drum across her cheeks.

  “Are they sending men across to rescue us somehow?” an elderly woman asked.

  “It’s not possible,” Camille said. “But it means we still have a fighting chance to survive.”

  “How?”

  “We will have to zip-line,” Camille said, then explained. As she spoke she saw the last lights of hope fade from the eyes of people around her. They were old and frail, and on the brink of collapsing with exhaustion. The idea of clinging to a rope or a leather belt to ride down a line to the city’s walls was physically impossible.

  “I would never make it,” a woman from the back of the group shook her head forlornly. Others close by nodded. There was no outrage; no frustration – just a weary bovine acceptance that their last chance to survive was no chance at all.

  In small disconsolate groups the survivors began to drift away. Some disappeared into nearby rooms where they sank down on the floor to rest. Others went to the end of the corridor and stood before the fire-doors as if expecting the undead to break through the final barricaded stairwell. Old Mr. Davis spoke up.

  He came from out of the dwindling crowd on stork-like legs and stood at Camille’s shoulder. He had a devilish twinkle in his eye. He gave a dapper little smile.

  “There is a way…” he lifted his voice so that it reached into the closest rooms. “We can tie a Swiss set rappel harness.”

  Camille blinked. “Monsieur?”

  The Englishman brushed at his moustache with the tip of his finger. “I spent some time in the Royal Navy back in the fifties, my darling. Learned some fancy rope tricks along the way, what?” his accent was a fraud of jaunty upper-class breeding.

  “What is this rope harness?” Camille became intrigued. From the corner of her eye she saw some of the survivors drift curiously back from the end of the corridor.

  “It’s a kind of seat, my love,” Mr. Davis still had the energy for a flirty wink. “All we need is enough rope and something to cut it with.”

  A pocket-knife was found amongst the ransacked luggage. Camille went running along the corridor into room 612. The window had been screwed down. Camille hurled a chair through the tinted glass.

  “I will go first,” she turned back to the others. “Do what I do, and put your feet in the same places I put mine.”

  She climbed carefully out onto the windowsill, then reached for a rung of the ladder with her hand. When she had a firm grip, she swung herself across and felt for a foothold. Camille was flushed in the face and shaking. She had a fear of heights. She caught a quick view of the ground between her feet and gasped with a sudden attack of vertigo.

  “Don’t look down!” she admonished herself.

  The climb to the roof was easy. At the top there were iron handholds. She swung her leg over the waist high wall that surrounded the rooftop and stood panting and trembling. Her hair hung into her eyes. She swept it away with a brusque flick of her fingers, and then saw the line of rope attached to a steel hook. One of the barbed prong
s had snagged on the cage of an air-conditioning box. The box was the shape and size of a large refrigerator laid on its side, with wire vents that covered fan blades.

  Camille sagged with relief. She untied the line from the hook and went running back to the ladder. None of the other survivors were poised in the window. She frowned and called loudly. Mr. Davis thrust his head through the opening.

  “On my way,” he said brightly, but his face looked hectic with agitation.

  While Camille waited for the elderly Englishman to climb up the ladder she walked a slow circuit of the hotel’s roof, gasping as each new horror was revealed. For as far as she could see the world was shrouded in the smoke of a thousand fires, turning the rising sun into a blood-red fireball. She had seen this phenomenon before during the summer months when vast tracts of forest had burned and the TV news cameras showed firefighters battling the spreading blazes. There was something doom-laden and eerie about the image that gave her chills of foreboding.

  She reached the far side of the roof and stared at the walls of Avignon. Camille could see a knot of men standing on the Porte Saint Roch gatehouse. She wondered if one of them was the American professor.

  The wide road between the two buildings was a writhing, heaving sea of undead bodies. They moved like water around the battered and burnt-out carcasses of abandoned cars, and they howled like wild animals. The putrid stench of death and corruption rose up from ground level and made Camille’s eyes water. She reeled away from the stench as if she had been punched with an uppercut, smothering her mouth with her hand.