Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  The APC charged towards the fence.

  Kane thrust out his jaw aggressively and braced himself for the impact. “Hold on!” he shouted over his shoulder to the men seated in the back of the vehicle.

  The APC blew through the flimsy wire-mesh fence at forty kilometers per hour, swaying from side to side like a boat on an ocean as it mounted a curbed footpath and ploughed towards the steel-barred gate on the far side of the campus. Small trees were flattened under the huge heavy tires, and a plume of dust and dirt billowed into the new morning sky.

  Kane wrestled with the steering wheel and lined the front of the heavy vehicle up with the approaching gate.

  “Brace yourselves!” he roared. He felt wildly alive with exhilaration, and giddy with righteous virtue. His faith made him fearless; he was God’s messenger on earth, shielded by His love. In the rear of the APC he could hear the men from the ambush team fervently singing.

  There was a solid crowd of infected pressed against the grille of the gates. Kane could see their tortured rotting faces and their hideous disfigurements. It was the first time he had seen the undead. They were gruesome beyond his wildest imaginings. Kane felt his heart quail with a tremor of uncertainty. They were howling; he couldn’t hear them above the rattling noise of the vehicle, but he could see their gaping mouths and the insanity in their eyes. He felt a cold chill of doubt, and the first premonition of doom crept icily down his spine.

  Kane started to pray, mouthing memorized words as they raced towards the ancient stone gatehouse. His eyes grew wide and fear draped itself around his shoulders. Blind panic overwhelmed him. He started to scream with fear and wrenched the wheel to the right.

  It was too late.

  The APC struck the steel bars of the gate and tore the huge grill from its chains and fixtures. The sound of the collision was calamitous. Beside Kane, Mary screamed shrilly.

  The vehicle hit the gate at an angle, swerving violently as it cannoned into the stone side of the tower and ricocheting on, out of control. The steel bars bent then folded under the impact, wrenching Kane’s hands from the steering wheel and hurling him sideways against the door. A shower of bright sparks plumed like a comet’s tail as metal crashed against metal. The APC bucked like a wild creature, rearing up on its back wheels then plunging down, the engine still roaring.

  Momentum carried the APC clear through the barred gateway and out onto the sidewalk beyond the walls, crushing dozens of infected ghouls under the chassis in a spreading oil-slick of blood and gore. The vehicle slewed wildly across the tarmac and one of the huge front wheels blew out, hurling chunks of shredded rubber through the air like shrapnel.

  The APC crashed into the trunk of a fallen tree and came to a sickening juddering halt. Kane sat stunned, hunched over the steering wheel. His ears were ringing, and he could taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth. He blinked bleary eyes until they focused on Mary. He groaned in shock and pain.

  Mary had been thrown head-first into the armored glass of the APC’s windscreen. Her skull had been crushed, and there were lurid smears of blood and tufts of hair stuck to the thick, cracked glass. Kane reached out for her. Her head lolled loose on her broken neck. Mercifully her face was turned away from him, towards the passenger side window, so that he could not see the dreadful damage the collision had done to her beautiful features at the horrific instant of her death.

  Kane cried out in grief and confusion, but the roar of the undead that had surrounded the vehicle drowned out his appalled croak. They hammered their hands against the steel and smeared blood in streaks down the glass. They pressed their rotting hideous faces to the windows and howled. The sound inside the armored car became the maddened beating of a thousand drums, rising louder and louder – until the door was wrenched open and clawing hands reached for him.

  Kane screamed.

  The APC rocked violently on its remaining three wheels. In the back of the vehicle other men were screeching. Kane heard a gunshot and then a savage howl. He thrashed at the hands that reached for him, and lifted his arms to the heavens.

  “God!” he cried out, with his face lifted to the smoke-scarred sky. “Give me the power you promised. Let me walk safe amongst the sick and infected so that I may do your work on earth.”

  Something seized his leg and dragged him bodily from the armored car.

  Kane hit the ground and scrambled onto his hands and knees. One of his followers from the rear compartment of the APC lay nearby on the sidewalk. The man writhed in a pool of his own blood. He looked like some savage beast had mauled him. His left arm had been torn from its shoulder and one of his legs was missing below the knee. His eyes were wide open, staring bewildered at the sky.

  Kane screamed again. His other followers were squirming in the dust of the footpath, surrounded by heaving knots of undead. Kane heard the gruesome howls and the ragged gasping pleas for mercy. It blurred into one unholy sound of frenzied savage terror.

  Kane died hard. The undead tore at his body, flensing the skin from his legs and arms, then slashing at the soft fatty flesh of his stomach until it unzipped like a purse and the content of his guts spilled over the footpath. They mauled his throat until his long beard became thick with blood, and then fought over the delicacies of his eyes, tongue and heart.

  The last thing his conscious mind registered was not the voice of God; it was a wail of fear and panic that rose up around the ancient city of Avignon as the undead poured in through the open gateway and buildings began to burn.

  It was the sound of mankind in its death throes.

  * * *

  LeCat, Tremaine and Camille bundled into a jeep and the Colonel raced to the gendarmerie barracks on Boulevard Raspail. As he drove, putting the vehicle to the corners without slowing, he shouted above the buffeting wind.

  “The gate at the university has been broken down,” LeCat snapped. “Insurgents seized the vehicle and rammed it into the gatehouse. The infected are in the city.”

  Tremaine felt the shock of it like a punch to the heart. “Christ!” he swore. Avignon was doomed. An enemy from within had betrayed them. “Can they be stopped?”

  LeCat said nothing.

  They reached the barracks and LeCat slewed the P4 across the road. Gendarmes were running from the buildings carrying their assault rifles. An alarm wailed in the background, high and piercing. One of the APC’s rumbled down the driveway and lurched out into the street. A man standing in the passenger side cupola swung the machine gun round and aimed it at the intersection a hundred yards away.

  LeCat was on the two-way barking instructions. The replies over the net were garbled and panic-stricken. He had just fifty men in a defensive perimeter around the front of the barracks. He sent five of them with a machine gun to the opposite side of the road where a laneway littered with drifting piles of autumn leaves intersected the boulevard. Three more men were positioned behind sandbags in the middle of the roadway facing west to warn of an unexpected attack from behind his position. The rest of the gendarmes faced east, from where LeCat felt certain the undead attack would come.

  He knew he didn’t have enough men.

  “Take Miss Pelletier inside,” LeCat told Tremaine. “You can use my office. Barricade the doors behind you with furniture.”

  Tremaine shook his head. “Camille can go if she wants, but I’ll stay here.”

  LeCat flashed him a sharp look of admonishment. The Frenchman was not accustomed to having his orders ignored. He looked utterly baleful.

  Tremaine narrowed his eyes and set his jaw stubbornly. “Nowhere is safe, Colonel. This is as good a place as any to make a stand.”

  “I’ll stay here too,” Camille said in a small but defiant voice.

  LeCat nodded bleakly and drew his pistol. Across the old city, gradually coming closer, he could hear the sounds of panicked gunfire and terrified shrilling screams. Oily black columns of smoke rose into the sky and blotted out the sun.

  LeCat issued his last instructions, walking a
mongst the frightened young soldiers. He had them fanned out across the middle of the road with the P4 and the armored car side-by-side as a barricade. They were nervous. He could see the anxiety in their faces and smell their sweating fear. He spoke calmly, as though they were on an urban warfare exercise.

  “When they come around that corner,” he gestured with his pistol towards the intersection, “do not conserve your ammunition. This will be the last fight. We must hold them here, or not at all.”

  * * *

  The undead surged through the battered-down gateway and wreaked havoc throughout the university. Gendarmes who had been posted to safeguard the city’s horded food and water supplies were overpowered within minutes. Thousands of infected spilled through the breach, like a vast tide of filthy water that had broken down the walls of a dam.

  Buildings on the east side of the old city quickly caught on fire and people ran screaming into the streets.

  The undead were driven to roaring, howling insanity by the lure of fresh flesh. They rampaged, unchecked, like violent rioters, and the cobblestoned roads began to run with blood.

  The quiet streets surrounding the university precinct were overrun first. Doors were battered down, windows smashed and people killed in their beds. On Rue Muguet, a narrow laneway that bordered the campus grounds, a baby was taken screaming from its cot and carried out into the street like a trophy. The infant’s parents were still alive, drowning slowly in their own blood, as the child was seized by both feet and swung head-first against the wall of the building. The baby’s tender skull cracked open like an egg and the howling undead roared their voracious hunger. They snapped and snarled for the oozing contents of the dead child’s skull, scooping the spattered custard-colored contents up in their rotting fingers.

  The soldiers manning the battlements were trapped and unable to flee. The undead came swarming up the ladders and over the worn stone steps. The gendarmes and the civilians who bore weapons fought back, flailing the undead on the narrow ramparts with determined fire that plucked them off the precarious ledge and threw them back into the roiling horde below.

  Four gendarmes formed a tight knot on top of the gatehouse and fought bravely, but it was only a matter of time before their ammunition ran out. The undead came at them from both sides of the wall and ran into a frantic hellish chorus of assault rifle fire. Still the ghouls came on, now forced to clamber over a tangled blockade of their own mutilated. The gendarmes fought for their lives, firing together, and the hail of lead cut down their attackers in swathes. The voracious undead were thrown back and the steps became slick with gore. They attacked again, scrambling over the mound of rotting corpses, berserkers driven to madness by the insanity of their infection. The second growling assault was beaten back, but the infected would not be denied. The third wave struck from both sides of the gatehouse simultaneously and the gendarmes were overrun. One soldier shot a ghoul from point-blank range. The bullet hit the zombie in the temple as it turned, howling. The ghoul’s head distorted, swelling and bursting. Its wild snarl became a hideous rubbery grimace for a split-second and then its body was slammed back onto the ground by the awesome force of the impact. The gendarme fired again at another of the undead but the weapon in his hands fell on an empty chamber. The soldier cried out in fear, then turned and hurled himself off the wall to his death.

  The other three gendarmes went down under the sheer overwhelming weight of their attackers. One of them screamed in agony. The undead eviscerated the bodies and gorged themselves on the slices of bleeding flesh until all that remained of the corpses was bone and gristle.

  The undead ran howling and barking through the streets. The apartments all had their doors bolted, the ground-floor windows covered by shutters or iron barred grilles. The citizens of Avignon cowered in the shadows and hid in their closets.

  Others ran, terrified, to the nearest church and pummeled their fists on the huge wooden doors, crying out for refuge and sanctuary. The undead threw themselves into the masses of wailing bodies and tore them to shreds until the closed and bolted church doors were splattered with blood and the stone steps became sticky with gore.

  Mangy wild-eyed dogs ran barking through the dark laneways, foraging through overturned garbage bags and gnawing at the gristle of freshly severed limbs. Children squatted on the ground next to their dead parents, sobbing with unimaginable terror until they too were savaged by the infected. A row of old houses caught fire and burned furiously. The trapped, terrified people inside the buildings burned alive, or flung themselves from the second-story windows.

  The alleyways stank of blood, death and the corruption of rotting flesh. Bodies lay in dark puddles and as the screams grew louder and more terrified, the sounds of gunfire gradually diminished. A man stood sobbing and bloodied in the main plaza, wandering in a daze until he was driven to the ground by one of the infected. Another ghoul pounced on the body and the two undead fought like rabid dogs, squabbling over the scraps of his flesh. A teenage girl ran screaming with icy black terror from a ghoul and tripped through a plate glass window. A nun, clutching her rosary beads to her chest, made not a sound as the undead surrounded her and threw her to the ground. She lay with her eyes closed and her mouth working in frantic prayer while the undead gnawed the flesh from her legs and then tore out her throat.

  Black smoke roiled into the sky and raucous birds and swarms of flies feasted on the splattered remains. The sun rose into the morning sky, shrouded by a thick pall of haze.

  Henri Pelletier’s apartment overlooked one of the long wide roads that ran like an artery between the outer city walls and the central plaza. Frantic gunfire had dragged him, scrambling and alarmed from his bed. Now he stood at his kitchen window, gaping with horror, his shoulders hunched, his face baggy as a bloodhound’s with sadness. He heard sporadic rifle fire and the sounds of doors and windows breaking. Through the glass he could hear screaming. He watched as a woman in her nightdress ran into the street below him, her face a mask of terror. She was being hunted by three of the undead. One of them lunged for her and hooked a bony hand into the collar of her clothing. It tore open and the terrified woman spun naked. The undead howled then leapt on her. Bright arterial blood fountained into the sky as they dismembered the thrashing body.

  Taking the numbed, drugged steps of a condemned man, Henri Pelletier went to wake his wife for the last time.

  * * *

  “You have been the love of my life,” Henri Pelletier said in a sad little voice. “From the moment I met you, I knew we were meant to be together, and you have made me a happy man.”

  His wife said nothing. Henri smiled lovingly. “And look at all we have accomplished,” he spread his arms wide in a gesture that seemed to encapsulate both their neat apartment and the city itself. “I became mayor, and I served Avignon proudly…”

  His voice trailed off, interrupted by the sharp retort of a rifle somewhere in the street beyond their building. Henri knew his time was running short. He shambled lethargically around the room, touching a photo frame that showed a picture of himself in his ceremonial mayoral robes, and then ran his hand gently over the smooth polish of the piano. He sighed, overcome by a profound melancholy of despair.

  He picked up the pistol from the kitchen table and reloaded it. His hands were shaking. He glanced over his shoulder. His wife sat in the big stuffed armchair that faced the television wearing her dressing gown. There was a plastic bag filled with knitting at her feet. The bullet hole between her eyes was the size of a small coin, but there was very little blood – and Henri was thankful for that. His wife’s eyes were staring and vacant.

  He thought about his daughter Camille then. He wondered if she was still alive. He doubted it. He wondered then if she had died at the hands of the infected… or if she had also chosen the swift mercy of suicide.

  A sudden terrified scream slashed across his thoughts and Henri’s attention snapped to the locked apartment door. The sound had come from somewhere in the passageway,
shrill and chilling. He heard running, pounding footsteps and a cold blade of dread ran down his spine.

  Suddenly the pistol felt heavy in his shaking hand. He carried it across the room and leaned carefully over his dead wife. He kissed her cheek. The skin against his lips felt cool and waxen.

  “Vive la France,” Henri muttered, and then opened his mouth and thrust the barrel of the gun between his lips. He could taste oil.

  He closed his eyes, drew a deep last breath.

  And pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  The long minutes of fretful waiting shredded the resolve of the soldiers huddled outside the gendarmerie barracks on Boulevard Raspail. Most of the troops who had been left at the barracks were raw recruits that had never seen combat. They were young and inexperienced. The nightmare sounds of approaching horror plucked along the strings of their nerves so they stood at their positions, their faces pinched and terrified.

  A young soldier crouched next to LeCat behind the steel bulk of the APC cursed softly each time a shrilling scream cut through the clamor of rioting, gnawing on his soft slack lips to stop himself from crying out.

  “Merde!”

  He had the barrel of his assault rifle braced on the steel prow of the vehicle, but still the weapon trembled in his white-knuckled hands.

  “Merde!” he swore again as a blood-curdling shriek of terror slashed across the growling chaos that crept relentlessly closer.

  “Is your weapon loaded, soldier?” LeCat asked the young gendarme.

  The pale-faced boy blinked, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Is this your first action?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long have you been a gendarme?”