August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand (12 page)

Liam rapped him on the back, and Jaxton saw his facemask had been abandoned. “They’re crowding us. We need more firepower.”

Liam was right. The infected to the front weren’t falling fast enough. He heard a scream and saw a Lion trooper get bitten in the neck, and stumble. Within seconds he was left behind, stranded outside the column and swarmed.

“If the column stops moving forward at any time, we are all going to die.”

“Reloading! Help! HELP!”

A man on the cart stumbled backwards, struggling to slam another clip into his shotgun. Another swore, and came to the front. Two infected slammed into the line of Lion shock troopers, and the cart came to a creaking halt as they engaged the foe.

“Keep it moving!”

Three more infected hit the front line, and the men grappled with them. Two succumbed to bites on the face, and the third used a set of slick brass knuckles to dispatch the snarling infected. “We need more men! Get some more men up here!”

The Lion troopers fighting on the flanks could sense the panic, and felt the column’s pace slow. They began to look for a way out, a way to escape, even if it meant only they would live. And Jaxton saw it too.

“It’s falling apart!”

Jaxton charged into the fray at the fore, his tomahawks blurring in an ecstasy of violence. His officers joined him with a wood axes, which slammed through flesh and bone with ease. But it was not enough. The troopers could not cut through the foe fast enough. But the flanks could not be weakened to support the front.

Jaxton shot a glance back to his friend Liam in despair, who stood atop the crawling wagon firing his shotgun wildly.

Liam saw the infected swarming at the edges, pushing the survivors back closer and closer to the cart. The archers were all out of arrows, and the men on the asphalt were falling quickly. His heart began to thunder, and he could scarcely breathe. He wanted his friends to live, and above all, he wanted to live.

“Sir! Sir! LIAM! What do we do!” The girl’s bulging eyes revolted Liam. He wanted to live. He could scarcely remember she wore the same patch he did. He wanted to live. Liam saw one of his Bear troopers lying on the hot tar road, his neck pumping scarlet all over his own torso. He wanted to live.

Liam felt the shudder as the cart stopped once more, and he locked eyes with Jaxton.

Running to the back of the cart, Liam launched his foot into two of his own men, one after the other. They tumbled off the cart, and struck the pavement hard outside the Lion’s wall.

“LIAM!” Jaxton screamed.

Liam ignored his friend’s cries, set his jaw, and squeezed the trigger of his shotgun, exploding his compatriot’s calf. Within a second the other survivor was screaming in pain as well, immobilized.

“What the fuck is he doing!?”

Jaxton’s mouth quivered in horror. “He’s leaving them as bait.”

Jaxton was shaken out of his own horror as the column began to collapse inward, the Lion driven back into a struggling mass of men that fought in the immediate shadow of the cart. Jaxton looked to the front, and screamed out, his voice hoarse, “Abandon the rear! Troopers to the front! Cut the path forward!”

Seven troopers from the back of the line began to shift, their eyes showing more horror at Liam than the infected. Stronger men than Liam, they pushed and shoved to the front, knowing the fate of the entire company fell to them and their axes. At the quick step they fell into combat, hacking through the collecting wall of infected.

Jaxton mounted the cart, and looked to the rear. Liam was standing, in the middle of the road. His two squealing compatriots were to either side of him, writhing in pain. The entire focus of the infected in that sector now surged to him. Liam’s shotgun hung loosely at his side. He leaned down, transfixed. “Cassidy, is that you?”

“What did you do to me!?” The girl at his feet screamed.

Liam’s hands began to shake uncontrollably, and he reached down gently towards his fellows. They screamed and writhed away from him on the hot blacktop.

“What have I done?!” His hands flew to his hair, and he stumbled away from them even as the infected began to swarm.

The infected fell upon the wounded survivors with a frenzy.

Jaxton felt the cart lurch, and its forward pace resumed, now possible with the reinforcements from the rear. Jaxton stood motionless as Liam stumbled and fell twenty feet behind the convoy. He could see his friend struggling to rise through a haze of limbs and axes.

Jaxton looked to the fore, and saw the path clear slightly. The wagon snapped forward, rolling down the road. The Citadel was not far. But Liam was fifty feet away, a single man standing against the tide of savage predators. In the summer haze he tried to sprint to safety, his eyes streaming with tears and his limbs shaking. Realizing he was too far, Jaxton saw him raise his shotgun and fire wildly. The infected pushed closer, till they breached the mist of smoke surrounding his scorching weapon. Jaxton saw him wield his shotgun like a club and wailing, battering away those closest to him. And then he was lost in a tide of the foe. Still the cart moved forward.

Through the trees in the distance, Jaxton could see the red bricks of his old high school; the Citadel was not far.

The Citadel

Jaxton tried to shut out the snarling moans. It was futile. They came from five thousand lips; it produced a constant, ceaseless drone that continued through the night.

Jaxton peered over the edge, and found a wall of them ten feet thick clawing at the bricks. They looked up, spotting him, and their incessant moaning increased in its pitch.

He threw a brick down, and it shattered one of their faces. His target fell underneath a stampede of feet and was lost.

Liam was dead. Jaxton looked up as the night deepened across the valley, and he chuckled at his own numbness. Then he shuddered and wept, and shot a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was alone on the rooftop.

Wiping his tears, he considered what he knew. Two hundred and twenty survivors were either missing or dead outside the Citadel. Every settlement save the mother colony had been overrun and destroyed. There remained a paltry seventy survivors alive inside the Citadel, most of whom were too frightened to move from their rooms.

“So this is what the end feels like,” he said to himself.

He knew Adira had left to go warn him, to try and rescue him from the hordes of infected. She had never made it back, along with Bennett, and Joseph. Wilder still had not returned. Logically, he knew they were almost certainly dead, or would be soon. But by his nature, he secretly believed it was impossible for that to be so. Maybe they would escape the valley, and find a new home west.

Jaxton would not be there to join them.

He drew his pistol and fired a few times into the crowd that now surrounded the school in a seething mob. Even if he wanted to go search, it would be impossible to get out.

“Jax.”

“How did you get up here?”

Troy swayed, and stumbled onto the roof. One of his wooden crutches lay under him in splintered wooden pieces. “Not easily,” he groaned.

Jaxton didn’t move to help his friend. He watched him struggle instead.

“I heard what happened.”

“It was disgusting,” Jaxton mumbled. He felt Troy sit down beside him.

“He panicked?”

“Of course he panicked. We were all panicking.”

Troy tossed another loose brick off into the seething crowd three stories below them. “Tell me.”

Jaxton sighed harshly, and wiped away his own tears. “It will destroy your memory of him, forever. I can’t.”

“I won’t be alive much longer to cherish it, anyways. I have to know. What kind of man he was. I need to know.”

“I could see him starting to panic. First, he stopped giving orders. Then he stopped shooting his weapon, and just stood there on the top of the cart, his eyes just scanning the carnage endlessly. I heard the screaming, even above all that slaughter. When I looked back again, he had kicked two of his own off the back of the cart.” Jaxton tossed his pistol off the roof, and continued. “Shot them. I guess to try and draw away the infected and save us.”

“Save himself,” Troy corrected him.

“And then I think he realized what he had done. He realized he knew those people, and he got off the cart. Even as the infected got closer, he didn’t even see them. It was a total reversal. Liam went to the girl and the guy he had shot, and he stood over them, just staring again. The convoy had moved forty feet by now. There were dozens of infected between us and him. He started to fight at the very end, as they closed in around him. I think he finally realized what he had done.”

“So our friend deserved to die,” Troy said.

“I don’t know. Did he?”

Troy was silent. Jaxton saw the sweat breaking out on his brow, despite the cool summer air. “You don’t look good.”

“No,” Troy smiled, “I don’t. My leg hurts.”

“One minute. Sixty seconds of something changed my opinion of Liam forever. Erased a lifetime of memories, emotions, experiences. Growing up together, in this fucking building. But if I die tonight or in forty years, today is all I’ll ever remember.”

“Well, if it wasn’t for his odd mix of weakness and fear, all of you would have died out there today. It allowed you guys to make the final push to these doors, didn’t it?”

Jaxton considered briefly. “Yes, because they were probably eating him and the others alive.”

Troy licked his lips absent-mindedly. “I’m hungry.”

“Do you not care?” Jaxton demanded.

As he massaged his festering leg, Troy looked skywards. “I’ve seen two dozen people I’ve truly cared about die in this past year. Two dozen. You get to a point where it’s just like, why bother putting yourself through that?”

“So it’s a choice for you.”

“It’s not really a choice. Fate made the choice for me, when the infected ate half my platoon in the capital, when I lost friends I had made along the road, when Liam died today.”

“What if he’s out there, right now?”

“Who? Liam?”

Jaxton nodded.

“I’m sure he is. He’s probably one of these, right here below us, just dying to eat us. And I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him. Don’t waste time mourning the dead, Jaxton. They certainly aren’t thinking about us.”

“What if there’s an afterlife, and the infected are stuck in limbo?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if Liam’s soul is stuck here, because he’s infected. I mean, they have to retain some of their original…qualities, right? It’s not like Liam died and came back to life infected. He was infected while alive, just like everyone else. It’s a disease without a cure.”

“So what are you guna do, save him? Find him and save his soul?”

“Fuck you, Troy.”

Troy chuckled darkly. “I’ve seen hints of a savage in you at times this past year, but it’s never come full circle.”

Jaxton poked a bloodstain in Troy’s camouflage aggressively.  “I think you’ll die too.”

Troy winced, and then forced a smile back on his face. He was still sweating. “You won’t have to save my soul Jaxton. I’ll kill myself if the infected get too close. So what’s the plan now? Now, at the end of it all?”

There was a roar in the night.

Jaxton shook, hearing something above the moans. Yes, there it was again. His pulse quickened, and his eyes strained in the darkness. “Troy, do you hear that?” The driveway was illuminated in a flash and two trucks came rushing up the drive.

“Fucking hell, hey! Hey!!!” He rose and waved his arms.

The two jeeps rolled past at high speeds, circling in the parking lot. Each one had a figure standing in the sunroof, firing a rifle. Wilder’s head stuck out of the driver’s side door. “ROPE!” He screamed.

The Jeep whipped around, slammed into a pack of zombies and continued to loop around the parking lot, evading strays or crushing them under the squealing wheels.

“Rope. Rope. Rope!” Jaxton stammered to himself. He ran back to the ladder and banged on it. “We need help! Is anyone down there?!”

Billy appeared. “What the hell’s goin’ on?”

“Two trucks outside, survivors! I think they’re guna try and climb the wall! Get some fucking rope and get some men up here, lets move!”

Jaxton sprinted past a struggling Troy to the music wing’s roof, where the roof was barely ten feet off the ground. The heady roar from the Jeeps was beginning to interest the massed groups of zombies clawing at the brick walls. In twos and threes they peeled off and began to pursue the trucks around the parking lot.

“Hold it here!”

Billy emerged from the hatch with several other survivors and flung a length of worn rope down to the ground below. He signaled five of his followers to grip it from atop the roof.

“You only brought one!?”

Billy looked to Jaxton, exasperated. “I had no damn time! Get one of the trucks over here now!”

Jaxton advanced to the lip and waved his arms frantically, catching one of the driver’s attentions.