August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand (13 page)

The vehicle surged forward in the night, striking two more infected and sending their crumpled bodies to the sides. The vehicle launched up onto the sidewalk and came hurtling towards the wall. The infected followed, nearly fifty strong now.

Skidding to a halt just below the wall, the first pair of hands emerged from the sunroof and clutched the rope.

“PULL!” Jaxton screamed.

The team of survivors responded with vigor, yanking the woman up the brick wall till she could clamber up the final inches.

Jaxton tried to smile, but it was not Adira. The rope team repeated the process three more times as the infected surrounded the vehicle. Billy and two others began picking them off with pistols that snapped in the clear air; the foe’s bodies tumbling from the running boards.

Bennett came up last. Jaxton gripped him by the jacket. “Adira?” He asked, his voice strained.

Bennett glanced backwards, wide eyed, and pointed at the second Jeep, now hurtling through a mass of infected.

“Move the rope over! Hey! Come on! Come on!” Jaxton cried.

The Jeep tried to turn, but its wheel well was stuffed with an infected’s corpse, which had gotten jammed above the wheel. The driver swung a hard right, thinking there was something in front blocking him, but the vehicle tipped. With a crash it slammed down on its side, stranded fifty feet from the wall.

Without thinking Jaxton extended his hands. “Pistols. Now.” Billy and two others slapped two sidearms into his hands and several extra magazines. “Cover me,” he ordered.

Jaxton slid down the rope, and felt his boots sink into the mulch. There was a thud beside him, and he saw Bennett was with him. The two made blistering eye contact.

“Make for the truck.”

The pair took of sprinting, their long legs pumping furiously, racing to the overturned vehicle before the infected had a chance to swarm it.

Jaxton reached it and mounted the hood from the side, seeking to open one of the doors now facing the sky. He ripped open the door and stuck his clammy hand inside, expecting the worst.

It was gripped, firmly. Wrenching upwards, he saw a familiar face. Adira clutched him by the shoulders, and there was shared ecstasy. The fragile moment was shattered by gunfire. Bennett stood atop the overturned hood, his dual pistols snapping back again and again. The infected tumbled and fell all around them, struck by hot lead.

“Help me!” Adira screamed.

Together they pulled two others out of the wreck. Wilder came out roaring. Joseph came up last, his eyes wild.

“We gotta move!” Bennett roared. One of the pistols clattered to the pavement as Bennett fumbled attempting a reload. Jaxton leapt down beside him, and took stock of the situation. They had fifty feet of ground to cover, and it was littered with the infected, which were now hurtling towards them in a mass.

Like an apparition from the heavens, two dozen figures appeared on the roof, outlined against the starlight. Jaxton could see the muzzle flashes, and the infected began to fall.

Jaxton gripped Adira’s hand, and he nodded to Bennett and the other survivors. They sprinted. The infected recoiled in bloody mists as the rounds took them off their feet. The snipers atop the roof were paving a way forward, thinning the herd. Jaxton and Bennett ran with their sidearm’s to the fore, snapping back with recoil. Then they were at the ropes, and the survivors were climbing.

Jaxton and Bennett did an about face, and tried to hold off the foe. One got too close, and Jaxton shuddered at its stench. Bennett drove a steel-toed boot into his abdomen and it broke free on the other side.

Jaxton heard shouting from above, and he screamed. “GO!”

Bennett fired three more rounds, and he hissed. “Not a chance.”

Cursing, Jaxton mounted the rope and felt his weight being yanked upwards. Bennett came last, and as he stumbled up onto the roof, a mass of infected slammed into the brick wall below, furious at having been denied their prize.

The survivors above collapsed to their knees around each other. There were no cheers, and no exultation. They clutched friends they had never expected to see again.

Bennett looked to Adira and Jaxton, who now clutched each other in the throes of rapture. A smile came unbidden to him, and he breathed deeply in relief. He felt a clap on the shoulder, and turned to see an unlikely set of faces. Wilder and Joseph stood beside him, smiles etched in their exhausted and gaunt faces. They nodded to each other, too overwhelmed to speak.

Chapter Eleven

The Citadel

In any other circumstances, they would have stood. But none had eaten in the past day, so they sat. Under the metal rafters Jaxton mounted the bleachers. He stared at them. Their tired, dirty, hopeless faces stared back at him, nearly one hundred of them. What they wanted to hear, Jaxton knew. He knew they wanted to hear a plan of action, some ingenious diversion that would allow the others to escape. He drew his breath, and saw Adira give him a slight nod of encouragement from the crowd.

“The Citadel is completely surrounded. Every possible exit, covered by hundreds of infected. They form a ring outside the walls, drawn by our bodies, which they are desperate to devour. More come in every hour, I have seen it. By dawn, there will be thousands.” He paused to let the reality sink in among his comrades.

“We have no vehicles. We are down to one day’s supply of food. We are down to several hundred rounds of ammunition. The barricades….the barricades are being pressed even as we speak. I fear that in the press, in the relentless press of their thousands, at some point one of the doors will break open. At that point, there will be nothing left for us.”

The crowd had its faces on the ground, or staring absently into space. Only his friends maintained his gaze. He saw Adira, Bennett, Duke, Wilder and Troy. There were others, whom he had grown to respect. Billy, Annabelle, Joseph, Kylie. Only they were able to meet his gaze evenly.

“If you seek to deny the reality which now confronts us, I will take that away from you. I will not allow us to be drawn into the delusion of mad hope. There is no one coming, to save us. We are all going to die here.”

He heard a high-pitched wailing in the back of the gymnasium and forced himself to continue. Though several seated on the cool wood were even more crestfallen than before, he could see he had the attention of several more. They had been expecting a grandiose speech on hope, but now that he had proved he would entertain no such delusions, some met him with steely eyes and trembling lips.

To these survivors, the realists and dreamers among them, he preached.

“Sooner or later, the infected will create a breach in one of the barricades. And when they do, they will pour into the Citadel, spreading on every level. No matter what we do, they will enter, and they will hunt us down.”

“There remains one final aspect we can control, each one of us can control. It falls to us to determine how we will go out. We have seven hundred rounds of ammunition for the firearms, several riot shields, spears, axes, mauls, and armor. We have the Lion, the Bear, the Destrier….we have men and women of strong flesh and hot blood. What more can we ask for, at such a time?”

More than half stared at him in the eyes, hanging on his words. They had accepted their fate, and were steeling themselves for what followed. Through the walls, if all was silent, one could hear the moaning.

“We can die one by one, in dark rooms and closets, hunted down and eaten alive, where the only beings that would hear our screams would be those tearing into our flesh. Our deaths would be a murmur, a whisper, a snap of the finger. Nature is betting on it. Nature wants us to kneel; she wants to complete the xenocide.”

Wilder got to his feet, and Duke joined him. Adira stood too, with Bennett. Slowly, the others began to rise.

“Nature has declared war on our species, and she might very well win. But she must not receive the spoils without a struggle. Humanity has always been baptized in fire, and in blood. We must pay homage to our species, you and I. We must not go out with just a murmur. Our lives are worth more, than a murmur…. It must be a roar. Nature must be forced to throw everything she has at us, you and I, the last bastion of humanity on the seaboard.”

The crowd was standing now, their glistening eyes wide in the torchlight. Forgotten were the moans and the foe that crowded the bricks outside.

“When nature comes for the final blow, we must the hammer that strikes her in the heart.”

A series of fists shot up in the mass of survivors, a delirious cheer. It was madness. They knew it, and it was all they could cling to.

“Let us make work for it! We must be a stain on her memory, a band that refused to break. Do not die alone. Do not run and hide. Die at the fore. Look for me at the forefront, and look for each other.”

The crowd surged closer, till Jaxton could reach out and touch them. They raised the crackling firebrands, with little sparks that tumbled among them. Jax could feel his head pounding manically; he had them.

“Let it not be a murmur. Let it be a roar. Make it a roar, with me!” They cheered, thrusting rabid fists skyward. “Stand with me! To steel and stand with me!” The crowd thundered, a blur of vicious energy that resembled a coiled spring, ready to explode despite their fatigue, despite their hunger. “Look for me at the front, brothers and sisters.”

The crowd nodded and thumped each other on the back and shoulders, voicing their approval loudly.

Jaxton knew he only had a moment before their madness vanished and fear filled the vacuum.

“Man the barricades, then,” he said quietly. But he knew they could hear.

The resulting thunder filled the cavernous space. “MOVE!”

“To the barricades!”

“You two, with me!”

With a ridiculous energy the ninety survivors broke into trots around the room, moving to pre-planned doors throughout the Citadel, shouting all the while. Jaxton could see one figure remained motionless in the sea of motion. Adira stood still, though her eyes were fixed on his own.

…

“You spoke the truth in there,” she whispered.

Jaxton swept off the tiny pieces on his map, and felt the dream of civilization vanish with them. “It was what they needed to hear. It was what I wanted to tell them.”

Adira drew closer, till he could smell her scent. She spoke again. “Is there really no way out?”

Jaxton did not look away. “Even away from the doors, they line the walls in a mass, ten feet thick. They must be able to sense us, cowering inside the fortress. Even if we lowered ropes and made a dash for it, we would be swarmed before touching the soil.”

Adira bit her lip, and looked at the torch that illuminated their little room. “So this is it, then? We’re going to die here?”

Jaxton felt tears come unbidden to his eyes and he turned, unable to look at her.

“I can’t really process that the others are all dead. I mean, I know they are. But my brain doesn’t really know how to make sense of that,” she mused, her voice shaking.

Jaxton took her by the hands, and marveled at the sheets of thick, straight dark hair that fell among his arms. “I won’t let them take you. I’ll do whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

She tried to push him away, but not with true effort. Her form shivered and then shuddered, wracked by great heaving sobs.

Jaxton moved to eliminate any space between their bodies, and he wept from the contact.

He forced himself to pull away. “Stay with me, do you understand. I need you with me till the very end.”

Adira nodded violently. “It’s pretty fucked up to say it,” she struggled between the tears, “but if it hadn’t been for this whole world-ending infection, I would have never truly known you. We would have both left school, and never seen each other again.”

Jaxton laughed through his own wretchedness, till they were laughing together, their cheeks wet.

“I’ll have to thank the infected, when I get the chance.”

The laughing stopped as abruptly as it started. “Let’s just get through this, and we’ll see each other after,” Adira said, her eyes burning.

Jaxton opened his mouth, and then thought better of his words. “Ok. We’ll see each other after.”

Adira nodded, looking insane to him. “Yes, and I’ll wait for you there. Before I go on.”

“Easy as that.”

She nodded immediately. “Easy as that. This isn’t the end.”

“I believe you.”

“I’ll wait for you,” she repeated, clutching him tight to her body.

They did not move for a long time, and remained motionless, one figure in the shadowy gloom.

…

The armories were bristling with motion. Men and women fitted makeshift armor to their limbs and torsos. Weapons were passed around, inspected, and seized. Jaxton and Adira were at the center of it all, directing the survivors and helping them to prepare for the worst. Nearest to them, Wilder and Duke armed themselves. Troy was loading slugs into a shotgun, resting in a wheel chair; his leg was useless.