Read August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand Online
Authors: Tyler Lahey
Tags: #Post-Apocalyptic | Dystopian | Infeccted
August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand (16 page)
“Ladder! Straight ahead!”
They could see the steel maintenance ladder ahead, between the massive stacks of books. It would buy them time.
There were infected in the library. They moved between the stacks, chasing a shrieking older man.
The Lion troopers charged down between the stacks, mauls at the ready. The others were close behind. Jaxton watched as they carved a path forward, bludgeoning any that stood before them with a spray of flesh and bone.
“Adira, go!” Jaxton shoved Adira towards the ladder, and she ascended rapidly. As she neared the top she shoved the metal plate up. Jaxton could see the stars through the roof.
“Protect the ladder,” Jaxton commanded, re-drawing his pistol. The maulers took positions with their backs to the others. “Joseph.”
Joseph shook his head as the group massed at the base of the skinny metal ladder. “No. Everyone else, go!”
Duke and Wilder leapt on, one after the other.
“Here they come,” Bennett whispered. He leaned around the shoulder of a Lion trooper and let his pistol crack. The target stumbled and fell, but another two appeared.
The mauls struck diseased flesh. Two down. Three down. Four down. The men grunted and heaved. Five down. Bennett ascended the ladder. Jaxton tapped one of his men on the ladder and indicated he should go. The man refused, and turned to re-face the enemy. Then the infected were on him, ripping out his throat.
Jaxton fired again and again, till his pistol was empty. He drew the tomahawks. They felt good in his hands. He could hear his friends shouting at him from above. One of his troopers turned and mounted the ladder. Jaxton looked over the pile of bodies for a millisecond. Only he and Joseph remained.
“Get up now, Jaxton. You’ve been a hero too many times,” Joseph growled. Jaxton saw him strip his glasses. They clattered on the ground, but Joseph rose with a maul in his soft hands.
Jaxton turned, and gripped the ladder. When he got to the top, and was hauled up by his friends, he looked back down. Joseph was locked in a furious struggle with an infected. He used the wooden handle of the maul to collapse an infected’s windpipe and roared as Jaxton had never seen him roar. He smiled; his friend knew finally knew glory. Jaxton saw him stumble from a bite and go down in a mass. They closed the hatch.
Above, the night sky stretched.
“It must be dawn soon,” Adira said, stretching her hand to the east.
Jaxton saw other figures on the roof, little shadows across the way. “What happened?!” He screamed.
The others shook their heads and dropped to the roof, exhausted. “They’re all dead. Everyone!”
“Is Joseph gone?” Adira rapped him on the chest twice.
Jaxton didn’t answer her. He turned to the others. “Scan the walls one more time, see if there’s an exit.”
As the others sprinted off, Jaxton drew a final magazine from his back pocket. He slipped it into the weapon and cocked it. “I won’t let us be taken alive.”
Adira nodded forlornly. “I know.”
“There’s hundreds!”
“They’re still in the trees!”
“What the fuck are we supposed to do!?”
“Jax. There’s nothing. They’re everywhere around us. We’d never make it far,” Bennett yelled.
“They’re piling up over here!”
The crowd of a dozen survivors on the roof shifted as the immediate danger returned. A man stood on the lip near the music wing, screaming and pointing towards the ground.
Jaxton jogged over, his pistol in one hand and tomahawk in the other. Leaning over the edge, he stared into the mouth of hell.
Inching closer towards the roof, the infected crawled. They seethed and writhed in a great mass of flesh, building slowly as more and more piled on top of each other.
The survivors’ weapons discharged in the night, sending echoes rolling across the parking lot beyond. The mass of moving bodies took fifty rounds, then one hundred. Within sixty seconds all the firearms were dry, and the mound kept building.
A single infected mounted the top of the mass, and stood to reach the precipice. Standing to full height, he reached his arms over the lip of the roof and began to pull himself up. Jaxton buried his tomahawk in the infected’s neck and positioned his foot on its chest to kick him back over the wall.
It was Liam. His bleeding eyes and flashing teeth snapped at him, as the bear’s giant hands sought to gain purchase on Jaxton’s boot.
Jaxton hesitated for a second, looking at his infected friend. He drew a hair closer, willing himself to see a shred of humanity left inside those eyes.
Jaxton roared with pain.
Adira collapsed Liam’s eye socket with her brass knuckles and shoved him over the edge. She reeled in horror, and saw Jaxton bleeding from a bite wound to his forearm, between the plates of heavy plastic armor.
“No. No, no, no, no.”
The group froze. They had seen others fall. Countless others. But their leader had never failed them, not once. Now he would turn into the enemy before their eyes in sixty seconds.
With his eyes wide in horror, Wilder set his watch. The seconds began to tick.
55 seconds.
“Jaxton, what do I do?” Adira dropped to her knees.
50 seconds.
“They’re coming up behind us!” Bennett roared.
45 seconds.
Duke and Wilder hacked into the infected now mounting the wall.
40 seconds.
A mottled hand grabbed Duke’s grubby face and wrenched it off his skull. Duke collapsed backwards, screaming, as an infected leapt on top of him.
35 seconds.
“There’s an opening! I think we can make a run for it! It’s all we have!” Bennett roared, pointing to the parking lot below.
30 seconds.
Bennett dropped to his knees, and gripped Jaxton on the neck. Jaxton nodded immediately, and Bennett grabbed Adira by the hand. “Get her out of here.”
25 seconds.
Jaxton handed the final pistol to Adira, and began to crawl towards the pipe. He could see it now, twenty feet away, a little tower on the roof.
20 seconds.
“Jump! Just jump!” “I won’t leave him!” “Get your hands off me!”
15 seconds.
“Jaxton! You can make it!” Wilder screamed, brandishing his weapon in the night. The infected had mounted the roof.
10 seconds.
Jaxton could see the pipe. It was so close. He reached into his pocket and flicked on the lighter, willing himself to crawl the final feet.
5 seconds.
He clutched the pipe, and turned around. There were snarling shadows all around him. Wilder dropped to his knees. The others were gone. Jaxton raised the lighter to the tube at the top of the pipe.
…
The infected were all around them. She pumped her limbs furiously, though she could barely see through her tears. They would never make it. Adira could still feel her throbbing knee from where it had struck the mulch. Bennett had shoved her off before jumping himself.
Another survivor fell beside here, run down by the infected. They had started off with nine. Now there were seven.
“Come on Adira, we can make it,” Bennett choked out.
She saw a group of four survivors at the other corner of the parking lot cornered and attacked.
As Adira and Bennett cleared the parking lot and burst into the forest, she heard a scream and a flash of motion behind her. The other survivors were swarmed. They had been right; there was no chance.
They were the only ones left. Hers and Bennett’s skin were the only targets now for the unrelenting enemy.
She stopped suddenly, hearing an explosion, and looked back towards the high school. She could see it there, between the trees.
In the dark summer night, there was a fire. The August air was burning.
Epilogue
“Did you almost die?”
The spider-webs of wrinkles tickling the corners of the man’s eyes deepened. He spat on the rough-hewn floor, as the other recoiled at his lack of manners. The old man didn’t care. He raised faded blue eyes to peer deep into the interviewer. “I think a more indicative question is…did we want to make it, at that point?” His gravelly voice filled the room.
“What do you mean?”
The hazy blue eyes narrowed even further, bristling. The stooped figure drew up, and then the words tumbled out of him musically, after he paused to enhance the effect.
“There was a time when I did not mark the days at all, and they ran by, so many numberless dawns and nights. The sun would rise, and then his sister the moon, but I never changed. My friends were young, my lovers were young, and my parents were old. And it was sad to see the old, but it was not a sadness that we carried. A fleeting reflection it was, gone the moment the scenery changed. We always had second chances, and nothing was forever. In the prime, it was our generation that decided what was right and what was wrong, what was fashionable or not. We, the young, stood haughtily, the fixed point at the center of a swirling existence, the old and the even younger at the peripheries.
The others, they strove to have their say, but it was always us that led the way. Though our paths might not have crossed unless I forced them to, it was steeling to the heart to know at any moment I could reach out and find any number of my friends, young and full of vitality like me. And time roared on like this until it felt like it would forever. Until, piece-by-piece, everything changed. I watched the world we all built become bitter and stale, break down and collapse in on itself, only to be replaced by another more young and vigorous one. But this time, we shared no part in it. And at first, this was an insult to the very fibers of our being, it was unjust, it was impossible. But we slowly realized this was how it had always been, and would always be. All the things that once drove us to mad passion and sweet sorrow, no one seemed to care about anymore. They regarded the things that had driven us mad with passion, fear, joy, and rage with a simple, casual ambivalence. They simply didn’t care. The road grew lonelier as those we once regarded as “the old” died, and the culture that once beat with vitality around our beings abandoned us.
As a boy, life was framed by all the things we would once be able to do. And then, it became all the things we could now do. Then there was the agony of having those abilities taken away piecemeal, slowly. All we began to have left was each other, dying reminders of our own faded glory. Life became a journey steeped in sickening nostalgia. And it has been my fate to be the very last. Until we sit here now, and at night I am overwhelmed by a simple consideration. It is when I realize that all my idols, my friends, my lovers, my family…have withered away slowly and left this place. Every soul and body that once burned with emotion and the vivacity of life was forced to watch that power slip from them, piece by piece. Every worthy enemy, every friend you could count on, every wondrous woman. That strength I once had, from knowing my friends were all across the world, doing great things, or doing nothing much at all, disappeared when I realized they had all gone. All those I once shared dreams, fears, and visions with have left. How could it have happened to them all? Every last one? Youth, I realized, was the most intoxicating, enthralling pull of all. And by its nature, you only understand its power as it slips away.
All my true friends died in front of me. They died young. They died fighting. They never came to know life’s most devious trick, old age. I alone have borne that burden.”
“Jesus. Slow down- uhh can I quote you on some of that?”
A cackling filled with raw contempt echoed in the little room. “Do what you like.”
The younger man recoiled, as if stung.
“Anyways, that’s what my poetic mind conjures up when I imagine old age. My friends never got to watch their strength slip away, boy. They never got that far in the journey. I’ve done it all alone.”
The younger man struggled to regain his composure, peering down at his little white screen. Then he raised his eyes and assumed a somber gaze. “How many people came to the town? To that little valley?”
“At the height, we had almost three hundred souls living in our new society.” His thin lips resumed their perpetual grimace.
The younger man nodded. “How long did you hold out for?”
“Nearly four hundred and fifty days.”
“And at the final hour? When you said they broke through the defenses at last? How many of you made it out alive?
The old man’s leathery lips twitched and his grey eyes gleamed.
“Just two.
”
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