Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV (32 page)

Carter nodded as he kept his eyes on the road. “Yep, the odds will never be better. With Utah on board we’ll have what, somewhere close to fifte
en thousand soldiers? I know ya believe Barnes has more’n double what we were hearin’ just a month ago, so maybe he has a couple hundred thousand?”

Luke quietly muttered, “At least—might be a million of ‘em.”

“Well, if we kill twenty thousand of ‘em at the dam, I guess it’s worth five hundred soldiers to do it with.”

Luke didn’t respond, and
after a minute or so of silence Carter continued. “Look, I wouldn’t bring ya along, or T.C., if I didn’t think some of us are gonna survive the fight. Hell yeah, we’re gonna lose people defendin’ that dam, maybe hundreds, but we ain’t gonna lose everyone.”

Luke finally replied, “I wonder if this is how the men of the 101
st
Airborne felt when they were being sent out to Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge?”

“
Yer pretty smart fer such a young pup. I bet they felt somethin’ like this,” Carter admitted. “I’ll guarantee ya they knew they was headin’ into a bad one, and they knew by then that a lot of men didn’t come back from bad fights ‘gainst the Germans. Hell, entire battles and wars got decided by suicidal last stands, Luke. Sometimes war demands a fight to the death, and if yer people ain’t got the stomach fer it, yer gonna lose. So yeah, this is a crazy, hopeless mission if the goal is to stop Barnes, but nobody’s expectin’ us to stop him. Our job is to kill as many hunters as possible so there’s fewer to deal with in Vicksburg, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”

CHAPTER
19

When Carter was a kid his parents would sometimes rent a cabin on Pickwick Lake during summers when the family could afford to do so. This had led him to assume that he actually knew the area and the dam he had volunteered to defend. One look at the massive TVA hydroelectric structure blew that assumption all to hell. The two-lane highway running above the dam was actually supported by iron beams, latticed across the top of the wall with what appeared to be a service road running beneath. That route would have to be stoutly blockaded or the hunter army would simply pass under the defenses planned for the road above. In addition, the surface of the road atop the dam appeared to be over a hundred feet above the water line, meaning that snipers would only be able to shoot at targets on the approaches to the bridge rather than those already on it. The height also meant that escape over the sides of the dam for troops cut off along the road would be very difficult to plan and execute.

Luke was seeing everything Carter was observing, and their minds were processing the information in much the same way, but T.C. came to a different conclusion. “Why don’t you just scrap all the plans for defending the road and blow it up so it collapses on top of the dam? Then those monsters will have to pick their way over all the rubble to even get at us on the other side; they won’t be able to push each other the way
you say they did at Brandenburg.”

Carter looked at his nephew with one raised eyebrow, then turned his gaze to Luke. “Tell this rookie why that plan won’t work.”

Luke sat quietly as he considered everything that could possibly go wrong with T.C.’s suggestion. He thought maybe he was missing something, and tossed the ball back in Carter’s court. “Uh, since you’re in command, Colonel Wilson, I’ll defer that task to your expertise.”

Carter squinted at
Luke, trying to decide if the young man was reluctant to criticize Carter’s newfound nephew or if he really couldn’t find a hole in T.C.’s idea. He finally turned to T.C. and admitted, “Blowin’ up the road might work better than the plan I had.”

“Hey Uncle Carter, uh, I mean, Colonel, I wasn’t suggesting that we dump your plan, just modify it a bit.”

“I’m listenin’.”

“Well, we still benefit from muckin’ up the approaches to the dam as much as possible, and the snipers still need to do their work. We’d want to keep some of the road over the dam still intact, so we could spear the hunters climbing up from the rubble. This phalanx-thing y’all keep talkin’ about could set up right at the edge of the blown road and push hunters off the sides all day long.”

Carter nodded as he considered the possibilities. “Okay kid, I’ll give yer ideas some serious thought. Truth is, I think ya may be onto somethin’, and if Luke here agrees, I may just hafta promote ya to tactical engineer.” He playfully punched T.C. in the arm. “And since I’m yer commandin’ officer, that means ya gotta run all yer ideas through me in case I wanna take credit for ‘em. That’s how the chain of command works in the military.”

By the end of the day
, scout teams had been sent forward to keep an eye out for Barnes while everyone else was busy preparing for the monster-army’s arrival. Most of the iron-beam-supported road was wired for destruction, while semi-trucks and propane-tank bombs were scattered all over the northern approaches to the dam. Boats for the snipers were quickly scavenged from nearby homes and positioned near the north shore, and the convoy of SUVs that had transported the battalion from Vicksburg was turned around, refueled, and ready to pull out in a hurry if the inevitable retreat became a rout. Carter was being true to his word: he didn’t consider this a suicide mission. Humans would die fighting above this dam, but everyone would go into battle knowing that they had at least a chance of surviving the horde heading their way.

The soldiers worked in shifts throughout the night and following day, finally receiving word that Chad Greenburg had been located at sunset on the second evening after Carter’s force was in place. Messages had to be relayed through smaller radios back to Vicksburg before being forwarded on to the battalion defending the Pickwick Dam, but eventually the information trickled in. The reliable old Ranger reported that his men had been quite busy, and Barnes’ army was missing a few thousand hunters since Jack had last seen it in action. In addition, the cattle had been scattered again, and the cowboys moving the food-on-the-hoof had apparently been turning up missing at an alarming rate. That was the good news. The bad news was that the army of infected was only about thirty miles from the dam, and still marched in numbers beyond counting. Carter accepted the incoming messages with feigned nonchalance, anxious about the hunters being so close
, but thankful that his troops had used the time they had been given to such good effect.

Much of the road above the dam was now a ragged pile of twisted steel beams and boulder-sized chucks of concrete. The route to that perilous path was mined with more than
two-hundred propane-tank bombs and over thirty large vehicles to break up the enemy approach. Luke had been at Brandenburg, and even he had high hopes that this time Barnes could be held for a while. Carter and the Utah commanders were basically incapable of imagining how the position could be taken by any force of infected, no matter how numerous, but Luke knew that time and numbers would eventually win the day. What excited him about the defensive works was that thousands of hunters were obviously going to die here, perhaps tens of thousands. He smiled when he thought about the scene that would greet people still living downstream of the dam in the coming days, the corpses stacked and floating like a forest chopped into cordwood on the way to a paper-mill.

Luke and T.C. decided to scavenge
area stores for arrows and broadheads and ended up taking out several packs of infected along the way. The deadly archer from Ohio would be going into this battle with over five hundred quarrels at his disposal, and that was bad news for the approaching horde. After the road had been blown, a huge semi-trailer had been backed up right to the edge of the chasm. From on top of this improvised observation post, Luke would command at the front of the phalanx. A radio-man would be stationed next to him, to keep Carter, commanding from the rear, updated on what was going on at the point of contact. Luke figured he could pour arrows into climbing hunters while he called for rank rotations and kept his commander supplied with information.

Carter, on the other hand, was once again disgusted with the reality that a colonel in charge of a battalion had to be in a position where he could exercise control of the fighting. He had argued that in a battle like this it didn’t matter if he led from the front, but Luke and several of the Utah officers had poi
nted out that there were multiple parts of the operation happening at the same time, and that meant a commander was needed. Ultimately, Carter would have to be the guy calling for the retreat when the time came, and that responsibility alone demanded his removal from the phalanx. Carter agreed that they had a point there, and he then won his point that he would keep two squads at his side with which he would personally conduct the rear-guard as the weary fighters made their way to the convoy. It was a grim compromise; Carter would command what was basically a certain defeat, and then he would fight in the most dangerous position in any battle as he covered the retreat. On the one hand he fulfilled the responsibilities placed upon him by his commanding officers, while on the other hand he satisfied the demands that the myth of southern honor placed upon his heart. Nobody was satisfied, but everyone accepted the arrangement and finished final preparations for battle.

The soldiers of the 1
st
Battalion, 1
st
Utah Infantry slept fitfully that night, if at all. A cold wind blew from the north across the Tennessee River, and by dawn the stiff breeze carried the sound of helicopter rotors in the distance. A few minutes later, the scouts Carter had ordered out could be seen emerging from the tree-line in the distance, trotting down to the shoreline of Lake Pickwick behind the dam and boarding the boats waiting to ferry them back to their companies currently positioning themselves into a phalanx. Carter and Luke had demanded that the battalion practice forming into the tight formation several times a day since their arrival at the dam, and the soldiers had spent hours going through the motions of rotating to the front and back again. They appeared to be combat-ready.

As Luke watched his Utah allies move into position at the edge of the wrecked road
, he felt a tremor of anxiety and was surprised at the dryness in his mouth. He knew he was experiencing fear, but was surprised that he felt anything but anticipation. Normally he looked forward to a fight, excited at the prospect of removing more infected from the planet. With a start he realized that the fight at Brandenburg had left him shaken; he, Luke Seifert, had been utterly helpless against the horde that had overrun their position as if it was completely devoid of defenders. There had been no stopping, or even slowing, the tidal wave of hunters that had washed over him and his friends on the walls of that bridge. Always, Luke had won his fights, and if he did have to retreat, he was able to cut down enough of the enemy to give himself the time and space to do so. That hadn’t been the case at Brandenburg, and Luke now realized that the memories of that rout had stuck with him: he would never again take victory or survival for granted.

He now stood on this dam with five hundred fighters at his side, but he alone had seen the enemy stomping their way beneath the damnable Blackhawks. Only he knew the unstoppable force of hundreds of thousands of hunters pushing in the same direction. The rational part of his mind argued that the preparations Carter had ordered would break up the enemy momentum, but there was a dark place hidden in his subconscious that threatened to overwhelm reason. Finally h
e shook his head slightly, clearing away the unpleasant thoughts, and began placing quivers of arrows in the small stands he had constructed for holding them. He realized that he really didn’t need to think too much in the upcoming battle, just kill with efficiency and confidence, and be seen doing so by the Utah troops under Carter’s command.

Carter was four hundred meters back, somewhat safely ensconced in a wooden tower erected on top of a semi-trailer. As he watched through powerful binoculars
, a half-dozen Blackhawks slowly approached from the north. He ordered his radioman to send the message for the sniper-boats to move into position. As the watercraft slowly pulled away from their moorings on the southern side of the lake, Carter asked for an update from Luke. Word came back that the Utah troops were in position near the edge of the collapsed road, arranged by companies and platoons just as they’d practiced. Now there was nothing left to do but wait, and five minutes was the amount of time it took to see the first hunters trot out of the woods on the northern side of the dam.

There was a huge power station over there, plus the semis and other large vehicles parke
d all over the open ground, so the hunters had to navigate an obstacle course before they could even begin to cross the rubble-strewn dam. As was the case at Brandenburg, after a brief delay in which thousands more infected joined the crowd, several Blackhawks flew over the edge of the dam and completed several slow circles. Even before the helicopters backed off, hundreds of creatures ran toward the collapsed road and began to pick their way across. The land behind this first wave was rapidly filling up with a mass of hunters packed shoulder-to-shoulder, jostling one another in their attempts to reach the dam.

Slowly at first, a few gunshots could be heard echoing across the lake from the boats now lined up below the road approaching the dam. Then the firing became so heavy it sounded as if someone was rocking on full auto with no need to reload. Carter continued to watch the gathering horde behind the monsters making their way across the dam, finally holding up his index finger so T.C., who was standing a few feet away with the detonators for the propane-bombs, knew it was time to set off the first explosion. Even the soldiers standing in the phalanx could see the geyser of flame shoot skyward on the opposite bank, while from his perch Luke watched dozens of hunters tossed about like debris in a hurricane.