Winter Apocalypse: Zombie Crusade V (30 page)

Jack started the battle with an AR-15, and he’d emptied twelve thirty-round magazines in less than five minutes. Combined with Carter’s fire on his right, and one of Chien’s soldiers on his left, the mind-numbing fusillade had left over five-hundred hunters dead on the ice. Many others were stumbling around with wounds to the face and skull. All three of the fighters had switched to using their .22s once the growing wall of shattered corpses created enough pressure on the defensive pikes to force the trio back to the main line of soldiers.

Through the detached focus of his combat-sharpened mind, Jack was processing information from several directions at the same time as he was gunning down the infected. He could hear the booming crash of the .50 Caliber BMG from behind, realizing that Todd Evans was doing his best to keep the Blackhawks at a distance. Barnes’ pilots had learned to be very careful around Jack’s forces, and these aviators were exercising great caution as they directed the assault. The helicopters flew low and fast over the heads of the monsters they were controlling, never approaching within five hundred meters of the small circle of targeted humans. Todd wasn’t aware of any scoring hits on the Blackhawks, but forcing them to keep their distance was his primary goal.

Waves of hunters had begun pouring across the abandoned laager as soon as enough bodies collapsed the once-deadly wall of pikes. Howling with anticipation, they gained easy access to the next line of human resistance. The circled ATVs and snowmobiles now provided launch platforms for the monsters, and the troops were forced to backpedal several meters in order to avoid an immediate collapse. Jack was fairly certain that most of his fighters were still alive and engaged, but the rapidly diminishing sound of gunfire indicated that hand-to-hand combat was beginning in earnest. He realized that the humans’ ability to continue resisting was now reduced to a macabre formula involving weight of weapon used, fitness of the wielder, and the willingness of the creatures to continue with their suicidal frontal assaults. The only certainty in the formula was that the infected would not stop coming; many more hunters had survived the hail of bullets than had fallen to them.

David’s crew was down to halberds, deadly instruments of destruction that they were intimately familiar with after countless hours of use in both training and actual combat. Their movements were precise and lethal, with very little wasted motion involved in the process. Once again, David was reminded of how mechanical the killing had become since the early days of the outbreak, when he and Christy had still been learning how to use the equipment Jack had managed to send them as the world was collapsing. He watched as the sharp tip of the spear at the end of the eight-foot shaft penetrated a small, wiry hunter’s forehead, then barely noticed how he expertly turned the weapon with a flick of his wrist and buried the axe-head on the side into the skull of a second creature. As he pulled back for another thrust, the cruel hook caught another flesh-eater by the back of the neck, slicing through a vertebrae and dropping the monster in its tracks.

Christy was just as deadly as her husband, but she could feel her energy flagging. Being in a fight of this nature in her sixth month of pregnancy was especially taxing. She was carrying a lot more weight under her armor than normal, and eventually the inevitable happened: she missed a strike, and a big hunter tackled her to the ice. David was on her left, but it was Sal, a massive presence on her right, who grabbed the creature and tossed it back into its advancing pack-mates. Christy quickly regained her feet and resumed her position in the circle, but she couldn’t quite catch her breath after the incident, and she knew her time was running short.

Unlike many of the islanders who’d worked to strengthen the fledgling community on Middle Bass following their deliverance by David’s people, Brittany had taken her medieval weapons training seriously. Father O’Brien had witnessed the effectiveness of such tools of war numerous times during his trek from Cleveland, and he’d done his best to convince the people on the island that they needed to develop skills to back-up their firearms. Unfortunately for Brittany, standing strong in what was essentially a shield wall required trained fighters who knew how to use edged weapons. Except for Roberto and a few others, the part of the line held by the platoon-sized contingent from Middle Bass consisted of part-time soldiers who knew how to shoot, and little else. When the ammo gave out, they began to fall back under immense pressure.

Brittany had no choice but to withdraw along with everyone else, knowing from experience that she wouldn’t last thirty seconds without flank protection against the horde of infected. When the retreating fighters reached the huddled refugees, there was nowhere else to go. As Jack had predicted, the sick, weak, and old found strength they didn’t know they possessed as soon as the snarling hunters bore down on them. Brittany suddenly found herself standing amid dozens of pikes pointed toward the advancing monsters. The people holding them weren’t warriors, but they knew how to hold the shafts and jab with the gleaming tips.

              Of course, plenty of the folks inside the fighting circle were simply incapable of defending themselves. A handful of infants and toddlers were being held by their mothers. Some of the elderly were ambulatory, while a number of people were too ill with pneumonia and other ailments to do anything but pray. This group screamed. Brittany didn’t blame them; the hunters were terrifying, and knowing what would happen if they got a hold of you was the stuff of nightmares. So, with screaming humans behind, and snarling, howling infected in front, Brittany hoarsely shouted her defiance as she continued to kill with her halberd. Roberto effectively guarded her left with a spear and war-axe, while Pete Henderson used a shield and long sword on her right.

For a time it seemed as if they might hold after all: the hunters had stopped advancing and their dead began to accumulate. As always, the problem was that their dead were accumulating into mounds. Before long, many of the piles of corpses were five-foot high. Sometimes, as the monsters scrambled over the grisly mounds, their final sight was of cold steel plunging into their faces just as their heads poked over the peaks. Others were managing to reach the top, a perch from which they would try to leap over the defenders to get at the obviously weaker prey gathered behind the deadly weapons being thrust at them.

Brittany didn’t know how long she’d been fighting off the jumpers, only that she was fatigued beyond thinking; her actions, for the most part, were now based on muscle memory. Eventually she was jarred out of the near-trance she’d slipped into as something heavy and powerful slammed into her right shoulder. Falling into the people trapped behind, she watched through her visor as Pete stabbed the huge monster that had knocked her down just before he was grabbed by three more of the creatures. He smashed his fist into one of the hunters’ faces while stabbing another in the eye socket. Then more of the flesh-eaters reached through the scrum and pulled the brave fighter into their midst, where he was quickly torn to pieces as the powerful beasts ripped his arms from their sockets while others began to eat.

Brittany prayed that her friend’s neck had been broken or he’d been knocked unconscious before he was dismembered, even as she regained her feet to resume fighting. She could sense a breakthrough to her left, and quickly peeked in that direction to see a mother and toddler being pulled through a gap left by a fallen soldier. Brittany screamed in frustration until the monsters holding the two humans collapsed to the ice in spite of the fact that no fighters were close enough to reach them. Then she saw the leather-clad war dogs standing between the advancing hunters and the woman with the baby. Several refugees pulled the lucky mother and child back into the center of the circle. Kyra and Digger stayed where they were, sensing that this section of the formation, manned by the islanders, was the weakest. The opening created by the dead soldier was closed as the circled fighters instinctively sought the shoulders of the people next to them, but Brittany knew that the end was close, very close, and it was going to be worse than any nightmare she could have imagined.

As hunters pressed in from all sides, Trudy stood on an ammo cart a few meters above the place in the circle held by Christy and David. She was armored, and held a spear in her hands that she knew how to use. After watching her husband be torn apart by the monsters during the journey to Fort Wayne, she was determined to give a good account of herself if the day ever came when she was hopelessly surrounded by the flesh-eaters. Twice in the last few minutes, she had used the eight-foot shaft of the weapon to reach the faces of hunters grappling with her daughter and son-in-law, but mostly she was still watching the battlefield from her elevated position on the cart. She saw the breaks in the section of the circle held by the Middle Bass fighters, holding her breath in fear until the gaps were closed and the resistance continued. She was very glad that somebody had brought a couple of war dogs north from Vicksburg.

Jack, Carter, and the veteran group from the Castle were still some meters away from the civilians gathered in the center of the defensive formation, but everywhere else the refugees had now added their pikes to the fight. Trudy could see that untold thousands of the monsters had been killed in the hour-long battle out on the ice. The advantages of good footing, lots of ammo, extensive training, and experience had allowed the humans to wreak a great slaughter on the horde. Still, she knew it wouldn’t be enough to save them. They were surrounded by thousands of infected whose numbers never seemed to dwindle no matter how many were killed. Trudy wondered how the humans had managed to hold out this long; she’d witnessed enough fights to recognize exhaustion when she saw it. David, Christy, and the warriors battling at their sides were all slowing down. There were more close calls, and spent fighters were being steadily caught and pulled into the crowd of flesh-eaters. She accepted that the end was near, determined to jump down and die fighting beside her daughter and son-in-law.

Suddenly she felt so close to Jim, her fallen husband. She almost smiled, even in the midst of such carnage and imminent death, as she considered the reunion about to occur.
Jim must be here
, she thought; why else would she find herself thinking about him at such a time as this. She lifted her face to look up at the heavens, wondering if she’d see angels waiting to carry them all from this place of suffering. Her gaze never reached the sky. As Trudy’s eyes rose from the fight by Christy and David, she saw a line of more hunters running toward the battle from the north. For a brief moment she wondered why the creatures were approaching along the river instead of using the nearby landmasses. Then, she realized she was looking at humans.

Trudy watched as several hundred people on ice skates, dressed in a hodgepodge of gear and wielding modified hockey sticks, bore down on the rear of the hunters almost directly in front of Jack’s position. The ice-warriors were flying across the frozen surface, and their impact with the infected was beautiful and horrific: a perfect picture of war. Skating along at nearly thirty miles per hour, the fighters didn’t have to swing their weapons hard to part heads from torsos. The mystery warriors were spaced five meters apart, and after killing one monster apiece they looped back out onto open ice to regroup and then completed the same maneuver again. Trudy didn’t see a single skater fall, and as they formed up for a third pass she saw that the stick-wielders weren’t alone.

Hundreds of snowmobiles had formed into a massive wedge pointed right at the spot where the horde had been weakened by the skaters. Most of the monsters were still focused on the humans to their front, paying little attention to this annoying new threat from the rear. Trudy decided that even if the hunters had been able to turn and face the epic charge of snowmobilers, they would have had no chance of stopping the humans.

All of the machines had been creatively modified, with spiked racks welded to the skis in front of the engines. The drivers were all heavily armored, and the passengers wielded small axes and swords as they stood in some sort of cradle that stabilized their torsos. The wedge hit the hunters with a resounding smack unlike any noise Trudy had ever heard. She didn’t know how fast the snowmobilers were going when they made contact with the infected, but to her untrained eye it sure looked like they were travelling at a higher rate of speed than the skaters. The resulting impact looked more like an explosion than a collision of two fighting forces. Broken hunters, and pieces of their shattered bodies, rained through the air. The drivers of the snowmobiles continued to accelerate until the sheer volume of dead flesh-eaters finally stopped their impressive advance, but the winter warriors were within ten meters of Jack when they finally came to a halt.

David was far too busy fighting to see, or even hear, the arrival of their mystery-allies, but he certainly noticed the lessening of pressure in front of his position. After a few seconds, he even had time to look to his left, out in front of where the Castle’s leadership had positioned themselves. He could see the flash of blades rising and falling above the heads of the infected, and briefly wondered if a group of fighters had somehow been cut off from the circle and was trying to hack its way back to friendly lines. Then he heard a roar of gunfire erupt from the position and realized that a new force of friendly humans was trying to help the refugees from Middle Bass.

A red mist seemed to hang in the air above the hunters now turning to face the threat on their flank as hot lead shredded their flesh and shattered their skulls. They fell by the score; then hundreds were writhing in pools of dark blood on the frozen surface of the river while even more of the monsters lay still with their brains leaking out onto the ice. David and Christy, along with the rest of the surviving fighters, retreated back towards the huddled crowd of refugees while keeping their weapons pointed at the increasingly confused enemy. The flesh eaters seemed to realize that they were now at a disadvantage; even the monsters that had penetrated the Middle Bass ranks began to drift away from the prey who’d turned out to be so vicious. David wondered why the monsters were giving up, until he heard Trudy shouting that the Blackhawks had disappeared over the horizon. He turned and saw Christy on one knee, trying to catch her breath. She looked up at her husband with a questioning glance. David could find no words, or even the breath, to express how he was feeling. He had no energy to speculate about the nature of their salvation. Finally, he simply placed his gloved, gore-crusted hand atop Christy’s battered helmet, and silently prayed that the baby was okay.