Crucifixion - 02 (22 page)

Back on the wall I stared dumbfounded at the sea of
infected.  They had reached the base of the wall and were pushing in, the
bodies pressed so tightly together they appeared to be a solid mass.  Mounds of
bodies from my mortar assault were piled high on the highway, but the infected
just flowed over and around them as they moved forward.  As the herd had made
contact with the wall it had started spreading out to the sides.  The heaviest
concentration had been following the highway and while some had been in the
woods to either side most had stuck to the easier path the asphalt afforded. 
Now, as they spread, the woods for a hundred yards to either side of the
highway was packed with bodies and they were still spreading.  They were also
starting to pile on top of each other at the base of the wall and it wouldn’t
take much piling up for hands to be able to reach the ten foot high edge of the
containers. 

As I was thinking this there were shouts of alarm from
several places along the wall as shooters suddenly saw hands reach up and grab
the metal rod that ran along the top edge of each container.  Most of them were
able to quickly dispatch the infected with shots to the head, but a couple were
caught unprepared when females made big leaps, reaching over the edge to grab a
hapless shooter and drag him into the churning mass in front of the wall.  Moving
right up to the front edge I looked over and then scanned up and down the
length of the wall.  The second level was still too far away and we were only
minutes away from the infected breaching our defenses and pouring over the wall
and into the town.  A female leapt up from below, screaming like a banshee as
she tried to grab my leg.  Stepping to the side I kicked her in the face while
she was still in the air and her body did a back flip before landing in the
herd below.

“Grenades, grenades, grenades!”  I shouted into the radio.  All
up and down the line I saw and heard the NCOs passing the order and the sounds
of rifle fire sputtered out as each shooter started pulling pins and tossing
grenades over the front lip of their container.  The explosions ripped up and
down the wall, competing with the thunder but not winning.  As planned, each
shooter tossed two grenades then went back to their rifle.  The effects were
devastating on the infected bodies that were pressed against the metal
containers, but unfortunately when they fell the ranks of infected behind them
just used their bodies to gain more height as they clawed and scrambled to
reach the people on top. 

The only advantage for us was the herd was pressing in so
tight the females couldn’t get a run to leap at the wall and were hampered in
even being able to jump straight up.  This didn’t stop them from trying and
right next to me one succeeded in leaping high enough to grab a shooter’s arms
and start dragging her over the lip.  This was the young girl that had been the
first to speak up earlier when I’d asked for volunteers.  She screamed when the
female latched onto her arms and started tugging and I dove across her body to
anchor her to the top of the container.  Fumbling for my pistol which was
trapped between our bodies I felt her slip a few inches on the wet metal, then
Dog bounded over me and bit down on one of the infected’s forearms.  I don’t
know how strong a German Shepherd’s bite is, but I know it’s strong enough to
break the two bones in the forearm and destroy the surrounding muscle.  The
female’s hand slipped off the shooter’s arm and Dog moved out of the way as my
pistol finally came free and I shot the infected in the head.  The girl
scrambled back from the edge, adrenaline fueled panic giving her enough
strength to move me with her.

Rolling off her and standing up I raised the radio again and
called for the firemen.  This defense had been Gunny James idea, and when he’d
proposed it I had liked it immediately.  All up and down the wall firemen
carrying red plastic five gallon jugs of gasoline mixed with liquid soap
charged up ladders and stepped to the front edge of the wall where they started
pouring poor mans’ napalm onto the infected.  Each fireman walked the length of
a couple of containers as he poured, soaking the raging bodies below.  One by
one as their containers ran out they tossed them back to the town side of the
defenses where a crew gathered them and started refilling with gas then more
soap.  Waving the shooters back from the edge the firemen pulled out road
flares and sparked them with the igniter in the plastic cap before tossing them
down onto the napalm soaked infected.  All along the wall fires ignited with a
whoosh, the mixture sticking and burning even in the pouring rain. 

Napalm is one of the nastiest and probably most frightening
weapons that man has ever devised.  It’s really quite simple, just gasoline and
any type of gel that will mix with the gas and cause it to stick to anything it
touches while not affecting the flammability of the fuel.  Military grade
napalm is a bit more complicated than that, but for our purposes four and half
gallons of gas mixed with half a gallon of thick, liquid soap worked
perfectly.  Thousands of infected instantly became walking torches, the mix
sticking to their clothing and skin and burning so hot that the infected’s
flesh started separating from the bone.  The bonus was that as they burned, any
other infected they came in contact with had some of the gas rub off and start
burning them.  Flames and heavy black smoke shot above the front edge of the
wall and all of the defenders had to move to the back edge.  I was glad it was
raining and all my people were soaked.  The water helped protect them from the
heat of the fire. 

Gunny James’ suggestion had given me another idea and as the
front ranks of the infected burned I called for the next wave over the radio. 
Moments later to either side of me I heard the two smaller fire trucks crank up
their diesel engines.  As I watched they rolled forward, each with a ladder
extending over the wall, 30 feet in the air.  Next to each truck sat a trailer
with a big plastic tank on it we had appropriated from a landscaping service. 
Each tank normally held 200 gallons of weed killer the landscapers would use
along the sides of roads, but that had been dumped and the tanks pumped full of
gas from a truck stop’s underground tank.  Now each pumper truck’s hose ran to
these tanks rather than a fire hydrant and the high pressure nozzles at the
tops of the ladders started spraying gasoline across the herd of infected in
front of the wall.  Both quickly ran through their supply of gas, the men
manning the nozzles on the ladders sparking flares and throwing them in long
arcs out into the herd.  First one new fire erupted with a loud whoomp, then
the second flare hit and ignited the fuel.  The fire spread throughout the
ranks of the infected and soon there was a sea of flames extending from the
wall out to nearly 100 yards.  The smell was horrendous.

Despite being on fire and their flesh literally cooking and
falling off their skeletons, the infected continued to push forward.  They
truly felt no pain nor did they care about mortal wounds.  Despite the number
of infected I had fought I felt a thrill of fear and not a little
disappointment that not even the instinctual fear of fire still existed in
these creatures.  There truly was no way to stop them other than killing them. 
I looked up and down the wall and could tell all the men and women manning the
defenses were thinking similar thoughts.  Looks of panic and terror were on
almost all the faces and that’s when I knew we were about to lose the battle
and the town.

“We’ve got to get these people’s heads back into the
fight.”  I had grabbed Rachel and pulled her close enough for her to hear me. 
“If we don’t they’re going to start breaking and running and this wall will
fall before the train is loaded and out of here.”  Rachel didn’t look to be in
a much better frame of mind than the defenders, but she nodded and turned to
look at me.

“What do you want me to do?”  She asked.

“Go east along the wall.  Encourage.  Use their fear and
emotions to get them mad.  Right now they’re afraid.  Get them pissed off, or
at least get them fighting!”  Rachel nodded and headed east as I started walking
west, Dog at my side.

“We’re holding them!  Don’t let up now!  We have to buy time
for the evacuees!  There’s no one but us to do this.  Don’t let these fuckers win! 
We fight together and we can stop them long enough for our people to escape!” 
I was yelling as I moved down the line, looking up to see that the second stack
of containers was finally getting close. 

The ex-military heard my words and with looks of resolve
started picking up their rifles.  The NCOs were also working to rally the shooters
and soon sporadic firing started up, but there were still a lot of civilians on
the wall and they didn’t look so sure.  One burly man dressed like a truck
driver stood with a dozen other similarly dressed men and they all stared at
the flaming herd.  He turned as I approached, fear on his face which quickly
turned to anger when he saw me.  He stepped forward to meet me, the men
pressing in at his back.

“It’s time to cut our losses and get the hell out of here!” 
He challenged, looking over his shoulders for support from the other men.

The first thought that flashed through my mind was to shoot
him in the head and get on with fighting the infected, but just as quickly as I
thought it I dismissed it.  He wasn’t the enemy, he was just scared.  He hadn’t
trained for this, had never dreamt of this in his worst nightmares.  Until now
the most violence he’d probably every experienced was a bar fight or two.  I
kept walking forward and stopped a couple of feet in front of him, resisting
the urge to put my face in his.

“And go where?”  I asked him in a calmer voice than I felt
like using.  I have little patience or sympathy for people who break and run
when things get tough and was summoning all of my self-control.  “You think
that herd out there is just going to go away and not keep coming if you run? 
What about the women and children in the town?  What happens to them if we
don’t hold this wall?”  Everyone on the wall knew we were just there to buy
time, and they also knew loading thousands of people onto a train would take every
second of the time we were fighting for.

The man was really scared and was turning that fear into
anger towards me.  He started to step forward, hands balled into fists at his
side.  I really didn’t want to fight him, and I was tired of wasting time with
him.  I was half a second away from pulling my pistol and shooting him when one
of the men behind him reached forward and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. 
He met my eyes and I saw understanding, not anger.

“Rick, it’s time to get it together.  We’ve got to help.  My
wife, daughter and granddaughter are trying to get on that train.  The man’s
right.  We’ve got to hold this wall for a while.”  Rick’s shoulders slumped as
soon as he knew he didn’t have any support from the other men.  After a long
moment he lowered his eyes and turned back to look at the herd.  Nodding my
thanks to the man who had interjected I kept moving down the wall.

I didn’t have to go far before reaching the vertical end of
a container that was the easternmost edge of the second stack.  A ladder was
leaned up against it and I climbed up to the next level.  20 feet really isn’t
that much higher than 10 feet when you’re trying to stop tens of thousands of
raging infected, but I got an immediate psychological boost from the gain in
elevation.  Looking at the defenders I could tell they felt the same way.  They
were already setting back up on the sand bags and sending shots into the
infected.  Looking towards town I saw four more containers coming my way and I
went back down the ladder and headed back to the center of the wall.  Damn, but
maybe we could hold out long enough.

As Dog and I moved back east I looked out over the wall to
the south.  Thousands upon thousands of infected had died in the fires,
blackened bodies littering the area.  But as unstoppable as the sea the
infected from farther back in the herd were pushing forward, their crushing
feet and the steady downpour turning the dead into a thick, soupy black pulp. 
The defenders were slowly rallying, the rate of fire picking back up as the
next wave of infected approached.  Females raced out in front, but the carpet
of bodies was so thick and uneven that they had to slow to maintain their
balance.  This made them easier targets and the shooters were cutting them down
well short of the wall.  But right behind them was a relentless tide of solidly
massed bodies that rifle bullets alone could not stop.

Soon the sheer volume of the herd had pressed to the wall
again and we had to repeat the napalm attack.  The second stack reached the
center of the wall and kept moving east as Jim Roberts and his crew worked
without pause.  As I watched the results of the napalm from atop a newly
installed container I reflexively ducked when there was a thunderous explosion
to my right and behind the wall.  I spun my head to see the fire truck and
trailer full of gasoline fully engulfed in a massive fireball.  The defenders
on the wall in front of and 30 yards to either side were immediately consumed
by the fire, other shooters to the right and left of the fire were running for
their lives along the metal containers.  One of them slipped on the rain
slicked metal and skidded over the wall into a thousand waiting hands.

“What the hell just happened?”  I asked no one in
particular.

“Lightning strike.”  Rachel answered me.  She had been
standing to my left and facing that direction when the explosion had occurred.

I looked up at the sky, rain washing across my face and said
a few choice words.  Focusing back on the task at hand I called ready reaction
force Delta and sent them to help plug the whole in the defensive line the
explosion had created.  To my left the other truck finished spraying its load
of gasoline and out of the corner of my eye I saw another flare arc across the
heads of the infected before igniting a large swath of the herd.  I only
watched the fire for a moment before looking back in the direction of the
explosion.  Not only had we lost a lot of shooters caught in the fireball, we’d
lost the lights on the fire truck.  That quadrant of the battle was now barely
lit by light from the fires and what little spilled over from the larger truck
directly to my rear.  I sent Rachel to tell the firemen to move that truck 50
yards to the right.  She passed one of the football players that was an ammo
runner and he came directly up to me, panting, soaked and looking exhausted.

“Major, Mr. Hawkins asked me to tell you that we’ve only got
about five minutes of ammo left, then we’re out.”  I nodded, thanked him and
turned back to watch the herd press forward as he raced off.  Fuck me, was
there ever going to be any good news?

I got on the radio with the NCOs and told them to pull half
their shooters off the line to conserve ammo.  They weren’t happy about it,
many expressing their displeasure the way only an NCO can, but they did what I
told them to do and there was a noticeable drop in the volume of fire.  More
napalm was mixed and used and more gas was sprayed from the fire truck and
ignited.  Without the fire we would have fallen long ago, but even with it we
were only delaying the inevitable.  The infected continued to press in and pile
up at the base of the wall.  Leaning out to check I was not happy to see they
were above the point where the upper containers sat on the lower, which meant they
were more than 10 feet off the pavement.  The rain was finally slackening and
the thunder was moving away, now more of a rumble than a sharp crack from every
lightning bolt.

A few minutes later Jim Roberts and his crew placed the last
container to make a full second row and he drove his forklift over beside the
larger fire truck and honked the horn to get my attention.  I turned to see him
gesturing with a walkie talkie and dug the one his kid had brought me earlier
out of my pocket.

“…last one.  What’s next?  Want us to start a third row?”  I
caught most of his transmission.  Turning to Rachel I asked her to call
Sergeant Jackson on the police radio she had to check on the status of the
evacuation.  It took her a couple of tries to get a response.

“We need another hour.”  Jackson shouted over the crowd
noise on his end.  I had Rachel tell him he had half an hour which she did then
stuffed the radio back in her pocket.

“Let’s start a third, Jim.”  I said into the radio.  “This
time split your crew and start at the ends, working your way in.  We’ve got to
hold for at least another hour so that train can get out of here.  Any way you
guys can move faster?  Are there more forklifts?”

“There’s plenty more forklifts, but I don’t have guys to
drive them.  I lost a lot of good people to this shit.”

“If I find you drivers that know how to operate a forklift
can they operate these monsters, or is there something special about them?”  I
was starting to feel a glimmer of hope.  Surely there were some guys here that
had driven a forklift before.

“Nothing special other than just how damn big they are and
how careful you have to be with a load this big and heavy, but considering the
alternative I’ll take anyone that can drive.”

“Stand by.”  I lowered the radio I was using to talk to Jim
and raised the radio to put a call out to all the NCOs.  “I need forklift
drivers.  Now.  Find me 10 bodies that have driven a forklift before.”  I
repeated myself a couple of times to make sure all the NCOs heard the call over
the weapons fire and screams and snarls of the infected.

Soon a handful of men were trotting towards me and I waved
them down the ladder and pointed at Jim, still sitting in the idling forklift. 
Eight men wound up climbing on and clinging to the forklift as Jim hit the
throttle and roared off back to the rail yard.  One of them was the burly man
I’d had the confrontation with earlier and I was glad I hadn’t shot him.  I
didn’t think we had time to build a third row the complete length of the wall,
but if we could get sections of it raised to 30 feet and concentrate the
infected into more of a choke point we might be able to hold them off a little
longer.