Crucifixion - 02 (23 page)

The extra drivers helped speed up construction of the wall,
but not by as much as I’d hoped.  Their inexperience with the sheer size and
weight of the loads they were handling slowed them down.  One of them managed
to lose a container off his forks as he was driving to the wall and precious
time was wasted getting the obstruction out of the road so the work could
proceed.  Despite the issues, 12 drivers still got more containers from point A
to point B in the same amount of time and the wall quickly started growing to
30 feet from the far edges in.  The infected kept pushing forward and piling up
on top of the bodies of the ones we were killing as well as crushing other
living infected under them in their frantic desire to reach us. 

The second fire truck’s pump failed, most likely due to
running something as highly corrosive as gasoline through it.  We were now
limited to filling jugs with our home made napalm and dumping it over the wall
on the heads of the infected.  This helped, but we no longer had a way to knock
down any of the bodies farther out that were pressing in.  As the wall rose and
moved in I had the NCOs start pulling their shooter off and back to ground
level.  Ammunition was collected and redistributed to those that were still on
the wall fighting.  The shooters that came off the wall took the opportunity to
drink water and eat some food that had been scavenged from a large grocery
store a couple of blocks down the road behind us.

The forklifts finished placing another section of wall and
roared off to bring more containers.  We now had a 30 foot wall running in from
each edge, but the center section was still 20 container lengths short of being
raised.  800 feet of only 20 feet of wall.  I stepped in between two shooters
and could see the grasping hands of the infected only a foot below the edge. 
We weren’t going to make it.  I had halted the napalm.  It had become
ineffective as we could only burn the infected closest to the wall and the herd
had now piled up to the point that it seemed we were just making an easier path
for those in the rear to climb forward on top of the burned bodies.  I grabbed
the police radio from Rachel and called Jackson to check on the status of the
evacuation.

“One train is gone, Major.”  We’re loading the second one. 
Had a problem when some people resisted being loaded into livestock cars, but I
got them in and we’re loading up the last of the hospital right now.  Ten
minutes at the most.”

“Copy.  I want you and everyone else on that train when it
pulls out.  If the last one is ready I’ve got one last trick to delay the
infected so all the defenders can make a run for it and get out.  Do you have
an engineer that will be waiting with that third train for us?”

“10-4, I do.  Rick Simmons is already in the engine and
waiting.  There’s half a dozen livestock cars hooked up, doors open and waiting
for you.”

“Copy that.  Thank you.  Call when your train is pulling
out.”

Handing the radio back to Rachel I looked around for the
forklifts but they weren’t back yet.  Glancing back to the front I saw
fingertips brushing the top edge.  We were in a bad spot now.  If we didn’t shoot
then the infected would grab on to the top edge of the containers and start
climbing up into the midst of the shooters.  If we kept shooting them we were
just creating another layer of the pile for the ones in back to climb on and
get closer to us.  Not shooting just wasn’t in my DNA.  Raising the radio I
called for a couple of the units that had already come off the wall to come
back up and fill in the open space between the shooters that were still
fighting.  They came running, and started plugging themselves into the line. 
The volume of firing increased and the infected were beaten back a few inches. 
Not much, but every inch we won was more time for our escape.

Horns sounded behind me as a convoy of forklifts rolled up. 
Another 12 containers arrived, ready to go into the wall.  The NCOs coordinated
moving their shooters out of the way as each new container went into place, but
it was a slow process.  We had a lot of shooters in a shrinking area, but the
NCOs did a good job and in only a few minutes the 800 foot gap had been reduced
to 320 feet.  I watched with satisfaction as the containers thumped into place,
several infected females that had made the leap onto the top of the wall when
the shooters pulled back crushed under the massive steel boxes.  That
satisfaction quickly went away as I started hearing voices calling out that
they were out of ammo.

Running up and down the remaining gap in the wall I started
pulling the ones out of ammo off the wall and sending them to the train
station.  If they didn’t have any more bullets there wasn’t anything to be
gained by keeping them here.  Rachel was circulating through the volunteers on
the ground below and sending everyone that was not actively involved in the
defense to the train as well.  Dog was still on the wall with me, shadowing my
footsteps as I ran back and forth.  Grabbing one of the shooters that was out
of ammo and on his way to a ladder I sent Dog with him to get carried down. 
Dog was talented and a hell of a fighter, but as good as he was there was no
way he could climb down a 20 foot ladder.  He gave me a hurt look but allowed
the man, with some help, to lift him up on his shoulders and secure him in
place with a donated shirt that tied him to the man’s body.  The guy probably
thought I was a moron for having let Dog come up on the wall in the first place,
but he scampered down the ladder without complaint, Dog tied to him and looking
at me with hurt eyes that I was sending him away.

The infected kept pressing forward, and they now seemed to
be surging like the tide.  One moment hands would be over the edge and trying
to grab on, the next they would disappear below.  Like ‘the tide’ was a good
analogy as the hands always came back and were a little higher each time.  The
shooters had slowed their firing and were now only shooting infected that made
a successful grab onto the edge of the container.  Unfortunately the number of
them that were doing this was increasing and the number of defenders laying
down their rifles when they fired their last round was also increasing.  We
needed five more minutes, but we weren’t going to get it.  Two partial crates
of grenades were sitting on the top of the wall and I started pulling pins and
tossing them over the edge, hoping to disrupt the push against the wall even
for a few moments.  The effort was partially successful and we gained probably
another 30 seconds.  The damn things flowed into and over any space created by
the explosions so quickly that the hundreds killed by my efforts weren’t even
significant.

Out of grenades I did a quick count and saw that we were
down to about 100 shooters that still had ammo.  This was bad, but not as bad
as it could have been.  The distribution of ammo had been fairly equal and
these last 100 defenders had been shooters that picked their targets and made
their shots count.  They hadn’t wasted ammo on body shots that did little to
slow or stop the infected, they had aimed and made every round count.  I was
willing to bet every single one of them was either ex-Army or ex-Marine.  We
had momentarily settled into a static battle, the defenders shooting the
infected that were in position to breach our defenses as fast as they arrived. 
If only we had a few thousand more rounds of ammo we could hold static for a
few minutes, but wishing wouldn’t get me anything.

A forklift horn sounded from the rear again and I breathed a
huge sigh of relief as I turned to look.  That sigh turned into a scream of
warning that no one could hear.  A large pack of infected females was racing
down Forrest Avenue from the east, heading directly towards the lead forklift
driven by Jim Roberts. 

The females had apparently worked their way through the
rugged terrain at the east end of the wall and with the defenders having been
pulled off due to the wall being raised and an ammo shortage there had been no
one there to stop them.  I raised my rifle to sight in on the lead infected,
lowering it with a curse a moment later.  They were well over 400 yards away
and moving fast.  A 400 yard shot with an M4 rifle is certainly possible, but
at night from a standing position at a fast moving target; I knew I couldn’t
make the shots and would end up only wasting valuable ammo.  Rachel had noticed
me aiming the rifle and turned to look at what I had seen, also raising hers
when she saw the infected.  She quickly lowered the rifle and started running
towards the approaching forklift, waving her arms over her head and pointing at
the threat.

Jim finally got the message, but it was too late.  I saw the
forklift swerve as he tried to avoid them, but they were too close.  Three of
them leapt onto the side of the machine and swarmed the driver’s seat, but Jim
wasn’t there.  When they leapt he had bailed out the far side of the open cab. 
Unfortunately the swerve he had started was the new path the forklift
followed.  Despite a deadman switch for safety that applied the brakes
automatically if a driver’s foot stopped pressing it, the giant machine with
its massive load couldn’t stop on a dime.  Slowing, but still moving at a good
pace the forklift carried the container directly into a fueling area of the
truck stop where we had been getting the gas for the napalm and fire trucks. 

The lower leading edge of the 40 foot long container made
contact with two islands full of fuel pumps at the same time, and even though the
forklift was braking the forward momentum of all that mass was still great
enough to shear all the pumps off their mounts and shove them along the ground
in front of it before finally coming to a full stop.  For a moment the scene
was frozen in place, nothing happening, then I saw the first flames.  I started
to open my mouth to scream a warning but before I could even form a word the
fire found the fuel in the underground storage tanks.  The explosion was
unbelievable.  I’ve been on battlefields where both artillery and air dropped
ordnance – bombs – were detonating, yet I’ve never experienced anything close
to the force of this blast. 

The entire truck stop, the container, the forklift and
everything and everyone within a 100 yard radius just vanished in a searing
ball of flame.  This was probably comparable to the fuel explosion that had
happened on the flight line at Arnold AFB, but I had been much farther away
from that one.  This one knocked me on my back and I would have slid over the
edge of the wall and into the sea of infected if one of the defenders hadn’t
grabbed me.  Sitting up I stared at the column of fire and smoke shooting up
from the explosion, then remembered to look for Rachel and Dog.  The fire did a
good job of lighting up the whole area and it didn’t take me long to spot
them.  Rachel was on her back, certainly having been knocked back by the
pressure wave from the blast, Dog standing next to her.  She wasn’t moving, but
neither was anyone else.

When the explosion had ripped through the night all of the
shooters on the wall had stopped firing and turned to see what happened.  They
were still staring at the inferno, but the infected hadn’t been distracted and
were using the lull in our defense to push forward.  Several females made it
onto the roof and fell on the prone shooters, ripping into flesh with nails and
teeth.  They were quickly joined by more and I raised my rifle and started
firing into faces only a few feet away.  I was screaming for the shooters to
get back in the fight, but they were probably as deaf from the blast as I was. 
Slowly they started turning back to the front, but we had given too much
momentum to the infected.  More shooters were falling to female leapers and all
along the gap hands were now solidly grasping the edge.

“Fall back!”  I screamed, running up and down the line. 
Every few feet I was shooting an infected that was either already on the wall
or about to clear the edge.  Quickly the remaining shooters scrambled backwards
and started rushing down the ladders, a couple of them slipping and falling to
the asphalt below where their screams of pain were added to the overwhelming
sounds of the fire and the battle.  Soon there was only me and three other
shooters remaining on the wall, clustered in a tight group at the top of one of
the ladders, facing a swiftly growing number of infected.  I looked over my
shoulder at the fire captain sitting high in the air at the top of the ladder,
saw him looking at me and made a slashing motion with my arm.  Seconds later a
tightly focused stream of very high pressure water started jetting out of the
chrome nozzle that was mounted at the top of the ladder with him. 

The water pressure was so great that it not only knocked the
infected down, it sent them cartwheeling through the air and back out into the
herd.  The captain controlled the placement of the water jet like a maestro and
even though we got a good soaking from water splattering off of infected bodies
he never touched us.  In a few seconds he had bought us enough room to start
down the ladder.  One by one the shooters disappeared over the edge until I was
the last defender standing on the wall.  Waiting for the ladder to clear, I
didn’t want to push my luck by adding my weight to that of the three men
already on it, I shot five more infected on one side while the water jet swept
through dozens of them and sent them tumbling.  Finally clear I stepped onto
it, grasped the outside of the ladder and moved my feet outside the rails and
started a fast slide 20 feet to the ground.  I had forgotten about my damaged
hands, and I had just started the slide when they reminded me that they weren’t
one hundred percent.  Somehow I managed to hold on, but descended way faster
than I wanted and hit hard enough to lose my balance and fall flat on my back. 
Fuck that hurt.

Forcing myself up and on my feet I did a quick check of the
top of the gap in the wall, glad to not see any infected faces staring back
down at me.  The captain worked the water jet back and forth, aimed a few feet
above the top of the wall so that any infected was blasted in the mid-section
and shoved back.  Shouting at everyone to run for the train station I rushed to
where Rachel was still flat on her back in the middle of the street.  Running
up I slid to a halt on my knees and leaned over her, Dog whining as he pressed
closer to her still form.  Her eyes were closed and she didn’t respond when I
called her name.  I checked the pulse in her neck, letting out a relieved sigh
when I found it beating steady and strong.  She was laying in the same position
you would use if you were making a snow angel and were just making the top arc
of the wings.  Her torso was straight and her head and neck aligned with her
body so I didn’t think she would have a spinal injury.  She had just been knocked
flat by the pressure wave from the explosion.  I hoped.

I checked around us and the water jet was still holding the
infected at bay, but even from here I could tell that the rate they were now
climbing into the gap was quickly going to overwhelm the captain’s ability to
knock them all back.  It would start with a trickle of infected leaking through
the opening then grow to a stream and eventually become an unstoppable torrent
that would flood the town and kill anyone still here.  We were only a few yards
from the ambulance that Rachel had stolen and even though I was reasonably sure
her neck and back were OK I decided to take advantage of what I had available. 
Rushing into the back I grabbed a cervical collar out of a bin on the wall and
a backboard that was clipped to the other wall.  I had just gotten the collar
on her when Dog sprang to his feet with a growl and leapt over me.  I spun to
see him collide with a female that had rushed around the side of the vehicle,
tumbling across the pavement with her.  Another female was moments behind the
first and ran around the edge of the ambulance with a scream and dove at me as
I squatted on the ground.

I had enough time to turn slightly and take the impact from
the body on my shoulder, twisting to keep the female away from Rachel.  The
woman attacking me was big.  She was probably close to my height and nearly as
heavy and had a strength that came from rage.  We rolled on the ground, each of
us fighting for a solid grip on the other, but unlike me she was also trying to
get her teeth into the fight.  Still rolling I finally got a fist full of her
hair and started trying to pull her jaws away from me, but she managed to get
her mouth onto my right forearm and locked on tight.  Her bite was strong
enough to paralyze the muscles in my right forearm and all I could do was use
the strength in my upper arm and shoulder to control her head.  She raked at my
face, opening long bloody furrows and kept clawing until she found something
solid to grab. 

There was a sharp pain then my left ear suddenly burned like
acid had been poured on it and I could feel warm blood running across my face
and neck.  Releasing her hair I managed to break her grip on my ear and bat her
hand away, then started pounding the side of her head with my free hand.  Each
blow sent waves of pain from my damaged hand up my arm, but I kept hitting,
hard and fast.  After several blows her bite on my right arm loosened and I
kept pounding, aiming for the softer spot right at the temple.  I must have hit
her a dozen times before she let go of my arm.  I stopped hitting her and got
my left hand on her throat, tucked my legs up between us and used them to push
her off me.  She hit the asphalt, rolled and Dog was on her as soon as she came
to a stop.  He consistently amazed me at the speed and power he possessed, and
this time was no different.  In a flash he had landed on her chest and before
she could do anything he lunged his head down and ripped her throat out,
standing on her until she quit moving.

Looking around I didn’t see any more immediate threats as I
scooted across the wet and bloody pavement to where Rachel still lay
unconscious.  When I leaned over her a surprisingly large stream of blood
started pouring off my chin and onto her shirt.  Not wanting to waste time but
needing to staunch the bleeding I ripped my shirt off and wrapped it tight around
my head and ears like a turban.  Blood still dripped on Rachel as I carefully
worked her onto the backboard, but there was nothing I could do about that at
the moment.  With Rachel fully on the board I used its Velcro straps to tightly
secure her as immobile as possible.  Keeping a close eye on my surroundings I
was happy that Dog was doing the same, and I lifted the head of the backboard
and drug it and Rachel across the parking lot to the back of the ambulance. 
Laying the end on the floor inside the vehicle I rushed to lift the foot,
shoving the whole thing into the back before running back to where Rachel had
fallen and retrieving her rifle which I tossed in back onto the gurney that was
locked to the floor.

I had just closed one of the doors when the siren on the big
fire truck started wailing.  Turning I saw that the water cannon had stopped and
females were starting to pour through the gap in the wall.  The problem was
readily apparent.  A large piece of flaming debris from the explosion at the
truck stop had landed on the big hose that connected the truck to the fire
hydrant and though the hose is very tough it had finally burned through and the
end was whipping back and forth as it sprayed water.  The females quickly
swarmed the truck and while the driver in the cab was safe for the moment they
were on the truck and up the ladder like a pack of monkeys.  The fire captain
didn’t even have time to get unstrapped from his seat before they were on him
and tearing him to ribbons.  Slamming the other door I whistled for Dog and we
piled into the cab of the ambulance.  The keys were in the ignition and I
started the engine, females slamming into the back and sides of the vehicle
before I could get it into gear.

Transmission in drive I jammed the accelerator to the floor
and smashed through the females that were piling up in front of me.  Heading
north on the highway I steered a wide path around the roaring truck stop fire,
feeling the heat from the flames even inside the cab of the truck with the
windows rolled up.  A small mirror mounted to the dash let me keep an eye on
Rachel as I drove, gunning the ungainly vehicle farther into town and away from
the wall, pursued by thousands of females.  The rail yard was just ahead and to
my right was the station for passengers that Sergeant Jackson had used to stage
the evacuation.  As I turned onto the road that ran in front of the station I
could see there was still a group of several hundred people waiting to board. 
Damn it!  There was no time.  The infected were only half a mile behind me and
coming fast. 

I felt for the police radio then remembered it was in one of
Rachel’s pockets.  Slamming to a stop I scrambled into the back and ran my
hands over Rachel’s pockets until I found it, ripping it out and pressing the
transmit button.

“Jackson!  Infected have breached.  That train needs to go
now!”  I shouted into the radio as I climbed back behind the wheel.  I had
hoped to make it to the train where I could get some help with loading Rachel
onto a car and we could escape on the rails.  Now, not only was that not going
to happen, there were going to be people left behind that would die when the
infected reached the station.

“Say again?  There’s still people on the platform.”  I could
hear the chaos of frightened people in the background when he transmitted.

“You have to leave them and save the people that are already
on the train.  There’s thousands of females coming and they’ll be here in less
than a minute.”  I let out a long, slow sigh and wanted to pound the steering
wheel in frustration but settled for reaching across the cab and wrapping my
arm around Dog who leaned into me and rested his head on my chest.  Watching in
the side mirror it was only about 30 seconds before I saw the fastest females
appear on the road no more than a quarter mile behind me.  They were in a full
sprint.  I had stopped a few hundred yards from the platform and could see the
people waiting to board turn all at once when the screams of the approaching
females reached their ears.