Plague of the Dead (10 page)

    Minutes passed. The soldiers began looking back and forth at one another. Where was the enemy? Why hadn’t they crossed into sight? What was waiting out there, beyond the comforting ring of brightness the floodlights provided?

    Brewster wiped sweat from his forehead and pressed his eye back up against the night sight of his rifle, gritting his teeth.

    Denton sat silently, rifle across his lap, camera around his neck, waiting.

    Commander Barker nervously tapped his foot against the sandy ground, scanning the dunes with his eyes. He checked his watch and folded his arms, then checked his watch again.

    Colonel Dewen chewed on the end of an unlit cigar, grimaced, and spit out a piece of tobacco. He went back to chewing.

    Inside the command tent, the Satcom troopers had finally synched with the spy satellites.

    “Quick! Quick! Pull up a view of our area, infrared, zoomed-in,” said the lieutenant in charge. “Sharpen! Sharpen it up! Where are the carriers?”

    The image flicked into focus, and the officer’s face drained of blood. “Oh, shit.”

    Sergeant Major Thomas looked over his shoulder at the small tarp General Sherman and the other brass stood under. The General nodded.

    Thomas holstered his pistol and held the flare gun out at arm’s length, aiming over the canal at the dark expanse beyond. He fired. The flare whizzed into the sky, leaving a light trail of white smoke behind it. It popped a moment later, bathing the desert in warm orange light.

    -And illuminating the teeming horde of infected just beyond the perimeter of light.

    There were tens of thousands of them, a mob the likes of which the world rarely saw, pushing and shoving one another like an army of agitated ants. The carriers closest to the defensive line seemed to notice it for the first time as the flare drifted overhead. They roared at the defenders.

    “Hail Mary, full of grace,” Corporal Darin whispered, sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

    They charged.

    The soldiers opened fire, hundreds of rounds thudding into the bodies of the carriers. Dozens fell, rolling down the sandy slopes of the dunes, but hundreds more ran over the bodies towards the water. Machinegun emplacements went full-auto, emptying drums of rounds at the infected. Here and there a head shot dropped a carrier permanently, but most of the shots went rogue, knocking a carrier to the ground only to have it rise up again minutes later.

    “Ammo!” soldiers began to yell from their holes. Runners sprinted up and down the line, dropping satchels of magazines into the holes of the troopers who needed them.

    “Backblast area clear!” yelled a man, aiming an AT-4 anti-tank rocket balanced on his shoulders. He fired, and the rocket blast cleared an area of infected, sending many flipping into the sky and leaving an open, blackened pocket that soon filled in again as the hordes advanced relentlessly.

    The carriers had reached the minefield. They were packed shoulder-to-shoulder and every mine that had been buried began to detonate as the teeming mass ran forward, blasts enveloping them. The ones in the ranks further back kept coming, detonating mine after mine. Some of the carriers were enveloped in fire, running aimlessly about, trying to bat the flames down. Their anguished howls echoed over the canal and in the ears of the defenders, but they kept firing. And the horde kept advancing.

    The carriers reached the razor-wire fences and ran full-on into them, slicing themselves to ribbons. As before, when the infected in front died, the ones behind kept pushing forward. The wire fences were a small obstacle, and were soon buried underneath the bodies of those they were meant to stop. The horde kept advancing.

    “Ammo! I need ammo!” the shouts rang out up and down the line. The runners doggedly tried to keep up, throwing satchels of ammunition to those who requested it, but they were tiring, and the ammunition stores were beginning to run low.

    The carriers had reached the water. They splashed into it, writhing, as they tried to push themselves towards the far bank. The canal was wide and deep and was the soldiers’ best defense. They focused on the carriers still standing on the far bank. The ones in the canal swiftly floundered and stopped moving, floating face-down in the water. More joined them every second, splashing in and drowning as they tried to cross.

    Soon the canal looked like a macabre logjam, with hundreds of floating bodies bumping in to one another as the firefight went on unchecked above them. The carriers splashing into the canal were pushing the bodies away as they thrashed about.

    General Sherman noticed a few carriers had managed to pull themselves on top of the floating corpses. They were dragging themselves across the surface of the water, using the bodies as floats.

    “Artillery!” he shouted. The radioman held a hand over one ear and began shouting orders into the handset.

    “Thor, Thor, this is Suez with a fire mission, over…”

    On the line, Denton found himself out of ammunition for his camera. The film rolls he had brought were used up and tucked tightly into his vest pockets. He let the Nikon rest around his neck, brought up the rifle Dewen had given him, and took aim.

    “They’re moving across the river!” Brewster shouted, noticing the same thing the general had moments before. He shifted his fire to the canal, picking his targets. Soldiers on the line joined him, and the infected crawling across the floating bodies began to fall off into the water. The soldiers were inadvertently helping the carriers build their bridge.

    A whistling noise filled the air, and heavy blasts rocked the soldiers as artillery rounds began to slam into the desert on the east bank of the canal, lofting carriers left and right. One of the infected was tossed end over end high into the sky, arcing over the canal and landing with a sickening thump directly in front of Brewster’s foxhole. He jumped back, startled, then thumbed his helmet higher and squinted at the body.

    “Fuckin’ A, man,” he breathed, then raised his weapon to his shoulder and resumed firing.

    The carriers were still madly scrabbling across the bodies in the canal. Some were more than halfway across. One of the soldiers pulled a grenade from his pistol belt, yanked the pin, and wound up to throw it. It slipped out of his hand and rolled back into his foxhole.

    “Grenade!” he yelled, pulling himself up and rolling out of the hole. His battle-buddy spun to look for the threat, saw his friend rolling clear, and had enough time to mumble a curse before the foxhole exploded in a shower of dirt and debris.

    The first of the infected put his foot on the dry eastern bank of the Suez Canal. A moment later, Denton dropped him with a shot to the forehead. The photographer was picking his targets, firing once every ten or fifteen seconds, sniping carefully. Dewen had only given him two magazines.

    The canal was boiling with carriers now. Their reinforcements seemed to be cut off as artillery continued to bombard the dunes, but there were already thousands past the protective curtain of indirect fire. Soldiers pulled themselves up and out of their foxholes to get a better angle, firing down into the infected.

    The second-and final-line of razor wire stood in the path of the carriers. This time they were going uphill, and they were less clustered than they were on the western bank. Many threw themselves into the slashing teeth of the wire, shrieking and pulling at it with their bare hands, trying to free themselves and only succeeding in tangling themselves further. What the razor wire began, the rounds from the soldiers’ rifles finished.

    The fire from the defensive line was becoming more and more sporadic. The soldiers were running dry. They settled for flinging hand grenades down the slope toward the wire fence, while the soldiers with ammunition remaining slowed their firing and picked their targets. Blasts cut through the air.

    One of the grenades bumped to a stop against one of the wooden support legs for a section of fence. It sat there a moment, rocking gently back and forth, before it exploded. The force of the blast lifted the section of fence and flipped its end over. It landed on top of a group of infected on the shore, knocking them to the ground and entangling them.

    It also left a section of the fence line wide open.

    The infected poured through the gap, running up the slope toward the line of foxholes.

    “The line’s been breached!” Sergeant Major Thomas shouted. “Hold them! Keep them back!”

    General Sherman’s head snapped in the direction of Thomas’s voice.

    “No,” he breathed, drawing his pistol.

    The living carriers and their dead brethren swarmed through the gap in the fence line like a biological hourglass, and they were the sand.

    Sergeant Major Thomas surveyed the situation briefly, then made a judgment call.

    “Fall back!” he yelled. “Fall back to the outer perimeter! Abandon your holes!”

    The call was shouted up and down the line. The soldiers began levering themselves out of their positions, scrambling away from the bank of the canal. The foxholes closest to the breach in the line found themselves directly in the path of the horde of carriers. The soldiers tried to get away, but grasping hands pulled them back into the pulsing horde. Their screams were drowned out by the roars of the rage-filled infected.

    The remaining soldiers booked it to their final line of defense-nothing more than a line of sandbags three feet high on the east side of the Suez base.

    “Get the trucks running!” shouted General Sherman, striding into the midst of the confused soldiers. “Where are my drivers? Drivers, get in those vehicles! Give me a firing line along the wall! If you’re out of ammo, get on a truck!”

    Sherman knew that with the canal breached, their hopes of holding the eastern bank were gone. He didn’t want to sound a full retreat-the soldiers would likely panic and run for it into the desert. They wouldn’t last long once the sun got overhead and they were lost with little water and no food.

    Brewster clambered up the side of the deuce-and-a-half and turned the ignition. He tucked his rifle beside him and hung his head out the driver’s side window.

    “Come on, guys, get on! Get on!”

    There wasn’t much time. The carriers were absolutely relentless. With the line of foxholes abandoned, they had quickly torn through the remainder of the razor-wire fence and made their way up the sandy embankment to the camp proper.

    The soldiers on the firing line took aim. As the carriers ran into view, they opened fire, controlled single shots that knocked carriers back or dropped them permanently with a wound to the head. One of the rounds took a carrier in the temple, spraying blood and gray brain matter back onto one of the camp’s floodlights. The blood coating gave the light an eerie pinkish-red quality, bathing the campground in a dusky hue.

    The deuce-and-a-halfs that were loaded with soldiers began to roll out of the camp with all possible speed, grinding gears.

    “Man, I wish I had a Bradley right about now,” said Brewster, tapping the steering wheel nervously as soldiers clambered into the back of his truck. The passenger side door swung open, and Brewster snapped his rifle up, thinking perhaps a carrier had gotten past the wall and was looking to make a snack of him. But it was only Denton.

    The photographer dropped into the passenger seat with a heavy sigh.

    “Where’s your weapon, man?” Brewster asked.

    “Lost it. One of you jarheads knocked it out of my hands,” Denton said, nursing a bruised wrist.

    “Hey, asshole, we’re Army. Jarheads are Marines.
Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Essential
. Remember that.”

    “Leave it to you to keep your levity in a situation as bleak as this one,” Denton replied.

    “My incessant jocularity comes from an innate talent to rationalize even the most depressing of scenarios,” Brewster said. Denton flashed him a surprised look. Brewster just laughed in reply.

    Outside the truck, most of the first wave of infected to come up the slope to the camp had been wiped out by the careful shots of the infantrymen. Still, General Sherman knew the battle was lost. Out of sight, down in the canal, there were still thousands of carriers making their way across. They had neither the manpower nor the ammunition to win the fight.

    He surveyed the scene one final time.

    Most of the soldiers had climbed onboard the deuce-and-a-half trucks parked around the outskirts of the encampment. Only he, a few riflemen, Commander Barker, and Sergeant Major Thomas remained on the ground.

    It was time to bug out.

    “Alright, men! Retreat! Fall back to the vehicles! Let’s get the hell out of here!” he shouted, taking a shot at one of the carriers with his pistol. The round took the carrier in the shoulder, spinning him and dropping him to the ground.

    “You heard the General! Fall back!” Thomas yelled, letting fly with two rounds from his Colt that tore into the chest of a target. He dropped the empty magazine and slapped in a fresh one before turning to retreat.

    Commander Barker was handling himself well. He held a rifle to his shoulder, popping off round after round, skipping backwards towards the trucks as he fired. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a soldier get tackled by one of the sprinter-type carriers. He spun, firing a three-round burst. Two of the rounds took the target in the neck and the third snapped its head back, impacting just under the nose. It fell to the sand, twitching. Barker ran over to the soldier, who was laying on the ground panting, furiously scanning himself for bites or scratches.

    “You’re fine, soldier!” he shouted, reaching a hand down to help the man up. The soldier looked up at his rescuer. His eyes widened.

    Barker saw the man’s expression, then whirled around. He found himself face-to-face with a carrier.

    Barker swung his rifle up, but the carrier was too fast. It leapt on him, knocking him backwards, and sank its teeth into the commander’s face. Barker screamed, feeling his own blood flow into his mouth. He managed to get the barrel of the rifle up and under the carrier’s chin, and he fired. The top of the carrier’s head exploded outward, sending a shower of brain matter all over the ground behind him.