Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV (42 page)

Incredibly, dozens of hunters were seen near the highway as the convoy drove the few miles south to I-20. Somehow, in spite of all the wire and the humans blocking the road, some hunters had managed to get past the defenses. With no nearby helicopters to control them
, the flesh-eaters appeared to be roaming aimlessly, though they had all formed into small packs and were undoubtedly a danger to any humans who might be in the area. The 1
st
Utah and the troops from Indiana didn’t have time to concern themselves with the strays; they soon reached the interstate and turned west toward the bridges. About a mile from the intersection with 61, the highway passed over a rail-line that ran roughly perpendicular to the road. Moments after the last truck rolled over the bridge, the entire area erupted in an explosion that collapsed the interstate and set fire to the railroad-cut for a mile to the north and south. The ditch had been filled with the same type of debris the Allies planned to use for the smokescreen at the river, and all of it had been doused with hundreds of gallons of flammable liquids as the extraction had taken place. Now a truly spectacular sight filled the rearview mirrors of the vehicles carrying the troops: flames rising nearly a hundred feet into the darkening sky provided a poor-man’s fireworks show for the exhausted soldiers.

Jack was pretty sure that Barnes would stop his monsters on the other side of the burning railroad cut for the night. The section now in flames could be easily flanked, but the hunters had been scattered to hell and back during the chase to the trucks
, and Jack’s guess was that Barnes would want to make sure he had everything in order before attacking the Vicksburg bridges. If the general decided to push forward in the dark, his creatures would be silhouetted by the flames while the Allies remained shrouded by the night. Jack figured that if Barnes had waited this long to take his shot at the Indiana-led rebels, he could wait twelve more hours in order to allow his helicopters to conduct a daylight reconnaissance over the town.

By the time the convoy rolled up to what was now the end of the road, nearly a mile from the bridges, word had come back from forward observers that the horde appeared to be completely halted at the burn-line. No organized flesh-eaters had been spotted trying to flank the flames
, so Jack gave the order to keep a fifty-fifty troop line in place for the rest of the night, with all soldiers not on duty ready to rush back to their assigned positions at a moment’s notice. The battered 1
st
Utah was allowed to go into bivouac just behind the second berm they would have to defend in the morning, and Jack had to order Carlson to stand down and make sure his troops got the rest, food, and medical attention they needed.

Jack got himself cleaned up and grabbed an MRE before heading off to the meeting house for a briefing with most of his commanders. Everyone was heartened by the fierce defense put forth by the 1
st
Utah that day, though sobered by early reports of forty percent casualties suffered by the division. First at Pickwick, and now along Highway 61, the Allied troops had proven to be capable of standing up to the horde and making a fight of it in spite of being overwhelmingly outnumbered in both battles. In the morning, the enemy would be forced to enter the teeth of the Allied defenses, and most of the commanders expected a slaughter of Barnes’ forces.

Jack did his best to rid his leaders of that notion. “When the hunters come tomorrow they will force their way through our trap at the second railroad cut. They will push through, over, and around the thousands of their own dead left by all the bombs and other surprises we’ve created for them. When they first hit the phalanx
, we will slaughter them because they will be attacking us piecemeal until the main body of the horde is able to put its full weight into the assault. Trust me, you won’t need to be told when that happens. Stand your ground! When we withdraw to the back-up positions, we have to conduct a fighting retreat.”

Jack realized that he had repeated the same words so many times during the previous week that he was boring the soldiers. “I’m sorry, I know you’ve heard all of this a thousand times already.”
He sighed as he searched for something new to offer. Finally he decided to tell the truth. “After what I experienced in Kentucky, I didn’t believe there was any force still alive on earth that could stop Barnes’ horde from going anywhere it wanted to go. Now, I’m pretty sure we are going to stop them here at Vicksburg. The cost will be high, at least as high as what the 1
st
Utah endured today. But the most important thing is that we CAN do this. You and me, and all of our soldiers, if we stand firm tomorrow, we will destroy the force that has ravaged most of the eastern United States. Right here, on ground our ancestors made holy with their blood and spirit, we can defeat a monster worse than Hitler.”

Jack tried to make eye contact with everyone at the same time before he quietly implored, “Have faith. We’re surrounded by flesh-eating monsters with the Mississippi at our backs, but keep the faith. Believe in yourselves, believe in one another, and believe in your soldiers. They’ll believe in us.”

With the eyes of his commanders glowing in righteous determination, Jack gave the benediction that had gotten him through every battle with the infected since Afghanistan. “Let’s kill ‘em all!”

Jack had forced himself to get some sleep during the night, having experienced enough combat to know when he needed to recharge his batteries. He awakened several hours before dawn and prepared himself for battle, then he made his way to the command post he would be manning on top of
the wall above the I-20 bridge. With his NVGS he could see the infantry filing into their positions on the berms, pleased to see so many 1
st
Utah soldiers on their feet and ready to fight again. Jack couldn’t see them at this distance, but he knew from radio updates that the snipers were ready on the western lip of the nearest railroad cut. Those brave souls wouldn’t have to let him know when the enemy arrived; the propane bombs prepared for the horde would signal the beginning of the Battle of Vicksburg.

Snow flurries had fallen off and on through the night, but there was little wind coming off the river or from any other direction so the smokescreen plan was still looking good. The nervous breathing of more than ten thousand soldiers gathered in the phalanx below engulfed the formation in a ghostly-white vapor that should have looked beautiful, but appeared rathe
r ominous considering the blood-letting that was about to occur.

As Jack contemplated the surrealistic scene, it occurred to him that, e
xcept for Andi and a few others back in Fort Wayne, everyone he loved was standing in the middle of the tightly-packed troops waiting to grapple with the horde. With that realization came a startling thought:
Except for my son
. He silently cursed his brother for both keeping and sharing the information about Maggie, and he decided to get the full story from David that very evening if they both survived the day.

Luke stood between David and Blake in the center of the front line of the phalanx. He had reluctantly left his bow in camp for this fight, choosing a halberd as his primary weapon and trench axe as a back-up. Gracie and Lori were with Marcus and Bobby along the railroad-cut. They were four of the best shooters in the Indiana Company and were beginning the battle where they could do the most damage. Luke worried about all of them, but was confident that he would soon see them passing through the phalanx on their way to new firing positions atop the escape barges at the river’s edge. Everything that needed to be said to Gracie and the rest of his loved ones had been said, so now he silently prayed to his God for the strength he would need in the coming fight.

Gracie wished for the hundredth time that she could feel Luke’s shoulder next to her own
, but she understood why it couldn’t be; her parents had raised her for a moment such as this. Since she and her brother had been strong enough to hold a rifle, they had been taught how to shoot by professional instructors. With a war-veteran, prepper for a father, and an Israeli-born and raised mother, she’d been trained in various self-preservation skills. But biology was undeniable, and she weighed one-ten soaking wet. She wasn’t built for a shoving match in the phalanx, but she was one of the best snipers in their settlement. She was glad to have Lori at her side, as she’d been since they first met near Cleveland in the early days of the outbreak. Marcus and Bobby were with them, and they all had people they loved in the dense formation to their rear. She was grateful to be among friends as dawn approached, ready to accept whatever fate brought her way with the morning light.

Jack finally realized that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him: the eastern horizon was lighter than it had been a few minutes earlier. T.C. was serving as his aide, and he had been relatively silent over the past hour after informing Jack that all commanders had reported that the
ir units were in place. Vicksburg was silently waiting for sunrise, its defenders simultaneously fearing the monsters the light would bring and anxious to get on with the business they were here for. T.C. appeared at his commander’s side with another steaming mug of coffee, and after a few sips Jack returned his gaze to the east, just in time to see flames roar into the dawn air from one of the propane bombs along the railroad.

Gracie and the others had heard the rotors of the Blackhawks slicing through the ice-cold morning sky just minutes before they saw the first of the hunters shuffling toward them along the I-20 corridor. Howls began to echo across the frosty landscape as the flesh-eaters started to hit the stakes and wire waiting for them. Jack had predicted that many of the monsters in the vanguard of the horde would successfully navigate the traps and make their way down into the railroad-cut. Only when the full weight of the massive army pressed into the backs of the forward ranks would the creatures begin to impale themselves in large numbers. The bridges over the cut had been blown the night before, and as the first monsters stumbled down into the rubble-strewn ditch, somebody with twitchy fingers prematurely set off one of the bombs that was supposed to be saved for when the snipers could no longer keep up with the horde.

Gracie jumped in her shooter’s rest, but luckily wasn’t looking in the direction of the blast so her vision wasn’t affected by the sudden, brilliant light of the exploding propane. Still shocked by the wave of the enormous blast, Gracie’s training took over and she found herself peering through the scope on her Ruger 10-22. She quickly picked out a hunter sliding down some gravel, waited until its feet hit solid ground, then sent two bullets through the beast’s forehead. The .22 wasn’t a powerful round, but at this range it didn’t need to be. Bigger guns were waiting in the barges for covering the phalanx later in the battle, but for now all Gracie and the other shooters needed to worry about was the fifty meters directly in front of their line.

Now the cut was rapidly developing into what the ex-Rangers would call a target-rich environment, as hunters began pouring into the ditch by the score, then the hundreds. Wire and stakes stalled their advance, but soon the remaining propane bombs would be needed to stop the strengthening horde. Gracie’s weapon was a semi-automatic rifle, and she had a backpack filled with loaded, twenty-round magazines. She had no incentive to conserve ammo, so she fired as fast as her eye could acquire targets. With the other snipers shooting nearly as fast as she was, the air around her reverberated with the sound of so many rounds being popped off that it seemed as if the hunters were being hit with machine guns.

Between the bullets, wire, and cruel stakes, thousands of hunters were being removed from the battle without ever seeing their prey, but still they pressed forward in numbers too high to stop. The propane bombs began to detonate all along the line, blowing pieces of earth and flesh-eaters into the sky and warning every shooter to retreat immediately. Lori grabbed Gracie’s shoulder and pulled her toward the rear as blast waves hit the girl from seemingly every direction. Marcus was suddenly with them, shouting that Bobby was on their six and they needed to run. Seeing the Rangers retreating was enough for Gracie, who finally put her remaining energy into her already aching legs as nearly a thousand other snipers joined in the withdrawal. None of them knew the full extent
of the damage the snipers had wrought in less than half an hour of shooting, but they had killed or disabled more than ten thousand of Barnes’ best monsters while losing only six soldiers to the beasts.

From his perch on the wall
, Jack did have some idea of the carnage his snipers and traps had inflicted on the horde. Beyond the railroad cut, the increasing light revealed hundreds of hunters impaled on stakes and tangled in concertina, and those creatures were only a fraction of what had to be moving through the trees and brush where they couldn’t be seen. The tiny, underappreciated .22s had cut through the forward ranks of the flesh-eaters like a sharp scythe through ripened wheat. Before the bombs exploded, the shallow ravine looked like some horrific scene from wars past, corpses lying in great mounds as the creatures were shot down while crawling over their own dead. Finally the push became too great, and the soldiers on the edge of the cut did exactly as they’d been ordered to do by withdrawing at the appropriate moment. Jack saw several snipers fall during the run back to friendly lines, something that was inevitable when so many people were running over rugged terrain, but almost all of the shooters reached the phalanx with room to spare.