Gravewalkers: Dying Time (20 page)

The sight of a thousand
survivors in one room as they waited to hear news impressed
Critias. The people had come from secret gardens atop hotels and
from dusty tunnels that ran beneath the streets. They were the
hardiest specimens that humanity had to offer, the final few with
the indomitable will to outlast all others. Decoded like a message
from their grim determined faces, Critias took measure of their boy
king.

The crowd parted to let
Critias and Carmen pass through them toward the Captains’ Table end
of the room with its back to the kitchens. Critias wore his full
mechsuit weapons strapped. During his explorations of the general
storerooms, Critias had discovered diving-suit gloves and a hood
that matched Carmen’s wet-surfing body suit. Thus aquatically
dressed, she appeared the paragon of splash protection, especially
combined with goggles and respirator. Along with her pistol
holster, teslaflux carbine-rifle, and the new samurai sword across
her back, the military equipment gave Carmen the intimidating
visual aspect of a clandestine martial assassin, which wasn’t far
from the truth.

The King stood on the
Captains’ Table where he waited to speak while the crowd murmured
with all their speculation. Because Critias had finally arrived,
Fat Jack shouted, “Everybody listen up!” His insistence was enough
to bring a hush down over the room.

Jim spoke to the attentive
community, “The newly arrived Critias has just detected a radio
message coming from five survivors somewhere up north of here on
the edge of the city. All our best efforts to regain radio contact
have thus far ended in failure. Come up here Critias; tell us as
much as you know.”

Critias went to Jim with
Carmen by his side then he told the audience, “I believe they are
still alive, taking shelter somewhere awaiting rescue. Their radio
is of poor quality, which explains why we can’t reach them, but it
may still work well enough for us to use it for finding them once
we are close to their location. Even if their radio no longer
functions, I’m certain they will hear us approaching. They can find
some way to signal to us, either by making smoke or by gunshots.
Even while uncertainties abound, Carmen and I are prepared to make
a try for them. We have experience at this kind of rescue
operation. If any of you are volunteering to assist us, your help
is appreciated.”

Jim told the room, “All the
main roads going north are blocked in with stalled traffic. One
option is to take the Thunder Child even further north up the river
then drive in heading south. The only way to get there from here
would be by taking the Rhino bulldozer out to clear the road.
Without knowing exactly where those people are, the risk of dying
stuck out there outweighs any realistic expectation of success. It
is one thing for us to lose those five strangers out there, but
it’s altogether worse not only losing them but also the rescue team
I sent after them besides. Any rescuers I sent out would surely be
from among our best most talented people, the kind of specialists
we could least afford to waste.”

The audience as a whole
felt inclined toward offering help to the five survivors, but most
of them didn’t think it was worth the try unless they knew
precisely where to go.

“
We will go alone on foot
before leaving them to their fate,” Critias pledged. “I told them
to take shelter and that help was coming. I intend to fulfill that
promise. I will not let this be the first time that I refused to
render aid to those in need of rescue from ghouls.”

Jim turned to Fat Jack,
“The survival of everyone depends too much on you and the Foragers.
I can’t allow any of you to risk yourselves over this. I’ll go with
them myself in the Rhino. At the very worst, we should just make it
back without them. The Rhino can handle any number of infected by
just plowing them under.”

“
No, my King,” Hatchet
advised hotly against it. “Send me in your place. If you fall so
shall we all. If you get killed, everyone would be at each other’s
throats within a month and divided inside the year.”

Jim decreed, “If anything
happens to me, Jack will take my place and everyone will follow his
lead. Even so, Hatchet, I would not go without you to watch my
back.”

“
Just send me in your
place,” Hatchet begged.

“
Admirals don’t win sea
battles by watching them from shore,” Jim told him. “If we are to
undertake this reckless endeavor then I will have my own hand in
it. I need teams to ready the Rhino to leave immediately. We need
fuel, weapons, and emergency supplies.”

The room exploded into the
action of people as they rushed off to make the
preparations.

The Rhino was a tracked
bulldozer that they had removed the original blade from then
replaced with an indestructible steel wedge like the prow of a
ship. The body of the lumbering machine was a cube of armor plate
that formed a mobile bunker. Downward-pointing skewers fortified
the roof to repel any infected that tried to scale the tall smooth
sides of the armor. Heavy military machineguns pointed to the front
and rear and flamethrowers could spray in all four directions.
While nearly unstoppable, the Rhino was agonizingly slow. It had a
small hatch on the top and a large one in the back. They kept the
vehicle behind the shed that sheltered Big Joe.

The crews quietly snuck out
from the King’s Tower entrance and then down the covered tunnel to
the transport shed so they could operate the gate to let the Rhino
outside the barrier. One of the teams loaded ammunition and
supplies into the vehicle then made certain they had it fully
fueled, which included the emergency reservoir.

When all was ready, Critias
and Jim went carefully out first to the Rhino so that none of the
ghouls outside the barrier witnessed their movements. Hatchet and
Carmen followed after. The vehicle’s rear hatch was against the
wall of the shed so it was possible to reach it
undetected.

Only a few dozen ghouls
lurked at the edge of the barrier cage, but hundreds more were less
than a minute away, always ready to respond to any feeding calls of
their kind. Many previous battles with the infected had left the
streets outside the barrier stained with their infected blood.
There were also those scattered headshot bodies that lay green in
the sun where they had fallen. Their flesh stayed perpetually
inedible to rats, birds, and insects alike. No other animal but man
could serve as host to the ghoulish disease, but all creatures
considered their tainted meat to be indigestible.

Jim checked the Rhino’s
radio to make sure it was operational then he ordered the gate
crews in position to let them out of the barrier. Hatchet started
the Rhino’s engine on his first try and then drove for the gate.
The sound of the Rhino’s powerful engine instantly alerted infected
to a human presence for a kilometer all about.

The gate crew ran to their
task ever vigilant that one scratch from the metal of the barrier
could mean their doom as they became one of the slavering ghouls or
at the very least, it would mean a day in the cells as they waited
to see if they turned. Two of the men swiveled flamethrowers to
give the infected near the gate a thorough discharge from the
weapons, which set the creatures into blazing retreat. As the Rhino
was about to collide with the barrier, two other men released the
locks that let the counterweights raise the portal.

Jim pressed the triggers on
the Rhino’s flamethrowers to the front and both sides to give the
crews time to close the gate in safety. Once the barrier sealed,
Hatchet cleared the truck-rails then turned left onto the main
boulevard. He headed east toward Foragers’ Castle. The Rhino
rattled noisily on its tracks and belched smoke as it rumbled
onward at a slow but unstoppable pace.

“
This is just like my
favorite movie,” Hatchet laughed aloud then pressed play on a
digital music reader that hooked into loudspeakers outside their
vehicle. His laughter became the maniacal cackle of the fearless
when they rush headlong into destruction as the music of ‘Ride of
the Valkyries’ by Wagner blared at high volume.

Critias glanced to Jim to
see if he thought Hatchet was sane.

Jim gave a reassuring nod
that Hatchet was as reliable as men came despite his
eccentricities. They were after all driving out into the tainted
urban wilderness in an interminably slow iron-plated bombilation of
a machine. Should they break down mid-voyage, it was highly
probable that it would also be their tomb.

Hatchet cackled, “Get
some!” with glee as the Rhino’s prow scraped aside any ghouls
foolish enough to leap into their path. The shape of the cowcatcher
invariably tumbled them off to one side since there was only
contagious disadvantage when they squashed under the
treads.

Critias tried to contact
the survivors with his helmet radio with no immediate
response.

The Rhino advanced at about
seven kilometers per hour, which was about one-third the speed of a
sprinting ghoul. Hatchet followed open roadway to Foragers’ Castle
then turned north up a highway. He kept on with his symphony music
that didn’t call in the infected any worse than the creatures’ mad
howling or the noisy vehicle already did anyway. The wakeless
silence of the dead city let any sound travel far without any
competition. It was better that the beasts be irate at the sound of
music than conditioned to pursue the growl of combustion engines.
One way or another, there would never be any shortage of infected
that were aware of their location.

By the end of an hour, the
ghouls that followed the slow Rhino numbered in the thousands, too
many for them to all be visible at once. That was when the open
roadway ended and the congestion of automobiles increased to true
blockage. The Rhino lost nothing of its steady pace as Hatchet
plowed down the center of the highway and displaced the vehicles
easily to the sides. The cars that didn’t slide athwart had the
prow flip them over entirely to stack them one above another. The
ghouls that imposed themselves in the Rhino’s way ended up getting
a bit of a squishing between the prow and the cars the dozer rammed
aside.

“
I smell spilled gasoline
behind us,” Carmen reported while she peeked out a rear gun port.
“It must be from punctured fuel tanks on all those automobiles. If
we use the flamers on the ghouls, it might set fire to half the
city.”

Jim went to check for
himself then realized by the reek of spilled fuel that it was true
so he switched off the pilot lights and the power to the pumps to
disable those weapons. “That’s just as well,” Jim reasoned. “Too
many disabled bodies in the roadway behind us would be a problem
for our trucks. The stringy meat twists itself up in the chassis.
We should avoid causing that problem whenever possible. The
solution to our mission today won’t involve killing all these
infected. There are far too many for that. We will have to think of
something else, some kind of distraction, keep them busy while we
make the extraction.”

Critias cautioned, “When we
find the survivors, we’ll be bringing an army of infected right to
them.” He took out one of his teslaflux grenades then showed it to
Jim, “Maybe we should cut down their numbers a bit. This won’t
ignite any gasoline.”

Jim considered the idea
then declined, “Don’t do anything like that yet. It won’t make any
real difference anyway. There are plenty more ghouls still
ahead.”

When the Rhino’s path took
them to a higher elevation, they finally glimpsed the true number
of ghouls that pursued them and it was at least ten thousand. The
creatures had no ability to harm the Rhino and they found it
impracticable to climb it because the way that they scrambled over
each other invariably pulled down any infected who tried to get up.
Such was their aggression, the ghouls frequently pushed each other
down to have the mob trample them under their steady procession.
The march of their chaotic army left hundreds of their own kind
strewn behind them, stomped unconscious in addition to numerous
broken bones.

By the end of the second
hour, the Rhino had a comet’s tail of infected that numbered near
thirty thousand. So great of a multitude was behind them that
Hatchet feared to ever slow down. If the Rhino ever came to a
complete stop, so many infected would engulf them like army ants
that the occupants would suffocate inside the vehicle just from the
press of their reeking bodies.

Over the music, the engine,
and the hideous screams of the frenzying cannibals, Hatchet yelled,
“We’re out of gas!” He then waited to see their expressions before
he laughed about his cruel joke.

Jim asked Critias about his
teslaflux rifle, “What can that weapon of yours do?”

Critias explained, “Carmen
could give you a lot of science words, but it’s not that much
different than your rifles. It generates recoil, so you can only
turn it up so high before it breaks your shoulder, and beyond that,
it doesn’t use any chemical combustive reactions.”

That explanation
disappointed Jim in that he had hoped that the futuristic weapon
could deliver miracles. “It’s about time we figure out how to get
this horde off our backs,” he said solemnly. “We don’t need to do
it now, but we need a plan for when the time comes. There’s no
chance of opening this thing up to let anyone in while that mob of
ghouls is dancing all around us.”