Gravewalkers: Dying Time (5 page)

Colonel Walker slammed his
fist down on the crisis alert button to sound the alarms everywhere
in his base. All of his people rushed to arms to repel a mass
invasion of infected when it arrived.

Critias told him, “This is
still your base, colonel, and you’re evacuating if ghouls are
coming or not, so do what needs to be done until transports can
arrive.”

The colonel sneered at that
suggestion, “This is Earth, and we are men! The infected have not
taken this installation yet and they’re never going to.” He went to
his microphone to bark orders, “Concentrate all firepower at the
breach in the defenses! All engineering crews are to get a new
barrier up as quickly as possible. I order you to sacrifice any
vehicles or materials you require to close up that wall
immediately.”

“
I want in on this,”
Critias told the colonel. “We marshals are not the sort to stand by
watching a fight. If our situations were reversed, you would expect
the same.”

“
Leave the android with
me.” Colonel Walker pointed to an exit, “Take that door and go up
one floor. I’ll call ahead and tell them you’ll be their new acting
commander.”

“
Do anything he asks I
would approve of,” Critias ordered Carmen as he rushed off to
follow the directions. Upstairs in an outfitting room, Critias
encountered ten men in mechsuits as they gave final checks to their
weapons. Their ‘Red Rat’ insignia patches identified them as
members of first platoon in the already elite ‘Reconnaissance
Armature Teams’.

Their Reclamation General
sent out such men in mechsuits to find worthy harvests. In the
trade lingo of the old Foragers, an armature meant a mechsuit and
recon meant built for sly speed rather than intense battle action.
In total, the applied meaning was that they were team player covert
shooters that scouted premium salvage locations then hunkered down
as mushroomed forward-observers while the reclamation excavators
collected the pay off.

To get all ten men straight
in posture and formation, the leader shouted, “Form up, you dogs!”
He informed his men, “You’ve all just volunteered to become
deputized members of a marshal’s posse!” He pounded his chest to
spark them all to a Roman salute to Critias, done potently and
perhaps best by men in armatures. The name over the heart of the
lieutenant in blazoned reflector gold read, ‘Lt. C.
Daniels’.

Critias joined their proud
salute saying, “Things have really gone to hell and I only just got
here. Some private suffering the brain-fry has hijacked a tank and
crashed it through the whole defense perimeter clear to outside. My
android tells me there are three-quarters of a million screaming
freaks near about in the local warren. Our situation is moments
away from nose-diving off into total disaster. We need to slow up
their attack until some major transports have time to come pick us
up. So who’s with me?”

Daniels led his men in an
aggressive roar that signified their readiness for action and then
everyone raced as a team to the rapid freight elevator. On the way
down dozens of floors, Daniels told Critias, “We have heard of you
around here, marshal. My brother Irving was on the Gaoxing when she
floundered north of Berlin back in eighty-two.”

Critias remembered the
incident well, “She was a fat boy reclamation freighter that
bellied down so hard she broke in half to the keel. Ghouls were all
over her looking for vittles like ten thousand pissed off honey
badgers. I saw some amazing sights that night. They tapped me for
my captain’s bars over it.”

“
Irving is a deck officer
on a new freighter now,” Daniels told him. “He serves on the ‘Big
Red’ Fred Sanford, thanks to you and your marshals’ rescue team.
They only take like kids with no parents, so I worked my way up to
Red Rat One to be more like you guys, always in the shit and taking
none of it.”

As thanks to the
compliment, Critias answered, “Your brother should be proud then.
The biomechanics won’t stew up those mechsuits for just anybody. In
the days of King Louie, you would all be Captains’ Table
Foragers.”

The marshals and
reclamation personnel were both Foragers in the meaning of the
oldest term before that single service of ingenious survivalists
had split up into those who specifically harvested resources and
the combat oriented marshals who wielded the heavy weaponry for
protecting them along with everything else. The Red Rats were
scouts and killers rather than scavengers, but still part of the
Reclamation General’s considerable reach of power. The lord of
scavengers commanded more ships, ground vehicles, and personnel
than the Marshal Service did. The Reclamation General even had
access to the same heavy weaponry with the exception that he
required the Council of Governors’ approval, which he had little
trouble coercing. With all the power that the Reclamation General
commanded, it was little wonder that he could also call upon his
own fully mechsuited equivalents of combat marshals. It was not so
huge a step for Colonel Walker to leave the Marshal Service to go
work for the Reclamation General, and in some ways, it had been an
upward promotion.

“
Been a long time since
the days when Foragers collected canned food,” Daniels reflected,
“but we need to keep the memory alive all the same.” He kicked open
the final door to outside; it led out onto a grated bridge that
reached out to connect to the top of the outermost containment
wall. Holding the portal wide for his men to pass through, Daniels
shouted, “Let’s get fat!”

As the armored warriors
rushed out at a run, they gazed down at the wide breach in the
barrier left by the reclamation tank. Many unarmored defenders
toting rifles were also down below. They had arrived first to take
covering positions from where they could gun down any infected that
impinged the security of the compound.

A dreadful howling
reverberated in the manmade canyons around the installation with
increasingly frightful volume. The infected made a distinctive
sound when chasing food and it invariably conjured up more of their
kind. The contagious chorus was always a frenzy of hunger, but
became a fanatical quest for mere homicide when humans were
available prey. The damned creatures still remembered enough of
their former lives despite the passing of inhuman centuries to seek
out men as though crazed necessity.

While the ghouls had all
started out as human beings, nearly three centuries of hard living
had differentiated them into a variety of monstrous forms. People
gave the creatures just as broad a range of amusing names based on
their general appearance and degrees of mobility. The infected
regenerated their injuries, but it had its limitations that
included rampant deformity under some circumstances.

The first enemies to
approach the opening in the defenses were the crawlers. When other
infected had first killed them while they were still human or some
later misfortune like the collapse of rubble had robbed them of a
limb, it rarely grew back; the amputations healed over as permanent
losses. Crawlers could no longer run or even walk without
functional legs, but they were still entirely ferine as they pulled
themselves along in a scramble to get where they were going. Their
progress was slow and their ability to initiate an effective attack
so greatly diminished that crawlers were the least dangerous
opponent their kind had to offer, at least when they operated in
the open.

Colonel Walker’s policy to
shoot infected with powerful exploding cannon shells had blown off
whole limbs with remarkable efficiency and created thousands of
crawlers in the process. Other infected ended up so
quadriplegically mutilated that they could never again effectively
chase food in any mode, ambulation or otherwise, so instead they
would lay in wait as the persistent lurkers, dormant as doormats
for years when necessary, until some unfortunate thing blundered
close enough for the disabled ghoul to strike at it with some
mangled limb from surprise.

Thousands of jitteringly
awkward crawlers clambered toward the gap in the containment wall
in an unwholesome wailing carpet of malice-enshrined faces that at
times were hideously reminiscent of their former humanity, maledict
prisoners of inequitable misfortune more deserving of mercy killing
than condemnation.

The troopers opened fire
with their weapons to repel the attack. The infected could not
bleed to death, but enough damage could force them into dormancy
where they slowly repaired themselves until they awoke once more.
When a weapon blew apart their head, a lack of functional brains
deprived them of ever regaining aggression, but even headless,
their undead bodies would never die. They would lie twitching,
taking water from the rain, using sunlight for their photosynthetic
organelles; they even consumed molds and fungus that tried to
devour them first with no chance of success.

The soldiers jeered as
their indomitable weaponry reduced the crawlers into a lake of
shredded gore that gnashed with broken teeth. Their furious defense
also prevented the engineering crews from getting up front close
enough to make any effort to repair the breach in the main
wall.

For all their success, it
really amounted to nothing because many more wrawling infected came
to replace the destroyed; limpers, stragglers, and hoppers
sacrificed themselves to the guns to press their advance ever
closer. They assaulted by the thousands and only a small minority
did so in direct path of the defensive weaponry. Far more of them
encroached along the footing of the intact perimeter wall where
they were relatively safe from the soldiers’ super-velocity
projectiles spitting from their teslaflux rifles.

Critias led his team to the
top of the main wall from where they could have a controlling
overview of the battle. As soon as they were in position, what they
saw struck them full of dread, so Critias went straight to his
radio, “Colonel Walker, the whole city is coming to wipe us out,
and I do mean the whole city, a million of them!” From their view
there was not a single street not packed with flowing rivers of the
monsters who all screamed the same song of hungry death.

“
There’s a hunter,”
Daniels called out in warning as he shot at a giant freak of an
infected they so named for being the most lethal manifestation of
the World-ender Plague.

The hunter had once been a
man that succumbed to the infection only to then later suffer some
catastrophic injury that had regenerated its whole body into a
blockish mass of rippling muscle easily four times the weight of a
mortal. It was even more agile a creature than it was strong
despite the heinously demented physical form. The hunter leaped
along window ledges as would a demonic squirrel until Daniels
landed the bullet that knocked it off to fall into the pressing mob
of lesser infected swarming the street below.

Colonel Walker broadcasted,
“Hold the perimeter so our tanks can plug the breach! This will be
our finest hour!”

“
He has gone mad,
marshal,” one of the recon soldiers told Critias as if that was not
already apparent to everyone who had heard the order.

The soldier’s words were
not wasted because from them Critias knew what had to be done.
“This is Marshal Captain Critias,” he radioed on the general
distress channel, “by the authority of Grand Marshal Wayne, I am
calling an immediate emergency evacuation of the Chicago
reclamation center. Any aircraft hearing this will come down and
support the evacuation. There are a million infected assaulting our
broken perimeter. I authorize you to engage in close air support
and give them everything you have. Combat teams will execute an
orderly fighting withdraw to the center complex. I order all
officers to shoot deserters on sight; the transports need time to
arrive so if you just run we all die!” With the message sent, he
transmitted a signal to his ship to autopilot to his
position.

Two tanks that escorted six
dozers drove into the front lines then unleashed their awesome guns
into the ghoul horde. Explosions hurled infected flesh into the sky
to rain down in wet chunks and still it was only the weakest
crippled ghouls that took the punishment. The main army of fully
capable runners had yet to arrive and when they did, they would
leap and sprint like the Olympic athletes they could run down and
eat.

Critias and his team could
shoot straight down the wall and not fail to hit some snarling
aggressor. The situation teetered on the final edge and when it
toppled, things were going to be so bad that a full-on panicked
rout of defenders would be unavoidable.

“
This is Marshal Erik of
the Gunship Predator,” reported a voice on the radio.

“
Bring the thunder, Erik,”
Critias radioed him. “Take the paint off the tanks; we’re in
trouble down here!”

“
Roger that, Critias,”
Erik replied. “I’ll be knocking on your door in thirty
seconds.”

The dedicated fire-support
gunship flew at street level down the main roadway that was wide
enough to accommodate it. All six of the ship’s rotary cannons
sprayed ballistic tungsten slugs into the infected army that filled
the thoroughfare wall to wall. Door gunners on each side of the
ship swung their swivel-cannons to slash lines of slaughter that
just as quickly vanished in the press of the flood. As the ship
passed where the outer wall had fallen, a string of dropped bombs
annihilated the attackers and covered the tanks in their liquefied
filth.