“
Merde alors
!” Theriot, the shipwrecked marine yelled at the top of his lungs as his musket blew up in his hands. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, face covered with black soot. Billy laughed as he thought the man looked just like the old cartoons where the duck got his bill blown off with dynamite. The man picked up his shattered musket and used it as a club, smacking the infected hands and the tops of skulls popping up just under his feet in the moat.
The Horde below in the dry ditch had begun piling up on top of itself and the infected swarmed more than twenty feet high all along the wall. Arms and heads popped up from the tangled mob and yearned for the living on the wall above. The scene was reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. The dead yearned to pull the living down into the depths of hell.
“Don’t waste your shot, son,” Billy said to Wyatt, pushing him to the grass of the glacis as he lay down next to him.
Both of their muskets, ancient dark wood and rusty metal manufactured some two centuries before, were already loaded with powder and a musket ball each. As he lay there in the briars and brown November grass, he could feel the cold of the earth below him reach up and chill his bones through his clothes.
“Lay here like this, just like in ‘Scouts, and pick your shot. Aim right for the head. If you can’t see the head, don’t shoot.”
Billy reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of improvised percussion caps. Percussion caps are placed under the hammer of the musket and used to set off the charge inside the chamber that launched the musket ball itself. Inside the fort, they were rare and precious items, made from scratch to use once the factory-made pre-outbreak supply was exhausted.
“Remember to close your eyes just before you shoot,” Billy said as he affixed the small dime-sized pieces of aluminum foil with fine magnesium and black powder mixtures glued to it just under the hammer of the musket. Everyone shied away from using these improvised caps as they created a small smoky explosion directly in the face of the weapon’s user. It forced the rifleman to close his eyes just before he pulled the trigger if they ever wanted to use them again. This, however, did not save the shooter from flash burns on their face, pinhole burns in their clothes and the reek of burned black powder that filled their nose and throat.
The charterboat captain centered the front sight of his relic on a writhing zombie twenty feet out and ten feet below where he laid. If it had not have been for the close proximity of his target, he doubted he would have had a chance. He squinted his eyes shut, held his breath, and squeezed the trigger. Billy heard the sound of the hammer fall against the chamber, felt the hot flash and flecks of foil on his face, waited the half-second pause before the explosion of the powder rocked the stock back into his shoulder and then opened his eyes.
He saw the lead ball exit the muzzle of his musket three feet in front of him, then seem to hang briefly Wile E. Coyote-style in midair, before it lumbered out and through the hairline of his target. The infected woman slumped forward and rolled down the pile of moaning flesh below him. He was smiling and patting Wyatt on the back as the boy fired his own musket in a flash of smoke and powder.
As they began the long and arduous process of reloading their muskets, the ground below them shook and rumbled like an earthquake. Two huge columns of gray-white smoke billowed up from the moat like a mushroom as a tongue of flame and shrapnel rocked the valley from end to end.
“They set off the flank howitzers!” Wyatt said with a look of wonderment on his face that before the outbreak would have only been caused by a free software upgrade.
Wyatt, Bert, and Ernie had been working on the two guns off and on for the past couple of days. The two 1830s-era 24-pounder howitzers mounted in the flank casemate by the sallyport below them had been designed to envelope any attackers in the moat below in crossfire. Captured after the Civil War, they had survived meltdown in 1940’s scrap drives by being part of a memorial in a northern state. When they returned to Fort Morgan in the 1980s, they were the only functional cannons still at the fort. Packed with two buckets of black powder that had been too coarse to fire in the muskets, the ancient cannons were set to fire a sixty-pound load of rusty bolts, brass padlocks and iron shrapnel collected from around the fort’s grounds.
Billy peered over the edge of the glacis and looked down into the moat below. Hundreds of infected had been pureed in the crossfire of the pair of old cannons and the pile of reanimated humans was cut back down to the ground. However, as soon as it happened, thousands more surged forward to take their place in building a new pile.
He looked down the line and Theriot and his marines along with the rest of the defenders were taking turns reloading and firing from the muskets that still worked. While waiting for a loaded weapon, the shooter would kick the occasional infected whose head or hand came within range.
Wyatt and Billy finished reloading and fired into the Horde again, Billy missing his shot and Wyatt making his. Once more, they started reloading as rounds kept firing raggedly to the left and right of them. The Civil War reenactor, who had instructed them on the parade ground the day before in how to use the muskets, had given them every chance to practice reloading. Still wearing his floppy black hat with crossed sabers on the front of it, the man had pronounced that a trained solider in the 1860s could reload and fire three rounds per minute. Billy was averaging one round every three minutes and was trying his best.
Bert and Ernie showed up behind them to get a peek at what their cannon had accomplished. The bearded men still had their Mk18s slung over their backs even though they were out of ammunition.
“That was awesome, Bert!” Wyatt said, busy pushing a ramrod down the barrel of his musket.
Ernie nodded, his face covered in soot except for a white area around his eyes where he must have had been wearing his sunglasses when the cannon went off. “It was a pucker factor for sure. I thought we might be taking ourselves out of the food chain when they went off.”
Bert chimed in, “I can’t taste anything but sulfur.” He was a carbon copy of Ernie and they even wore the same outfit. “Did we get many of them?”
“Pretty good shooting guys. I say do that another 200-300 times and we should be alright,” Billy said, pouring powder from a recycled Coke bottle down the throat of his musket.
“I wish we could,” said Ernie, shaking his head. “We used the last of our powder firing the cannon off. Everything else has been given out for use with the muskets.”
Billy looked at his Coke bottle; he had enough for maybe ten more shots. Wyatt’s already empty bottle rolled underfoot as did several others up and down the line.
««—»»
The reformed high school band played on the parade ground of the fort. Many of the kids were off key and out of tune, but they did not sound too bad overall. The band director worked them through the same ten songs repeatedly, taking breaks to walk around and grab some ice-cold water from the belowground cisterns. They formed the soundtrack to the battle.
At one point during the afternoon a group of infected had stood on the wall closest the beach. A militia unit led by other high school kids commanded by a 16-year old girl had taken the initiative to remove them, fighting with bayonets and rifle butts.
“I will have you doing monkey fuckers until you throw up your own asshole, you cocksuck!” he heard the little girl, who everyone called Oswald, say to encourage her group into the fight. He thought about Hoffman and Reid and assured their spirits that the torch had been passed to the younger generation of leaders.
Bert and Ernie had joined the fight at that section and Ernie had finally tackled the last four infected from the wall, pushing them all off only to be carried down into the mosh pit with them. Bert shot his friend in the head with a musket to put him out of his misery as the Horde ripped him to shreds.
To say that the survivors were gloomy was the ultimate understatement. Billy sat down in the grass and briars on the glacis and held his five foot long unloaded musket. Topped with a 21-inch rusty bayonet, the weapon was taller than he was. Edgar Wallace, his next-door neighbor, had climbed the steep steps to the top of the wall and sat next to Billy. The man had brought a jug of water for them to drink and a couple cans of salvaged ravioli for lunch. After the cold meal both of the men had ordered Wyatt to go down and the old judge would take his place on the line.
“Never thought I would fight with a weapon older than I was,” the man said, looking at the musket in his hands. It, too, was unloaded as was common all along the line. It’s only use now was as a spear to force infected off the wall if they came close enough to the glacis to reach out to the defenders.
“You just thought the Nazi’s were bad. These guys below will literally eat you,” Billy tried an effort in gallows humor.
“Well, death is a natural part of life. I’m toting 87-years around with me and I’m tired,” the man replied. It was the first time that Billy had ever seen him not smiling.
Billy looked down the line and saw Stone and two of the colonels walking along the wall, inspecting the defenses. One of the old colonels had died in the Great Retreat, caught in the evacuation of one of the barricades. The other two colonels had been muted ever since the fort had come under siege and seemed to spend most of their time in endless meetings with George and a few of the other county figures who had escaped town.
When Stone came up to Billy, he did not even get up from the ground to meet him.
“Gunslinger,” the Captain said in his characteristic drawl, “how are you guys holding up?”
“I’ve got brains on me, man…”
“So you’ve been getting some shots in?”
“It’s kind of a hobby of mine lately.”
“Good to see you in the line, sir,” Stone said to the judge, patting his back. His German Shepherd shadow licked the man’s hand.
“I served under Patton sixty years ago and learned to fight where I’m needed, Captain,” the old man mustered.
“Did you eat today?”
“Yes, but I ordered the Kentucky Breakfast and they didn’t have it,” the old man said with a smile.
“We may be able to muster that in the morning, what is it?”
Ed grinned through his perfect teeth and explained, “A quart of whiskey, a beef steak, and a big dog, who is assigned to eat the steak.”
Stone returned his grin, shared by the rest of the group. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Did anyone get a radio working to talk to the armada?” Billy asked. A few handheld VHF radios had been floating around the fort but they were all long dead. Without them, they could only wave and hold up homemade signs to communicate with Jarvis, Mr. Trung, Cat in
Fooly Involved,
and the other 100-odd charter boats, yachts, sailing ships, and shrimp boats that remained offshore of the fort. They were the moteliest flotilla imaginable, but were the only outside hope of the fort and its inhabitants.
“No. The two ham radio guys tried to make a battery out of a can of orange juice and some wires but they couldn’t get it to power up the radio,” Stone said.
“Well, I guess eventually they will sail off and start over somewhere,” Billy mumbled. “Then I guess we’ll die up here. So be it, I’ve got my spot picked out.”
Stone looked around at the surging infected below, then to the scattered defenders around the rim of the fort on the glacis, and to the unarmed civilians sheltering inside the casemates inside the fort. The sound of the high school band filtered up through the air. The occasional musket and increasingly rare shot rang out in the distance in accompaniment.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Stone said, moving off.
««—»»
The afternoon sun hung low in the sky and the situation had grown desperate. No one was talking anymore. It had been hours since the last gunshot had been heard. A crew of militia wandered up and down the line asking if anyone had any powder, musket balls, or percussion caps left.
Billy shook his head and, although he was out of everything they asked for, neglected to mention the old .38 in his pocket with its last three rounds left. He was saving those for the end if needed, one for Mack, one for Wyatt, and one for himself. He was sorry for the judge, but that was just the way the ball bounced.
The high school band had broken up after its all-day concert and the only noise was the moans of the undead in the moat and the distant crash of the surf three hundred yards away at the beach. He scanned the horizon back towards Gulf Shores and could see his house, the judge’s house next door, the ferry dock, and the fort road. For the first time in a week, the fort road lay open and empty. The end of the Horde could finally be seen. The fact that there must have been 20,000 infected in the half mile between the fort and his house dampened that fleeting piece of good news. If those 20,000 rushed the walls at night, with no lights to see them clamber over the glacis, the show would be over.
“Dad?”
He turned around to see Wyatt behind him. The boy stood there with Bert. The creepy bearded man hung back and let Wyatt talk.
“I’m going to try to get to the boats.”
Billy stood up immediately to kick the madness out of his son. “T-there is no way. There are thousands of them. No one could make it a foot into that crowd before the infected would get them. It’s mathematically impossible.”