His hearing coming back as the killing fury left him, he could barely make out Rick Styles yelling, “You crazy son-of-a-bitch, you were almost ten feet outside the wall. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Smiling at what he took as a compliment, Tick-Tock let his fellow defenders pull him into the fort. Even when he was safely inside, they still restrained him, worried that his berserker rage hadn’t been spent. Knowing he had to get his head and his ass wired together, Tick-Tock tried to get his mind to shed the dregs of the insanity that had possessed him by focusing on the men and women hammering a patch in the hole they had just pulled him through.
The sight of dead arms and legs thrusting through the openings between the boards disturbed him for some reason, so he turned his attention to the sound of gunfire coming from around the compound. Noticing that it seemed to be diminishing, he worried that everyone was on their last rounds or were fighting with sharpened sticks like himself.
When his hearing was fully back and his mind clear, Tick-Tock felt he had returned to reality enough to be released. Croaking out something that even he didn’t understand, he swallowed a few times to wet his throat and managed to say, “I’m fine, you can let me up.”
The people restraining him looked skeptical, but Rick stepped forward and said, “Turn that crazy bastard loose. We might need him again.”
Feeling his limbs freed, Tick-Tock rolled onto his hands and knees before slowly rising to his feet. While he was examining himself for wounds, Rick told him, “We already checked. I don’t know how you did it, but you didn’t get bit. You got a few tears in your shirt, but I think that armor you wear stopped you from getting infected.” Looking at where his people were securing the last board over the gap in the telephone poles, he added in a quiet voice, “I have to thank you though. From what the people here told me, they were about to be overrun when you went full Viking and pushed the dead-asses back so they could close the gap.”
After considering Tick-Tock for a moment, Rick asked in a slightly awed voice, “What came over you. I only got here in enough time to catch the last of it, but you were like some kind of crazed beast.”
Exhausted, Tick-Tock pulled the magazine of ammunition from his pocket, held it up and said, “I dropped my last clip and was trying to get it back from the dead-asses.”
Rick laughed and said, “Well, I’m glad you got it because you’re going to need it.” Handing him his spear, he added, “You also might need this. Whatever ammunition you have on you is your last. Do what you can with it, but use it only as a last resort. We’ve managed to stop all the breakthroughs, but it’s only a matter of time before we have more.”
As if in response, a large crack came from the far side of the fort. Tick-Tock only needed a split-second to realize which direction it had come from before he was off and running. Not feeling the pain in his back, arms and shoulders from wielding the spear, his only thought was where the latest breakthrough was happening.
Exactly where he had left Denise.
Reaching the parapets where Denise had been sleeping, and seeing it had collapsed to lie in a jumble at the base of the wall, Tick-Tock’s felt his stomach drop before it leapt back into his throat to almost choke him. Looking frantically through the wreckage, he was surprised when he couldn’t find any bodies. Spinning around at the sound of her voice, he found his love directing the crews rushing forward to close the gap in the wall.
Running up to her and grabbing her in his arms, Tick-Tock said with relief, “You’re safe.”
Looking at him like he was crazy, she replied, “Of course I am. We heard the wall start to break long before it caved in so we got the hell out of the way.”
Turning his attention to the split in their defenses, Tick-Tock saw that it was a major one, probably the worst since the dead first surrounded them. Seven of the telephone poles had been pushed in, one so far that it was almost standing straight up. When the dead had first hit the wall, hundreds of them had been crushed into the wedge at its base, and these now made a step that others crawled up to push their weight against the upper part of the barrier where it was weakest and they had more leverage. Although he knew if they had built the wall straight up and down that it would never have withstood the initial assault, he wished they had used something heavier.
Like steel beams.
Knowing this was fantasy, Tick-Tock reacted by rushing forward. Before he had taken two steps, he saw another 20 inch wide telephone pole being levered out of position by the dead as they forced their way in. With the constant sound of gunfire, the whining of the dead, and the screams of the defenders almost deafening him, he couldn’t make out any orders coming from the officers. Not slowing, he started slapping people on the back to get their attention as he passed them, calling out, “Follow me,” as he ran into the middle of the fray.
A few of the defenders he tagged followed him immediately, but most stayed frozen in place at the thought of rushing toward the dead now pouring through the wall. By the time Tick-Tock and his recruits reached the few defenders trying to hold the savage horde back, they numbered only ten. Without thought for their own lives, they used whatever was at hand to stop the flow of corpses coming at them. Clubs were raised and lowered onto dead skulls too many times to count as spears were thrust forward, twisted, and quickly retracted to be pushed in again to skewer the corrupt brains of the dead. Occasionally, one of the Zs would slip by them, only to be promptly shot down by one of the rifle men that covered them.
Tick-Tock looked neither left nor right as he repeatedly shoved the point of his spear into the craniums of the dead. Aiming for an eye, or the dripping, black orb where it had been torn out, he found this was the fastest way to drill into what was left of their brain and eliminate the dead. He could see that while he and his small group weren’t pushing the dead back, at the same time they were keeping them from flooding into the compound. Hope surged through him that with a few reinforcements, they would be able to push the Zs back. Realizing that he could see his targets better, he blinked his eyes rapidly in the first light of the rising sun.
Looking around wildly for more people to help them, Tick-Tock stopped when he saw the beginning of the end of Fort Redoubt.
With the dead scrambling over those crushed against the base of the wall in the initial assault, and with the thousands behind them clambering over each other in their unrelenting urge to feed, the dead had managed to build a bridge of dead flesh high enough to cross the top of the wall. At first visible in ones and two across a fifty foot wide swath, in the dim illumination of the light, Tick-Tock watched in horror as they became a flood of bodies scrambling between the wooden spikes to slide down the inner face of the wall and attack across a wide span.
Looking around for Denise, he spied her thirty feet behind him, frantically motioning to him to run. Glancing to his left and right, he noticed that everyone else was turning to flee the dead. Disgusted at their cowardice, Tick-Tock joined them, knowing that he couldn’t stand against the hordes alone. With the dead close behind him as he fled, his mind spun as he tried to think of a place where he and Denise would be safe. Coming up blank, he knew it would only be a matter of minutes before the Zs rolled over everyone in the camp and the feasting began. If they only had a few more people to defend this section, they might have been able to hold the dead off.
Out of breath as he neared where Denise was waving for him to hurry, Tick-Tock was about to vent his anger at the others giving up, when she cut him off by screaming, “It’s too late. Get down,” as she dropped flat on the ground.
Peering through the haze of gun smoke and dust kicked up by the defenders, Tick-Tock saw why everyone had abandoned their positions. They weren’t fleeing the dead, they were getting the hell out of the way. Lunging forward, he threw his body across Denise as the twang-thump of the porcupines filled the air.
As soon as the whistle of darts flying over his head dissipated, Tick-Tock jumped to his feet and hoisted Denise to hers. Keeping her hand clenched in his, he pulled her along as he ran toward the semi-circle of defenders that had set up around the breakthrough to push the dead back.
Reaching safety, Tick-Tock turned to see that while the dead who had made it over their defenses had been wiped out, more were pouring over the wall. As he heard calls of, “Fall back,” and, “Retreat,” mixed with the screaming of people running one way and then the other as they found the barricades of Fort Redoubt being breached in this manner all around the perimeter, he knew this was the end.
An aching in his left hand made him look down, and seeing the rifle still clenched in it, he turned to Denise and said, “Whatever happens, don’t leave my side.”
Tick-Tock’s heart dropped as he said this. He knew it wasn’t because he felt he could save his love, but when there was nowhere left to run or back up to, he would finish them both.
Using the bodies of their brethren as a walkway, the dead poured over the wall into the fort from all directions. With so much fresh meat close to their grasp, they rushed forward as one to claim it. In their mindless haste, they ran into a phalanx of desperate, spear and club wielding humans to fall by the hundreds. Despite this, the unending wave of dead swarmed forward as they were pushed by the thousands behind them.
At first bolstered by the porcupines, the living defenders quickly found the archaic weapons too slow to reload. One by one, the strongpoint set up around them fell to the onslaught of rushing dead, leaving the living to destroy them with spears, clubs, and stones. As they were backed into a slowly shrinking perimeter at the center of the compound, the living found their only respite when one of their own fell to the dead. When someone was dragged down, it caused a swarm of reanimated corpses to fall on the spot, fighting each other for a mouthful of meat and giving the living a brief respite.
The bodies of the living and the dead that had been destroyed quickly piled up, pushing the humans into a steadily decreasing circle as more reanimated corpses crawled over the top of the gruesome heap and leapt at them in their attempt to feed. Old men and women rushed forward as the more able bodied fell, only to find themselves quickly exhausted by the fight and taken down.
When the man next to him was pulled into the mass of ragging dead, Tick-Tock used the pause to take a quick look around. After turning one way and then the other, he estimated that there were less than three hundred living being forced into a slowly shrinking ring. On his left, he locked eyes with Denise.
As he was trying to come up with something reassuring to say, she cut him off by shouting over the whining of the dead and the screaming of the defenders, “You’re going to have to do it for me. I won’t be able to do it myself.”
Relieved and horrified that she understood how desperate their situation was, he yelled, “Now?”
Shaking her head, she replied, “At the last second, I want you to put a bullet through my brain. Until then, we fight.”
Turning his attention back to the dead, Tick-Tock saw that his brief reprieve was over as three whining, naked creatures from hell lunged toward him. Blocking one with his chainmail coated arm, he jabbed forward with his spear to dispatch the second. The third was taken out by Denise as she connected with its head with a club she had taken from one of the fallen.
Seeing a dozen more dead take their place, Tick-Tock looked to the never-ending wall of walking corpses pushing forward over the mounds of bodies. He knew it was a hopeless situation, but his mind still raced as he tried to find some way out of the slaughter. Even though he had been given the okay to kill both Denise and himself before the dead infected them, he kept hope that he wouldn’t have to resort to this dire finish.
His mind flashed to the radio and generator rooms, but after looking in that direction, he dismissed the idea. These were the two most secure buildings in the compound and were being used to house the children. Only twenty feet away from the advancing dead, Tick-Tock knew it wouldn’t matter if he and Denise did manage to squeeze in, since the structures would only stand against the dead for a short while before being crushed and their inhabitants dragged out and torn apart.
The thought of this angered him, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the exhaustion racking his body. As he tried to tap into his earlier berserker strength, he knew it wouldn’t come. His body, mind and soul had reached their limits. Looking over to Denise swinging her club in slower and slower arcs, he knew it was almost time. He would rather it came quick and painless for her, so he dropped his spear and unslung his rifle.
Reaching down to pull the charging handle back, Tick-Tock heard an unusual noise as he sighted in on the side of his love’s head. Over the whining of the dead and the screams of the last few defenders, he heard something that he hadn’t heard in what seemed like years. Looking up, he saw a dim shape coming over the trees in the distance before slowing to hover over the center of their steadily shrinking perimeter. Recognizing it instantly, he screamed at the top of his lungs in triumph as he turned his M4 away from Denise and toward the onrushing dead.
***
Taking in the situation on the ground at a glance, Steve pulled the boom microphone of his headset away from his mouth and yelled at Jim, “Turn that thing on.”
Holding his hands up in futility, he replied, “I need a power source. I need at least five thousand watts powering two-hundred and twenty volts.”