Fortress of the Dead Read online

  “Yes, sir!” Jun raised her T-99 to her shoulder as she took up position across the road from the sergeant, and without hesitating fired a round into the head of the Dead leading the pack. The skull blew apart in an expanding bloom of bone fragments and gore, and as the headless body pitched forward Jun shifted her aim to the next Dead over, lined up her sights, and fired again.

  It had been difficult to gauge the size of the Dead from the village below: Jun had originally thought they numbered around a dozen. But seen closer to, it was clear that there were more than that: many, many more. The rise and bend of the road had hidden their numbers, and what had originally seemed as little as a dozen was clearly more like two dozen, or even three. This was no small band of shamblers, but a considerable horde.

  “Sergeant?” Jun said without taking her eyes off the targets, picking off another approaching Dead with a shot to the head. The falling bodies were slowing down the approaching horde somewhat, but it would not be much longer before the two of them were surrounded. She slung her T-99 over her shoulder and unslung her Thompson submachine gun, better suited for close quarters combat, and opened fire.

  “Form up!” the sergeant shouted back, firing a round from his shotgun that ripped through the head and torso of one of the Dead on his side of the road, racking the pump to chamber another round, then firing again at the next Dead over. “We hold this spot to give the survivors time to get clear.”

  Jun just nodded as she slid over to stand at the sergeant’s side, firing short bursts from the Thompson into first one and then another of the Dead as she did, the hail of bullets sending bone fragments and rotting brain matter flying as their skulls burst like overripe melons.

  The Dead were scrambling over the bodies of their fallen fellows now, spilling to the left and right sides of the road like a surging tide, hands out and grasping towards Jun and the sergeant, their jaws working furiously in their ruined mouths. But at least they seemed to have drawn the attention of the Dead away from the fleeing civilians, as the shambling horde appeared intent on devouring the two of them before continuing after the survivors still racing downhill towards the village.

  “Sergeant?” Jun picked off another of the Dead who was circling around to their left, and so far they’d been able to keep all of the approaching horde on the uphill side of the road. But if they put it off much longer then the tide would spill all the way around them and they’d be surrounded.

  “If they close around us, we’ll take them back to back,” the sergeant answered. His shotgun appeared to jam, and without missing a beat he drew his Colt M1911 from the holster at his belt and fired a single round into the eye socket of a Dead that had come almost within arm’s reach. The Dead collapsed like a marionette whose strings had just been cut, the back of its skull exploding outwards and covering the other Dead coming up behind it with bits of rotted grey matter and fetid blood the color of India ink. “The important thing is to keep them back while those survivors get to cover.”

  Jun and the Sergeant were practically back to back as it was, but she didn’t see anything to be gained from debating the point with him. She’d been given her orders, and it was her duty to carry them out.

  “Bastard!” the sergeant shouted. He’d managed to clear the jammed shell that was lodged in his shotgun’s ejection port, but barely had time to rack the action to chamber another round before one of the Dead was upon him. As it was when he fired the round that brought the Dead down it was at practically point blank range, and the resulting carnage was even more dramatic than usual.

  Jun swore in Mandarin, scowling with fury. She had tried to fire a round at another of the encroaching Dead but the Thompson’s magazine drum was empty. There was another full drum hanging in a web of netting at her back, but she’d need a moment’s grace to switch them out.

  “Sergeant, can you cover me…?” Jun began, but the sergeant cut her off with a grunt before she could continue.

  “Kind of got my hands full here, kid,” the sergeant answered, taking out another Dead who had gotten so close that its clawing hand had ripped through the fabric of the sergeant’s sweater. “Just a little while longer.”

  “Yes, but I…” Jun kept hold of her submachine gun with one hand, and with the other swiftly drew the Webley Mk VI from the holster at her hip and fired two rounds in short succession, taking out the two closest Dead to her current position.

  “Wait for it!” the sergeant shouted back.

  For a moment Jun was unsure what exactly she was meant to be waiting for. Then just as she was taking aim the Webley at another of the approaching Dead, she was surprised when its head exploded into a bloody mist before she’d even had the chance to pull the trigger.

  Jun’s gaze cut back the way they’d come, where she could see the light of the setting sun glinting off the lens of a rifle’s scope atop one of the few standing walls in the ruined village, and heard the sound of another round being fired in the near distance. Werner, Curtis, and Sibyl must have gotten into position as the sergeant had ordered, and with the survivors having moved out of the field of fire, they were free to pick off the Dead at long range.

  “Pull back!” the sergeant shouted as he fired another shotgun blast and took out another of the Dead that was trying to get around the downhill side. “The others’ll cover our retreat!”

  As the sergeant stepped in between Jun and the nearest of the oncoming Dead, she took the opportunity to yank out her Thompson’s drum magazine and quickly swapped out the full one she pulled from her back. Then she in turn covered the sergeant’s retreat with a few well-placed bursts of submachine gun fire into the oncoming horde, and the two of them continued to walk backwards down the road towards the village, as shots from their squad mates behind them picked off the forward most of the Dead one by one. But still the Dead came closer and closer.

  Even with the number of undead bodies that they managed to put down, the oncoming tide of the bastards surged towards them. Thankfully none of the Dead were moving much faster than a shambling pace—not like some of the burning Dead that Jun had encountered from time to time, sprinting towards their enemies as flames consumed them whole, only to explode without warning—but they were relentless, inexorable, and they had the strength of numbers on their side.

  Jun chanced a look back over her shoulder, and could see that the band of survivors had made it off the road, no doubt sheltering somewhere out of sight behind one of the village’s ruined buildings. And now she could more clearly see Sibyl perched atop one of the walls, firing a round from her Lee Enfield at the advancing tide of Dead, and not far behind her was Curtis lining up a shot with his M1. Jun couldn’t see Werner, but was sure he must be nearby.

  So the immediate threat to the civilians was passed, and now Jun and the sergeant were the only ones under direct threat. But even with the rest of the squad covering their retreat, the two of them couldn’t just break off and make a hasty retreat, not without running the risk that one of the Dead in the forefront might take the opportunity to lunge forward and attack while they were still in range. As it was, the quicker of the shambling Dead still managed to get almost within arm’s reach before Jun or the sergeant put them down with well-placed headshots; the Dead in the front of the vanguard were too close to the pair for the rest of the squad to snipe them from a distance without potentially hitting their teammates in the crossfire.

  Perhaps a grenade might scatter the vanguard of the Dead enough to give us time to get clear, Jun thought. But a blast close enough to disrupt the nearest of the Dead would run the risk of hitting Jun and the sergeant as well. If we’d had time to set up some sort of defensive explosive, then maybe…

  Before Jun could finish the thought, she heard a voice calling from behind them.

  “Four more paces, sergeant, then you will want to step carefully.”

  Jun shot a glance back over her shoulder and saw that Werner was standing in the middle of the road a short distance downhill, taking aim with his Karabi
ner 98K bolt-action rifle and firing a round that whizzed just past her head and took out one of the Dead shambling towards her.

  Werner worked the bolt to chamber another round, and then nodded in Jun’s direction.

  “Mind how you go, Fräulein,” Werner said, and then pointed towards the ground in front of him. Jun could just make out a thin line like a spider’s thread glinting a few inches above the road’s surface and stretching from one side of the road to the other. “I will keep the verdammt Dead off of your backs.”

  Werner was backing away from the wire slowly as he fired another round past the sergeant, taking out another Dead that had been closing in.

  “Okay, kid, you heard the man,” the sergeant said, nodding in Jun’s direction. “Get over and get to cover.”

  Jun was tempted to argue that with the Thompson she was in a stronger position to cover the sergeant’s retreat than the other way around, but those were the orders she had been given and this was far from the appropriate time to debate the matter. She turned, quick-stepped until just short of the tripwire, and then gingerly stepped over the wire, first one foot carefully placed on the ground on the far side, then the other lifted up high and swung over with as much care as she could muster. When she was safely on the other side, she took two steps back and then shouted to the sergeant.

  “I’m over, sir, now you go.” Jun emptied what was left of the submachine gun’s magazine in a spray across the entire oncoming vanguard from one side to the other as the sergeant turned, took three long strides, and then simply stepped over the tripwire like he was simply stepping over a crack in the sidewalk.

  “Get going, y’all!” the sergeant shouted, and started sprinting down the road towards the village. Jun slung the Thompson over her shoulder and then she and Werner followed close on the sergeant’s heels, pounding towards the ruins as quick as they could go.

  Sniper fire from their squad mates atop the ruins kept the leading Dead from reaching the tripwire while Jun and the others were still in range. The forward-most of the Dead was now just a couple of shambling steps away from the tripwire, and there was nothing more than a few small boulders between Jun and the tripmines that she had glimpsed in the scant foliage on either side of the road. Knowing Werner, he would have placed the explosives where they would deliver the maximum results, and doubtless he would have ensured that the bulk of the blast was directed back uphill in the direction of the rest of the shambling horde. But still, Jun didn’t want to be anywhere close by when the mines were tripped. Only a shambling step remained now, surely, as Jun poured on even more speed, breathless as she pushed herself to sprint even fast. But the Dead vanguard must have reached the tripwire by now? She risked a quick glance back over her shoulder and…

  The fireball swelled like a flower blooming impossibly fast, the flash of light reaching Jun’s eyes a fraction of a second before the deafening boom of the explosion reached her ears.

  The Dead were engulfed in the flames, immediately set to burning like human torches. They did not go down all at once, though, but continued to shamble forwards, stumbling erratically and waving their limbs in a horrible dance as the fire consumed them. Rotten flesh and rancid muscle burned away to ash until they collapsed into greasy piles of blackened bones that continued to smolder and pop, all the while accompanied by inhuman howls and the sickening smell of burning flesh and hair.

  A handful of Dead from the rear of the horde made it through the maelstrom with only minor burns, but sniper fire from Sibyl and Curtis dropped them long before they’d gotten close to the village.

  It was some time before Jun was able to catch her breath, and even longer before she was willing to let her guard down and accept that the immediate danger had passed. And the smell of the burning Dead would linger in her nostrils for a long time to come.

  Chapter 3

  HOURS LATER, A partially burned Dead that had lost both legs and both arms up to the elbow dragged itself through the ash and fallen bodies of its former companions, inch by painful inch, until it had almost reached the entrance to the ruined village. But by that point the team had already set up a defensive perimeter, stringing up razor wire around an encampment with torches marking out each of the approaches. Jun had been busy digging a latrine when she spotted the near-limbless Dead dragging itself towards the camp. She almost had to admire the persistence of the damned thing. Almost. She removed the head from the torso with her shovel, not even bothering to draw her firearm, and then used the shovel to push the rotting remains a ways downwind from the camp before jogging back to rejoin the others.

  “Any trouble out there, kid?” the sergeant asked as Jun approached the campfire, wiping gore off the blade of her shovel as she drew near.

  “Just a straggler,” she answered, shaking her head and sliding the shovel back into her pack. “Nothing to worry about.”

  On the far side of the fire sat Werner, cleaning and oiling his rifle. Sibyl was heating up water in a valiant if ultimately doomed attempt to fix a pot of tea—her every attempt to brew up anything like a decent cup had resulted either in a scalding hot discolored water or lukewarm slurry that tasted of dirt, but still she kept trying—while Curtis was distributing emergency rations to the survivors who had fled down out of the mountains.

  Satisfied with Jun’s response, the sergeant turned his attention back to the survivors. Or rather, refugees, to be precise, since all of them had evidently covered considerable distances after fleeing from the Dead, only to find themselves driven together by geography and circumstances as they fled south out of the Alps.

  There were eighteen of them in all, ten men and eight women, the youngest of them around Jun’s age, and the oldest of them a grandmotherly type with a deeply-lined face and a nimbus of white hair around her head. How they related to one another Jun was not entirely sure, though it seemed that there were members of several different families among them, who clumped together in defensive knots as they huddled near the fire. They spoke a variety of languages, mostly Italian, German, and French, though Jun caught smatterings of English and what she thought might have been one of the Slavic tongues. And ever since the squad had finished setting up the camp as night fell, the sergeant had been trying to calm the refugees and to coax some sort of meaning out of the babble of frightened, weary voices.

  “Why here?” one of the refugees was asking in broken English, clearly uncertain about the idea of remaining so close to the place where they had only narrowly escaped the pursuing Dead. He gestured behind them, away from the mountains and towards the south. “Go? Now?”

  “Tomorrow, I promise,” the sergeant answered in a calming tone, giving his most assuring smile. “It ain’t safe to travel at night, so we’ll hole up here, and when the sun’s up my guys and I will get you down to our basecamp. They can help you get to the compound down south, where the rest of the survivors and refugees are staying ’till we get this mess cleaned up.”

  Jun wasn’t sure how much of that the refugee had understood, but a number of small knots of conversations broke out, with questions whispered and answered in several languages, as the group attempted to translate for each other as best they could. Jun, who spoke Mandarin and Japanese as well as English and passable Russian, wished that Werner had volunteered to help translate, as his German would doubtless have come in handy. Sibyl only spoke English and a smattering of Tibetan, Hindi, and Arabic, while Curtis only spoke English, and neither the sergeant’s English or the Creole French he’d grown up speaking were of much use at the moment. But Werner was not the best at interacting with civilians at the best of times, and the circumstances were far from ideal, so perhaps the sergeant was correct in declining to force the man to assist.

  Even so, the sergeant was determined to piece together the story of how this unlikely group of refugees had come together, and just what had driven them across and down out of the Alps.

  “Now, let’s try this again and take it slow,” he said. “Y’all can call me Josiah, and I’m i
n charge of this squad. My team and I are out here searching for survivors and cleaning up after past action, making sure that there aren’t any pockets of the Dead left hiding here or there. But what you folks was running from…?” He shook his head, whistling low. “That wasn’t any ‘pocket’ of the Dead. That was a whole damned chest o’drawers.”

  The refugees exchanged confused looks, and the sergeant hastened to clarify when they started asking him about clothing and furniture.

  “Never mind about that,” he said in a rush, holding up his hands to gesture for silence, “the point is that you folks were running away from a much bigger bunch of Dead bastards than we thought was still up and running around these parts. So my question to y’all is, where the hell did you run into the bastards in the first place?”

  Jun could see the exhaustion on the faces of the refugees as they stared at the sergeant with a mixture of confusion and fear, and then broke into small knots of conversation as they translated his request into the various languages they spoke. Finally, one of the older members of the group, a grey haired man with an unshaven chin who looked to be about the age as Jun’s mother, stood up, pointed to the north, and in deeply accented English simply said, “Mountain?”

  The sergeant covered his eyes with his hand and sighed deeply. In response, the grey haired refugee turned to some of the other members of the group seated at the ground around him, and there was a rapid-fire exchange of questions and answers in French before the spokesman turned back to the sergeant and clarified.

  “Nazi. Dead. In mountain.” One of the other refugees chimed in with a quick note, and the spokesman nodded quickly before adding, “Nazi Dead ON mountain.”

  The sergeant lowered his hands and fixed the spokesman with a hard stare.

  “Look, old-timer,” he said, sounding impatient, “we saw them chase you down out of the mountains, right? We get it. There were Dead Nazis roaming around up there. But how did all of y’all come to be running from ’em together? You didn’t just go looking for trouble, I’m guessing.”