Red Devils

21

There’d been an uncomfortable delay whilst they’d waited for the inevitable attack, but within minutes the dead had begun to slowly come at them from all directions at once, crawling out of the forest with a nonchalant lack of speed but unquestionable intent.

The company medic was still trying to do what he could for Private Willard; badly burned, shaking furiously with shock, not long for this world. They’d moved him to the hangar building while the rest of the men formed a defensive line around the top of the airfield. ‘This ain’t good,’ Captain Hunter said to Sergeant Hennessy.

‘We can hold them back, sir,’ Hennessy was quick to reply. He was spoiling for a fight, desperate to get his teeth into these damn creatures.

‘I’ve no doubt, Sergeant, but that’s only half the battle. We’re light on supplies and they’ve got us backed into a corner. It’s not just about holding them back, we’ve got to beat them back too so the airfield’s clear for pick-up. We don’t know how many of them are out there, and I don’t need to remind you, if we don’t do what we’ve been sent here to do, we ain’t going home in the morning, understand?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Tell your men to hit ’em hard in the head. Only use bullets if they have to. Keep the noise down and keep an eye on our ammo.’

‘Yessir,’ he said again, before saluting and returning to the fray.

Between fifteen and twenty of them were heading straight up the airstrip in an unruly pack. Some of the troops had armed themselves with things they’d scavenged from the airfield to use as bludgeons. Anyone watching would have thought they’d stumbled upon a moonlit gang-fight, a street-corner brawl. The prospect of fighting one-on-one like this (actually more like one-on-many) appealed to some of the men. Better to be bare-knuckle scrapping than sitting waiting like they had been.

And so it began.

Brutal and relentless.

Sergeant Hennessy held back at first, but the adrenalin and fear kicked in and before long he was running at the creatures that shambled towards them. He had a length of metal pipe in his hand that he’d taken from the ruin of the booby-trapped building, and he took great pleasure in using it. He swung it like a sword, and damn near removed the head of the nearest cadaver. ‘Take them out,’ he ordered his men. ‘Take them all out. Leave nothing standing.’