The Girl with All the Gifts

19

Long before Sergeant Parks has come up with any kind of a counter-attack, the fences are down.

It’s not that it happens fast; it’s just remorseless. The hungries that Gallagher clocked in the trees on the eastern perimeter suddenly come out of there at a flat run. They’re not hunting anything, they’re just running – and the strangeness of that maybe makes Parks hesitate for a second or two, while he tries to figure it out.

Then the wind changes and the smell hits him. A rank wave of decomposition, so intense it’s almost like a punch in the face. Soldiers on either side of him gasp. Someone swears.

And the smell tells him, even before he sees it. There are more of them. A lot more. That’s the smell of a whole herd of hungries, a frigging tidal wave of hungries. Too many to stop.

So the only option is to slow them down. Blunt that headlong charge before they reach the fence.

“Aim for the legs,” he shouts. “Full auto.” And then “Fire!”

The soldiers do as they’re told. The air fills with the angry punctuation of their guns. Hungries fall, and are trampled under by more hungries coming behind them. But there are too many, and they’re too close. It’s not going to stop them.

Then Parks sees something else, at the back of the moving wall of undead. Junkers. Junkers so thickly padded with body armour that each of them looks like the Michelin man. Some are carrying spears. Others are wielding what look like cattle prods, which they jam into the neck or back of any hungry who slows down. At least two are holding flame-throwers. Jets of flame fired to right and left hem in the hungries and keep them from straying too far off the target.

Which is the fence, and the base beyond.

Two bulldozers are also rolling along on the flanks of the herd, their blades set obliquely. When the hungries straggling at the edges get too close, they either turn back towards the central mass or else they’re ploughed under.

This isn’t a stampede. It’s a cattle drive.

“Oh God!” says Private Alsop in a strangled voice. “Oh Jesus!”

Parks wastes another moment in marvelling at the sheer genius of the assault. Using the hungries as battering rams, as weapons of war. He wonders how the junkers rounded up so many, and where they corralled them before this forced march, but that’s just logistics. The idea of doing something like this – it’s nothing short of majestic.

“Target the live ones!” he bellows. “The junkers! Fire on the junkers!” But they only get in a couple of ragged volleys before he yells at them to fall back, to get away from the fence.

Because the fence is going to give, and they’re going to be neck deep in rotting cannibals.

They retreat in good order, firing as they go.

The wave hits. It doesn’t even slow. Hungries slam full-tilt into the mesh and into the concrete stanchions that support it. It leans inwards, groans and creaks, but seems to be holding. The front ranks of walking corpses are treading water.

But more and more hungries fetch up behind them, push against them, transmit their own weight and momentum to the point of impact, the flimsy barricade of woven wire links.

The concrete posts themselves are starting to list drunkenly. A stretch of fence goes down, suddenly unviable, as a fence post tilts clean out of the ground along with a hemispheric divot of earth.

Dozens of the don’t-know-they’re-dead come down with it, trampled and ground down and compressed to mincemeat. But there are plenty more where they came from. They rush forward, their pistoning feet threshing the remains of the fallen.

As quick as that, the hungries are through.