Mark Rogers: The Dead

They charged straight on into the barrage, the one on the right pulling ahead, taking the brunt of it. Bones and bone fragments bursting from its body, it reminded Max briefly, crazily of a string of exploding firecrackers. Then it was nothing but pieces rolling across the asphalt.

The second leaped high into the air, jaws yawning. Max ducked, but the thing’s mouth still caught the shoulder of his jacket, locking in the cloth. The creature flipped over, toppling him backward; fabric gave, and the thing went sailing past him, upside down.

Dropping the bomb, he flung himself onto his belly. The bone wolf was already clattering back toward him.

Max thrust the H and K’s barrel into its mouth and pulled the trigger. A hail of slugs bored it clean out through the middle. The hollowed shell continued up the rifle barrel on momentum, disintegrating over him in a rattling wave.

Shaking free of the remains, Max took up the bomb again and started back toward the truck. Looking past the cab, he saw that the cairn was coming now, pounding forward on its elephantine legs.

He eyed the tank trailer. A cylindrical hose container ran along its side. He flipped the cap open. The container was empty. He shoved the bomb in and lit the fuse. Turning, he pelted back for the bridge, thinking to take cover behind the support.

Please, Jesus, let this one work…

He noticed something sweeping toward him on the edge of sight. He glanced aside to see that it was a long braided cable of bones. It seemed to be lengthening rather than merely moving, reconfiguring itself to catch him, pieces racing along it and locking together out near the tip. The sight was so mesmerizingly strange that his wits momentarily failed him. The tentacle fastened about him with an arthritic crackling noise. Points of bone dug cloth into flesh.

Finally he reacted, twisting violently, firing into the appendage several feet from his body, shearing it through with the last bullets in his gun. Cut off from the cairn, the section around his waist instantly fell apart.

Yet hardly had the skeletal belt crumbled when a second appendage looped in. Whirling him around, it dragged him back toward the truck.

He could see the cairn looming up behind the vehicle. It had flung a web of smaller tentacles out over the cab and trailer, as though searching for the bomb. One snaked down toward the hose-container, opened the cap. Smoke leaked out. The tentacle snaked inside.

“Now,” Max cried. “Oh God, now!”

With a flash of red, the nozzle tube split open, the blast punching upward into the fuel trailer.

The tentacle let Max go, almost as if the cairn had been startled by the explosion. Burning fuel gushed from a yard-wide diamond-shaped hole in the tanker’s side.

But the truck didn’t blow.

Max turned and ran, reloading. What could he do now? Could the cairn narrow itself to cross the bridge? Even if it couldn’t, there were always those thrusting arms. He couldn’t possibly hold the span against them…

A wicked thundercrack clapped his eardrums. The tanker had gone.

A massive push of hot air struck him in the back, lifted him off his feet, flung him forward several yards before dropping him to the asphalt. Bones and burning gas drops rained around him. Curved fragments of tanker hull clanged down.

Palms and knees skinned, he scrambled onto the strip of grass by the bridge. Jumping to his feet, he looked back across the parking lot. The top of the truck’s cab had been sheared off. Tank gone, the trailer was enveloped in flame.

As for the cairn, all Max could see was pieces. A vast fan of them had been blasted back into the corpses waiting by the fuel tanks, and many of the cadavers appeared to have been cut down by the brittle shrapnel. Most of the blast seemed to have spewed out that way.

Why the truck hadn’t exploded immediately, he didn’t know. But trailer tanks were compartmentalized. Hoping to tear into a section full of gas vapor, he’d hit liquid instead, much less explosive. Perhaps it had taken a few seconds for the heat to detonate the vapor in a compartment alongside.

Time to leave, Max, he thought. Up the ladder he went. Expecting Gary and the rest to be long gone, he got a nasty surprise at the top; they’d paused near the other end of the bridge. Father Chuck was propped against the rail. Max stamped in rage.

Nothing, he told himself. Y ou did it all for nothing.

Metal glinted. Steve was lifting his pistol toward the priest’s head.

“You piece of shit,” Max said.

There came a flat report. It sounded almost like a firecracker at that distance, with nothing nearby to contain the sound. But it wasn’t Father Chuck who fell.

It was Steve.

Max wondered who’d shot him, hoped it was Gary. He already knew that Linda had the stuff.

Gary took Father Chuck’s arm. Linda followed them down the ladder.

Max was seized by an impulse to join them, to run and catch up. But that would sign their death warrants-they’d all be slaughtered when the dead crossed the bridge. They might all be slaughtered anyway, he knew. But he was going to give them the best chance he could.

That was his first thought. Only afterward, once he’d turned to face the dead, unslinging his H and K, did it occur to him that he was also grasping at his only chance.

They were coming now, coming in their hundreds, the army of the Apocalypse, the host of Hell. It was hard to see God’s grace in that onrushing storm of hate; impossible to see it anywhere else.

“Through a glass darkly, huh Max?” he said.

A medieval legend leaped to mind, steeling him to his task: a lone Norwegian warrior holding a crossing against an English multitude.

Stamford Bridge, Max thought, and laughed. Stamford fucking Bridge.

“That’s it, you sons of bitches!” he bellowed, pulling out the rifle’s retractable stock, clicking the gun to semiauto. “ Come and get it!”

After leaving Max, Gary’s group had almost gotten to the northern end of the bridge when Father Chuck slipped from Gary’s shoulder and fell.

“Going to stay behind, Father?” Steve asked. “Give the rest of us a better shot?”

The priest shook his head. “I’m not… ready yet.”

Max’s gun rattled in the distance.

“Max is laying it on the line,” Steve said. “If he can do it, you can too, Father.”

Father Chuck closed his eyes, ignoring him.

“We’re not leaving him, and that’s final,” Gary said, helping the priest up against the railing. “We can’t stay here much longer though, Father. Do you understand? Max isn’t going to sacrifice himself for nothing.”

The priest nodded.

Moments passed. Father Chuck stood gasping.

Max’s bomb roared. They all turned. Seconds later came the next explosion, a huge fireball billowing into the sky as the truck went.

“Screw this,” Steve said, cocking his.45.

“Steve, you can’t-”Gary said.

“No?” Steve asked, and leveled his gun at the priest. “Remember Ginger?”

Gary brought his.45 up too.

“You’re going to shoot me? ” Steve laughed. “Your best buddy? The man who taught you just about everything? ”

“Everything you taught me was shit. Try me.”

“You don’t have the guts,” Steve said, and aimed the gun toward Father Chuck’s pale sweat-beaded forehead.

Gary gave him one in the stomach, knocking him over. The pistol bounced from Steve’s hand. Gary kicked it farther away.

“Well what do you know?” Steve gasped up at him, grinning with pain.

Gary put his shoulder under Father Chuck again. Followed by Linda, they made for the end of the bridge.

“You’re not getting rid of me!” Steve cried after them. “ If I’m going down, so are you!”