Peter Clines: Ex-Communication

“Take your time,” ordered Freedom. His voice bellowed out of his barrel chest, louder than the sound of teeth and rifle reports. He stabbed a thick finger at the horde. “Make them count.” To accent his words, Lady Liberty roared and threw two more dead things back from the wall. At close range a twelve-gauge round packed enough raw force to shatter a Kevlar helmet and the skull inside it.

The panicked shooting slowed. A dead man with a biker helmet staggered back and fell. One in National Guard headgear stumbled from a shot, then threw itself back at the wall. A figure in a football helmet dropped with a bullet in its eye.

More of the exes fell, but more of them reached the wall. A dead woman made it to the platform, but a guard smashed her off with a baseball bat. Another withered hand slapped onto the platform. Captain Freedom grabbed it by the wrist and pushed it away. The ex, a dead man in an Oxford shirt, fell back into the horde and was crushed under dozens of feet. Freedom turned and cracked Lady Liberty’s muzzle across the jaw of a teenage boy with a batting helmet and a bloody Atari T-shirt. The dead thing staggered back from the blow and vanished over the edge.

Captain Freedom shouted a few quick orders and got the guards spaced out to cover more area. “All units,” he called over the radio, “this is Six. We have a major incursion at the northwest corner of the Big Wall. Request immediate assistance.”

At least two people replied, but their words were drowned out by another burst from Lady Liberty. One of the rounds shattered a bicycle helmet and pulped the skull beneath it. The ex dropped and vanished into the tide of dead things below. Two of the others he hit struggled back to their feet.

The guard closest to him, a rail-thin woman with gray-streaked hair, paused to reload her rifle. It was an old M1, and Freedom was impressed by how fast she loaded the magazine without pinching her thumb. She brought it back up just in time to shoot a chalk-skinned man in the face. The round took a chunk out of the Lexan visor of the ex’s helmet and knocked it back off the Big Wall.

A dead body threw itself up onto the platform a few feet away and struggled to its feet. Freedom took four quick steps and clotheslined it with a sweep of his massive arm. The ex pin-wheeled back off the wall.

Another guard near the far end stopped to reload, but an ex crawled over the edge of the platform just as he pulled the magazine. He slammed the rifle stock into the zombie’s face, right below the brim of its yellow hard hat, then smashed it again when the dead woman grabbed at his knee. The ex trembled and fell limp across the plywood.

The guard with the baseball bat, a wiry man with Asian features, swung a line drive that knocked one of Legion’s puppets into the air. There was too much force behind the swing, though, and the man stumbled forward on the follow-through. His body bent over the ropes and the lines flexed. He dropped the bat, flailed for the lines, and added to his own momentum. An ex grabbed one of the waving hands and threw itself off the wall, dragging the man with it.

Freedom leaped to help the man, soaring two dozen feet along the top of the wall, but it was too late. The exes closest to the wall passed the guard back over their heads, carrying him away from safety. He had time to look back at his friends before the dead things dropped him on the ground and fell on him. Then he started screaming.

The captain clenched his jaw. He fired three bursts into the swarm of exes before his pistol ran dry. Half of the exes dropped and the guard stopped screaming. Freedom half hoped he’d put the man out of his misery.

He kicked away another ex, loaded a new drum onto Lady Liberty, and sized up the situation. The line was too thin. It was down to himself and five guards. It wasn’t even five minutes into the assault, but he knew which way it was going to go if something didn’t change.

Movement caught the corner of his eye as his pistol spat out three-round bursts at the undead. Back at his position another ex had made it onto the platform, a gaunt figure with a bare chest and a black SWAT helmet. It crawled across the platform and rolled over the far edge.

Legion was inside.

Freedom tensed for a moment as the dead thing crawled to its feet. One ex compromising the security of the Wall could mean the end of everything. But it was too far away for a kill shot from here, and he couldn’t risk leaving the Wall.

Then he realized what the ex had landed next to. Huge armored fingers wrapped around the zombie’s helmet and lifted it into the air. Legion batted at the steel digits and swore in Spanish. Its voice was a dry rasp that barely carried over the sounds of gunfire and teeth.

The blue and silver titan stood just shy of nine feet tall and six feet wide. Flags decorated its shoulders, and each of its metal arms ended in a three-fingered fist a little bigger than a football. The battlesuit swung an arm and hurled the undead creature back over the wall. It sailed through the air and hit the pavement outside.

“Situation?” barked Danielle Morris from inside the armor. She had the suit in public-address mode and her voice echoed across the corner.

Freedom fired three more bursts into the horde. The Cerberus Battlesuit wouldn’t’ve been his first choice for backup. It was powerful, but it no longer had ranged weapons. It was also too big and heavy for the platform on top of the Big Wall.

“You’re the second line,” he told her. “If anything gets past us, it’s yours.”

Legion took that moment to send another ex scampering over the wall. Cerberus took two steps, scooped up the dead teenager, and threw it over the barrier. “Got it,” she said.

The huge officer turned and found himself face-to-face with a dead woman in a football helmet. The ex lunged at him, but its gnashing jaws were blocked by the face mask. Freedom gut-punched the creature and it flew back down into the chattering horde. He moved along the wall back to his starting position, blasting exes wherever he could. They’d put down close to a hundred since he arrived on the scene, and the dead were still coming.

Two more guards, a man and a woman, ran along the Big Wall from the east. They added their fire and helped hold everything beyond the corner of the barrier. It meant somewhere else had thinner defenses now. Freedom hoped they’d hold.

He heard Cerberus move behind him, the muffled clomp of metal toes and the hiss of servos, and another ex came sailing back over the wall. He hadn’t even seen that one get past them. Not a good sign.

The thin woman with the gray streaks reloaded her M1 again. She shot him a nervous look he’d seen in other firefights. It was the last of her ammunition. He fired two bursts to cover her and Lady Liberty’s slide clanged empty again.

The guard heard it and looked up. As she did, an ex in a gold CHP helmet wrapped its pale fingers around her ankle and yanked. She screamed and slid toward the edge as the dead man pulled itself up onto the platform. She kicked it once in the head with her free leg. It snarled at her.

Freedom took two steps and slammed his boot into the ex’s chin. The head whipped back and its neck snapped with a sharp crack. It tumbled off the platform and knocked another one off the wall on its way down.

The woman scampered back and grabbed her rifle. Freedom grabbed another drum from his belt. He had one more after this.

He turned his attention to the horde and something fluttered in the corner of his eye. His weapon came up. And then he realized they might have a chance.

A woman stood a yard to his left. She was dressed head to toe in skintight black, crisscrossed with charcoal straps and belts. Holsters rode low on her thighs, like the ones on a Special Forces soldier or an old-time gunslinger. A wide hood hid her face in shadows, and her cloak settled around her like a parachute.