After (#3)

Chapter Twenty-Five

If Max covered his ears and gazed up at the sky, it could have been mistaken for a beautiful night, with the blazing fires leaving a faint orange glow against the deep black expanse. There was no question that the world was a place of wonder and natural beauty, it was people who invented pain and suffering. If he'd had time, he would have wondered about the future. Not only about if they would survive, or even if the human race would survive, but everything, the wider significance. Had the damage been done on this fragile world? People had destroyed everything that was once pure, and the dead would watch it burn. That couldn't be the legacy of the human race, could it?

Max wished he could think about these things. He wished he could be part of the solution. But those kinds of conversations seemed so far into the future that they barely existed, mere flickerings of potential thoughts in the brain of a man who may soon disappear into the night. He had never felt more insignificant.

The past ten seconds had ticked by agonisingly as Max held his hand to the air once more. The three main roads were now all engulfed in crackling flames, kickstarting phase two and the waiting that came with it. Max couldn't see past the blazing flames and the pouring smoke, he couldn't hear any trace of the approaching enemy. Perhaps the fire had been enough, he thought for the briefest of moments. He knew not to be so naïve. The burning cars were meant as a distraction and a bottleneck, nothing more. No, this fight was not to be won from a distance, this would be fought face to face, hand to hand, eye to dead red eye.

As if to prove Max's point, a call rang out from the east wall. He bound across the wooden walkways surrounding the expanse of the wall and peered down the road, following the finger of the shouting guard. The fire was burning just as fiercely on this side, but nothing could mask the unmistakeable silhouetted figure emerging from the flames. Max pressed his binoculars against his eyes and nodded, psyching himself up after confirming what he had already known.

A clicker had clambered its way over the makeshift blockade, through the searing fire and onto the tarmac beyond. Its rotten skin swung loosely from its arms, the flesh now also licked by the flames. The entire undead body was ablaze, yet it appeared not to feel a thing. Max had never gazed upon a more unsettling sight than that sole clicker shifting towards Novus, its very skin and bones set alight, without a hint of pain or sense of consciousness in its eyes.

After the clicker had stumbled a few more feet, another emerged from the orange glow. The another, and another, all burning in the pursuit of an unquenchable hunger.

Max swore under his breath before stating, "Phase two." He coughed, "Phase two!" he bellowed far louder this time, before returning to his original post.

The clickers were beginning to burst through the flaming barrage on the north side too, and from the shouts to his left, the same could be said for the west.

And now they waited. Waited for the very beings who had come here to kill them to inch closer and closer to their goal. Max could feel the anticipation, he could taste the nerves, he could hear quivering trigger fingers dying to send bullets flying. But that wasn't the plan.

The clickers edged closer still, with more and more finding their way through the wall of fire. Like a sea of Viking burials come to life, the burning army regrouped little by little, and clicks began to fill the air once more, above the soft crackles of fire.

The first of the clickers had reached the second wall, a thin wooden line, six feet in height, running across the width of the street. However, there was a clear route through, a five-foot-wide gap in the very centre of the fence, as if designed to guide the clickers though. That had been GiGi's idea, another bottle neck designed to slow, but not stop. If they had put up a makeshift wall across the entirety of the road, the clickers would have trampled it down within minutes due to sheer numbers. Even the one they had built would not last for long, but then again it wasn't meant to.

Max raised his hand wide and clenched it into a fist.

Crack

The first clicker's head exploded into a hundred different burning pieces, before it's motionless body flopped to the ground.

Max waved his hand in a forward motion, signalling for the snipers to fire at will. Each time a new undead body reached the opening, it was put down without hesitation. Within a minute or so, the corpses began to pile up, only slowing the herd even further. The clickers were pouring out of the flames en masse by now, converging on the wooden fence, dropping like flies if they dared to cross it.

Max was constantly turning from left to right, checking on the progress in the other streets. This all hinged on a sense of synchronicity. The bodies were piling up on all three, and the fences were starting to wobble slightly under the pressure of the undead bodies pushing from the other side. He raised his fist back into the air and held it, waiting patiently for the right moment before opening his hand wide again.

The snipers stopped. The clickers began to burst through the gaps in the walls, like an ocean feeding straight into a stream. The walls were shaking now, bending. Max could imagine them creaking under the strain, inching closer to their breaking point. He waited as long as he dared before bringing his arm crashing down with force and clenching his entire body, awaiting the impact.

The ground shook as three titanic explosions crashed and rumbled around the city. Every last drop of explosives left behind by the army, all packed into three locations, just beyond the gaps in each wall.

Many of the leading clickers had been right on top of the pre-painted 'X' marks when the detonation occurred, and the sound of rotten, dead limbs thudding and splatting against the tarmac was something Max would never be able to unhear.

However, the admiration for their second and final trap could only last for so long, as a wave of surviving clickers appeared once again through the ash and dirt. This was where the fight would really begin.

Max didn't hesitate for a second before giving the order.

"Open fire!"