GRAVES
The gunfire hammering across the wall nearly muffled the explosion at the other end of the parking lot. By the time Carl looked up from the enemy trying to scale the frozen ramparts, all he saw were the after effects of the colonel's attack.
Rising smoke filled the area around the epicenter of the blast. Dozens of fires dotted the landscape, glittering like tiny stars in the gloom. There was no trace of movement, except from the wind-whipped flames.
He looked to his left. A corporal who had been monitoring the progress of his superior officer lowered his binoculars with shaky hands. The kid gawked, pale-faced, at the devastation.
"Give me that," Carl growled, snatching the spyglasses from him. The stunned soldier surrendered them freely, barely noticing his now empty hands.
Graves focused the glasses on the smoke drifting into the darkening sky. A single thought raced through his mind like a runaway freight train. Did he do it? Did he get the alpha?
It was a sentiment shared by Tommy, to his right. "Did it work?"
Carl stared through the lens, holding his breath for an answer. Excitement flowed through him at the thought of the attack throwing the ghoul army into chaos, even for only a while. With a herd this size, he had to figure that it'd take some time for a new alpha to assert dominance.
He couldn't say how much time though, and that worried him.
The colonel's surprise attack had caught everyone with their pants down. He and the others hadn't planned to make their escape until well after dark. Carl worried that a new alpha ghoul might step in by the time they gathered their people and supplies together to leave. If that happened, their chances of reaching the dock dropped significantly.
At the moment, the dead were concentrating their efforts primarily on the one wall facing the parking lot. He suspected there were stray ghouls elsewhere around the fort, but their numbers were few. Dealing with them would be tricky, but they could handle it. As long as it didn't mean facing off against a force that completely surrounded them on all sides.
Carl watched carefully as the area around the explosion slowly returned to life. A few singed bodies rose again on wobbly legs, searching left and right for either an explanation of what just happened or for something to sink their teeth into. All around the blast, dozens of zombies smoldered from scorched clothes, burning hair, and blackened flesh.
The undead army collectively paused to consider the rising pillar of smoke. The red truck now burned with angry, white flames, illuminating the devastation. Through his glasses, Graves watched smoking shadows wander around it. None of them bore the striking figure of the alpha ghoul.
Between breaths, he noticed that the gunshots from Castle's wall had also fallen silent. It was as though time had frozen both sides in place until it was ready to reveal an answer.
That answer came sooner than he would have liked. Cutting through the relative stillness of hundreds of distant, murmured groans, a voice screamed in fury. It caught everyone by surprise, including Carl.
Even more surprising, the howl wasn't that of the alpha male they were expecting. It was from a woman.
"What's going on?" Tommy moaned. "Let me see."
Ignoring him, Carl scanned the devastation with the binoculars, searching for the one he presumed to be the new alpha. He spotted a long haired female in charred clothing with her fist raised in protest.
"Shit."
"What?" Tommy said. "What is it?"
This threw more than a wrench into their plans. This threw the whole damn toolbox. If the ghouls accepted a new leader that quickly, there would be no right time for them to make their escape. Their only options were to stay here and die or simply go for it and hope for the best.
As he continued to watch, the female ghoul raised her other hand. In it, she held the decapitated zombie head that her predecessor carried. Though blackened by the flames, it had otherwise escaped the detonation unharmed.
Carl pondered her ghastly prize. The ghouls were treating it like some kind of royal scepter, seemingly ready to accept any of their kind who grabbed it first as their leader. He thought back to their earlier encounter with the ghouls at the mansion, trying to remember if Camilla's corpse had touted a similar badge of supremacy. Nothing came to mind.
The alpha female raised the disfigured symbol of her authority high in the air, dangling it from its crooked spine like a blade of wheat. She howled again. This time, several ghouls bowed around her in subservience.
"Graves, let me see," Tommy whined.
Carl scowled. "Hold your water, kid."
Something about the scene rubbed him wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on what. He'd encountered these things three times before now, and not once did they carry on like this. He was used to seeing them act like a pack of wolves, but now they appeared more like a cult following their deity. The level of devotion they displayed towards one of their own felt grossly out of place.
Then it struck him. They weren't responding to the woman. They were following the bodiless ghoul she carried.
All of the pieces snapped into place with this realization. Their undead, beheaded "god" was the real commander of the ghoul legions. So long as he whispered his commands into the ears of his subjects, the most dangerous threat to everyone's safety would persist.
"We were wrong..." he muttered.
"What? What's that?" Tommy asked. "We were wrong about what?"
Carl lowered his binoculars, taking in the entire horde responding to the female ghoul's shriek. "The big zombie wasn't the alpha. Neither is she. It's the head. The one they carry. That's the voice in charge."
Tommy grimaced. He grabbed the binoculars and yanked them from Carl's grip. "Let me see."
Graves didn't bother wrestling him for a closer look. He'd seen more than enough already.
The "alpha" female bellowed, drawing more ghouls around her. Her undead generals pushed through the ranks of their mindless army, flocking to her with unquestioning loyalty.
"That face..." Tommy gasped.
"You recognize the woman?" Graves inquired.
"I recognize the head. That's Manconi's assassin. The one who shot dad."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive." Tommy lowered the binoculars and gawped at him. "I killed him myself."
"Not well enough, apparently."
Graves gazed across the field of walking corpses at the fire-lit summit happening hundreds of feet away. He'd seen this sort of behavior before from these things, during their first encounter in Mr. DiMarco's basement. The alpha was calling them back to issue new orders, changing up their strategy. That was never a good sign for anyone standing against them.
Resting on the shoulder of its new emissary, he could almost picture the horde's true leader whispering its commands into her ear. A moment later, she trumpeted them in the form of a hoarse war cry. The other ghouls in the army echoed her call, until their collective roar threatened to shake Castle's walls to rubble.
"Shit."
"What are they—?" Tommy whined.
Hundreds of ashen eyes turned to the fort. Howling with a unified wail of bloodlust and fury, ghouls and zombies alike surged forward to take on the stronghold directly. A black flood of bodies moved as one, threatening to drown every shivering soul huddled inside. The sight of the creeping death shroud rolling their way filled every man and woman on the wall with an impending sense of doom.
"Shit," Tommy parroted weakly.
"We need to find the others. Fuck the supplies," Graves said. "We need to get out of here."
He gazed at Tommy. The kid was staring out into the dark void in horror. Carl grabbed him by the shoulders and shook some sense into him.
"Now!" he screamed into his shocked features.
DENISE
Her eyes clouded with tears, Denise trudged down the steps from the fort's tower to the stark tunnels below. She couldn't take it anymore. With the violent demise of Colonel Hayes, the last thread holding her together had finally snapped.
After Lloyd took his own life, her military service was there to distract her from the overwhelming grief strangling her heart. Then the body count began to rise. The uniform became a reminder of her failures, rather than an escape from them.
She couldn't save Colonel Andrews, much less deliver justice to his killer and free Fort Weaver from his tyranny. The men and women under her command perished at the claws of monsters, and again she was powerless to save them. Nor could she save Martinez, or Lieutenant Chu, or even Charlie's dog. Now the colonel was dead too. It was getting to the point where every time she closed her eyes, all she saw was a graveyard full of faces blaming her for her incompetence.
Over the renewed clamor of gunshots ringing out from above, Denise heard the clapping of feet running up the stairs. Before she could raise her head, someone bumped into her, almost bowling her over.
The other woman facing her on the stairway had a wild look about her. She glared at Denise, presumably entertaining saying something along the lines of, "Watch where you're going." She chose to remain quiet at the last second.
Perhaps it was something in Denise's face that changed her mind. Her blank stare and deadened features, probably. Whatever it was, the woman removed the hand buried in her coat pocket and pushed on to the rooftop without exchanging a word. Denise continued on her way down, not looking back once.
She paused at the bottom of the steps to heave a deep sigh. A part of her knew that her place was back up on the wall, helping to fight off the dead. She couldn't do it. She had no fight left in her, not for anyone; herself, least of all.
A hint of movement caught her notice. She spotted a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen scrutinizing her from his hiding place by the doorway. He clutched the jamb and stared at her with eyes of dark flint.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Denise."
The boy ducked out of sight. When it became clear that she wasn't going to chase him away from the battle happening outside, he slowly reappeared.
"Lee," he replied.
"What are you doing here, Lee? Playing a game?"
He deliberated over his response for a moment, before grudgingly nodding his head.
"Is there someone looking after you? Family? Friends?" Judging by the way Lee's eyes widened at her second guess, she gathered his family had met the same fate as most everyone else's. "Friends, then. Where are they?"
Lee's gaze trailed towards the stairway.
"Ah, I see. Well, there's some scary stuff happening out there. It's not really safe for children," she said. "I'm sure they'll be down shortly. In the meantime, you should go back to your bunk where they'll be sure to find you. I could escort you, if you like. Keep you company until—"
Lee pushed away from the door jamb. Throwing her a strange look, he departed quickly, glancing back only once to make sure she wasn't following him.
"I guess not," Denise mumbled.
She watched him go, and then shot a look up the stairs. Elsewhere, the night boomed with the clamor of gunfire. Denise saw no sense in adding hers to the mix. A few extra bullets weren't going to make any difference.
The way she saw it, if the ghouls were determined to get in, they'd find a way. Regardless, the commotion from the battle would only bring something worse down on their heads. That was the way of things now. They'd fight until the end, and still the enemies would keep coming. It was a vicious cycle, one that could only end in mankind's extinction. All the bullets in the world wouldn't change that.
Denise plodded off to her bunk. Her weariness sunk to her bones. All she wanted to do was sleep and dream of simpler times in the little house she and Lloyd once called home. If she never woke up again, that would be all right too.
She didn't get farther than a couple of rooms from the tower staircase when the sharp clap of pistol fire echoed through the passageway. The sounds of battle from the wall hadn't let up once. She had grown used to it by now, enough to recognize that this shot wasn't part of the muffled rumbling seeping through the stonework.
Somebody had fired a gun from inside the fort.
Denise froze. Blocking out the noise from outside, she listened for further activity from within. Her worst fears were quickly realized when the din of running feet soon culminated in screams.
"Damn."
She pulled her Beretta from its holster. With their supply of grenades and ammo for their carbines used up, the 9mm was the best she could manage now. If those things from outside had found a way in after all, its effectiveness was limited. She'd be better off using her bullets on anyone trapped in here with them, including herself.
With this disturbing thought chasing her the whole time, Denise broke into a run in the direction of the turmoil. It wasn't hard to track down the source. More screams followed the first one, spreading further outward along Castle's passageways.
A second gunshot came from the corridor up ahead. Leaving her doubts and fears behind her, Denise poured on the speed to reach it in time.