It was like something out of a movie. Conner couldn't stop thinking that as he sprinted toward the edge of the secured area with Farley and Dorn at his side. The sound of gunfire drowned out almost everything else. The tank he had seen earlier let off a massive BOOM every time it fired its main gun, cutting massive swaths in the horde of walking corpses as they approached. Officers were shouting orders, shell casings clinked against the concrete of the road as soldiers fired, and great explosions spit out flames and showered nearby soldiers in dirt and debris
Everyone was shouting. "Fire in the hole!" "Left flank, left flank!" "MEDIC!" "I'm out, get me some ammo!" Many of these calls were cut short, some being drowned out due to the noise, others ending alongside the life of their owner. It was disorienting, overwhelming. He couldn't make sense of any of it as he, Dorn, and Farley maneuvered through the chaos.
Finally reaching the eastern edge of the perimeter, one of the combatants stopped firing and looked at them. He had a deep scar running down the left side of his face, ending at his jawline, and bright blue eyes that contrasted sharply with the dark green camouflage patterns on his helmet. "I don't recognize you," he rasped, " You ain't from this platoon."
Farley responded while Conner and Dorn took up positions and began firing. "We just got here. The Cavalry has arrived." Relieved, the scarred man stood up and put his hand on Farley's shoulder in a gesture of gratitude. The rest of his squad stopped firing as well and turned to look at their reinforcements. Farley brushed the man's hand away and shrugged. "No need to thank us, saving the day is just what we do."
Scarface pulled his sidearm out of his holster and fired it directly into Farley's chest.
Scarface yelled at the top of his lungs while Farley collapsed, struggling to breathe and clutching at his chest. "New meat just arrived! That means we've got a way out of this insane asylum, boys! Let's book it!" In unison, Scarface's squad grabbed their rifles and fled, dashing back the way Conner, Dorn, and Farley had come from. An entire section of the line, originally intended for ten men, was now manned by only three.
"Jesus Christ! Dorn, help him!" Dorn rushed to Farley, groaning in pain on the ground, while Conner stayed at his post. The field in front of him, once a lush green pasture beside the road broken occasionally by a tree or two, looked like an old World War Two picture. Shell craters were everywhere, bodies lay strewn throughout the once peaceful field, and severed body parts were scattered as far as the eye could see. Through it all, the horde marched toward him, unyielding in the face of overwhelming firepower, driven by a single minded determination to kill, to eat, to turn.
Conner pulled the trigger as quickly as he could, sending as many of these creatures back to whatever dark abyss they crawled out from. For every one he killed, two more seemed to crawl over its body and take its place. He let his training take over, as he'd been taught in boot camp. He detached, letting his body go through the motions without thinking.
A yelp of pain from beside him snapped him out of his trance, and he finally saw just how close the corpses were. In a minute, maybe less, they had closed the distance he'd been trying to hold. Without Scarface or his squad holding down their position, the horde had managed to advance the last few yards to the barriers. They were reaching over the wall and into nearby vehicles, spilling over in ones and twos. The soldier manning the machine gun on one of the Humvees nearby was being yanked out by the collar of his uniform, and dragged over the side of the vehicle into the waiting hands of the undead. The driver panicking, slammed down on the gas pedal as the dead swarmed his vehicle. The Humvee shot away from its position on the barricade as the driver made a futile attempt to escape, opening a wide hole in the barricade. The gap it left in the perimeter was the final nail in the coffin for Checkpoint Echo.
The dead surged through, a tidal wave of rotting flesh and hungry faces. Conner turned his toward the breach, eyes wide with fear, and held down the trigger. His assault rifle shredded the first dozen corpses that came through with fully automatic death, bullets tearing flesh from bone, blowing holes clean through the reanimated bodies as they lurched toward him. The empty click of his rifle seemed deafening as the final bullet left the weapon and the horde advanced unchallenged. He frantically searched for Dorn and Farley, but they had disappeared. Taking one look back at the horde pouring into the Checkpoint, he did the only thing he could do. He ran.
