The Eternity Legion
Book One: The Gathering
By J.C. Lords (jclord96@aol.com)
Copyright and Trademark Disclaimer (Long)
Alien and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Fox and related entities.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Fox and related entities.
Star Trek and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Paramount Pictures.
Highlander and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Rysher Entertainment.
Xena Warrior Princess, Hercules the Legendary Journeys and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Universal Pictures and/or MCA Universal and/or Renaissance Pictures.
The Riftwar, Serpent War and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Raymond E. Feist.
Terminator and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Carolco.
Doc Savage and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Conde Nash Publications Inc.
Indiana Jones and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Lucasfilms, Ltd.
Star Wars and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of Lucasfilms, Ltd.
Sliders and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of St Clair Entertainment and/or MCA Universal and/or USA Networks.
Charmed and associated characters, concepts and names are @ copyright and ® trademarks of WB Television Network and/or Aaron Spelling.
The Stand, and Home Delivery and associated characters, concepts and names are @ Stephen King
Walker Texas Ranger and associated characters, concepts and names are @ and ® trademarks of Columbia Tri-Star
Blade and associated characters, concepts and names are @ and ® trademarks of Marvel Comics.
Chapter Five: To Do or Die
Buffy was having a profoundly crappy day.
Her "Vamp-dar" (Xander's term) had gone off the moment she'd seen Blade, but the readings were kind of muddled. Vampire, but not quite a vampire. She figured Giles would love to interview him and figure out how it was possible to be half-human, and half-Undead. Fortunately, there'd been no time for that -- yet. For a fleeting moment, Buffy wondered if she and Angel could have… Better drop that line of thought, she told herself. No time to delve into Buffy's Vault of Romantic Horror.
"You should focus your thoughts," Obi Wan whispered behind her. "Don't let negative emotions distract you now."
"Sure. Whatever. Just don't call me Grasshopper," Buffy replied. She was not in the mood for fortune cookie wisdom right now. Obi Wan shook his head, but said nothing else.
She, Blade and Obi-Wan were on point, leading the rest of the group. Dr. Jones had discovered the secret door leading to the tunnels beneath the museum. Tomas, who wasn't exactly dressed for sneakiness -- gold chain mail was not exactly Ninja-wear -- brought up the rear, with the rest of Team Two sandwiched in between. So far, there were no bad guys in sight.
"Duck!" Obi-Wan shouted. No flies on Buffy -- she ducked.
Gunfire erupted from the end of the tunnel. Bullets cracked over her head. Someone behind her shouted in pain. An agent had been hit!
"Let's go!" Blade said, and charged the shooters.
He's crazy! Buffy thought, but followed.
Obi-Wan somersaulted ahead of them, his lightsaber out and glowing like a beacon. He moved with unearthly speed, catching bullets out of thin air. Unlike energy beams, the bullets could not be deflected back towards their attackers, but they were neatly vaporized by the touch of the energy blade.
Blade ran, using speed and momentum to actually run on the side of the tunnel for several seconds, spraying the attackers with automatic fire. Buffy followed Obi-Wan. All she had was a crossbow -- she really wasn't a gun bunny.
The ambushing party had set up in a cross tunnel. Buffy spotted one of them aiming a big tube at Obi-Wan -- a rocket launcher of some sort.
"On no you don't!" she said. The would-be rocketeer staggered back, a crossbow bolt right through his heart. The vampire didn't explode into dust; Buffy had been warned not all vampires in the Multiverse did that when they died. But he also didn't shoot, which was the important thing.
Between Blade and Obi-Wan, the three of them reached the shooters, and the fight turned into hand to hand affair -- just the way Buffy liked it. Buffy punched faces, kneed groins, and staked hearts. This brand of Undead were strong and tough, but she was a Slayer, and she was the best at what she did. Although
Blade's moves were not half-bad, either. And Obi-Wan…
The Jedi was a killing machine -- the light saber sliced, diced and made Julienne fries out the vampires. He rolled, ducked under a point-blank burst of automatic fire, and thrust his energy blade right into the heart of a vampire. Another one tried to stab him in the back with a wicked-looking knife. Buffy's kick took his head off even as Obi-Wan stabbed backwards and ran him through. Buffy whirled, ready for her next opponent. There were none. Blade rose over the last bloody corpse. "This is it."
The Slayer turned towards the other agents. They were surrounding a figure lying on the ground. She rushed past them.
"Giles?"
The Watcher was on the ground, clutching his chest.
"Giles!"
The Enterprise tried to twist away from the path of the moon-sized monster. It didn't quite make it.
A head-on collision would have probably destroyed the ship. It managed to avoid that, but a lashing miles-long tentacle struck it.
One moment, Picard had been on the command chair. On the next, he found himself lying dazedly by a fire control console -- on the other side of the bridge. Blood was running down the side of his face, and his vision was blurry.
He forced himself to sit up, overcoming the pain and the nausea from the head blow. "Status!" he shouted out.
"Aft shields out," Data reported with dispassionate coldness. "Hull breaches on decks eleven and fourteen. Aft nacelle damaged, down to 10% capacity. Casualties…"
"… will have to wait," Picard said. Without shields, the hull breach meant death for anyone unlucky enough to be there. At least twenty, perhaps as many as forty crewmembers had been ejected into space. His heart cried out for the dead, but he kept his emotions buried, and tried to stand up. A battered Worf helped the
Captain to his feet. He saw Riker lying still on the floor. Dr. Bashir was looking him over. "Severe concussion, internal injuries. We need to beam him to sickbay!"
"Transporters are off-line," Data said.
All the crewmembers had the protection rings provided by the Eternity Legion. Without them, Picard was sure half of the crew would have been killed or severely injured by the impact. As it was…
"What's our heading and position?" Picard asked. He half-walked, half-limped, with Worf's help, back to his command chair.
"We have managed to evade the main body of the creature," Data reported. "The smaller symbionts are closing in. At our current speed, they will overtake us in under 5 minutes."
"Weapons?"
"Off-line."
"Picard to Engineering! Giordi, we need power to the shields and weapons!"
Giordi's voice, sounding tense, almost panicked, came back through the comm system. "Impossible, Captain! I just barely managed to prevent a containment field breach in the matter-antimatter reactor! It's going to take me several minutes to put things back together down here!"
Riker writhed into semi-consciousness. Troy leaned over him, ignoring her own bruises, and held his hand tightly. "Try to stay awake, Will."
"Battle… stations…" Will said weakly.
"Picard to all personnel! Prepare to repel boarders. Repeat, prepare to repel boarders!"
On the screen, the worm creatures got closer and closer.
"This is bad," Quinn Mallory said. He'd been in tight spots before, but this one was in his personal Top Ten list, easy.
The original plan called for them Sliding in, holding off the zombies for a few minutes -- one hour, tops -- and then beaming up to the Enterprise, with all the refugees on tow.
"Say again, Enterprise," he spoke into the comm badge. Maybe he hadn't heard right.
Giordi's voice came back distorted, and broken up. "Ship damaged… not beam up… hours…" The communication was cut short.
"Great. Just great," Quinn said. He looked up and surveyed the scene around him.
The horizon was chock-full of zombies. There must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them. They were advancing from every direction, still some distance away, but getting closer and closer.
Arnold and Doc Savage were setting up the weapons they had brought down. Two high-power phaser cannons; a mini-gun and 10,000 rounds of ammunition; a field mortar with energy grenades, and enough guns and normal grenades to arm a regiment, or close to it. The leader of the community, some Ranger named Walker, was distributing the weapons amongst the men and women of the community. Quinn, Gabrille and Wade also had phasers; Wade was carrying a light saber as well. Xena and Hercules had their traditional weapons, plus a couple of phasers. At least this mission allowed them to use energy weapons.
It wasn't going to be enough. Not if they didn't start beaming people up now, and that wasn't going to happen.
"Er, Xena?" Quinn called out. Xena was the nominal leader of Team Three.
The warrior princess walked over; she, Gabrielle and Hercules had been organizing people into small groups to be beamed up. "Yes?"
"Uh, the Enterprise cannot start transporting people just yet." He explained about the garbled transmission.
Xena's face grew grim and determined. "Then we'll have to hold here until they can."
"I don't know if you've noticed there are a million zombies out there," Quinn snapped.
"We hold, or we die, Quinn. Sometimes, life can be that simple."
"Take us toward the main body of the entity," Pug said.
Qui-Gon nodded grimly. The shuttle darted towards the huge mass that was Wormwood.
"Please tell me you're joking," Phoebe said.
"We have no choice," Miranda replied. "We have to hurt the creature, distract it somehow, or it will engulf the Enterprise and all aboard."
"All right, all right," Phoebe relented. Piper walked behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It'll be okay," she said. Prue sat quietly, leafing through the Book of Shadows. They needed some powerful magic, and fast.
Qui-Gon let the Force guide him through the wave of worm creatures swarming over the craft. The foulness ahead and around them was the direct opposite of everything he stood for. He had to hurt it badly somehow… "I have an idea." He sketched the plan quickly, even as he piloted through a cloud of worms.
"The timing will be critical," Pug commented. "A second off, and we will die in the process."
"If need be," Qui-Gon replied. Pug looked into the Jedi Knight's eyes and found a strength of purpose the likes of which he had never seen. He dipped his head, a gesture of agreement, and of respect.
And perhaps a farewell as well.
"If Wormwood disrupts the spells or knocks the ship off course, we'll all die," Prue said. She looked at her sisters. For the last six months, she had felt they were living on borrowed time. None of their hosts had commented on it, but it was clear many agents had been rescued from certain death. In a way, then, they were already dead.
"I guess we'll just have to risk it," Piper replied.
"Just a scratch," Rupert Giles said, brushing off the hands of their friends. "Let me stand up, if you please." He staggered to his feet.
"Giles, you're bleeding!" Buffy said.
"So I am," Giles said, looking at the red stain on his chest. "But…" He reached into the wound -- and pulled out a deformed slug with his fingers. "The import of the wound, like reports of my demise, have been greatly exaggerated."
"I guess those force fields really work," McLeod said. "The bullet barely had enough energy left to pierce your skin."
"I'm quite sure I'll feel more pain come morning," Giles said. "Now, let's return to the task at hand." He sounded vaguely embarrassed by all the attention.
"There is a second group of vampires deeper in the tunnel," Obi-Wan reported. "They will try to ambush us." Seeing the inquiring look of the rest of the agents, he explained. "I can sense the disturbance in the Force."
"Oh, that makes everything crystal clear," Buffy said sarcastically.
"How far?" Blade asked. "The vampires. How far?"
"About one hundred yards. Two groups of five or six each, I believe, positioned on both sides of the corridor at a crossroads."
"You people might want to cover your ears," Blade said. He picked up the rocket launcher.
"Wait," McLeod said. "What are you…"
Buffy covered her ears.
Blade fired a rocket down the corridor.
The resulting explosion was fairly loud, and pieces of the tunnel were shaken loose. Dust and smoke blinded everyone.
"Watch it!" Indy shouted. "You can bring down the whole…"
Blade had reloaded the launcher. He fired again.
This time, whole chunks of tunnel fell down. A basketball-sized piece bounced off Buffy's head. "Hey!" she cried out, more startled than hurt -- the force field protected from the worst of it.
"I'm coming to get you suckers!" Blade shouted, dropping the spent rocket launcher and charging forward.
"When this is over," McLeod said, dusting himself off. "I'm going to have a talk with the lad."
"Get in line," Buffy said. "And the line starts with me." Blade was not a team player, apparently.
Although from the sounds up ahead, he had taken care of the ambush pretty well.
"Come on, guys!" Buffy shouted. "We can't let him hog all the vampires!" She ran towards the sound of the fighting.
Blind and drifting dead in the water, the Enterprise was soon covered in writhing wormlike creatures. The monsters crawled on the surface of the ships. They secreted a powerful acid that burned through walls and bulkheads. In small groups, they entered the ship, searching for live flesh to feast upon.
The surviving crewmembers and the Eternity agents onboard prepared to do battle.
"Here they come," Annalee Call said. She was an android, but she could feel fear. The internal wall started to smoke and sizzle. A manhole-size section started to melt.
"Looks familiar, doesn't it?" Ripley said. Not the same acid of her alien brethren -- she could smell the differences, but similar enough to bring out the strange combination of hatred and longing contact with aliens seemed to inspire in her nowadays.
Call raised a phaser pistol and fired as the first worm jumped in. The beam of energy spread the creature into its component atoms. Others followed.
Ripley reached past Call and caught one of the worm-things -- about the size of a garden snake, but able to fly even in the artificial gravity of the Enterprise -- before it could sink its head into the android's neck. She tore the thing in two with her bare hands, angling each half so the acid did not spray back towards her or her friend. Another blow sent another worm spinning into a wall.
Call switched to wide-beam and burned all the worms, and a whole section of the interior wall. "Oh, shit!" she cried out in dismay.
The hull beyond the wall was covered with holes, and dozens -- hundreds of the worms were crawling through them. The only reason they were not being sucked into space was that the structural force fields must be back on line. She aimed her phaser, then realized she had exhausted its power.
"You should get down now," a voice said behind them. Ripley grabbed Call and hit the deck.
A phaser rifle set on wide beam sprayed the hull for a full thirty seconds. All the worms on the walls were consumed.
Ripley and Call looked at their savior. It was Sherlock Holmes, dressed in his old-fashioned clothing and Inverness hat, the phaser rifle clashing decidedly with his clothing and demeanor. "I have been traveling through the service tunnels that honeycomb this vessel," he explained. "They provide some measure of protection against the invaders, and allows rapid movement through much of the ship."
"Let's get there, then," Ripley said. Holmes led them to the maintenance tunnels, reloading his phaser. "I was looking for reinforcements, as a matter of fact," he continued, seemingly unfazed by the carnage around him. "I fear the creatures may try to attack the… boiler room, or whatever equivalent this ship has, to finish crippling her."
"That makes sense," Call said. "We should get to the engine room. I can get us there."
The three agents started crawling through the narrow opening, even as more worms entered the ship.
"Report," Picard said, dreading what would follow.
The bridge was clouded by smoke and shrouded in the twilight hues of the emergency lighting system. Several worms had attacked the bridge, and been beaten back by a combination of phaser fire and desperate hand to hand fighting. One third of the bridge crew was dead or severely injured.
"I have restored the structural and atmospheric shields," Giordi reported from Engineering. "Just in time, or we would have lost half of our air -- the ship is riddled with holes."
"How about protective shields? Weapons?"
"I should be able to jury-rig something in five minutes. We came up with an unconventional way to reroute power and bypass the damaged plasma flux modulators. We…"
"Try to do it in three minutes, Giordi," Picard interrupted. No time to hear the details; he had many other things in his mind.
"Mr. Worf?"
"The creatures have taken over Deck Three, Captain," Worf replied. "Security has contained them there with a portable shield generator and heavy phaser weapons. We have sustained over a hundred casualties, sixty-three of them fatalities. There are multiple other breaches, but the creatures are not present in large numbers yet. We have been able to fight them off, for now."
"They are killing my crew!" Picard snapped. "We need power!"
Five minutes, even three, might be an eternity.
On they came, in the dawn's early light, the horde of the walking dead.
Xena had fought many battles, but never had the odds been so uneven. Less than a hundred fighting men -- including the Eternity Agents -- against as many as a million, perhaps more, walking dead. Ten thousand to one.
The first blows were struck when the creatures were still over a mile away. Doc Savage fired the phaser cannon, on wide beam. It struck the massed creatures like a water stream cutting through sand. He fired a long burst, moved the weapon to another section of the camp, fired, moved it again, fired. Thousands of the creatures were vaporized. In a few moments, some ten thousand Undead ceased to be.
"We have one power cell left," Doctor Savage reported.
"Save it for when they get close," Xena ordered. She was the informal leader of the group. Arnold had more experience, but had the leadership abilities of an inanimate object. Besides, Xena was familiar with the capabilities of the new weapons they had -- familiar enough to know she didn't like them worth a damn.
She patted the sword at her side. She had the feeling it would come down to cold steel, eventually.
The zombie horde pressed on, uncaring of the horrible damage the phaser had inflicted.
Xena turned to Arnold. "Start with the mortar. Concentrate on maximum casualties, slow fire until they reach 800 yards." The Terminator nodded, and started to rain death upon the Undead.
The warrior princess turned her back on the enemy and toured the camp. After the initial surprise and elation at the agents' arrival, the survivors had been shocked to learn that rescue was not at hand quite yet. Some had just collapsed, unable to bear any more strain. Others were working doubly hard, setting up an interior barricade and obstacles, trying to improve the fortifications and buy the group more time.
A girl caught her eye. She was walking through the camp, pitching in organizing people, both children and adults, encouraging everybody to work harder. The
girl walked to a man who had collapsed into a sobbing mess. She whispered something in his ear, and the man stood up, wiped his eyes, and went back to work.
"That's Liz Delgado," Walker said behind her. "She has helped us pull together more than once since this madness began."
"She must be very special," Xena said, thinking of another girl, in another time, in another world. A girl who had seen her parents killed, and who had turned into a monster. Xena had turned that little girl into a monster. Perhaps if she could save this child, she might start to atone for that crime.
"They all are," Walker said in a low voice. He looked Xena in the eye. "They cannot be allowed to get through."
"They won't," Xena replied. "Not while we are alive."
Walker seemed satisfied. Xena recognized a fellow warrior in the man, someone who would could be killed but not defeated.
"They won't get through," Xena declared.
The tunnel had become narrower, a twisting, almost organic structure. Duncan McLeod had the uncomfortable feeling of being inside a living thing, as if the Eternity Agents had descended into the belly of some colossal beast.
Three times, vampires wielding guns had attacked. Three times, they had beaten them. Tomas' gilded chain mail was smudged, his helmet gone. The human-Vallheru hybrid had survived a near miss from a rocket launcher. Duncan had never seen anything like it before.
They were getting closer. Duncan could feel something lurking on the edge of his Immortal-sharp senses, like an unpleasant if barely audible buzzing gnawing at his mind. All the agents were feeling it; the small group was silent and tense. The agents advanced, ready for trouble.
Vampires exploded from the walls around them.
The creatures had somehow blended with the walls of the tunnel. Magic, or some unknown Undead power? McLeod had neither the time nor the inclination to wonder -- he was too busy fighting for his life. At close quarters, the Undead were not using guns; instead, it was a fight to the knife, claw or tooth.
Duncan shifted the grip of his katana, blocked a wicked knife slash, and neatly decapitated a vampire. On the backstroke, he severed the neck of a second Undead that had knocked Rembrandt down and was trying to bite the Slider's throat. He turned around.
All the vampires were down, except one, a tall, powerful creature, clearly the leader of the pack. As Duncan watched, Blade and Buffy attacked it at the same time. There was a brief flurry of movement, and the vampire fell.
"I think that was the last one," Buffy said. She turned to Blade. "Thanks for the assist."
Blade grinned. "No, thank you for the assist."
From the darkness, someone started applauding slowly. The banter ceased, and the agents turned and faced the approaching noise.
A man in a denim jacket, jeans and work books stepped from outside the shadows. "Not too shabby," he said. "I'm disappointed in Hugo and his gang. I really thought they would be able to hold you off longer. Oh, well. When you need something done right, you've got to do it yourself."
Duncan's senses flashed a warning. This man was neither vampire nor Immortal. He was something worse.
"I'll handle him," Tomas said. He strode forward, sword in hand.
The dark man grinned at him.
Tomas froze. He shuddered for a few moments. And turned around, to face the other agents.
His face was twisted, full of rage.
"Your friend has some issues," the dark man explained. "He's part human, and part something else. All it took was a little push, and now he's one hundred percent something else." The grin widened. "And now he's going to chop all you of into dogmeat."
Duncan had talked with Tomas and his companions a couple of times. He'd heard the tale of the Vallheru, the ancient immortal race of conquerors and destroyers, utterly devoid of mercy or compassion, cruel to a fault. Tomas had been able to exorcise all the mental attributes of the Vallheru, while retaining the physical ones.
No longer. The man was gone, and the monster remained.
With a wordless cry of rage, Tomas attacked his companions.
"We are on the final approach," Qui-Gon reported.
"Did you have to say final?"
"Hush, Phoebe," Piper said. "Let's do it." The three sisters started chanting a spell. At the same time, Pug and Amanda released a different incantation.
The shuttlecraft, under Qui-Gon's control, dodged a giant tentacle and came closer to the twisting, boiling surface of Wormwood. The vessel was surrounded in a red shield of mystical power. The myriad of worm creatures that now flocked too close to avoid exploded in flames whenever they touched the shield, and yet they still kept coming.
"Destroy the Destroyer, by the Power of Three," the Halliwells chanted.
Qui-Gon fired the ship's phasers at full power, searing the flesh of the planet-sized creature. "Locking ship on course," he announced.
The Halliwell sisters released the spell, focusing all their power. The shuttlecraft shuddered. Where the phasers had merely burned and pitted the surface, the
spell blasted a huge crater into the alien flesh of the monster. The sisters collapsed, exhausted.
Qui-Gon activated the ship transporters, and beamed them into the Enterprise. He hoped things at the Enterprise were not as desperate as they seemed.
"We're next," he said, leaving the piloting station. The ship had its instruction. Its matter-antimatter reactor was set to self-destruct, even as its propulsion system went into warp. The resulting explosion would shatter a starship.
"Our spell should magnify the explosion a hundredfold," Pug said. "Let's go."
No time for transporters; Miranda opened a dimensional portal, and the three stepped even as the ship hit.
Dark energy roared after them, followed them into the gate.
The last thing Qui-Gon heard was Pug's scream of pain.
Darkness.
"Worms!"
They charged without warning -- they emerged from a blood-covered turbolift -- a dozen of them, six feet long, half a foot wide, swimming through the air like
demonic snakes. One of them speared through Ensign Kivak. The Vulcan crewmember's limbs and head were flung away in five different directions, spraying
blood everywhere.
Giordi grabbed his phaser, blasted one of them seconds before it reached him. Another worm tore through the three men of the Security contingent killing all of
them before they could fire a shot. Giordi and the rest of the engineers ducked for cover, opened fire with their personal weapons. They had to be careful, though
-- a bad shot with a phaser in this section, and they were all dead anyway.
And he had been so close… "Cover me!" he shouted to the terrified engine crew. "I need to finish the reset sequence!" Without waiting for a response, he
returned to his workstation. "Come on, come on…" His fingers flew over the keypad. Redlined systems started flashing green. "Just a little more…"
Someone screamed horribly just a few yards away. He forced himself to ignore the sound.
A phaser fired only inches away. He heard a loud thud, a grunt of effort, and a tearing sound. "Watch out, Ripley!" A loud whack, the sound of a heavy body
smashing into a computer desk.
Finished. All vital systems on line.
"Computer!" Giordi shouted. "Lock on transporters on all unidentified life forms on the ship."
"Patterns locked. Warning. The number of unidentified life forms is greater than the safe memory capacity of the transporter banks."
"Override safety protocols!" Giordi rattled off his authorization code, fully aware now of the life and death struggle going on around him. Call and Ripley, who had
come from who-knows-where, were each wrestling with a worm creature. Ripley was winning her fight. Call's left arm had been chewed clean off, and her
synthetic yellow "blood" was flowing freely from the torn limb. "Convert all life forms into transporter patterns, NOW!"
The worms were surrounded by the transporter energy nimbus, and disappeared.
"Specify destination," the computer asked petulantly.
"Hell," Giordi muttered.
"Invalid destination."
"No destination. Computer, initialize transporter memory banks."
"Warning: all patterns in memory banks will be lost."
"Exactly," Giordi said with a savage expression. "Erase them from existence. Wipe them out."
"Memory banks initialized. 12,421 patterns have been erased."
All the worms inside the ship had been converted into energy and then consigned to oblivion. The shields were up again, so no more creatures could get
aboard. It could not make up for all the death and destruction the Enterprise had endured.
But it was a start.
The Cyberdine T-100 opened fire.
The minigun, a Gatling style five-barreled machinegun, was not a good infantry weapon. It was too heavy, and it consumed ammo too quickly. It worked best a
vehicle-mounted weapon.
In the hands of the Terminator, however, it was the ultimate assault rifle.
The Terminator fired precise, controlled bursts. His optic sensors were able to predict shot spreads and impact points to within a quarter of an inch. Every burst
destroyed 8.45 targets. Every long-burst at close range destroyed 63.5 targets, on the average.
He was firing long bursts now.
By his calculations, the enemy army had lost 174,700 units, plus or minus fifty. That still left an approximate 789,300 enemy units, plus or minus a hundred. The
leading elements were already within two hundred yards. Everybody in the camp who had a gun was firing now. The Eternity agents were using their phaser
pistols, running back and forth to shoot at any concentration of zombies that got too close. And the T-100 "Arnold" was using up the last of the minigun's ammo,
holding an entire quadrant by himself.
The rotating barrels spun empty. All the ammunition was gone.
Arnold dropped the gun, pulled out two sub-machineguns. Fire. Reload. Fire.
Leading enemy units: 100 yards.
The enemy had lost an additional 5,215 units, but they would soon reach the camp. The razor wire would further delay and hinder them, but not stop them. The
Terminator estimated the camp's defenders would exhaust their ammunition in 5.5 minutes, plus or minus 30 seconds.
Fire. Reload. A sub-machinegun started overheating. Arnold threw it at the enemy. The gun spun in the air like a hatchet and split open the head of a walking
corpse. Down to handguns now. Arnold drew two .45 automatics. Each shot claimed a head.
Walker came up to the position, a shotgun in hand. He started firing as Arnold reloaded. "Figured you could use a hand," Walker said.
"My efficiency has been diminished by the lack of ammo," the T-100 explained.
"Yeah, it's happening to all of us."
Walker left the strange killing-machine guy at his post and surveyed the camp. People everywhere were waving around useless guns. Even the newcomers
seemed to have run out of whatever powered those ray guns of theirs.
"Pull back to the inner works!" he ordered. "We'll try to hold them at the wire for a while!"
'We' were him, Trivette, a handful of men with axes and baseball bats, and the strangers. A couple of them were firing the last few blasts of their ray guns. If
Walker hadn't been so worried about other things, he might have wondered about them. Now, all he cared about was not letting the creatures get past him.
Even when one of the girls in the new group activated a sword made out of pure energy, he didn't pay much attention.
The zombies were at the wire. The first few hundred of them got caught and tangled over them. The others started climbing over their bodies.
Walker started swinging his shotgun by the barrel, crushing skulls, knocking back monsters. A few steps away, Xena threw a spinning disk -- which beheaded
half a dozen zombies before spinning back to her hand. In all his years as a martial artist and Ranger, Walker had never seen such a thing. But he didn't have
time to appreciate or wonder at the move. The zombies were crawling over the razor wire, crushing their brethren under their weight.
The broke the shotgun on the head of one, kicked, punched, spun away, kicked. Half a dozen down, a million to go.
A hand grabbed his ankle, pulled. He fell on his back
The undead swarmed over him.
To be continued…