Immediately the machinegunner sprang up and looked over the embankment next to Phillips. I joined him and had to stifle a gasp of astonishment.
There was a fog, all right, impossibly dense moor or sea fog, coming though the gateway to the Old Kingdom. It was thick, amorphous, far denser than anything I'd ever seen before, and it came rolling up to our trench. It billowed and seethed, like a rippling blanket, and I knew in my gut that this fog was not moving on it's own accord. It was somehow, some way, being guided by across the Wall.
Phillips rushed to put his gas mask on. I could see the wisdom in that. After all, it might have been some new weapon. I had heard rumors of countries down southways that were developing gas for wars, but I couldn't imagine the Old Kingdom getting their hands on that stuff..
And I was right. The machinegunner growled to Phillips. "Put that away." he said, gesturing to the gas mask. "It's harmless." he said, reaching over the lip of the embankment and brushing his hand through it. "But you should get yourself properly worried about what's in that fog, though. I've seen it once before when we crossed the Wall, and right after it settled we were ambushed." He notched up the machine gun a little further over the trench.
As the fog rolled on, enveloping first A Company's barracks, then C Company's, then finally the entire base, the electric lights around the base started to dim, the wink out, one by one, as if some unseen power was sucking both light and life from them. The tanks' ever-present engine rumble quieted, sputtered, and finally died. The tank crews shouted in alarm, but the boys in the trench stood there quietly. They had been expecting this, I realized.
My rifle had long been in my hands, and now I was gripping it like a maniac, as if it was my last hold on safety. I was acutely aware of how loud my breathing sounded, no longer covered by the electric hum of the lights.
A low fiss came from behind me, and I started, pulling the hammer down on my rifle. But to my immense and ridiculously exaggerated relief, it was only a slow burning phosphorus flare, thrown into no-mans-land for illumination. A small circle of clear ground could be seen where it burned away the fog. Others joined it, and soon the Wall was lit by a flickering candlelight from the flares. It was probably just my overactive imagination, but I thought I saw shapes moving across that Wall...
And at that moment, a slow low sound, like the echoing of a giant whistle came through the night.
"What's that?!" I yelled at the gunner, looking wildly around.
"It's the flutes." he said in amazement, looking up at the top of the Crossing Point on the wall, where several reeds had been tied on to the stone. Dark patterns that I couldn't quite make out were drawn on them.
"Make sense, damming!" I yelled, forgetting all civility and just generally being fed up with what was going on. "Flutes?!" I cried.
He pointed to the reads. "A man came up a while back. Put up those flutes. He said they were to keep the dead down.." He looked at me, and I could see astonishment in his eyes. "I've never heard them before."
The haunting pitch of the wind flutes on the Wall grew higher, higher, higher, until it was like one horribly long drawn-out scream.
I clapped my hands over my ears. Phillips and the gunner did the same.
The pitch past my hearing, but I could still feel the flutes screaming, vibrating my jaw, rattling my teeth in their sockets. Then, in an instant, the reeds, Wind Flutes, whatever, shattered, sending shards of rowan wood down upon us like confetti.
The new moon slowly emerged from behind the clouds.
From behind the Wall, there now came the sound of a constant stamp, stamp, stamp that sounded like a crowd of people, moving on our position. I readied my rifle up against the embankment. Whatever the hell came from behind that Wall... I was going to blow it's fucking brains out. Simple. That, I reasoned, would slow just about anything down.
"That's it lads." said the machinegunner, keen eyes watching the Point, waiting for the shadows and shapes behind the wall to move into range. "Keep it steady..."
Suddenly a howl erupted from behind the crossing point, and the stamping was replaced by a thunderous beat of thousands of feet.
"Steady...!"
And in they rushed.
Deformed, cankerous, loathsome, foul-smelling creatures, eyeballs missing or hanging from sockets, limbs missing or torn off. A far cry from the mock soldiers we had dispatched at basic training.
Putrescent odors boiled off them, so we could smell them before we saw them. When I did see them, they were directly in front of us. I looked at them, repulsed. Freshly dead, some almost still human, next to the rotted week-old corpses of the lately fallen. All running, running, running at us.
"FIRE!" bellowed the gunner.
The sound of fourteen forward mounted heavy machine guns all sprang to life in a single cacophony of gunshots, bullets and tracer fire. Countless more rifles opened up around us, individual shots lost in the fray.
The dead could take single rounds in them with no problem, it seemed, but 90 rounds per minute would cut them down like wheat before a scythe. The grey-eyed machinegunner was yelling something I couldn't hear, but a few seconds later, the tanks behind us opened fire.
Deep, bass BOOMS! that shook my bones echoed around me from the four tanks placed at strategic points along the trenches. The Dead that were trapped in the barbed wire were obliterated by the shells, but still, more, more, more came!
I took aim, sighted, and fired. I didn't know and didn't much care if I hit a head in that seething flow of dead flesh. Then I leaned over and started helping the gunner by feeding the yards long ammo clip from the box. I caught a glance at Phillips, yelling, almost frothing at the mouth, throwing one white powder grenade after another into the wire below. The combined acrid fumes of the fog, guns, Dead, and some sort of hot metal smell I can't describe, all bit at my nostrils, making me want to vomit. I choked back the bile and reloaded.
The gunner was screaming something at me. I stared at his once-calm grey eyes that were now livid with battle, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.
"What?" I yelled as loud as I could.
"They're flanking us!" he yelled back. He unsheathed his long bayonet, and now I could see strange marks glowing and running up and down the length of the blade. "Hold here! I'll cut them off! Man the gun!"
And with that, he dashed off down the trenchworks to the east of the wall, where already the sheer force of numbers of the dead had broken through the lines. The men down there were fighting hand to hand. I didn't envy them.
Suddenly I felt very alone. I had come to understand that the grey-eyed man – I had never asked his name, I realized with a shock – as a sort of protector of me and Phillips. He seemed to know what he was doing, and I didn't. I felt very lost.
Something hard and heavy hit me on my right shoulder. I was Phillips' fist.
He was trying to get my attention. He looked at my shock, and bellowed at me in a voice I didn't know that old sardonic Phillips could make.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Evans?!" he roared with an incredulous fury. "Light up those bloody fucking things with the machine gun!"
He scrambled over, nearly plowing me over with this tin plated hat, and started feeding a new strip of ammunition on to the old. I grabbed the heavy gun, feeling with my hands for the trigger. The Dead were all most on us now, climbing over their fellows who had fallen on the wire. One of them turned it's misshapen, diseased head toward us, and started to make for the pit. I fumbled. Where was the trigger?!
The dead thing had climbed the embankment. I was now looking directly into it's one remaining eye, blankly staring at me. It let out a howl of sick delight.
I suddenly remember the look that the dark haired girl and I had shared. It came to me, as I crouched here, knowing I was about to die.
I'm sorry.
My desperate finger found the trigger.
The gun leapt back and up with a mighty roar, blasting chunks of meat off the corpse. In the next second, my shoulder was slammed with the butt of the gun five times which felt like a hammer on my bones. I looked up-
And saw the creature still coming for me! I saw that the hole in it's midsection hadn't stopped it, only slowed it down. The body of the Dead thing had fallen on the gun, a dinner-plate sized hole where it's stomach should have been, and the thing had fallen onto the muzzle of the gun with a soft, sickening squelch. It shrieked an inhuman squeal at the heat the metal was giving off, with the friction of every bullet adding a little more.
"Phillips!" I yelled hysterically. "Why won't this bastard die?!"
Phillips, with a great presence of mind of which I will always remember him by, looked up from the ammunition pile and at the thing on the gun. He stared at it for what seemed like a very long time, and at last reached into his satchel and whipped out his newly charmed bayonet like a knife, slicing the thing across the throat. It gave a horrible howl of pain and dark blood spilled everywhere, coating my hands with sticky, half-clotted gunk. It fell back, off of the muzzle, and straight into the hail of bullets coming from the machine gun, which blew it to pieces.
I think I lost it then. I started screaming and spraying bullets wildly left and right with the machine gun, but there were still too many of the Dead. They were now on the sides of the embankment, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they climbed up into the foxhole and ripped me and Phillips from limb to limb.
I looked down at Phillips, still threading ammunition into the gun. "PHILLIPS!" I yelled. "WE CAN'T HOLD OUT HERE MUCH LONGER!" I didn't know if he could hear me or not. "WHEN. I. STOP. FIRING. MAKE. A. RUN. FOR. IT!"
He looked up at me, and I saw him going over what I had said in his head. In a surprising display of calmness, he said. "Sounds good!" Maybe the shell-shock had turned the man back into the Phillips I knew.
I counted to myself. Waited to till I had shot the dead off the embankment, and counted...
The tanks had stopped firing, I noted absently.
One...
The machine guns were also going silent for some reason.
Two...
One by one, the ear-defining sounds of man-made weapons were dying. As were the men. I could now hear them screaming. The howls of men and Dead, fighting hand to hand with each other.
Two-and-a-half...
My own gun died. The hammer kept clicking down, but the round wouldn't fire. I figured it was about time for-
THREE!
I jumped off the machine gun and immediately collapsed on the ground, jelly-legged. Philips grabbed me up and hoisted me over his shoulder to carry. My right shoulder felt like it had been jarred out of it's socket by the recoil of the machine gun, and my arm wouldn't heal for a couple of days, if I managed to get out of this to live those couple days. Had to admit the chances of that were looking very bad. Extremely bad. Phillips-getting-a-date-with-a-member-of-the-opposite-sex bad.
But say what you will about his oddly-shaped nose and garlic-y breath, Phillips was a man and a half that day. He charged down the trenchline, myself limping along, with the strength of an ox. I sort of did a panicky tread in the air, even though I told my legs that they weren't really doing their job. A hundred yards away, he stopped for a breath. The fog had collected in the trenchline to form a deep, murky soup that I saw Phillips with effort exhaling from his lungs. He set me down on the side of the trench with my head above the denser fog.
Behind us I could still hear the men fighting for their lives up in the perimeter trenches. It was almost pitch-black now, and almost none of the flares that had illuminated the Wall were still shining through the thick haze. To the east of us, I saw a flash and the slow, steady, desperate BOOM BOOM BOOM of the last tank firing its shells. Then it stopped. What would happen to the men inside the tank? I figured I didn't want to know.
I suddenly sat up with a start, and took a sharp breath, choking on the fog. I could hear the last men fighting out in the trenches.
"Phillips!" I breathed. "There are still men back there! We have to help them! We're, we're... deserters, Phillips!" I grabbed at his shoulder madly, pointing back towards the network of trenches, vainly trying to pull him.
Phillips stood there as solid as a rock and looked at me if I had just turned into a walking, talking stoat.
"Have you gone completely mad?" he shouted loudly and incredulously, his ears still not adjusted from the constant machine gun fire. "Deserters?" he asked, as if I were a large, walking, talking stoat in a bun with a side order of fries. "We barely fucking got out of there with our skins, mate! You want to ruin that?"
"Yes, but the men-" I started weakly.
"The men back there." He said, matter-of-factly "Are either dying, dead, or both. The only way we're not going to become Grade-A fucking zombie kibble is to keep our heads down, and get as far away from all this as possible."
He had a point. And I hated him for it. I hated the whole bloody situation.
"Right." I said, getting up, knees wobbling back and forth. "Right." I said again, trying to think of something to say next. "First things first. We've got to get out of here. From what I can tell, all the motors have died out for some reason. Unless we find a couple of bikes, we'll have to leg it."
From behind us came a marrow-freezing howl. I was sure that there was nothing worth dying for to save behind us.
"Well that's your incentive!" said Phillips, slightly sarcastic and visibly shaken. "C'mon!"