SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

But then Brainpan edged back, his eyes rolling as he glanced at me. Twinkle yelled something animalistic, a split second before he was yanked bodily into the surging wave of inhumanity that swept towards us. There was the briefest attempt at fighting back, Twinkle’s carbine snapping off a short burst, and then the timbre of his yelling changed to bleats of terror. His last scream was ripped in two along with his body.

“Twinkle’s down,” I yelled, and propped my M4 to my shoulder, filling the gap he’d left with a hail of rounds.

Brainpan was still backpedalling. “Get the fuck out, Muppet! There’s no stopping them.”

He was right. For all that my rounds punched into bodies, scattered gobs of bloody meat and bone in all directions, the tsunami of bodies advancing along the corridor came on as if untroubled. For the first time I got a clear view of the mass of limbs and torsos through my Oakleys and knew I’d be as well trying to hold it back with a pea shooter.

“Fall back!” Hooky’s order was rhetoric; I was already backing up alongside Brainpan. We fired, but we were wasting rounds.

“Shoot them in the fucking head,” Hooky commanded.

I did, but it was advice he’d gleaned from watching too many B movies, and was woefully misinformed. I blatted skulls, one after the other for all the difference it made, because the insidious things just kept on coming and coming. Chest shots didn’t stop them either. The only thing that slowed them was to render their limbs to stumps, but that was only momentary because they still flopped and squirmed, worming their way across the ground with singular intent. You might think an eviscerated torso harmless, but that wasn’t the case. These things didn’t need teeth to gnaw or fingers to rip, when even their jellied flesh consumed.

There were dozens of them, maybe even hundreds, because it was too dark to tell beyond the sporadic flashes of our weapons. The darkness surged and moved, and I was sure that those we could see were only the leading trickle of a tidal surge.

“Where the fuck did they all come from?” Again Hooky was shouting questions for questions’ sake as he laid down covering fire. None of us knew. All we’d been briefed on was that there was a small cell of infected holed up inside the warehouse, and we’d been given the order to go in and clean them out. Nobody told us to expect a horde.

Maybe it was something to do with the hive mind these things were suspected of having. Once assimilated, you became part of the larger organism. Maybe their cell had reached out and called more of their kind. Whatever. All that was important now was getting back out again with our arses intact.

Four of us.

Minutes ago we’d been six. A third of our force down already, and our chances of making the exit door were getting slimmer with every expended round and yet another failure to drop any of those things.

“Fire in the hole!” Brainpan was growing desperate. Using grenades in the corridor was as likely to kill us as it was the shambling mass surging towards us. But what was done was done. I turned, crouching, ducking my helmeted head as if that would save me. The grenade went off within the mass of limbs and torsos so the detonation was dampened by the pile of flesh between it and me. The sound was like God’s loud clap, and then I was pummelled by raining chunks of meat and bone. Some of the sharper clumps rattled off my helmet or stuck in my fatigues. Thankfully a spearing rib fragment lanced into my antiballistic vest and not in my throat. Blood spray was all over my Oakleys. I didn’t try wiping the smear away, just yanked off the M-frames and threw them aside, even as I lurched up and ran back to the first corner we’d initially cleared.

Brainpan wasn’t named for his high IQ.

“Crazy fucker,” I snarled at him. “You almost took me out with that grenade. Next time a heads-up would be appreciated.”

“If it comes to it, I’d rather go out to a grenade than torn limb from limb by those things,” Brainpan replied. “Promise me, if they’re gonna get me, you stick a frag down my pipe first.”

RP smacked a gloved hand across Brainpan’s helmet. “Don’t fucking tempt me,” he snarled. “I might just as well do it now as later.”

Shaking my head, I checked on Hooky. The blaze of the sergeant’s carbine told me where he was in the opposite corner, and only his covering fire had given Brainpan and me a moment to chat. There was no more time for talk, just saving our butts.

We backed into the entrance vestibule. The shuffling, creaking and bubbling noises of our enemies filled the space as Hooky’s shooting fell silent. He jerked his head at the door we’d so recently blown open. “We can’t let them get out,” he said. “If they do that, and in these numbers, they’ll be all over town like sweat rash on a crack addict’s arse.”