Chapter Text
“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars…. but in our selves.”
-from “Julius Caesar”, by William Shakespeare
Phaing had looked, and found no alcohol in bottles that had been sealed outside of town or with a commercial label on it. While Demetrius slouched against the wall near the door, Phaing complained loudly in Siamese as she walked up and down the top of the bar. The haggard woman with a Balalaika began to play a lively tune, and Phaing obligingly ended her stomping and began dancing. Her demands for something good to drink did not stop, Phaing switched to Lusitanian and then Anglic as she berated them for being backwards and lacking the ambition to trade eggs for decent grog… and so on.
While she was doing that, some of the men shuffled over to the bar to clap and cheer Phaing on. The language barrier was such a formidable one that they did not even try to speak any recognizable words to her, and the trio of locals that confronted Demetrius had nothing to say, either. They stood between him and the bar, and such behavior did not necessarily mean that they were trying to separate him from Phaing for any villainous reasons. Rustic folk had reason to fear and distrust strangers that came bursting in on them, so Demetrius only reacted by crossing his arms over his chest and staring back at them.
He saw the Bartender pouring a large beer for Phaing out of the corner of his eye as Mary, not Tanya, broke radio silence. “The entire water supply is poisoned?!” The way she said it made it seem like a question as well as a statement, and Phaing did not seem to think much of it, she was accepting the beer, so….
“They’re all dead, the whole town!”
At last, the uneasy feelings he had been having about these dusty natives clicked into place. Demetrius had been paying careful attention to Tanya’s stories and her conclusions from the start. In a cross-draw holster under his arm was a very modern pistol with a magazine capacity of twelve 9mm rounds, and crossing his arms put his right hand exactly where he needed it for a quick draw. All three of the men in front of them had their brains blow out through the backs of their skulls before they knew they were in danger. The beer was nearly at Phaing’s lips, so he shot the mug out of her hand. Her radio must have failed her, Phaing was looking at him as if he was crazy …. but her trust in him ran deep because when she landed behind the bar her own pistol was not pointed at him. Not yet, anyway, so Demetrius shouted “Dead things, all of them!”
Phaing nodded and fired three quick shots into the bartender, and only the one that went in through his mouth had a serious effect.
They were starting to take fire from the other end of the room, slow and badly aimed fire that could not prevent Demetrius from reaching the bar and joining Phaing behind it. ‘What now?” he shouted over the sound of bullets and buckshot impacting on the wall above them and the bar beside them.
“Let’s do it the easy way.” Phaing said and fired an artillery spell into the roof. “Up and out!”
The two of them flew straight up through the gap where the roof had been, and then fired explosive spells straight down into the building until the remainder of it collapsed in on itself.
“Three cheers for the easy way!” Demetrius nudged Phaing. “Check your radio to see why its not working before we form up with her.” Tanya’s train was just arriving, just a few hundred meters away.
As the train pulled in, Tanya was on one knee with a hand on the roof of the locomotive and the foot with the thruster braced straight out behind her. Tanya was happy to hear that the entire town was made up of nothing but enemies. Confirmation from Demetrius was all she needed to put one of her most diabolical plans into motion.
“All units; Blood-moon. I say again; Blood-moon.” This was the code for 100% hostility, both on the part of the native population and what she was expecting from her own men. As things began to happen automatically, she issued a few specific instructions.
“Dragon-eyes, get out of there, leave your motorcycles behind if you must, you will have incoming…. Thumper! put five H-E into the town north of my train, and the incendiary into the south side. Make sure that last one falls short of where I am! ALL DRAGONS; that is six big ones, everyone move in once you hear them all land. Giftszwerg out.”
Giftzwerg was a Fatherland word that could mean “tough little bastard” or “poison dwarf” depending on how it was used.
Thumper was the halftrack, an Sdkfz. 251 with a special iron frame along the left and right sides. On each side were three of those boxes, which truly looked like ordinary crates… until the firing switch was triggered. Each of the Boxes held a 28-centimeter rocket with a range of nearly two kilometers, except for the one with a 32-cm. incendiary warhead.
The effect on Chokpar would be roughly the same as if it had been hit with a broadside from a Pocket-Battleship.
In the fortunate event that the Americans made it out and the unfortunate event that some Ongesh escaped, she would have taught both parties a thing or two about the true meaning of “Overkill”.
“Oh God save us!”
Mary was screaming and fighting at the same time. While Sneed had been trying to free his guns from the folds of the ragged junk he was wearing, the Mage had gone into action with a searing beam of light. The Sargent Major did not know enough about Mary’s powers to duck out of the way, so when her beam touched the sink and instantly turned all the water in it into steam, he was blown halfway across the street. She played her beam of golden light over the dead women coming at her, and watched them turn to wisps of vapor without it even hitting them directly.
That was very encouraging, so Mary stopped screaming and dialed back on the manna she was pushing through that spell. Another score of dead-walkers tried to surround Sneed, and fell into burning heaps of ash and bone. And again for the next bunch, leaving Mary ecstatic. The Type 95 responded beautifully, scaling her power level down exactly the way she wished to. Once she was dialed it, she could hit the Zombies just hard enough to put them down. Without any mages to fight, she felt as if she could do this all day.
Sneed got to his feet in front of her and grabbed her before Mary could lose her head. “INCOMING! Aren’t you listening?”
He meant the radio, but Mary could hear the approach of the rockets with her own ears by then. Her experiences in the war came flashing back at her, things that she had been blocking out for years. The troops in Africa had names for every weapon that they could hear but not see based on the noise they made. Names like Whizz-bangs, Crash-booms and Screaming Meemies. This did not sound like any of those, it was more like listening to a train coming at her through a railroad tunnel. Mary knew these must be the rockets Tanya had been so eager to use. Speaking of trains, Mary could see that their own was just pulling into the town that Tanya had ordered demolished.
“That crazy bitch…” Mary said, too softly for Sneed to hear her.
“Go, I’ll cover you!” The sergeant major was unquestionably brave brave, but he was still thinking two-dimensionally. His intention was to defend Mary while she mounted a motorcycle and fled. Mary grabbed the stout Marine from behind and triggered her concealed flight unit. The acceleration was so sudden that Sneed would have lost his shotgun of he had not wrapped the sling around his left fore-arm. He cursed and gasped for air as Mary took him flying for the first time in his life.
Chokpar was large enough for the big rockets to land where they could do damage without threatening the railroad, and Tanya knew it. The Halftrack had halted half a kilometer west of the town at a bend in the railroad. All the crew had to do was aim to the left of the rails and increase their elevation a little as they followed the firing sequences. They laid a path of destruction that walked across the town diagonally towards the northeast that Tanya found lovely to behold. Once the five high-explosive rounds were gone, the driver of the halftrack turned right and the aimer dropped his elevation lever to where the next rocket should hit 700 meters ahead of him. The big incendiary round flew out in a shallow arc to rain hellish fire down on a neighborhood made up of walled compounds.
The halftrack rolled forward towards what was left of the south side of town, with the rocket-aimer coming up out of his seat to take his place behind the shielded machine-gun. A few hundred meters to the left and the right, 4x4s also converged on Chokpar, and all three vehicles opened fire at the same time with automatic weapons. There were no infantrymen in the halftrack, firing the rockets had made the troop’s benches uninhabitable for a moment, and so they rode into town on the train...
There was indeed a platform at Chokpar, and it was conveniently on the north side of the tracks. Made of concrete and 100 meters long, it suited Tanya’s purposes perfectly.
As soon as the train pulled up next to it, men scrambled up on top of one of the cars to set up a machine-gun (the rear one from the halftrack) and a little mortar. Tank engines coughed and came to life before the train stopped. When the flatcars were parked next to the platform, a pair of -Sturmgeschutze- rolled out. Called “assault-guns” they were not true tanks, and in Tanya’s mind they were something even better. Light, low to the ground and with a much larger cannon than the Mark III tanks they were based on, each one mounted a 105mm howitzer with 36 rounds for it. Their first shots blew the fake towing-blocks apart, revealing wide muzzle brakes and their true purpose at last.
Following them were two Mark I tankettes, obsolete in the modern battlefield, but not in the Grey Zone. Tanya had shrewdly anticipated that there would be no tanks in the Grey zone, so she brought assault artillery instead of tanks, and mini-tanks with machine-guns to cover them. The big gun in a little chassis had left no room for things like machine-guns inside a Stug III, so each one had a Mark I to serve as it’s escort.
There were also a dozen infantry jogging along behind them that split up when the Stugs went off on diverging paths to spread their destructive power out over the shattered town. Tanya watched them go at it like a two-headed Dragon proudly. It may not be much, but that is MY army! Out to the east were more of her people in another 4x4 and two armored cars. The ADGZ was joined by a much smaller and cheaper vehicle known as a 222, and this 4x4 had one of those diabolical GAST twin-barreled machine guns mounted over the rear seats. The cordon was closing in, preventing the escape of anyone or anything in Chokpar.
Tanya drifted over to Phaing and Demetrius, who were demolishing the walled compounds that were still standing. When they noticed her, they both flew to her and formed up on either side while she turned north to look for Mary. Along the way, they all saw something unexpected; none of the dead things tried to escape from Chokpar. All of the ones that were able were headed for a large rectangular building inside the north section of town. It had probably a temple of a church before the icons and symbols had been torn from the facade.
No no no…. there can’t be normal people mixed in with those walking corpses, can there?
Tanya looked at the townsfolk, taking a good look at them for the first time to make sure they were not frightened humans running for their place of worship and comfort. She did not have to take a very close look to know the truth. The way they moved gave them away because whatever injury killed them never healed. Limbs with broken bones flapped grotesquely, heads lolled around on broken necks, and one of them left a trail of its own guys in its path. “I hope the two of you saved images of this. People will need proof that this actually happened.”
Mary brought Sneed back to the truck and dropped him off there before doubling back. Their truck had been on the northern outskirts with the ridge between them and the town, and once the radio came alive they moved up and were just topping the ridge to find a good field of fire when Mary arrived. She left Sneed there without a word of explanation, trusting that he would speak for himself, Mary doubled back to meet up with the other mages. Degurechaff had been very specific on that point; in the event of trouble, the Mages were to form up into a Platoon and fight as they had been training to do over Sera. However, by the time Mary reached her, there was hardly anything left for the Mages to do.
Tanya was watching her army wrap things up while Phaing and Demetrius sprayed fire at little groups that the armored fighting vehicles had missed. She watched the tankers quickly adjust to fighting mob of poorly-armed yet fearless meat-puppets. The drivers kept their speed up so that any undead that they could hit would be obliterated, while the gunners aimed at creatures outside of the driver’s chosen path.
Look at that! How could anyone in 2013 believe that a Zombie apocalypse could ever be a thing in a world that has tanks?!
Mary interrupted Tanya’s thoughts by asking; “Why are they doing that?”
Tanya saw that she was looking at the dead-walkers point of convergence, the large rectangular building. The Countess who was once a Colonel decided to make it a thought-exercise for Mary. “Why do you think they are doing that? Think of what I told you about how they work, alright?”
“Right….” Mary worked it out as the other two mages ceased fire for fear of hitting the tightening circle of men and machines around that building. “They are fearless, have no mind of their own, but they could be valuable to their master, or masters. Yes, there is no point in trying to carry word of us back into the Grey Zone... they already see us through those poor dead eyes down there! So, instead of trying to out-run us, they are trying to fort-up…. and what, wait us out?”
Tanya grinned but did not look at Mary directly. “Very good. Its all starting to come back to you now, isn’t it? I was wondering when ‘the American Tanya’ would grace us with her presence. Welcome to the party, ma’am.”
Mary winced, and hung her head. “I did not want to go back to that, I wanted to put it all behind me-“
“Then you should never have gone to Aden.” was Tanya’s blunt reply. “Let’s back off, I think I know what’s going to happen down there.”
If the dead had thought they could hold off the living from inside that stone-walled building, they were sadly mistaken. One of the Stugs followed the last of the dead-walkers right up to the main entrance, and the mages watched as the last one of them tried to close the door…. as if that would deter 26-ton mechanical monster chasing it. The muzzle of the 105mm howitzer broke the door off it’s hinges, and the gun fired an instant later. The combination of the muzzle-blast and the shell detonating in its interior had an interesting effect on the building. Flame and smoke bleached from every window, every side-door and every little gap in the exterior. The walls seemed to bulge for an instant and the roof lifted up off it’s supports before everything settled back into place…. not nearly as well fitted together as it had been a moment before.
The Stug withdrew, and its place was taken by a Mark I. Those little tanks had done admirable work already, their machine-guns were mounted at exactly the height of the head of the average human being, almost as if they had been custom-made for eliminating Zombies. This one had a further modification; one of it’s machine-guns had been replaced by a flame-thrower. When it fired into the temple, the mangled roof caught fire and flaming bodies came tumbling out through windows and any other opening they could find or make. They never stood a chance, the mercenaries already had the place surrounded and casually dispatched the fire-blinded creatures with head-shots.
Tanya flashed Mary a wicked smile. “Come on, even you have to admit that there are times when this is the best damn job in the world!”