The world returned gradually, first light and muffled sound, then came a bit more refinement as shadows could be seen at the edge of her vision followed by the familiar sound of gunfire. Pain arrived with the other sensations, a dull, all-over throb that sharpened whenever she tried to move. Heat was next, licking across her face and the exposed skin of her arms. The weight on her chest made every breath feel like a truck had been parked on her lungs..
She drifted in that half-place for a long while, aware of nothing except the fact that she was still alive and in an incredible amount of pain. This was interrupted when there came the voice she knew almost as well as her own.
"Sergeant. Tee, come on. Stay with me."
Hands brushed soot from her cheek as fingers fumbled for the pulse in her neck, pressed and held. A few mumbles failed to make it to Tamara's ears, but they felt comforting. As the fingers left her neck, she soon felt when a glass vial touched her lips, cool and smooth.
"Drink this! That's an order!"
The liquid slid over her tongue, sweet, metallic and faintly electric, like strawberry lemonade with a couple 9 volt batteries dropped in for good measure. A health potion. She swallowed on reflex, and warmth spread outward from her stomach in slow, deliberate waves. Cracked ribs shifted and settled. Torn muscle re-knitted with soft, internal pops. The ragged hole in her lung sealed like someone had sewn a zipper in her body and pulled upwards; It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Her vision cleared as the picture became clear, as color bled back into the world.
Rodriguez knelt over her Sergeant, face streaked with soot and blood, eyes red-rimmed and wide. He looked like he'd aged a decade in the last five minutes.
"You told me I'm not allowed to die on a day ending in "Y", and that goes double for you," he said, voice cracking halfway through. "If I have to follow that rule, so do you, Sir."
Tamara coughed, tasted copper, and managed a rasp. "Gate?"
She received nothing in response, though she supposed that was a response in itself. She rolled her head and looked toward where the gate once stood.
The Penske was a burning husk thirty meters away, the breach behind it a gaping wound of twisted metal and fire. Bodies lay scattered across the asphalt, some still, some twitching, some already trying to rise.
A wall of flames began to dance up into the air, smoke billowing into the air as heat distorted the air around the gate. Tamara couldn't see much beyond the flames, but what she did see sent her into a terror induced panic attack.
It started as a ripple along the cross-streets, a darkening of the shadows. Then the ripple became a wave, and the wave became a flood. Thousands upon thousands of silhouettes poured from every alley, every doorway, every broken window north of 42nd Street. A single, mindless organism made of hunger, stretching from one horizon to the other.
Rodriguez followed her gaze and whispered, "They heard the explosion. Every dead thing in the city is coming."
Behind them, engines roared to life. The three Strykers assigned to Bravo Company lurched out of the vehicle park, turrets rising, chain guns beginning their low mechanical whine as they spun up. Orders cracked over the net, sharp and frantic but still holding together.
Tamara pushed herself up on her good elbow. The world swayed, then steadied. She met Rodriguez's eyes.
"Help me stand."
"Tee, you can barely—"
"Help me stand, dammit!"
He slid an arm under her shoulders and hauled her upright. The potion had done most of the repair work, but her body still felt battered, like she had just gone three rounds and come out on bottom. She leaned on him anyway and got her boots underneath her.
One step forward. Then another. She just needed to keep moving and her strength would return. The rejuvenation of the potion merely accelerated her natural cell growth and healing, but to get back into top shape, she needed to get her blood flowing. To hell with the exhaustion that followed.
She stopped at the edge of the burning wreckage and looked back toward the compound. Civilians were already running deeper in, mothers clutching children to their chests, soldiers dragging the wounded. The fallback sirens began their long, mournful rise. It was always the first priority to evaluate the civs they had collected along the way. Their entire force was one designed to gather and deposit survivors to the main base for assignment and care.
The nearest Stryker rolled past, its driver half out the hatch, eyes wide. "Sergeant, we're sealing the breach! Fall back!"
Tamara shook her head once as her gaze returned to the tide which appeared to be endless.. She looked at the people still streaming behind the makeshift line. She looked at Rodriguez.
"Get them out," she said, quiet but absolutely certain. "Every last one. Whatever it costs."
His mouth opened, closed. He started to argue.
"That's an order."
She went for her M4 but it was missing, likely blown off her shoulder in the chaos. So she went to her old reliable and drew her Beretta with her good hand. She tried to raise her off-hand and the limb was still limp, so she racked the slide with her teeth, and started walking toward the fire. Just step at a time.
Rodriguez shouted her name once, raw and broken, before the roar of engines swallowed everything else.
The first burning runner cleared the wreckage and came straight at her. Tamara raised the pistol and began to shoot.
The first wave hit Stryker that had wedged itself inside of the wall to give them a moment of reprieve. The issue with using a vehicle as a wall was that the dead could crawl underneath, work their way in from the side, or even use the vehicle as a wall to climb. There were plenty of hand-holds for them to reach for, and they had proven time and time again that they could do basic actions like climbing.
Tamara stood in the ten-meter gap between the Stryker's armored flank and the sagging concertina wire, boots planted wide, Beretta steady in her one good hand. The heat from the burning Penske rolled over her in waves, thick with diesel and cooking meat… Human meat. Sweat stung her eyes; she blinked it away and kept counting.
One round every two seconds. No faster, no slower.
Crack. A construction worker missing half his jaw dropped.
Crack. A teenage girl in a prom dress folded forward and was trampled.
Crack. An NYPD officer still wearing his duty belt staggered, fell, became part of the ramp.
She had started with seventeen rounds in the fresh magazine, down to fourteen now.
Behind her, the Stryker idled and she could hear Rodriguez's voice over the external speaker, low and pleading, but she tuned it out. Orders had been given. All that mattered now was the count.
Eleven rounds.
The pile in front of her was chest-high and growing, a grotesque speed bump that forced the dead to climb. Every body that clambered over the top presented its head for a heartbeat.
Eight rounds.
She took one deliberate step backward, closer to the Stryker, shortening the choke point by another meter. The gunner on the remote weapon station tracked with her, holding fire so the barrel wouldn't sweep her silhouette.
Five rounds.
A big one, likely a firefighter based on the outfit they were wearing, used the ramp of flesh like a ladder and came over fast. Tamara put her fourth-to-last round through his left eye. He fell backward, taking three more with him.
Three rounds.
The horde adapted. They started pushing from the sides now, trying to spill around the edges of the corpse pile. She pivoted left, fired once, pivoted right, fired again. Two more down.
One round.
She let the slide lock open, dropped the empty magazine, and simply held the useless pistol by the barrel like a club. Her knife was already in her left hand even though the arm still hung half-numb.
The dead hesitated for but a second, seemingly confused by the absence of gunfire. She used that second to her advantage.
She took one more step back until her shoulders brushed the Stryker's warm armor. The vehicle's shadow fell across her like a blanket.
"Ramp's clear," she said into her shoulder mic, "Go."
The Stryker lurched backward immediately, tires spinning for traction, dragging the breach closed another five meters. The gap shrank to six.
She had six meters now. Six meters and a knife and however many heartbeats she had left in her chest.
The dead surged again and Tamara met them as she slashed, stabbed, kicked, used the empty Beretta like a hammer when the knife was busy. Every motion was small, economical, the way her father had taught her when ammo ran out and all you had left was raw fury and muscle memory.
A hand caught her bad arm, wrenched it. She let the limb go limp, spun inside the grip, and drove the knife up under a chin.
Another grabbed her vest from behind. She dropped her weight, rolled forward, came up inside its guard and buried the blade in an eye socket.
Blood soaked her sleeves to the elbow, and whether or not it was hers or the walking dead, it mattered not. She had lost track of time, but that mattered not. Any second she could buy the civs was worth her life.
There was only the next target, the next breath, the next foot of ground she refused to give up. At some point the Stryker's ramp slammed shut with a metallic boom that vibrated through her boots. The engines roared, tires spun and the vehicle reversed hard, sealing the breach completely. The gap was gone.
She was alone on the wrong side of a wall of steel and corpses, with the entire city trying to eat her alive.
Tamara had nowhere to go, not that she would leave without making sure everyone else had a fighting chance. The dead pressed in from three sides now, a tightening noose.
She smiled, a tired and almost peaceful smile, and switched the knife to an ice-pick grip.
"Come on, then," she whispered.