Camouflage

Let me tell you about yesterday.

It was brutal. I ran off to add my stream of arrows to the others on the wall--the inner wall, as the outer defenses buckled in two places under the numbers of undead coming through. I fired two hundred and seven arrows, the urge to count them just another expression of my inner OCD child. I was on that platform for an hour and some change. By the time it was done the pile of bodies was half the height of the wall in places. The buffer held, but it was full of dead people. Teams had to go out and unhook long sections of the cables and wires just to be able to clean the buffer out.

I had just made it home when the damn bell went off again. Fortunately some brilliant soul had made cutting arrows from corpses a priority, so my position was stocked back up with the same shafts I used the first time. Rows or bundles.

Rinse and fucking repeat. We fought all day yesterday. The last attack came after dark, and by then we were all too dehydrated to even sweat. Too tired to think past the mechanical effort of dealing out death. Looking back it seems obvious that the UAS planned it exactly that way.

They used our own trick against us. The team of infiltrators we scared off a few weeks back apparently made their first go at us a shitty one just so we'd let our guard down. Don't know how many of them were in the swarm on the last attack, but they did quite a lot of damage even if it was just the two we managed to kill. In the cover of darkness and chaos they wormed through the horde, bodies covered in zombie ichor and meat. That was how they got close, shimmying beneath the buffer, which was never made to stop a clever human being.

The explosion wasn't something out of a movie. These guys knew their business. We're assuming they used a shaped charge and picked their spot, because the blast destroyed a section of the wall, thick and heavy stone aggregate though it is, nearly five feet wide and almost down to the ground. For the first time in ages we had zombies inside Central in numbers. Dozens of them.

We're not idiots or undisciplined. We always have people ready just in case. There was no panic in the streets, thank god. People stepped up and contained the breech quickly and efficiently. We lost five people in that crush, and now have a gaping hole in our defenses. Secondary explosives took out that section of the buffer, too. Not wholly, but enough to make getting through it all too easy.

Work is already being done on the gap, and hopefully we'll have that bit functional by the end of the day. We will do as we always have, rebuild and adapt, but this is hitting a lot of people hard. To know how easily it happened, to suddenly realize how much danger we're actually in. This was a handful of men with small bombs, hiding in plain sight.

What happens when it's an entire army at our doorstep?