Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Slaughterhouse

What a pair of days this has been. Our people are still trapped in the hospital, but we're at the end of our effort to get them out. Trying to keep a group safe while they plugged the leak in our outer defenses was hard, and a lot of yesterday was spent swearing loudly as more zombies came through the gap while our folks tried to do their job.

The whole time I was picking off the undead at the repair site, a group of a hundred fighters tried to thin the herd around the hospital itself. Granted, I was busy, but I got a lot of glimpses of the activity over there since it wasn't all that far away. You might be thinking we stood our ground, both groups, against the swirling tide of bodies against us. Like heroes from some story.

Nope. We had to pull back and regroup a dozen times only to fight our way back to our positions. Some enterprising genius brought in a portable cage for some people to fight from, a ring of archers with spearmen behind them. But the undead will only attack that kind of structure so many times before they realize they can't get through the bars and stop bothering. The piles of bodies around the cage got in the way, too, but it was a good idea.

After the first hour my hands started to go numb from loosing so many arrows. I pride myself on being a pretty good shot, and Big K is much better than I am, but no one can keep up speed and accuracy over so much time. The spirit was willing but our bodies are only capable of so much. We ended up spelling each other, each taking ten minutes while the other stretched and rested their tortured fingers.

It was during those breaks I watched the carnage unfold. By my estimate more than seven hundred zombies filled the area at one point, most of them clustered on the hospital. A few wandered over to the wall around East, which suited us since the guards there found them easy pickings. The entire hospital area is fairly closed-off, which would have been a lot more helpful if the swarm decided to spread out at all. They could have made it over to the Box, where a warm reception awaited, but they didn't. The undead were singularly drawn to the easy meal--us on the outside trying to fight them, and the two hundred people in the hospital itself.

I watched men and women squelch through mud to hack away at the teeming mass of bodies only to be pushed away by the weight of the undead. Over and over again they slogged forward only to trim the edges of the swarm and pull back once more. Hard as they tried it was impossible to get a solid footing for attack; the ground was against us, the lay of the land itself not at all suited for attack. All of us looked like amateurs out there, constantly venting our frustration as we moved in and out of combat--K and I included--and seemed to get nowhere.

But we kept going. Little by little my group closed the gap, slowing the flow of bodies through it and finally cutting it off. The trapped zombies died by inches, slow and difficult for our people, but they finally began to thin out. As of about an hour ago less than three hundred are left, and we now have twice the number fighting them as we did yesterday. That place already looked like a slaughterhouse when I left last night, and I can't imagine how much worse it is today. Over that stinking field of bodies, torn limbs, and destruction, our people will keep fighting. Until the job is done or they die trying.

Say one thing about Haven's people; we're stubborn. We don't give up no matter how stupid it makes us look. When we've got the enemy in our teeth we lock our jaws down and shake that bastard until he stops. Stops moving, stops fighting, stops everything. We learned that lesson early.

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