The moment they go into combat, improvisation becomes king.
—Lieutenant Colonel Ian Archer
—
“—tcher-1-5, we’re getting fucking swamped over here, where are those damn mortars?” Borysenko spoke into his comms, thumbing his .50’s trigger at another concentration of crawlers. ‘Damn things are going to clog up the tracks.’
BOOM
The entire panzer kicked back as the 14cm fired into an intact apartment face. The siege round dug deep into the building before its fuel-air warhead detonated, sending flaming chunks of flesh and brick tumbling down into the horde.
“Eat bricks you fuckers!” Garcia shouted, letting out a maniacal laugh. His hand was slowly turning bone-white white from clenching the coaxial’s trigger for so long; the man was on his third reload.
It was in times like these that Borysenko truly appreciated the concept of relativity. Right now, he kept thinking how it was ‘only’ half an hour into the op. Thirty minutes ago, that would’ve seemed like an inordinate amount of time.
For better or worse, ammunition was the best time-piece in a combat environment. And according to their rapidly-plummeting magazines, time was running the fuck out.
“Finally!” He exclaimed.
It felt like they’d been plowing on for a hundred kilometers, but they’d barely made a klick into their route before getting bogged down. The column of armored vehicles had awoken hundreds if not thousands of zombies in just a few minutes, which made sense…until one thought about the huge fucking noise a multi-thousand-ton formerly FTL-capable dropship should’ve—
BOOM
The shockwave shook the entire panzer, hundreds of mortar fragments pinging off the chobham like murderous jingle bells. Borysenko cursed, finding a giant crack running through the middle of his day camera, the visual getting fuzzy.
“Primary’s toast, switching to aux.” He called out, eager to inspect the damage.
As the secondary camera’s armored lens opened, it revealed an image of pure carnage. The streets and rubble were painting crimson black with zombie blood.
‘We did ask for danger close…’ He thought, cursing himself.
They’d rushed into battle too fast, underestimating just how many zombies would pile up. Not that any one of them had ever actually fought against reanimated bodies, save for a few of the madmen in the cav scouts. Where Recruitment found madmen with their skillset was a well-guarded secret.
“Odin…wait one.” He said, looking into the daylight camera as the dust of a dozen collapsed buildings settled.
The tip of the kampfgruppe stood in the middle of a T-cross, where Main Street met the market and split in two. East of them were a block or two more of buildings, and then the city harbor. The route looked relatively clear.
Unfortunately, the route to their objective was not.
A sea of blood approached them at a sedate pace, groans and gurgles mixing with the splashing of torn shoes and bloodied feet against the gore of the previous wave. There must’ve been thousands of them…less than a hundred meters away.
“All Butcher-1 elements, turn to bearing two-seven-zero and fire as you bear. Weapons free!” He shouted into the radio.
“Siege in the breech, on the way!” Garcia shouted back.
The panzer reeled back, its blood-stained cannon belching out another anti-building round at the horde. Better to fire now and reload than wait ten or more for the autoloader to unload the shell and load a fresh one.
Borysenko was witness to the strange course the shell tore through the undead as its delayed action fuze —designed to detonate the munition afer punching through reinforced concrete— took its sweet time to activate.
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BOOM
It must’ve dug into the road, because the detonation turned into an eruption of dirt, stone and bone. Garcia was not one to wait for the dust to settle; he lit off with his coaxial into the horde while the autoloader picked a fresh shell full of canister shot from the external magazine.
“Odin-5, this is Butcher-1-5, we’ve got about two to three thousand undead rolling up.” He said in the calmest voice he could manage, thumbing his own .50 at the closest stragglers. “I’m not sure we’ve got the ammo to deal with all of them, please advise.”
The rest of Butcher-1 followed suit, firing into the oncoming horde or at the stragglers trying to climb up to the panzers. Sapper-3 tried their best, but the combat engineers were packed up inside their APCs and the .50s on their vehicle’s did have good angles. What might’ve been a big road for a pre-industrial civilization was barely enough for the kampfgruppe, and was becoming less and less so with every new pile of rubble and gore added to the mix; they could barely fit a platoon through at a time.
‘All good things must come to an end…’ Borysenko thought as he listened to his superior. “Understood, Odin-5.”
Borysenko shook in his seat as Garcia fired into the advancing horde again.
The canister shot’s proximity warhead detonate right in front of the crowd with a low bang, unleashing five kilos of tungsten beads into the wall of unliving fleshing. The effect had made him gag during the Xandria campaign.
Everything in the first few rows was eviscerated by the metal shower, crippling those behind. Two or three-dozen undead, flash-shredded into crimson-black fertilizer.
Within seconds the other three panzers of the platoon fired as well, turning the first rows of the horde into mist. The tracer beams of half a dozen .50s dug into the crowd, gunners and panzer commanders firing short burst aimed at the densest parts of the oncoming horde.
Borysenko glanced back as his panzers slowly advanced westward. Sapper-3 had already been joined by the kampfgruppe’s second platoon of tanks. The pair advanced eastways, followed by platoons of infantry fighting vehicles and personnel carriers. The first infantry platoon, however, turned west and joined his panzers.
Reinforcements. The only ones he would be getting.
TUTUTUTUT
Four Crocodiles opened fire simultaneously into the crowd, their 3cm autocannons perfectly suited to the job and paired with an equal amount of ol’ reliable .50 caliber heavy stubbers. Tracer fire big and large tore chunks out of the horde.
“This is Butcher-1-5, good to have you here crabby. Get your men out and start clearing the closest stragglers; the everything above 3 centimeters will focus on the main horde. Weapons free, but give me a ring before your boys blow up a building.”
“On the way!” Garcia’s shouted with ceaseless vigor, the breech kicking back for the umpteenth time.
Borysenko caught the edge of the used shell as it dropped into the waste hopper, the brass subtly deformed. They were firing too fast, and he couldn’t afford to lose a gun to a jammed breech.
“All Butcher-1 elements, keep your rate to four a mike unless they get closer than seventy meters.” He ordered on the comm, trying and failing to find some hint of a joke to sneak into the chatter. He’d yet to completely get used to the Regiment’s culture; his instructors in the academy had been very…harsh when it came to the matter of humor.
Garcia grumbled but acknowledged, his body visibly slowling down.
He liked the sergeant; crude as he may be, the man did his job and listened to orders. Not exactly a flying colors’ grade for his rank, but nothing was ideal. That rang double when it came to everything relating their profession.
Hopefully they’d both live long enough to enjoy its fruits.
—
‘Well…no plans survives contact with the enemy.’ Victor thought, looking at the live drone feed above the market.
It could’ve been worse. It could’ve been much worse. He’d thought up a hundred different alternative scenarios for what would happen once those panzers drove over the rusted iron gates, and most of them were not good.
To put it simply, they didn’t know jack.
They were fighting zombies, yes, but they knew very little about what made them tick. They could be killed with bullets —unlike their nanobot cousins— yet they were more resistant than the reanimated results of a genewar munition. Curious, considering they were significantly less infective. Not one trooper had been infected so far, and even Archer’s most optimistic estimates put projected casualties in the high double digits.
So the fact that their only current issue was being overwhelmed by the zombies’ sheer numbers was…calming, in a sense. Computer projections put the zombies’ number in the upper five digits. Those numbers would’ve been overwhelming had the variant been close to the Tokyo Attacks, but these zombies were slow, weak and stupid. They could be baited, led into traps and handled with conventional weapons.
It was less than two hours since he’d ordered the mortars to prepare tactical atomics for use, yet it seemed like years ago. He’d quickly reversed the order half an hour ago, though the warhead vault was kept up to a high readiness in case shit really hit the fan.
The threat was being handled in simpler ways; high-explosive mortar shells, canister shot and liberal amounts of .50 cal ammunition. So well, in fact, that their main problem was one of logistics. At this very moment several hundred troopers with logistics patched were involved in a glorified daisy chain moving crates of mortar shells to the perimeter defenses, canister shot to every panzer platoon in action and belts of stubber rounds to everybody logistics could reach.
“You think we’ll make it?” He asked McRiley.
The CO-XO pair were the only ones currently in the conference room-turned-headquarters, as Ops, Logistics and Intelligence were too busy putting out fires. A few years ago, they would’ve both been all-too-eager for a hands-on approach, but in time they’d learned that their subordinates were more than capable of handling crises by themselves.
The lieutenant colonel looked at him with a cheeky grin, the very same he’d sported during their tour-of-duty inside the Roach. “To tomorrow? Probably. At least the zombies don’t have artillery.”
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