Chapter 435 — The Dead Fight Back I

Chapter 435: Chapter 435 — The Dead Fight Back I

"*Stay down! Nobody crosses that forecourt! Stay behind the walls!*"

Cronin’s voice came across the junction from the doorway of the two-storey building, and the soldiers who had started to get up went flat again.

James stayed behind the barn wall with his hand on the stone. Finn crouched beside him. The forecourt in front of them was scattered with bone and glass and pieces of the jeep, and it smelled of diesel from the split engine. Up past the town the gunfire went on, faint and steady, as if nothing had happened here at all.

Eamon was still by the ambulance under Ruth’s jacket. Farrell was still by the jeep’s front wheel. Two medics were carrying a stretcher in through the barn door at a crouch.

James opened his window.

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 51]`

`[MANA: 1,940 / 3,100]`

`[EXP: 25,785 / 96,000]`

`[UNRECORDED COMBAT GAINS — CHALLENGERS SLAIN ×7: +7,000]`

`[EXP: 32,785 / 96,000]`

It had been days since he looked. Seven British Challengers on the roads round Dundalk had died to him, and the System had kept count even while he had not.

He closed it and looked at the forecourt.

Then he looked past it.

There were British dead all round the junction from the morning. They lay in the field by the farm wall where the counterattack had broken, along the north road and by the sheds below the farmhouse. Some had been gathered for collection and some had not been reached yet. There were twenty, maybe more.

For four days he had been working with two or three skeletons at a time, from cattle in fields. He had told himself he would never put his hands on the Irish dead, and he never would.

These were not Irish.

He thought it through quickly. That thing out there had gone through a diesel engine and a skeleton as if they were paper. He could not survive one of those rounds, and neither could Finn. Neither could anyone on this forecourt.

But it was one weapon. It fired, and then it fired again. He had heard the gap between the second and third shots, a long one. It could kill anything it hit. It could not hit ten things coming at it from ten directions at once.

And the dead were already dead. It could not kill them twice.

---

He went along the back of the barn to the building, staying low, and found Cronin inside the doorway with the radio.

"I’m going to use the British dead," James said. "Raise them. Send them out ahead. Whatever’s out there can’t stop a dozen of them coming from different directions. I want to go and get it."

Cronin looked at him.

"Get it where?"

"North-east."

"North-east’s a lot of Louth." Cronin did not raise his voice. "I’ve got wounded in that barn and two dead on that forecourt and forty men under cover who’ve just watched a captain killed through a jeep. I’m not sending any of them across open fields after a direction."

"The undead take the open ground. Not your lads."

"And when they get there? Where’s *there*?" Cronin held his eyes. "You don’t know, and neither do I."

James did not argue. Cronin was right.

"Then find out," he said.

Cronin was already keying the radio.

"*Castlebellingham, this is Cronin at the junction. I need everything you’ve got on the Longbow traffic. Bearing, distance, anything. And I want our observers on the north-eastern approaches looking at every hedge and every building out to three kilometres. Over.*"

---

The answer came in pieces.

The intercepts put Longbow north-east of the junction. Castlebellingham could not say how far. Somewhere between two and four kilometres, maybe, from the timing of the radio traffic and the shots.

Cronin did not wait for more. He kept the evacuation going and got the last of the wounded off the forecourt and into the barn, away from the walls that faced north-east. He picked two soldiers and told them to bring Kelleher and the captain in, when it could be done from cover, not before.

"Nobody else dies fetching them," he said. "They’d be the first to say it."

---

Finn had not said much since the ambulance.

He was sitting against the inside wall of the building with his axes across his knees. He was running a whetstone down the edge of the left one, over and over, though it did not need it.

He looked up when James came back.

"You’re going after it."

"When we know where it is."

"I’m coming."

"I know."

Finn put the whetstone down. He looked at the axe and then at James.

"I’m not going to do anything stupid," he said. His voice was flat. "Before you say it. Eamon told you to stop me doing anything stupid, and I’m not going to."

"I wasn’t going to say it."

"You were thinking it."

James crouched in front of him.

"We go with Cronin’s lads," he said. "We stay with them. Whatever it is, it kills us if it gets one clean shot. It doesn’t care how good you are with those. So we don’t give it one. We go together and we do it properly."

Finn looked at him for a long moment.

"Properly," he said. "Fine."

He picked up the whetstone again.

---

James went out the back of the building and along the farm wall, behind the barn and the sheds. He stayed on the side the Irish held, away from the north-east.

There were British dead along the inside of the farm wall where the counterattack had come over it that morning. Six of them lay where they had fallen, among broken stone and spent brass.

He knelt beside the first one. It was a young man, younger than James. His helmet had come off. James did not look at his face for long.

He put his hand on the man’s chest.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×6`

`[MANA: 1,460 / 3,100]`

They came up one after another, along the wall.

The flesh went off them all at once, as it always did. What stood up were six skeletons, with the scraps of British uniform still hanging off their shoulders and ribs. One still wore its helmet. Another still had its webbing on, slack round its spine, pouches flapping. A rifle lay on the ground at the feet of the third. It did not pick it up. It did not know how. James did not try to teach it.

He had two more already, the cattle skeletons from that afternoon. One stood at the corner of the barn where he had stepped to. The other was by the medical station door. With the six new ones, that made eight.

Behind him, somebody made a noise.

He turned. A soldier at the end of the wall was staring at the skeleton in the helmet, the one with the British tunic hanging off it, and his rifle had come halfway up.

"Easy," said Cronin, coming round the corner. "Easy. Those are his. Those are ours now. Don’t shoot anything in British kit that’s walking without any skin on. Pass it on."

The soldier lowered the rifle slowly.

Some of the others had seen James’s skeletons on the farmyard wall that morning, and at the petrol station, and in the junction the night before. They did not like it, but they knew what it was. They looked once and went back to what they were doing.

The ones who had come up with the battalion from Drogheda had not seen it. They stared. One of them crossed himself.

Owen was at the barn door helping a medic with a stretcher. He saw the skeletons standing along the farm wall in British uniform, and his face went very still. He looked at them for a second, then looked away and took his end of the stretcher in through the door.