Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Books 2 & 3

The initial panic subsided and the rebels closed ranks, firing in a more disciplined fashion. Rifle rounds punched straight through the zombies without slowing them much. "Heads!" the leader shouted. “Aim for the heads!”

Shotguns were more effective, but despite what movies and video games show you, pellets have low penetration. They don't spread out as quickly as the games show. This is both good and bad. You can't cover one whole side of a room with a single shotgun blast. But when the pellets don't spread, they hit like a fist of doom, all in a tight mass. Which is good because individual pellets don't have enough penetration to do much damage.

That's what we needed to take out the zombies, damage. They didn’t care about pain or blood loss. As long as their bodies were intact enough to move, they kept coming for you. of the rebels fire began to turn the tide. The flow of zombies trickled and slowed and stopped.

There was one final roar of gunfire as several rebels cut down the last one. Far too many of their bullets were going into torsos still instead of proper headshots, but volume got the job done.

We bunched back up. I looked the group over. Many had steely eyes and a calm demeanor. Several of the younger men and one of the older were breathing heavily. A scrawny man barely older than a youth had eyes wide and rolling. "They killed Grigor, they just wouldn't stop. I shot and I shot and they just kept coming."

"You have to aim for their heads," the leader growled. "We told you this, Leonid.”

"We're all gonna die," the kid said. "This thing isn't working." He yanked the amulet up from his shirt and held it out. It glowed with a dim blue light. He stared at it with eyes like saucers. "It's not working. They're still coming."

"Shut up. We have no time to waste," the leader called. "Everyone get moving."

After a few hesitant steps, the entire squad started forward again. We made it down the rest of that block without more zombies showing themselves. We came to a corner and the frontrunners pulled up to peer around the corner cautiously, but the leader shouted and ordered, "We have no time for that. Go!"

The first five men moved around the corner together. I was just behind them. A shot rang out. One of the men to my right staggered and stopped. He was staring down at his hands and his chest. There was another crack of rifle fire and the man's tunic jumped at the impact. He gave a gurgling cry and pitched forward on his face.

"Take cover!" someone screamed.

"No!” The leader shouted. "There's no time! Charge!" Nobody heeded him.

I made a lunge for the fallen man's submachinegun. A bullet skipped off the pavement in front of me as I grabbed the weapon and quickly got back under cover. I needed to get his ammunition bag too, but that would have to wait.

The whole group seemed paralyzed. Someone in the back was talking rapidly with wild speculation about who might be shooting at them. Four men were around the corner under cover.

The leader was still yelling that we all needed to get moving, but he wasn’t making a move to run around that corner himself. He did move up beside me and peer around my bulk to see what lay ahead. “It’s more zombies," I told him. He jerked with a start and stared at me with a shocked expression. "Yeah, yeah, I'm more than a golem. Focus, man. These things can use weapons. I've seen it before. They often carry their rifles with them, and sometimes they even use them."

"We have to keep moving," he said. "These amulets won't last long."

Oh, shit. Why hadn't someone said that sooner? I vaguely recalled hearing something like that in the briefing, but the sense of urgency in his voice put the situation in a new light. This wasn't a blustering sergeant. This man was really terrified.

"What happens when they run out of desh or whatever?"

"We die," he hissed. "If the shield's not down, we die."

One of the men broke from cover and ran for the corner we hid behind. He was hit just as he reached us.

I caught him as he fell and pulled him under cover around the corner. I would love to say this was a humanitarian action, but he had been hit bad, and I wanted his equipment. He slumped against me, and I lowered him to the ground, but with my left hand, I quickly caught his rifle before he dropped it.

Two more rebels pushed past me to get at their friend. One pulled open his tunic and started to apply first aid.

I realized with disgust that the rifle’s action had been hit by a bullet. The gun was useless. I tossed it aside.

"Never mind him,” the shotgun-wielding leader said. “He's finished. We have to move."

"He's not dead!" one rebel protested.

The shotgun came down and leveled between the eyes of the man applying first aid. "If we don't get to the objective, we are all dead. Move!"

The other rebels looked at the leader, aghast. There was a long moment punctuated by rifle fire from around the corner.

"Do you feel how hot your amulet's getting? There's no time!" The leader's voice rose, a hint of desperation filling it. He waved his shotgun around. "Everyone around the corner now. Run and they can't hit us. There's no time to argue, or we're all dead."

A man behind me swore and took off running around the corner, and a general rush followed.

"I'll not leave my friend," another man said, remaining crouched beside the wounded.

"Then you're already dead," the leader snarled. He turned to run.

I brushed aside the man helping leaned over the wounded man. He had a revolver shoved in his waistband and I grabbed it. His friend protested, but I didn’t care. I dropped the small handgun into my pocket and moved on. There was no time to lose, if what Mr. Shotgun was saying was correct.I had thought about swiping the rifle from the unwounded man I was leaving, but I wasn't a complete dick. The man was doomed, but at least he could go out fighting. I had a revolver, a Colt .45 and a submachine gun with only what remained in its magazine; not nearly enough against an entire city full of zombies, but it would have to do for now.

Around the corner, a battle was playing out. The rebels were charging down the street in a disorganized mess. One was down, sprawled on a sidewalk, and another was staggering like he would fall in another minute. The fallen man also had carried a submachine gun so I detoured over to grab his ammunition pouch.

Shotgun and rifle fire boomed down the street where the rebels were cleaning out a group of zombies. I jogged to catch up. There had been an actual pile of sandbags and a squad of zombies in a firing position behind it. They had a machine gun, but had not fired it.

Hell yeah. The submachine gun I had picked up earlier had a sling. It took a moment to loosen the strap to its maximum extent, then I slung it over my shoulder. I snatched up the machine gun.

Did you ever see one of those action movies where somebody kung-fus the crap out of a bad guy and then leaves a perfectly good gun lying on the ground while they go snap the next guy's neck? Yeah, I hated those movies. ‘Pick up the damn gun’ was my motto.

Further down the street, there was a deep throb of machine gun fire. Apparently, these hadn't been the only zombies with heavy weapons. I caught up with the group of rebels as they gathered around the leader again.

Ahead was a wide plaza in front of a building that had once been fancy. At the foot of its marble steps was another machine gun nest manned by zombies. The rebels stopped short of the plaza and were huddling around a corner. I glanced out to see before ducking back as machine gun bullets sprayed the area.

"What are we going to do? We have to get past it!" The survivors were clearly near panic.

"Calm down." The leader seemed a bit less frantic. "That building behind them is our objective. We need to get in there and go down to the basement.”

I was on board with Mr. Shotgun. There wasn't a moment to lose.

"Here, give me one of those." I reached over and plucked a glass jar from the bandolier pouch of the panicky rebel. "Let's see if these work on the zombies, shall we?" I warmed up my arm in a pitching exercise.

I hadn't thrown a baseball since college but the twinge in my mind told me I had the skills. I hefted the jar a few more times while I waited for the headache to subside. The weight felt just about right in my hand, and I hoped that meant the knowledge had all slotted into place. I stepped around the corner and threw.

The thing with dodging gunfire is you can't actually dodge bullets, but you can dodge the person shooting them. I completed my throw and stepped back around the corner before the zombies opened fire.

Even so, it was a near thing. Bullets ripped into the corner of the brick building in front of me, spraying shards across the area. Bits of brick peppered my chest and arms as I ducked away. The bullets chewed an impressive chunk out of the building before the zombies stopped firing, and a good thing too. That caliber of bullet was likely to chew through the building and into the group of rebels huddling around the corner in a fairly short period of time.

The gunfire stopped. I heard a hissing sound in the ringing silence that followed.

One of the rebels poked his head around the corner and gasped. "They’re -- dead?” he started to say.

The leader took his reaction as a good sign and sprang to his feet. "Charge!" he yelled and ran around the corner. When he wasn't immediately gunned down, the rest of us followed.