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— 5 —
“Do you think you can do it?” Mark asked nervously. “Do you think you’ll survive?” He watched Rachael’s group gathering their weapons, his own hands empty.
“I think we can,” Rachael said with more confidence than she felt. “You don’t have to worry; we’ll make sure we still have a home come morning. Plenty more plants for you to weed,” she added with a small smile. He didn’t return it. She put it down to nerves.
Turning away, she moved over to her waiting army. Walking up and down their ranks, she split them into five teams of equal size, making sure each squad had the right balance of muscle, fighting skills, and common sense.
“We need to clear out the orcs,” she said, “and keep them away from the fence while Maria, Kate, and Eden secure it. They should be able to barricade it temporarily with some of the metal sheeting we have in the yard, but it will take some time. We need to buy them that time.”
“It’s dark, and we will use that to our advantage. We need to be as quiet as possible, take the orcs out a few at a time so we don’t get swarmed. We’re going with a buddy system, groups of four. Know where your team is at all times. We want to come out with the same number we go in with.”
Brett headed up one team, while Rachael joined another. Alice, armed with a butcher’s knife from the kitchen, stuck close to Rachael’s side as they made their plans: all the teams would split up, defending and clearing the courtyard from different angles, hoping to spread the horde thin.
The runners—with Sophia, Maria’s mom, as backup—would sneak to the fence and make the repairs as quietly as possible, hoping that darkness and silence would would give them enough time before more orcs came through. Once the fence was fixed, they would clear out the rest of the orcs a few at a time, and hopefully have them all cleared before morning.
Rachael gave each of the runners a hug before they left, wishing them luck.
“May the odds be ever in our favor!” Eden said with a smile, giving Rachael a salute before they moved off into the darkness.
The odds are never in our favor. The ominous thought struck her, but she hushed it, focusing on sending each team to their starting point, and readying the attack. The runners slipped into the darkness, silent shadows keeping to the fences and weaving undetected between the orcs. Rachael crossed her fingers for luck. Playing at being heroes was one thing, but actually being heroes—being warriors—was something else. The armor and weapons and occasional bits of speech cribbed from a fantasy novel or movie helped support the affectation, but once they were in combat they were going to be ordinary people faking it until they made it as heroes, or until they died. Rachael could not will them to be better fighters, she could not make them remember their training and drills. All she could do was pray, and she was not great at that.
She said a prayer anyway. In Elven, because . . . fuck it. Why not?
Then led her own team out to begin their assault.
Rachael had left the most dangerous approach for her own team: the barricaded front door. Moving with quiet caution, they unbarred the door and she stepped up to peer through the gap. There were more orcs than she had anticipated, and most of them had come close to the hospital, following the sounds and smells of living flesh. Turning to her team, she gave them a brave smile.
“On three. Ready?” They nodded, and without making a sound, she drew her sword and dagger before silently mouthing the countdown. On three, she kicked the doors wide open and led the charge.
Immediately out the door they were deep in battle, and Rachael moved with practiced skill as she sliced and stabbed through heads and necks, digging her dagger into the eye socket of an orc and driving her sword through the skull of another.
Bracing her foot against the second orc to pull the blade out, she turned to watch the rest of her team. They weren’t as skilled or experienced, but all four of them moved with purpose, Alice slashing the head of one orc with her knife while Andy slammed a club into the skull of another, crushing it with an explosion of black decayed brain matter.
Rachael heard the yells of other teams as more and more orcs began to notice them. She returned to her attacks with renewed determination, focusing only on her strikes and the sound of her breathing. The orcs fell, but where one went down, two more took their place as more and more were drawn to the sound of combat.
Slice, cut, dodge, stab. Her sword and dagger were a blur as she struggled to make a dent in the sea of monsters. Each time there seemed to be a lull,
more orcs poured into the courtyard. She didn’t have the luxury of checking on her team to see if the screams were sounds of triumph or of one or more of her people dying.
Then she heard a blood-curdling scream of pain and terror come from the fence.
Rachael’s stomach dropped, and she lunged past the orc she was fighting, sprinting forward. She didn’t stop to fight, instead dodging under outstretched arms and clawing hands, ignoring the decaying faces. Right now she had one focus in mind—the girls at the fence.
The darkness near the barricade made it nearly impossible to see, and Rachael nearly tripped over a fallen orc sprawled on the ground. It snatched at her ankles, catching the leather boots with its sharp nails, unable to break the surface. She stomped on it a few times, driving shards of skull into its brain and silencing it forever.
The screaming had also stopped, though, and Rachael feared the worst.
Shapes moved by the fence, but Rachael couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe, so she sheathed her sword, keeping only her dagger out, not wanting to attack an ally by mistake. Still, when a small form hurtled into her from the darkness, only the sound of all too human sobs stopped Rachael from lashing out with the dagger.
“Kate . . . ?”
The figure nodded.
“Are you okay? Were you bit?”
Kate shook her head. “No, but . . . ” She couldn’t finish, her body wracked with sobs.
“Stay here,” Rachael ordered, and crept forward, counting the bodies along the ground, struggling to see who or what was in front of her.
