Solitaire POV: Day 51

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

Physics lesson, kids. What happens when you pack explosive material into a confined environment and leave it only one route to escape?

Congratulations! If you answered “a gun”, then you’re our lucky winner.

Well, it wasn’t really a gun. A gun, ideally, would’ve been a lot longer. The bell we’d had was a narrow one, and we’d added a few inches by heating it up and working it with the blacksmith, but there’s only so much you can do to mediaeval brass and iron before it breaks. Fortunately we had enough black powder to more or less compensate for efficiency with raw power.

Fifteen kilos of explosive was about the limit I’d calculated for the thing, to play it safe we’d loaded it with ten. Ten kilos of black powder, that is, and about another ten of pebbles, nails, even teeth and such. Anything small and hard. What was a gun, without its bullets.

Well, it wasn’t really a gun. And they weren’t really bullets. There were a million practical concessions I’d been forced to make by circumstance and the compressive proximity of my deadline. The projectiles were angled, uneven, they would fly inconsistently, and slower than was ideal. The muzzle of my weapon wasn’t strangled nearly as tight as I’d have preferred, and I estimated some two thirds of its kinetic potential would be wasted in the air, compared to a more professionally made piece.

It actually hurt, a bit, to know that I was using a quarter of my hard-earned black powder on such a detonation. But the feeling disappeared soon enough.

It wasn’t really a gun, but it didn’t need to be. The proof of its success came as a crowd of tightly packed bodies, and the sight of those bodies flying apart at the seams.

Rotters have one disadvantage against a human, other than their minds- which, in fairness, I’m yet to be fully convinced are actually sub-average for a homosapien. Their bodies are…Well, rotting. Decayed, softened by the putrefaction of their condition.

The first row of them was nothing, after the blast rang out. Spongy bodies ruined past the point of solidity as one supersonic chunk of death after another tore through it. They must have slowed the debris, slightly, because the ones behind fared slightly better, and the third set better still.

Even so, I didn’t count a single specimen among any of those three layers that failed to be mangled past the point of fighting. Sixty destroyed, easily, and dozens more left impeded by their wounds deeper into the horde.

We didn’t have time to explain the weapon to many people, only the team now loading it, but I heard Xangô screeching out to galvanise our side.

“RETREAT!” He ordered. “HURRY AND RETREAT, WE’LL ONLY BE ABLE TO STAVE THEM OFF FOR A FEW MOMENTS MORE!”

It put a very sensible haste in our side- if there’s one thing you can trust a human to do, it’s preserve itself- but only seemed to entice the snarling rotters below, congealing their mass back into a surging wave that rushed right for us. Beam was at the top of the stairs, Argar beside him, and next to them both was a new figure. The Vittonian woman, wearing a woollen gambeson, wielding a shortspear. She glared at me.

“We need to hold the stairs.” She declared. “To buy time for another spell, yes?”

Burying the urge to make fun of her for the primitive mistake regarding my weapon, I nodded. She didn’t hesitate even an instant before throwing herself onto the stairs and bracing her body for the enemy.

Argar rushed in after her, and Beam after him. I paused, then swore and joined them.

Four of us against hundreds wouldn’t have been a fight at all, usually, but the stairs were much, much narrower than the hall beyond them. Perhaps we could buy a few moments more.

Perhaps.

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A mouth came for me, open, wet, filled with rotting teeth. I smashed those out first, breaking them free of the gums with a big wooden cudgel I’d found among the village’s improvised armoury and sending the owner back into its friends. More were behind it, though, pushing its body back to me, and I was forced a step farther up the staircase to ready my next swing. This one caved the skull in entirely, but the body hadn’t even landed before a new enemy replaced it.

From the corner of my eye I saw two things at once, Argar swinging his sledgehammer, and a rotter coming at me sidelong. I ducked, making room for the giant’s strike to meet the enemy’s head and smash it in half. Another backstep, as they closed tighter, then my teeth rattled.

The cannon went off again.

If anything, the second shot was even more destructive than the first, and it bought us a few more moments of ease as the tide of bodies was stemmed somewhat. We fought our way back three more steps before another shot rang out. By now we were just a dozen or so feet from the cannon, which in turn was cresting a twenty foot hall leading to the mayor’s office. Thick-doored and barricaded, that had become our final retreat, and it was already packed with most of the villagers.

Forcing myself to focus, even as I fought, I surveyed the carnage. Could we buy time for one last shot? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we didn’t?

By my estimate, we’d halved the rotters already, if not moreso. But that still left the village’s fighters outnumbered close to ten times over. Those weren’t winning odds, even if the enemy were mindless undead sprinting into a fortified position. One more shot could shrink the gap.

But could we buy the time for it?

That was the crux of it, and my heart sank as I realised we couldn’t. Already fatigue was starting to take us, we were ceding ground faster, and rapidly running out of it. It would be another minute before the bell-cannon fired again, and we’d be lucky to last so long as forty seconds without being overwhelmed.

I didn’t turn to Xangô, didn’t need to. I just called out to him over the brutality we were spilling out around us.

“We need to break!”

No answer came at first, but I recognised the silence. Sniffed the air- ignoring the decay now forced almost fully up my nostrils by the undeads’ proximity- to smell what he was thinking.

He was thinking that he agreed, and that agreement smelled of horror, fear, panic and regret. I recognised the concoction well enough, he felt it every time he made a major error. I’d need to have a little chat with him later about that.

Dirty nails raked my face, and I swore, headbutting their owner. A chat later, for the time being I was still preoccupied.

“Start backing off!” Xangô roared. “Abandon the cannon, head for the office!”

It should’ve been fine, to give such an order, we should’ve had a free run back to our retreat. We didn’t. The moment the words left Xangô’s mouth and echoed out across the room, the rotters redoubled their assault. Charging faster, more numinous, more forceful than before.

That wasn’t right, it wasn’t rational. It- no, stop it, shut up Solitaire, keep that giant brain of yours calm and use it on something useful. It’s happening, which makes it both right and rational. The probability of any event is 100%, after it’s already occurred. Instead of bitching about it, try and figure out what caused those odds.

For all my immediate panic, and for all the growing proximity of my enemies’ snapping jaws and dragging nails, it didn’t take me very long. We’d been operating on the assumption that the rotters were merely self-assembled, drawn together only by a shared interest in eating people. That was wrong. Something was controlling them, something smart enough to order them in even harder once it realised that the people responsible for blowing up a large fraction of its army might get away.

I scanned the crowd of enemies for any glimpse of something less sticky, but all I could see amid the thrashing limbs were more undead. Cursing under my breath, I was forced to concede the point to reality. There were more vital concerns for the time being.

We continued our way slowly, as we backed up along the stairs. But not by choice. If any one of us had gotten what we wanted we’d have broken and run, but the rotters had all the momentum on their side. They’d be on us before we got far, and we’d be shredded mincemeat in seconds. All we could do was stare into the face of death as it came for us, and try our best to keep poking it in the eyes while we made for safety.

The door grew closer, and so did the rotters. Black blood was staining me up to the elbows, now, and the fatigue in my arms grew worse with every swing. I felt fear touch my mind, cold and crushing, like the feeling of a guillotine hanging over my neck. I was going to die, we all were. We’d failed, and this was the end of me. The great Solitaire, torn apart by mindless undead in some shitty town, never having achieved a damned thing of note. It would’ve been funny, if it weren’t so pitifully tragic.

My thoughts scattered as I heard the sound of moving hinges and creaking wood behind me. Feet behind me, I risked a glance, saw the door was open, and called out to let the others know. We were there, we’d made it, we just needed to kill for a few more steps…And we did.