Bones stared up at an imposing structure. “If Sans Souci Palace was on a hill, this place is on a mountain.”
Willis surveyed their surroundings in all directions. He lingered on the road behind them. “They’re still coming.”
“Unbelievable,” Bones said. “And they’ve spread out, too. One of us might get past them, but not all three.”
“I nominate Maddock as sacrificial lamb,” Willis said.
“Yeah, right.” Maddock eyed the citadel. “That gang or whatever they are will be on us soon. We don’t want them to catch up to us on open road. We’ll have to make our stand here.”
Bones pumped his fist. “Remember the Alamo! Or somewhere the good guys actually won.”
The trio moved off the road to a path that wended its way up the final stretch to the Citadelle. The way became even tougher going on the upper part of the mountain, and by the time they were near the crest, they could hear the upward progress of the horde as they crunched over brambles and knocked down rocks. The three men forged on and after a while Bones’ whoop signaled that they had reached the plateau on the summit where the citadel was situated.
Before them, the high walls loomed more than one hundred feet tall. It would have afforded defenders a remarkable view of the surrounding area.
“Too bad we don’t have a few sniper rifles handy,” Bones said.
They moved onto a concrete strip probably once used for staging artillery. Signage nearby indicated that the old stronghold was built in 1805 as a means of defense against French invasions. The building, up close, was much more elaborately designed and more intact than the fort at Sans Souci.
“Check it out.” Bones pointed to rows upon rows of round, metal balls a few feet in front of them. “Cannonballs.”
“Hey Bones,” Maddock said, looking down the slope, “maybe you could come back as a tourist some other time, okay? Because we don’t have long before our friends down there get to us.”
“He’s right.” Willis also looked down the mountain, his brow furrowed with concern.
Maddock looked back to the cannonballs and then down the mountain again, where the mob of non-lingual men was that much closer. “I have an idea. From watching these things, I’ve noticed that they can run fast, but they don’t have good lateral movement. They can’t turn well. It’s almost like these are the…”
Willis turned to look at him. “The what?”
Maddock shrugged. “The zombii Rose told us about. Look at the way they move — it’s like certain parts of their senses are just… off.”
He turned and eyed the stack of old ammunition Bones had pointed out.
Bones smiled. “Hell yes. Zombie bowling.”
The cannonballs, though old and rusted, came free with a little persuasion. They were heavy enough that it was only practical for each man to carry two at a time, but they made quick trips and in short order had a good sized pile perched on the concrete strip on the edge of the summit. Below them, the horde was scrambling ever closer; they could hear the ragged rasp of their breathing from those on the front line.
“Bombs away.” Maddock hefted the first cannonball and gave it an underhanded toss over the mountaintop. It bounced once and then rolled smoothly until it slammed into one of the zombii, cutting it down at the knees. It fell face-first on the ground and attempted to crawl forward, fingers digging into the soft turf.
“Score!” Bones then lobbed the second shot, and then Willis got into the action. Soon the three men settled into a rhythm, lobbing a ball down the hill and then bending down to scoop up another without watching to see the result of the last shot. Many balls missed their mark, but enough hit so that the main thrust of the attacking pursuers was diminished.
When the defending trio had gone through all of their stockpiled ammunition, they returned once more to the main pile to grab one more cannonball each before the still climbing zombii would reach the summit. Returning to the edge, each took down one more marauder with a well-rolled projectile, leaving four more to scramble over the top up onto the concrete strip.
It was now clear that in order to eliminate these final four, the three treasure hunters faced a hand-to-hand fight. Bones backpedaled away from a zombie who lunged at him. He assumed a fighting stance, legs wide, shifting nimbly from foot to foot, a knife in his right hand while his left was extended to block.
“Davy Crockett wins this time!” he said, sidestepping the zombie’s crude hammer blow and then shoving him off the cliff with a swift kick.
“Still with the Alamo?” Willis grunted as he slammed an elbow into the cheekbone of another assailant, knocking him to the ground.
“That’s why we’re awesome!” Bones’ enthusiasm was infectious, and before long all four of the attackers had either been tumbled down the mountain with the others, or else lay at their feet, incapacitated.
Maddock reached down and rifled through the pants pockets of one of them, but found no identification or objects of any kind. He stood and looked around. “We better get out of here before someone sees what happened and we get detained for questioning.”
Bones and Willis agreed, and the three of them set off for a different way back down the mountain.
“Now what,” Willis asked once they had started down an empty path.
Maddock’s eyes focused unwaveringly on the path ahead as he answered. “Something happened to those zombii people to make them that way. We’re going to find out once and for all what it was. More important, I want to know why they were sent after us.”
Chapter 22
Fabi squinted hard at a line on a spreadsheet open on the computer. Beside her, Cassandra was packing up, jingling her keys, shutting down her workstation. The work day was near an end, but since it was her first on the new job, Fabi was eager to make a good first impression. She had identified an anomaly in one of her new clinic’s financial statements and decided to stay a little late to get on top of it while the details were fresh in her mind.
“Girl, you been working all day. Let me show you my favorite local watering hole. Cold drinks, cheap, hot food, cute guys…” Cassandra smiled.
Fabi looked over at her new co-worker and smiled warmly. “Thanks. I really would like to do that, but I’ve come across something I think I can fix in one of the sheets. You know how it is, it’s hard to get back in gear once you leave right in the middle of it. How about tomorrow, okay?”
“They don’t pay us overtime, you know.”
Fabi shrugged. “I know. I guess I’m just a workaholic.”
Cassandra wrinkled her nose and stared at Fabi’s screen for a few moments, then shrugged. “Okay, Fabi. I hope you get it sorted out, but don’t kill yourself. No one expects you to get this whole place running like a top your first day here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Cassandra left and Fabi got back to work at the computer. She didn’t want to say anything about it to Cassandra, lest she was wrong or — even worse — Cassandra had somehow been a part of it — but it looked as though a substantial portion of the clinic’s budget had been rerouted for the past few months into an obscure special project. She was digging deep into the databases now for more information on this project, but at every turn she hit an encrypted file, a hardware firewall or some other security measure. Finally she got a break when she cross-referenced something she read in a cached email to a data backup log file, which gave her a file name. She searched for that file and found it buried deep in an obscure directory.