SurvivorZ: Grave Harbor

96

JAMES

Career soldier Colonel Jim Hayes knew Death well. The formerly happily married man and father of two spent most of his professional life depriving it of its prize on one battlefield or another. It was a game of chess they played, one in which he proved victorious on more occasions than he could remember.

Over time, he gathered that Death was a poor loser. Instead of taking its revenge out on him, it went after everyone he cared about. It took his wife and children. It claimed the men and women under his command. It even sunk its black claws into the earth and squeezed until the soil bled corpses.

Though he played a good game, Jim always knew his eternal opponent would not be denied its win forever. The one thing he hadn't anticipated was to see Death's checkmate coming, while finding himself without a countermove.

He considered the duffle bag Sergeant Lowe left in his care. It wasn't very big to begin with, yet it still looked mostly empty. It seemed to be a poor thing upon which to pin the hopes of every man, woman, and child hoping for deliverance from the storm raging outside.

Jim sighed and unzipped the bag. He barely needed to open it to count its contents. Five. Not even a half dozen grenades remained from the arsenal they were forced to abandon in Harvard.

It was barely enough for one shot of Milton's trebuchet. If his aim was anything less than perfect, they'd waste their one chance at taking out the enemy commander. It was a huge gamble, with everyone's lives at stake.

The risk's too great, he thought. He needed a strategy that didn't put everyone here on the receiving end of Death's retaliation.

He removed one of the grenades and studied it up close. Conceivably, it was possible to string the frags together into a bundle charge by lashing them together to a piece of wood and looping a pull cord or tug bar through the safety pins. Even that was something of a gamble, though.

It didn't take a great amount of strength to pop the striker lever, but it did take some. It wasn't like Hollywood war films. You couldn't just pull the pin with your teeth, not unless you wanted to end up in a dentist's chair.

Expecting a single cord to successfully pull the pins on all five grenades simultaneously didn't seem realistic. Practically, they might activate two or three of them before the sling fired the bundle from the wall. Considering how far they had to travel, he still couldn't imagine Milton's trebuchet shooting them off with enough velocity to keep them from exploding prematurely in midair. Achieving a bullseye with all five grenades going off at once was almost akin to winning two lottery drawings back to back.

"No chance," he muttered, returning the frag to the pack.

Milton's plan would never work. What they needed was a more reliable delivery method. Some way to march the explosive package right up to the ghoul leader and—

Jim's bloated stomach gurgled, belching foul air from his caboose. He exhaled and pinched his nose against the stench of his rebelling body. A part of him almost wished his lifelong chess opponent would simply call checkmate already, rather than dragging things out.

His gaze dropped to the half open bag again, revealing its load of explosives. He supposed he must have looked insane, standing there holding his nose and grinning at the same time. A crazy idea took root in his brain and began to grow.

"Heh. Why not?" he asked, his voice sounding as pinched as his nose. Releasing his nostrils, he chuckled at the mad tactic that just came to him.

At the very least, he would deprive his lifelong chess opponent of its unchallenged triumph. Death would simply have to settle for a stalemate.