Aberrant: Dead Rising - James: Herd [Alternate DR Ending v1] - Complete

[Courier]

Quote:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

James leaned against the camper, checked his rifle for the 4th time, and reflected that somewhere someone had botched something. No way should this group have gotten this close to the refuge without being seen, someone just hadn't figured it was worth mentioning. Maybe seen them in or by a city and hadn't realized they were walking.

They'd spotted The Herd was coming for less than an hour before it got to the refuge. Sometimes zoms walked for no reason. Sometimes others saw them walking and followed. Sometimes a pair of groups would run into each other and they'd merge. This was why you could find a dozen zoms all together out in the wilderness.

Everyone had seen this happen, but no one had realized how high this phenomenon could scale. The herd headed towards them had tens of thousands of zoms. The wall was finished on that side, it should hold, but this was going to be a chore.

Fox had stationed James next to Priest and his crew with the older man in charge. There was method to that madness, although there was some bad blood the two of them Priest would presumably 'see' any break ins before they happened and be able to send James as reinforcement. Jill was on a watch tower with a rifle, Jo, Violet, & Jas were keeping the children from panicking. This was going to go on for a long time.

James started firing from long range, every time he pulled the trigger another zom fell and the ones behind it stepped or tripped over him and kept coming. 200 rifles spoke, and spoke, and spoke again, the zoms died and died with indifference and walked forward with hunger. Humans were the only thing to use firearms.

Hundreds died before they even reached the wall, and then at the wall they stopped and waited and died some more. Fox had already given the order, don't kill the ones next to the wall, they'll climb over their bodies.

The wall held, and held, and zoms spread out to cover most of the walls. Then Priest looked around in horror at wall and screamed at everyone to fall back. His crew obeyed instantly, most everyone else, James included, was wondering what the problem was when the super-zoms pushed the wall over.

Ten thousand zoms walked forward and James scanned them to figure out which were the ones strong enough to pull off this kind of feat. To his horror he realized he had no idea, the super zoms didn't look any different from the others.

James leaped forward, up to Jill's watch tower, grabbed her and two others over their protestations and leapt back towards Violet's. Behind him the wave of zombies covered the tower's base and reached up uselessly. The ladder had been pulled up before they even reached the wall.

A moment later, while Jill was yelling she had been just fine back where she was, the tower fell. James knocked on the wall of Violet's and said it might as well be tissue paper.

Two minutes later James picked up the SUV with 7 people in it and leapt away to the sounds of people cursing him for not saving them. Not the first time, as much as James tried to hope, he couldn't convince himself that it would be the last.

[Dawn OOC]

1 xp - totally a James fic.