We were getting pretty good at setting the defenses at this point. We had done this in several situations over the five days of the apocalypse. The problem had been when they break through the front. We don’t exactly have a whole lot of melee specialists, and we just lost Hank, one of our best. We needed to develop more melee capable soldiers. However, we needed to get those folks to survive today and enough more days to be able to progress into genuine melee focused classes. However, that was a problem for Tomorrow Neal, and not Today Neal: clearly two entirely different people.

  Despite the refresh on ammo, we continued to go through it fairly quickly. Even with headshots becoming the norm, we couldn’t always bring down an orc with one headshot. Often it took two, three, or even four well placed critical hits to bring orcs down. They were tough bastards. This wasn’t a good trade off for dead orcs. We used an awful lot of ammunition to bring down every group of ten to fifteen. It was unsustainable.

  The real problem was when the first 50 caliber ran dry. It was Will’s machine gun. He had been firing a little more consistently than the others, and that had drained him of all his ammo. We couldn’t give him more ammo without leaving any of the others nearly depleted. With that sobering reality we realized we had to start to fall back.

  We used heavy fire into the orcs just out of melee range to create separation allowing the shield bearers and their offensive focused partners to take several steps back. The problem was that this was not going to end that way. Nora finally gave us the help we needed by nearly draining her force bolt wand. It at least let soldiers get onto the Humvee hoods or truck beds and allowed us to pull back. The problem became that we could only fall back so far.

  Billy let me know that the buses that had been sent north to us had been filled up and had exited with a half a dozen militia to protect them. However, there were still far too many civilians left for us to simply pack them in with us and flee. We needed to take them somewhere that would work as a new staging area for buses to meet up with us. I had no ideas off the top of my head. Someone got out a map, and we pinpointed the best spot as the train yards not too far away. They weren’t close, but it was our best bet to possibly cobble together a train escape.

  The spider never showed itself again, which was a relief, but that relief was dashed away by the appearance of several female creatures on leashes. Well, that and the creature holding the leash. It had finally shown itself. It looked like a minotaur, if minotaurs were ten feet tall with reddish skin. He had muscles on muscles, and I was instantly not a fan. He gave off a malevolent aura that I could feel from hundreds of feet away. It made me afraid.

  We travelled the one block to hook up with the civilians and the remaining militia. I wish it had been more than one block, but there wasn’t that much distance between the portal and the interstate. I found myself running around with others to get civilians onto vehicles while all of the militia remained on foot. This was a bad set up, but I wasn’t left with a plethora of choices. We ended up loading civilians in as many of the large 4x4’s with a single militia person to protect them on the way to fenton. We gave up on almost all our vehicles that way.

  Our injuries had climbed by another seven people too injured to help. A half a dozen people were also killed before any medical help could be brought. We put the dead and injured in the Humvees as they each ran out of 50 caliber ammo and sent them down the interstate as well. From here we still had a dozen or so civilians that couldn’t be fit onto the vehicles for various reasons, mostly adult men. No kids were left behind to walk with us.

  We continued to fire weapons at the orcs, and it seemed to be just enough to keep us from getting overrun. I wish we had more breathing room, but we didn’t. We were left with about sixty of us on foot along with a dozen civilians. No Humvees remained. No trucks remained. We did get Natalie to have most of her crew retreat with additional civilians, but stayed with us. She even kept one cameraman.

  We needed to walk well over a mile to get close to the rail yard. If it was the first walking we had done in the brutal august heat, it wouldn’t have been too bad. We were in the afternoon, however. Many of our guys had been fighting off and on all day. We couldn’t let guys do level ups that they needed for health purposes, much less let Nora do her class change. This was a problem, because she already stated she had stalled out on experience earlier in the day. This meant that for the entire fight in the afternoon she was gaining all of zero experience. I hadn’t reached that threshold yet, but I would soon, provided I lived that long.

  Thus began our trek towards the rail yards. I tried to stay close to the middle of the group. We had to walk down the part of Hampton Avenue that split. Most of it went on a bridge almost all the way to the Interstate, but the smaller part of the street met up with Manchester Road. Manchester was a long road that contained part of the historic Route 66. I don’t really remember, nor care about Route 66, but the signs are up next to the road every quarter of a mile, so it was hard to miss.

  My promise to myself to stay close to the middle lasted less than 500 feet. I felt myself gravitating towards the rear. I spotted Frank and the other shield bearers staying barely ahead of the orcs pursuing us. I climbed on top of an abandoned car to get a better look at the situation. The situation was depressing to see once I could see more of it.

  It started with roughly twenty orcs trying to get into melee with the shield bearers, each attack, lunge, and grapple was designed to slow my guys down. Just because we hadn’t lost any of them yet, didn’t mean we wouldn’t. I was certain that they were all in the greatest danger of any of our folks. There were more orcs beyond them, but they were merely keeping pace with the front group. After that was a distinct gap. I wanted to feel good about that, but beyond that gap was the big minotaur creature with all his slave pets on leashes mixed in with rank after rank of monsters. Many were orcs, but I think we had thinned them out to the point that we were starting to see nastier threats. There were a ton of goblins mounted on arachnes. There were clusters of demonic munchers. All of this was bad for us. My radio chirped at me.

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  “Captain Cassland, this is command. What is your ETA to retaking the Hampton Avenue Portal.”

  “Command, this is Cassland. We have no ETA. We are falling back due to casualties.”

  “Did you say you are falling back? Who gave you permission to do that?”

  “I did. We had no air support or artillery. Hampton Avenue was overrun and we never got to the portal. We’ve killed hundreds of enemies, but we took lots of casualties. We’ve also evacuated a fair number of civilians.”

  “Cassland, this is command. Please confirm if you retreated?”

  “We fell back. Retaking the portal is not possible without a lot of air support. We have killed almost all the orcs. We are seeing bigger threats now.”

  “This is Command. Cassland, did you say killed almost all the orcs?”

  “This is Cassland here. Yes We’ve killed several hundred of them. I now see far more dangerous threats included creatures mounted on large spiders, armored up stomachs with mouths, and this minotaur looking demon.”

  “In that case get off of Hampton Avenue. We will route bombers to that street. Command out.”

  We had less than a hundred feet until we were entirely off of Hampton and entirely on Manchester. I shouted, “Hurry up everyone, Hampton is about to get glassed!” I jumped down from the car, which was now dangerously close to Frank and the other shield bearers. I did not stick the landing, but one of my legs was half lame. I wasn’t surprised. I started limping as fast as I could towards Manchester.

  My limping would have been faster, but I had an AR15 strapped across my back and I was carrying Hank’s axe. I couldn’t put either in the little pouch of storage. Despite that I limped on. My feet kept moving, and that is what counted. I soon felt a hand on my arm, and I thought it was Frank. I turned to discover that it was an orc who had slipped past the shield bearers and now gripped my arm and stopped my motion in one swift movement. Fuck! On instinct I brought the axe around in my non restrained hand and took a chunk out of his arm. If I were any stronger or better with an axe that would have lopped the arm clean off. My skills were not that. The Axe bit through his flesh and muscle before it scraped his bone. The orc looked surprised, like it didn’t know I was carrying an axe that could slice him into a dozen pieces. His surprise shifted to anger as he stabbed his blade directly forward to my gut. I tried to shift out of the way, but that was made impossible with him gripping my arm. How he still gripped me with a mangled arm, I did not know. The blade struck my gut, but off center, and had to pierce through both the lesser ring of force armor and the Kevlar vest I always wore. The blade passed through the force armor despite the resistance it provided, which slowed down the attack. Then it hit the Kevlar at an angle, and sliced sideways through that. The result was a thin bloody wound to my abdomen with a blade trapped between flesh and armor. The pain sucked, but the leg wound was far worse.

  I bit my lip to keep from crying out and somehow changed my grip on the axe. With the orc trapped in close I couldn’t swing the weapon freely, so stabbed the conical blade on the end of the axe into the orc’s face. Unlike the orc’s blade, I had no such resistance. Helm, flesh, and bone all peeled away from my attack. Blood splashed my face before the convulsing orc released his death grip on my arm and slumped into me. That was about as close to a living enemy as I had been, and I did not want to repeat it.

  “You really put your elbow into that thrust,” Frank’s voice cut in. I turned to see him smiling at me, despite numerous cuts on his exposed skin. How can anyone smile like that with the amount of physical exhaustion they had gone through? It was an errant thought, but one that I hoped to answer some day. I just needed to live long enough to have a chance at it.

  “Yeah, but he’s gone now. So at least we can keep running away.” I pulled the blade out of the wound, grunting through the pain. It worse coming out than going in, but stopping for long was not an option. I slid the thing into my pouch, as it was more a machete than anything else. Despite my heaving chest, I turned and kept limping towards Manchester.

  An explosion went off behind me, and I turned to see the last edges of a fireball exploding in the middle of the orcs still in pursuit. I frantically looked around for the source of an actual fireball to see Nora standing on top of a truck lift her index finger to her lips and blow. The only thing better would have been her finger smoking, but we couldn’t get everything that we wanted. She cast a fireball: an actual freaking fireball, and not from an item or a scroll. That meant that snake had the ability but hadn’t used it. We don’t know how much mana it hard when it was fighting us, so maybe fireball wasn’t the first choice. Yet I didn’t have time to contemplate that.

  I focused on limping faster. I had to pull the staff out of the pouch to use it was a walking stick to keep me steady. Otherwise, I would have fallen behind. In my state, falling behind wasn’t an option. I heard frank saying, “Keep the pace up, Neal.” Before I knew it we had reached Manchester. Just in time too. I could hear the sound of Jets nearby, and the sound grew louder, much faster than I had anticipated. It’s not like the movies exactly, the sound seemed to catch me unaware, despite me being mentally prepared for it, and then there were missiles landing up and down Hampton.

  Explosions bloomed before my eyes. It was strange being on the ground just a little below the angle of where the missiles hit. From the slightly lower angle, due to the downslope towards Manchester, I saw a shimmering color infuse itself with the explosions. I had no idea what that was, maybe it was something making it extra powerful. As the smoke and debris settled I saw that I was oh so very wrong. The missiles did kill things, but the shimmering color were force shields of some kind. Not everything was protected by the fields, but the minotaur and all his pets were. Not to mention the few hundred within his protective shield that stayed shimmering through the little bit of dust still in the air. Such a shield would be beautiful, all the colors of the rainbow playing off it, though mostly blues and purples reflected back at me. If I were on the demon’s side, it would be a great comfort to know about such defenses.

  Then the whole scene got a bit worse, as many of the creatures not protected by the force shields started to get up, despite many visible injuries.

  My radio screeched at me, “Cassland, this is command. Hampton should be clear. Confirm, Captain!”

  “Negative, Command. This is Cassland, Negative. The enemy survived. Some were slain, but most of them were protected by some force field. I have no clue who or what generated it.”

  “Did you say, most survived?”

  “This is Cassland, I repeat, they survived. We need to fallback further.”

  “Confirmed, Cassland. Hampton Portal is now designated a lost portal. Get out of there.”

  They say get out of there, but offer no evacuation. Well, at least the monsters directly in front of us are dead. We needed to find some place to hide and recover for the next day.