Subject: Re: 667 Day 172
Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 172 - Outside Temp - havent looked - probably 234F
Well, there was something you dont see every day !
will return this post after I finish it on other forum haha sorry
Here Ya Go! Restored ****************************************
Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 172 - Outside Temp - haven’t looked - probably 234F
Well, there was something you don’t see every day !
Battles over. Where to start?
History needs a name, I suggest Battle of South Corridor, or Battle of Tunnel 3. Hope there aren’t anymore. Like 2nd Manassas, or 3rd Ypres. And I got to see the whole thing, I’m proud to say. Well, most of it. The important part anyway. The bloody part.
Commotion I mentioned in last post was a false alarm. Just some guys coming this way trying to get to the cafeteria. Our guys wouldn’t let em. Nothing happened.
Next morning the rumor mill was running full speed. Someone said the Jocks were coming. Someone said they were going to turn off the air (we can control the fans in this corner so that wouldn’t matter). They said the Jocks were pumping exhaust thru our end (our detectors didn’t go off so that was BS). They said the Jocks were building walls just around the corners ( the air was flowing so that was a load of crap too). Then it got real quiet. Too quiet, as they say in the movies. Everyone got real serious. That lasted til dinnertime.
About 6:30 Will the computer geek came in wearing the stupidest looking hat I ever saw. It was made from the tube shaped gray foam that gets put around pipes to insulate them. It looked like a bicycle helmet inflated, and had a shoestring tied to it for a chinstrap. He told the doctors to get ready for battle casualties, and to make sure they were ready with all the blood they had. I stopped him and asked him what they were planning. He went outside and came back in with the damnedest thing I ever saw. It gave me the chills when I first realized what it was.
He said they had a brainstorming session to figure out how to defend themselves. They had some seriously weird ideas but it settled on an idea they came up with. They reasoned that if they went back thru their History Lessons and figured out what the most dangerous weapons were before the invention of rifles and pistols, they'd be able to work out some sort of strategy that had been tried and proved before. No need to reinvent the wheel they said.
They considered bows and arrows, which was a good idea, but impractical since they really didn’t have time to make them, and even less to practice with them.
Then they had a stroke of genius, in my opinion. Back before gunpowder, the best armies had huge masses of pikemen, and fought in a tight box formation, like the old Greek phalanx. In the 1400s and 1500s those armies tore the hell out of the old Medieval heavy cavalry, and knights with swords. Until muskets were really common, pike armies ruled the battlefield.
So Will brings in this damn evil looking piece of aluminum tube. Inch and a half diameter bare aluminum, 20 feet long, and cut off at one end at a 60 degree angle. He had me touch the end, it was as sharp as a goddam razorblade. If you don’t deburr the metal, a bandsaw cut leaves a nasty sharp edge on metal.
He said they'd been practicing just around the corner out of sight. Staying in a tight formation, holding those pikes out, moving forward in unison one step at a time. Just the thing for a corridor fight, where the bad guys cant get around to your flanks.
About that time we started hearing a lot of yelling. The Jocks were coming towards us in a large mob, and they had bats. I doubt they even had a plan, except for the "lets go get em" mob mentality.
The Nerds lined up right outside the Infirmary. They were in 3 rows, 5 abreast, even though it is the widest part of the shelter, they had to stand sideways to fit in 5. The rows behind had their pikes between the guys in the rows in front. So they had 15 of those damn razor sharp pipes sticking out in a little space about 4 feet wide and a foot tall, right about eye level of the mass of Jocks coming towards em. There were a dozen or so Nerds hanging back, since there wasn’t enough room in the corridor for all of them at once. They had a pile of extra pikes in a pile behind them. There were a dozen or so staff and Nerds down the hall at the intersection, to make sure another bunch didn’t sneak up behind us.
The Jock Mob came forward til they were about 5 feet from the spear points, and that’s when they really realized there was something sharp pointing at them. They yelled a lot, insults and taunts. The ones in the back pressed the ones in front forward a bit, but no one really wanted to find out how sharp the pipes were. I could see the 3rd row of the Nerds formation. The shorter ones like Will were in front, Tiny took up a big part of the 3rd row. 667 and Stan were in the middle. I wish you could have seen their faces. They were scared as hell, but they had a scary hard look in their eyes. But those stupid looking foam helmets were so ridiculous looking.
The groups stayed a few yards apart for a good minute. I was worried their arms would get tired from holding the pikes out. Then one of the Jocks threw his bat. It missed the front row, hit the ceiling a bit, and struck Stan on the shoulder. I bet it hurt like hell but he didnt flinch. Right then 667 yelled "STEP". And the whole group took one big step forward in unison. You could hear the sound from the Jocks change completely, from razzing and low taunts, to a much higher warning pitch.
667 yelled "STEP" again, and they moved mostly out of my line of sight. The pitch from the Jocks mob became higher still. I jumped out of bed and tried to get thru the crowd at the door, my back felt like a poker of fire where I'd gotten stabbed. But I had to see. I got around by the wall and could see over the tops of peoples head just enough to see the fight from the shoulder up.
He yelled "STEP" one more time, and then "THRUST". People started screaming. 2 ballbats bounced past our door, the doctors who were leaning out too far shoved themselves back inside the doorway. "STEP" ... "THRUST" ... STEP ... THRUST.
They got into a quick rhythm. Someone was screaming a lot louder than the rest. And then another.
667 yelled "THRUST" three times in a row. They must have reached the mass of targets. It was easy to imagine to people in front frantically trying to push back away from the pikes, but stopped by the mob pushing forward. Classic tactics. The Jocks were already beaten but didn’t know it. My blood was up, I wanted to rush outside, but Allison had me by the belt and wouldn’t let go.
They started moving forward again, one step at a time, and obviously someone went down almost every time they thrust. The screams were like something from a nightmare. In about a minute a few of the doctors rushed out and started dragging people into the infirmary. I finally got to push my head out the door to see the fight heading away from me towards the west. The floor was covered in blood, and I mean covered from wall to wall, and plenty on the walls and ceiling in places too. The dozen reinforcement kids had to step over piles of rags on the floor to keep up with the main phalanx. Then I realized the piles were dead and wounded. They didn’t look real.
In just over a minute it was mostly over. The crowd behind the battle was yelling encouragement so much that I could barely make out 667 keeping cadence. He started yelling STEP 3 or 4 times for every THRUST. And then they just walked forward, spearing anyone who was too slow. It was a rout. A bloody rout. They chased the Jocks all the way to the SW intersection, slowly turned the corner, and then chased em some more up the West Corridor. The fight was clear out of them by then. A few of the ringleaders and hard core followers holed up in the NW heat exchanger, among the cooling pipes. I'll save that for last.
The doctors started dragging in the wounded. There was blood everywhere in the infirmary in less than a minute. Severed arteries have much higher pressure than anyone imagines, and just about all of them had spurting wounds. The infirmary filled up quickly, and the overflow went into the cafeteria. Allison set me onto an office chair and pushed my into the Communications Room where I'd be out of the way. The little wheels on the chair left 4 parallel tracks of blood into the Comm Room. I was covered in other peoples blood.
The Jocks that got speared cleanly in the torso, facing forward, mostly died where they fell. A hole that big lets a lot of blood out very rapidly. Most of the wounded had vicious gashes on their arms, backs, and thighs. One guy had a cut from just below his nose, tore thru his cheek and ear, that ended on the back of his scalp. Head wounds bleed a lot. A lucky few had neat round holes in their buttock muscles, they were able to crawl themselves to the doctors. They must have been trying to crawl away. Just as Allison got me to the Comm Room, I saw that fukker that stabbed me, first time since he did it. He had a pike run clear thru his stomach and 3 feet out his back. They had a helluva time getting him thru the crowd and onto bed. The Doctors had to cut off the long end of the pike and pull the rest thru from the pointy end.
I wanted so badly to stand over him and ask him how it felt.
They got about 50 of the survivors rounded up and put under guard, down in the SW dig. We're going to go thru the video logs and see who was involved. Stupid bastards were so cocky they didn’t even think to shut off the cameras. A lot of the guilty ones are probably just laying low.
We got our people down into their dig, where they had the Staff members held captive. Bastards killed half of em and beat the others half to death. The Captain was the first one killed, and they just all went berserk on em. I want in the worst way to take a pike to whoever was in on the massacre. Probably better that I’m dinged up. I doubt I would be able to control my rage if I had a weapon. Best that I stay out of the infirmary for awhile.
Total Casualties - Our Side - 3 injured. Stan had a nasty shoulder bruise but the bone didn’t break. The kid next to Will got a broken knee cap, which hurts like hell. And one staff guy got a bad knife cut to his arm when they were turning the SW Corner and some girl rushed out at em. Their Side - 8 dead, 2 more not likely to make it thru the week, 23 severely wounded, 16 lightly wounded. 2 of the dead were trampled by their own people in the panic to escape. 3 more dead when you count the Ringleaders that tried to hide in the Cooling Pipe Array.
Of the 3 main ringleaders, Josh is under arrest, Paul was among the first to be killed outright, and Jake was one of the ones hiding in the pipes. Will came back just after the battle and had the air flow re-routed so it exhausted out the array they were taking cover in. Then the guys set fire to a bunch of cardboard and tried to smoke em out. I suppose you might say they used too much cardboard, because the air flow really got that fire hot, and they cooked those three. Good riddance I say.
Last but not least, that psycho bitch Emily. Word is that she grabbed one of the pikes and tried to pull it away. Not sure who’s pike she grabbed, but everyone says it was 667 that ran his spearpoint right into her eye. She'll live, dammit. She got my old bed in the infirmary. Doc says the eye socket shattered, if the spear had gone a centimeter deeper it would have pushed the bone splinters into the brain and killed her instantly.
Tomorrow we get to figure out what to do with the guilty, and how to dispose of the 30 or so bodies. The doctors will be working all night. I have to change my attitude about the Jocks now, from kill em all, back to keep as many alive as possible. That wont be easy.
All the adrenaline is worn off now. There’s a familiar sound of girls screaming from all corners of the shelter again. I think I saw Tiny throwing up. Lots of wailing from the wounded. Kinda hard to bask in this victory.
You just would not believe how much blood there was.