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back; the amputations healed over as permanent
losses. Crawlers could no longer run or even walk without
functional legs, but they were still entirely ferine as they pulled
themselves along in a scramble to get where they were going. Their
progress was slow and their ability to initiate an effective attack
so greatly diminished that crawlers were the least dangerous
opponent their kind had to offer, at least when they operated in
the open.
    Colonel Walker’s policy to
shoot infected with powerful exploding cannon shells had blown off
whole limbs with remarkable efficiency and created thousands of
crawlers in the process. Other infected ended up so
quadriplegically mutilated that they could never again effectively
chase food in any mode, ambulation or otherwise, so instead they
would lay in wait as the persistent lurkers, dormant as doormats
for years when necessary, until some unfortunate thing blundered
close enough for the disabled ghoul to strike at it with some
mangled limb from surprise.
    Thousands of jitteringly
awkward crawlers clambered toward the gap in the containment wall
in an unwholesome wailing carpet of malice-enshrined faces that at
times were hideously reminiscent of their former humanity, maledict
prisoners of inequitable misfortune more deserving of mercy killing
than condemnation.
    The troopers opened fire
with their weapons to repel the attack. The infected could not
bleed to death, but enough damage could force them into dormancy
where they slowly repaired themselves until they awoke once more.
When a weapon blew apart their head, a lack of functional brains
deprived them of ever regaining aggression, but even headless,
their undead bodies would never die. They would lie twitching,
taking water from the rain, using sunlight for their photosynthetic
organelles; they even consumed molds and fungus that tried to
devour them first with no chance of success.
    The soldiers jeered as
their indomitable weaponry reduced the crawlers into a lake of
shredded gore that gnashed with broken teeth. Their furious defense
also prevented the engineering crews from getting up front close
enough to make any effort to repair the breach in the main
wall.
    For all their success, it
really amounted to nothing because many more wrawling infected came
to replace the destroyed; limpers, stragglers, and hoppers
sacrificed themselves to the guns to press their advance ever
closer. They assaulted by the thousands and only a small minority
did so in direct path of the defensive weaponry. Far more of them
encroached along the footing of the intact perimeter wall where
they were relatively safe from the soldiers’ super-velocity
projectiles spitting from their teslaflux rifles.
    Critias led his team to the
top of the main wall from where they could have a controlling
overview of the battle. As soon as they were in position, what they
saw struck them full of dread, so Critias went straight to his
radio, “Colonel Walker, the whole city is coming to wipe us out,
and I do mean the whole city, a million of them!” From their view
there was not a single street not packed with flowing rivers of the
monsters who all screamed the same song of hungry death.
    “ There’s a hunter,”
Daniels called out in warning as he shot at a giant freak of an
infected they so named for being the most lethal manifestation of
the World-ender Plague.
    The hunter had once been a
man that succumbed to the infection only to then later suffer some
catastrophic injury that had regenerated its whole body into a
blockish mass of rippling muscle easily four times the weight of a
mortal. It was even more agile a creature than it was strong
despite the heinously demented physical form. The hunter leaped
along window ledges as would a demonic squirrel until Daniels
landed the bullet that knocked it off to fall into the pressing mob
of lesser infected swarming the street below.
    Colonel Walker broadcasted,
“Hold the perimeter so our tanks can plug the breach! This