Free Off With Their Heads by Mainak Dhar

and joined the others in walking towards the troops. Some men took a step back and Chen knew he had just a few seconds before his men gave into full-scale panic. His men were well trained, but they had never fought an enemy who could not be shot dead.
    He had already heard how other units had panicked and tried to run. That never worked. The moment one of them was bitten, the contagion spread, and within minutes, a disciplined platoon of crack troops was turned into bloodthirsty and mindless Biters.
    Chen ordered one of his men to fire an RPG and within seconds the rocket snaked out towards the approaching Biters. It exploded in their midst, scattering all but three of them.
    ‘Did we get them?’
    Chen did not answer the man who had asked the question but brought up his rifle scope to his eyes to take a closer look. The Biters who had been torn apart by the rocket were not dead yet. One of them had his leg taken apart by the rocket but his torso was still trying to crawl towards them, his mouth open with blood and drool streaming out of it. Another had lost much of one side of his body, but both halves were flopping around. As horrified as he was, Chen had just learned an important lesson. Even if the Biters could not be killed, they could be stopped.
    ‘Take their legs apart! Aim low and fire on full auto!’
    A volley of rifle fire on full automatic targeted the three approaching Biters and all three of them went down, their legs shredded. What remained of them continued to move and wriggle around on the ground, but they were no longer an imminent threat.
    ‘RPG!’
    At Chen’s command, another rocket streaked out and obliterated what had remained of the Biters. For all Chen knew, their body parts were still moving, but they were not getting any closer and for now, that was victory enough. A cheer went up as his men realized that the enemy they were fighting could be defeated after all. He turned to smile at the men and shouted loudly enough so that they could all hear him.
    ‘Every bastard thinks he’s tough till we put a few rounds into him. If they come again, just remember to shoot low and anyone who hits them in the balls gets a drink from me.’
    A few chuckled but then his radioman’s face turned ashen.
    ‘Sir, scouts are reporting more of them.’
    ‘Deploy into fire teams of six men. One RPG and five riflemen. Shoot only for the legs and then mop them up with rockets.’
    As his men began to deploy, he saw the hesitation on his radioman’s face.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Sir, aerial recon is reporting that there are hundreds of thousands of Biters headed this way. We just got news that Guangzhou has been overrun, and all radio contact has been lost with the city.’
    *
    ‘Sir, we are out of bullets for the sniper rifles.’
    That was the last thing Chen needed to hear. All day they had picked off Biters at long range with their snipers. He had ten specialized snipers with him, and they had fired and fired again till their fingers bled and their guns overheated to dangerous levels. But Chen had known it would never be enough. The People’s Liberation Air Force had been flying all day as well, but China was a vast nation and the PLAAF was already dangerously overextended.
    War had broken out in the Middle East, and with all seemingly lost, Iran had launched nuclear missiles at Israel. Chen had heard that the Middle East was now a radioactive wasteland. India and Pakistan were trading blows as well, and then had come the news that some fool in Taiwan had ordered missiles fired at the mainland. The Chinese had retaliated with a fury, unleashing a barrage of missiles and air strikes. What the Biters could not accomplish in terms of wiping out civilization, it seemed humans would finish on their own. But for now, Chen had more immediate concerns. He had heard back from the Air Force that short of using tactical nuclear weapons, there was no way they could hold the Biters back.
    The one silver lining was that