Free Off With Their Heads by Mainak Dhar Page A

news had spread along the line on how to stop the Biters. It was simple really.
    Aim for the head. Only the head. That was the only thing would bring a Biter down for good.
    So Chen’s snipers had been busy for over an hour, shooting down hundreds of Biters from more than two kilometers away. The problem was that they were now out of bullets and there were still thousands of Biters shuffling towards Chen’s position. Chen ordered his riflemen to take position, but he did not have high hopes. They could not guarantee head shots at long range, and if the Biters could get close enough, he knew they would be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Chen thought back to his days in the Military Academy and smiled at the irony of it all. The Chinese Red Army had made itself infamous for its near suicidal ‘human wave’ tactics which had come as such a nasty surprise to the Americans in Korea. Now the same Red Army faced the prospect of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but this time the oncoming wave was hardly human.
    Some of the men pointed to the sky as two jet fighters swooped in low, releasing bombs over the approaching sea of Biters. As the bombs exploded, a wave of fire expanded from the point of impact. Even from a kilometer away, Chen could feel the extreme heat they unleashed.
    ‘Was it a nuke?’ one of the nervous men whispered. No, it was not a nuclear weapon, but a napalm bomb dropped right in the middle of the approaching Biters.
    For a few seconds, all that was visible was a wall of fire and Chen heard cheers. Those disappeared when the Biters emerged from behind the flames. Some of the Biters were on fire, yet they shuffled on, stepping over the burnt bodies of their comrades. Any normal army would have collapsed under the firepower unleashed against them and the devastating losses they had suffered, but the Biters were unlike any army Chen had imagined.
    Chen sighted his rifle and took aim, sending a bullet through a Biter’s head. A couple of men whistled appreciatively at his aim.
    Chen tried to put up a brave front and turned to look at his men.
    ‘Just take off their heads. Not much to it.’
    A few of his men took aim and fired and a couple of Biters went down from direct hits to the head. It was but a small victory, but Chen knew the war was far from over, and he was no longer sure he would live to see it through to its conclusion.
    *
    ‘Blow the bridge.’
    Chen watched as the explosive charges were triggered and the bridge went down, taking with it several dozen Biters. It was now almost dark and they had retreated well into the residential areas of Beijing. Any further and the Biters would be among the millions of civilians now cowering inside the city.
    There was no counting how many Biters had been destroyed in the fighting that day but they kept coming. Many Army units had been overrun, further adding to the ranks of the Biters, and finally Chen had received orders to retreat, destroying all bridges and mining all approach roads along the way. A row of tanks in the distance were heading out to meet the Biters, but he doubted they would achieve much. He had already heard tales of tanks that had destroyed hundreds of Biters, then run out of ammunition and gotten bogged down. Heavy armor was of little use against a seemingly never-ending sea of Biters. Once the tanks ran out of ammunition or got bogged down, the Biters would just bypass them and carry on.
    The Biters did not seem to feel tiredness, fear or pain. They kept coming, and several more cities had fallen. Beijing, Shanghai and a handful of other cities were still intact, but he had already heard that with Beijing under greater threat, the government had been flown out to Shanghai. His men were dead tired, and terrified. Many of them just wanted to get home to their families, and Chen thought of his own wife. Yet he knew that he could not allow them to leave their posts. One or two units further to the East had scattered and Chen had