Session music: Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier – Corb Lund.
The team slowly advances along the winding road that leads up the hill toward the village. The fog grows thicker, shrouding the details of their surroundings, but what they can see is desolate. As the group once saw in the forest south of Ponikla, and as the expedition team later encountered in a deserted section of Radomsko, the village’s outskirts are in a state of decay far more advanced than the date would suggest. The asphalt of the road is cracked and buckled, and Leks’ bearers frequently have to detour around craters and potholes that would wreck the handcart. The few vehicles alongside the road sit on their steel rims, the rubber of their tires cracked and dry-rotted. Buildings, too, slump under their own weight, their load-bearing members bent or splintered.
There are bodies everywhere, too – those of the human victims of the nerve agent attack, as well as those of the scavengers who came to feed upon them. Many are already picked clean or rotted down to the bone.
Leks calls a halt. The hill’s crest is finally visible a few hundred meters ahead. A tight cluster of buildings marks the village’s center. He confers with Red and puts out flankers. Miko and Arkadi move off the road to the north; Minka and Alexei take the south. Red and Magda stay formed up on Leks’ handcart, while Zenobia and Jablonski form the rear guard.
Magda, on point for the center element, is the first to spot trouble. She’s moving up to take a position in the burned-out building to the right of the road, but as she turns the corner of a sagging fence, she realizes something else is already waiting there. Gaunt shapes move in the shadows – it’s another pack of the skull-faced dogs the team faced at the bridge below.
Magda slinks back and confers with Red. Then she creeps forward again until she can put a burned-out car between herself and the dogs. She breathes deeply, arms a frag grenade, and hurls it forward. It’s a good throw, but something alerts the dogs just in time. They spring aside as the ovoid lands in their midst. But Magda’s throw flushes them out of their den and into the road. Leks’ machine gun and the rifles of Red and the Jablonski cousins are waiting.
A man with a bow leans out a second-story window overlooking the intersection. As he takes aim at Leks, Magda walks a burst up the wall and into his throat. He topples out of sight.
As the sounds of the grenade and the gunfire die away, both flanking teams, still advancing, hear the sound of rapidly-approaching hoofbeats. To the north, Arkadi and Miko move into cover and go on overwatch with their rifles. Minka and Alexei, to the south, also move into cover.
Each flanking team sees a similar force approaching: four horses, two unburdened and two bearing riders. The riders are all of a type with those the team has engaged previously: gaunt, deformed, clad in the rags of Soviet uniforms, bearing lances and bows.
Arkadi and Miko exchange a glance and a nod. Then they open fire, raking the approaching cluster with lead. Their efforts are rewarded with sprays of blood, but none of the horses go down and neither of the men loses his seat. Both guns jam, too [pushed attack rolls at maximum rate of fire with multiple 1s].
The two riders continue south toward the intersection. The two riderless horses reverse course and thunder toward Arkadi and Miko, clearly intent on trampling them.
Miko cackles unhingedly and drops his hand to his Tantal’s underslung grenade launcher. The blast knocks down both animals.
In one smooth motion, Arkadi lets his AKS-74U fall on its sling, draws his secondary weapon, extends its stock, sights in on one of the downed animals, and holds back the trigger. The vz.61 snarls out twenty rounds into the horse’s belly. The creature screams, then goes limp. Arkadi locks in a fresh magazine and holds his point of aim above the other horse’s head, waiting for it to regain its footing. As it stands, its skull rises through Arkadi’s line of fire and shatters.
“Let’s move,” the Russian mutters to Miko. He drops the empty machine pistol and starts moving south, clearing his Suchka’s jam as he goes. Miko draws his sword and follows.
The cluster of enemies to the south turns off the road and canters east in the beginning of a flanking maneuver. “Let’s go,” Alexei hisses, pointing down a narrow, weed-choked alley. Minka nods emphatically and moves out.
One of the riders approaching from the north continues toward the intersection. The horse’s hooves never falter on the uneven pavement as it makes a hard left turn. The rider sees Red and his lance comes down – but as he charges, Leks’ MG3 comes up and spills the rider onto the street. The horse screams – and, a moment later, drops under surprisingly accurate fire from Red.
The other rider spots Magda in her position behind the wrecked car. She levels her Tantal across the hood and opens fire. She can see her fire striking home, but it’s not enough to prevent the lancer from brutally laying open her forearm [crit]. She falls supine, spurting blood.
At the far end of the street, Leks and Red see four more horses come into view, preceded by another pack of dogs sprinting all-out. Three are without mounts, but the fourth bears a man wearing a stag-skull helmet. The snap of a bowstring announces at least one more sniper in an upper-story window. The flankers approaching from the south are rapidly wheeling to envelop the central group.
Minka and Alexei dash across the street to assist Magda. The rider’s head snaps around and he raises his lance. The horse, however, stays focused on Magda. Its lips draw back and it snarls at her, exposing a carnivore’s canines and incisors. It rears, extending glistening bony dewclaws behind its hooves.
Leks, Red, and the Jablonski cousins spray fire in every direction as the envelopment closes on them. The two riderless horses bypass them in pursuit of Minka and Arkadi, but the riders close on them with sabers. The dogs – those who survived the torrent of defensive fire – are but a moment behind.
Red tosses his carbine aside in favor of his axe, splitting a dog’s exposed skull open. The Jablonski cousins drop the handles of Leks’ handcart and wade in with rifle butt and bayonet. Their defense buys Leks the time to bring his Saiga-12 into play. He dumps all eight rounds in the magazine, sweeping a wave of buckshot across his assailants.
Minka, a step behind Alexei as she dashes toward Magda, hears an equine scream from down the street. She knows that sound. She looks over her shoulder in time to see one of the horses in the approaching herd turn and sink its fangs into the neck of its neighbor, tearing out a chunk of flesh. The turncoat is a massive blue roan draft horse with a white star on his forehead. Wiegel turns from his prey, tosses his head, and makes eye contact with his person.
Miko is heading toward the converging fight on Arkadi’s heels, but he veers aside as an arrow shatters on the pavement at his feet. He plunges into a half-shattered building, finds the stairs, takes them two at a time. The archer hears him coming and drops his bow in favor of his own saber. Miko giggles as steel clashes.
Still on her back beside the burned-out car, Magda fumbles her pistol out of its holster and extends it toward the horse towering over her. She dumps the magazine into its chest. It falters, and the hoof strike that was aimed for her tears ineffectually at the metal above her.
Alexei and Minka pincer the horse and rider with Mister Morgenstern and smith’s hammer. They tear the rider off his mount, but the horse turns on them, slashing with its claws. The two from the flanking group arrive behind them, and Alexei screams as jaws close on his shoulder.
Magda tucks the empty P7 between her knees and, shaking with fatigue and pain, forces herself through the one-handed reload drill that Leks made her practice. Push the heel-mounted magazine release, toss the empty away, slap the full one in, tug the baseplate to make sure it’s seated. Gun back in a firing grip, squeeze the cocking lever to drop the slide, and… ready. She puts the front sight on her attacker and fires again, watching her hits pock the unnaturally-thick hide.
As Red axes the last dog into silence, Leks picks up his MG3 again and walks fire down the street into the swirling mass of horse-on-horse violence. Wiegel’s two-to-one odds suddenly tilt. He tears out the throat of his remaining opponent and turns toward Minka’s fight, pursuing the horned rider into the fray.
A vicious kick puts Alexei down. Mister Morgenstern spins aside as the East German teenager falls, blood soaking his airbrushed denim jacket [incapacitated by damage, crit]. The horned rider looms up behind Minka and stabs her with his lance. A moment later, his mount tramples her into the pavement [incapacitated by damage, crit].
Arkadi, approaching at a run, sees his allies fall. Across the melee, he makes eye contact with Leks, whose bearers, grey-faced with strain and fear, are nevertheless still pushing him toward the fight. The Estonian glares, braces his MG3 as best he can… holds his fire for the half-second Arkadi needs to spin into cover, and sends a long, spiteful burst into the horses that are poised to crush Magda, Minka, and Alexei into pulp.
Magda pushes herself farther under the derelict car as the stream of tracers reaches out above her head. She still has her pistol, though, and her last five rounds find the horned rider and his mount.
Wiegel veers aside to avoid trampling Alexei. The detour costs him, as the horned rider’s horse tears a chunk out of his flank and kicks him in the chest. He falls.
Arkadi hurdles the downed horse. His tomahawk flashes as it comes down into the horned rider’s thigh where it’s… fused… into the horse’s flank. Horse and rider turn as one, snarling at him with two mouths, and his ‘hawk barely knocks aside a lance thrust.
Red arrives from the other side, leading with his axe. He puts all his weight into a swing that chops one of the horse’s legs out from under it. Arkadi exploits the opening, burying his tomahawk in the rider’s throat. Red steps back, swings the axe overhand once more, and brings it down two-handed on the base of the horse’s skull.
