Dawn of the Epoch

Chapter LXXXIII - Turning the Tide

The bay at La Spezia lay chocked full of ships. Battleships, corvettes, cruisers, destroyers, dreadnaughts, frigates, and every other conceivable type of ship that could be retrofitted with guns patrolled the tiny inlet. The town’s garrison was airtight. Over the last couple of weeks, the population had more than doubled from a hundred thousand to well over a quarter million. The Allied Forces thought that with the naval support and the tight entrenchment that La Spezia would be a perfect point to maintain the line and hold ground against the ghoul onslaught. Among the soldiers on the ground, however, the psychological tension grew daily. Ominous clouds wafted by lazily. The clusters of claustrophobic young men speculated over whether they were natural or crafted by the megalomaniac warlord.

They knew that eighty miles north, the ghoul army occupied Parma. They knew that the inhuman army could come pouring down the mountainside at any moment. Their fears were not assuaged when the ships began leaving. As orders came in, soldiers received new assignments at new posts. The attrition happened quickly. The numbers dwindled. The tension grew. The troops wondered whether they would attack or be attacked, whether the action would be on the East front or the West front.

Then one day, they heard that the attack had started without them. Over the radio, the news came. The Allied Forces had attacked Arenzano again, but with a vengeance this time. The casualties piled high. Frantic orders crisscrossed the airways. The La Spezia garrison listened to the live updates in solemn silence. At a local tavern where a hundred soldiers crowded around a large plasma television screen watching footage of the rapidly failing Allied advance, a messenger sprinted in. Between labored breaths, he told them the news that they had dreaded, but had not expected today. The ghoul army was coming. It was flowing out of Parma, across the mountains, and down to the bay. Chaos erupted. The soldiers hustled to their positions.

Meanwhile, the young man with the President’s papers held court in his war room aboard the largest battleship in the fleet, the Leviatano. He listened to the reports and watched the live footage with a placid expression. He cooly issued directions. Nothing surprised him. The battlefield was his chessboard.

The skirmish at Arenzano was ending badly for the Allied Forces. The initial ground gained in the lightning-fast attack had quickly been lost along with countless lives. A half-hour ago, the young man had ordered a full retreat. The ghoul army pursued briefly, but then stopped dead in its tracks and turned around. A vast fleet of jets hurtled toward the city. They blotted the sun out from the sky. The fleet slowed two miles out at the cannon’s range. Only the first wave of jets launched a barrage of missiles. The cannons shot most of the projectiles down, but a few slipped by and detonated inside the city. The rest of the jets veered off course and left without dropping their payload.

When the missiles slipped by, Ghaelvord had ordered a retreat. The ghouls scattered throughout the city. They piled into makeshift bomb shelters like sardines in cans. Ghaelvord did not want to lose numbers. His soldiers were his most valuable commodity and if Arenzano was bombed, he would lose many ghouls, both actual and potential. The remaining Allied forces escaped without pursuit. Rather than drop the rest of their expensive payload, however, the remaining waves of jets reversed course. The fleet turned and headed east.

Ghaelvord had ordered the attack on La Spezia the very minute that the attack on Arenzano had begun. The leaving ships and dwindling soldiers had not gone unnoticed. Ghaelvord had been watching and waiting for the chance to advance on the Eastern front. He had noticed the weakness at La Spezia. As his Parmensi army swooped down on the bay, the missing ships, however, reappeared. Rather than joining the attack on Arenzano, they had been hiding on the west side of the isthmus. They turned the corner and entered the bay just as the ghoul army swarmed down the mountainside. Minutes later, the jets that had originally been sent to Arenzano appeared. The ships and jets opened fire on the mountainside almost simultaneously. The rocky ridges erupted in blinding flames and explosions. The ghoul army was caught wholly off-guard. The stragglers who survived the firefight reached the bottom of the mountain only to be mowed down by the thin, but well-prepped La Spezia garrison.

The young man watched the victory unfold. While many lives had been lost that day, the ghouls killed at La Spezia drastically outnumbered the Allied lives lost at Arenzano. The young man watched a muted video of Ghaelvord’s initial speech at Genoa.

“Check.” He said.