Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation

by Ford, Devon C.

  “This here’s a report from Master Chief Petty Officer Ryan Miller of the US Navy SEALs. He states that Professor Grewal stated to him, directly, that he needed an enhanced infected subject to be able to complete the serum testing. Complete. What have you got to say about that?”

  “I have to say I’m a little shocked,” Fisher said, keeping his expression so still as to be worthy of a seat at a high-stakes poker table. “To knowingly put all those people at risk just to prove he was right?” he shook his head in disappointment. “It saddens me.”

  Jacobs handed back the paper, knowing that it proved nothing without any of the scientists surviving the outbreak to shed any light on the matter. As much as he didn’t like the feeling in his gut, he had no way to disprove Fisher’s story and knew he wouldn’t get the support from Langley to remove him. Fisher sensed this and doubled down on his position.

  “How are we proceeding with the large-scale deployment of the sound lures?” he asked. “I know I’ve been out of the loop after being kept in quarantine, but we’re deploying them, right?”

  With those words, he simultaneously gave the agreed account for his absence being an enforced quarantine as he’d escaped from an infected zone, and reminded them that without his project they’d have no way of luring the infected into large groups, which was, without a doubt, the biggest advantage they now had over their undead enemy.

  FIVE

  The lookout posted in the tower on the highest point in the village of Fairlight scanned the skies when he first heard the thumping sound of rotor blades in the distance. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, which were squinted against the strong wind blasting in off the English Channel.

  “Strange,” he muttered to himself, scanning the far-off clouds for the origin of the whop-whop-whop sounds.

  “What?” his companion, resting his eyes, asked in response.

  “You hear that? Sounds like a bleedin’ ‘elicopter.”

  “Don’t be daft, when was the last time we saw anything like that?”

  The man said nothing, just panned the glasses left and right until rewarded by a flash of dull grey fuselage before it was obscured by clouds again.

  “There,” he said, as if the man supposedly keeping watch with him could see anything with his eyes closed and the collar of his coat pulled up high to block out the breeze. “Definitely an ‘elicopter. Biggun, too.”

  “If you say so,” the other lookout said with a bored tone, annoyed that his nap had been interrupted.

  The two sentries for the camp of survivors high on the hilltop were there for different reasons; one was eager and observant, albeit mildly annoying to many people, and the other sought any opportunity to be out of sight and away from anyone who could make his life any more difficult than he felt it had to be.

  Those people who doled out the tasks, the ones who had fortified the village and organised everyone as they carefully tended to every spare piece of ground that could be used to grow food, were there solely to make his life harder. Anyone who told Gary Jenson when he had to get up, when he had to be in a certain place at a certain time, when he couldn’t have a second helping of food, just reminded him of his parents and his supervisor and anyone else he had never liked in his life before.

  He spent his first days after the outbreak hiding in a safe place with enough food for three people to last a month, all the while ignoring the desperate cries for help from the beleaguered living, and had emerged like a selfish butterfly into the daylight with a renewed sense of looking after number one.

  To that end, pulling twelve-hour shifts on the wooden scaffolding of the watch tower overlooking a vast swathe of southern English coastland was the easiest way to do nothing and still be fed. He didn’t take his job seriously, but luckily for him the man they’d saddled him with, Stu something or other was, in his opinion, an eager moron who was more than willing to do the work of two people and allow him to take long naps and read books.

  “Yep. There it is again,” Stu said. “One of those big ones with the two spinny things.”

  “Twin rotors,” Gary said, correcting him with authority even though he’d never once set foot inside a helicopter.

  “Whatever it’s called, it’s one of them.”

  “So what?”

  “So… they could be, I dunno, looking for us or something?”

  “Dream on, kid,” Gary said in his eternally morose tone, closing his eyes again.

  The distance was far too great and the cloud cover too dense for either man to see what the helicopter did next. Having flown along the coast from the south eastern tip of the mainland, it stayed low to the waves until turning north to fly the short distance to Hastings, where the largest open area was selected to drop the three devices being fussed over by the team of engineers who seemed unaccustomed to spending time onboard a rotary aircraft.

  At the designated co-ordinates, the helicopter slowed, settling into a hover a mere one hundred and thirty feet from the ground. The three devices, resembling heavy ordnance, ordinarily dropped from a much greater height by specialist fixed wing aircraft, were deployed by rolling them in a flimsy wooden frame on wheels out of the open rear ramp to plummet straight down and slam into the soft earth below.

  The casings cracked open, and… nothing. Nothing happened.

  Or at least they didn’t see anything happen, much the same as the other devices spread all over Britain in a rolling north to south pattern over the last days, but that wasn’t to say that the devastating effect wouldn’t become evident soon.

  As the casing split open, the devices inside spun up, deploying their weapon that was undetectable to any human one hundred and fifty feet and rising above them wearing headsets and drowned out by the thrum of engines and huge rotor blades.

  To anyone standing there looking at the three devices appearing like unexploded bombs, there would be a distinct hum in the air, more of a feeling than anything they could hear, as the low-frequency sound radiated out over a distance far greater than the first test conducted in faraway Bristol had yielded.

  The detection of anything from the devices was an academic one, as anyone hanging around to examine them would have fallen to the first wave of stinking, decaying flesh that approached on faster legs than the vast majority of infected in the world. These faster ones—ones which had no name to the people living on the cliffs in the distance, as they hadn’t encountered them due to their lucky isolation—came from the north in the direction of the last device dropped days before, and took some of them only half a day to reach.

  Others followed, over the course of the next four days, until the flat ground hidden from the watchtower at Fairlight filled with the frenzied bodies of so many infected that the total number could only be estimated to be into the multiple of millions.

  So much of the country had been emptied of the undead by these devices, and nobody still living on the mainland knew anything about it other than to remark as to the sudden and unexpected absence of walking hazards to their health.

  Nobody there, in fact nobody at all, knew that the plan so carefully and cleverly concocted would spell the beginning of the end.

  “I can smell it again,” Stu said excitedly, hefting his small calibre hunting rifle and looking out over the dusk as if ready to take on the fight all by himself, even though he’d never been in a fight and didn’t know what to expect.

  “You know what?” Gary said from the folding chair smuggled up the hill to make his night shift on watch more comfortable. “I think you’re right…” he added in a whisper.

  Stu felt instantly vindicated, and the knowledge that he wasn’t imagining it dropped a brick of terror into his stomach.

  “Wait,” Gary said in the same theatrical whisper, “I think I can smell it again…” he could barely contain his laughter as his words trailed away to be replaced with a squeaky, undulating, prrrrrrrrt, which left him in fits of giggles at his comedic timing.

  Stu stood tall, relaxing himself from his s
tance of readiness, and for the first time in his life actually gave Gary a piece of his mind.

  “You fuckin’ twat,” he said, his chin quivering and his chest heaving from the scare and from the adrenaline of challenging the man he’d been scared of for almost the last year of his life. “You think everything’s a joke. You don’t care about any—”

  “Shh.”

  “Don’t you bloody shh me! I mean it, you alw—”

  “Shhhh!” Gary stood, lifting his own weapon which had barely been in his hands for months, and stood closer to the edge to stick his nose out into the wind and inhale deeply. “I really can smell it. Rotting meat.”

  Both men went rigid and silent as the full implications of what that might mean hit them at the same time. Just as Stu turned and reached for the heavy battery to connect it to the spot lamp aimed back at the town—their agreed alarm after spending months ready to ring a loud bell until someone referred to it as ‘the dinner bell’—a noise stayed his hand.

  It was a droning noise, high up and seeming to fill the air above their immediate piece of dark sky and was unmistakably a heavy plane flying low enough to be heard.

  Before either man could say anything, a percussive thumping noise filled their world as muted flashes both high up and in the middling distance on the ground lit parts of the night with dull flashes. Other similar sounds seemed to come online just afterwards, adding their own heavy din to the symphony as the dead ground to their west was hammered by repeated muffled explosions for long minutes.

  As if building to a crescendo, what sounded like cannons above the clouds all seemed to fire in a frenzy at once, until silence reigned as the droning of engines faded into the distance.

  Unseen and unheard, another plane flew higher and dropped the final salvo to end the show with three huge explosions before leaving their echoes as the final word on the matter.

  SIX

  Once again the aircraft carrier was the nerve centre co-ordinating the operation, with assets from the newly formed American bases in the Canary Islands and other vessels in both the English Channel and the North Atlantic, that launched the right aircraft at the right time to ensure the correct running of proceedings.

  The three AC-130s and the single C-130 flew straight and true, angling just east of north after they reached their cruising altitude to cut the corner of mainland Europe on their way to what they were all sarcastically calling the Battle of Hastings.

  Nine hundred and twenty-four years after the original battle, this one was fought on very different and very uneven terms. The millions of infected amassed there weren’t facing an enemy seeking to enforce their claim to a throne, and the victorious side weren’t invading by wooden ships across the Channel, but were instead flying in a staggered formation, ready to circle the chosen battleground at a lower height than they were accustomed to operating at. This made their already easy task even simpler and the crews did not complain; they simply serviced their weapons as tonnes of special ordnance in one-oh-five and forty millimetre forms were pumped into the roiling mass of frenzied undead drawn to the natural bowl in the landscape. Through the enhanced telescopic night vision optics, they looked like a tub of maggots ready and active for a day’s fishing.

  When the three armed gunships were spent on ammunition, they retreated out to sea where they planned to rendezvous with a mid-air refuelling plane. This would allow them to return to the area to expend the remaining ammunition for the guns they had yet to fire; their twenty-five millimetre gatling guns, effectively giving them free reign on mopping up anything around the edges of the site that had avoided the destruction of the opening bombardment.

  “Ready for phase two,” the naval officer in command of the operation said to his control room. Fisher stayed silent, sitting at the back of the room drinking coffee that had gone cold, still unable to believe his good fortune in being permitted to stay on with the CIA in-theatre after the debacle on the Isle of Skye.

  He listened as a radio operator spoke into a microphone, calling to give clearance to continue to another plane with a callsign that oozed so much overt masculinity that it could only have been selected by a man known for over-compensating.

  “Linebacker Two-Two, Linebacker Two-Two, you are cleared hot. Repeat, mission is a go, over.”

  The reply, if one came at all, didn’t reach Fisher’s ears as he wasn’t plugged into the comms. But the air of anticipation grew as the last plane, this one a simple cargo plane capable of deploying the huge ordnance required for the final phase, set off after its armed cousins. It was, however, flying more slowly than they were, to both conserve fuel and to allow time for the gunships to complete their part of the mission and clear the skies before the arrival of the three big BLU-82 bombs packed with a huge amount of the serum.

  Those bombs were deployed in a similar fashion to the lure devices, only from a far greater altitude. The devices attached to their noses—affectionately named Daisycutters—activated the massive detonations just above ground height, in that case raised by the oozing bodies of so many hundreds of thousands of infected, which added to the efficiency of the deployment by sending the serum out over a larger area.

  “Ordnance deployed,” reported the radio operator, as the now empty plane turned back out to sea to refuel much the same as the three returning gunships did, which were already flying back to mop up the area.

  The atmosphere inside the control room, buried deep inside the floating fortress, turned to one of celebration with whoops and high-fives. Fisher sipped cold coffee again, smiling to himself, because after all the screw ups and all the potentially career-ending events in his recent life, what had just happened was only possible because of the projects that he headed and the discoveries that he pushed for.

  He wasn’t so arrogant as to fail to acknowledge that those discoveries had cost a lot of lives, but loss of life was a mere statistic in their current war and the addition of a few hundred or a few thousand was but a drop in the ocean.

  He leaned back, satisfied that the beginning of the end had just been set in motion, and allowed his thoughts to drift back to that station chief job he’d been after from the very beginning.

  “Okay, that was pretty impressive,” Gary admitted with a chuckle after the three massive rolling, echoing booms faded into silence. The stench of rotten meat was thick in their noses now, a fact which none of them truly considered, and as others joined them at the tower for the finale of the firework show, the buzz of excited conversation about what it all meant filled the air along with the smell.

  A new sound filled the sudden and eerie silence, giving Gary a brief thought about a vacuum and nature’s opinions on such things, and that sound grew in intensity much as the approaching planes had done minutes before.

  That sound, the closer and louder it got, manifested itself very much in his ears as multiple small sounds all gathering their combined might to become one; a gentle thunder, only in the ground and on a much smaller scale.

  He’d experienced only one thing similar in his life and as his brain fought through the memories tucked neatly away inside his head, much the same as selecting the correct person from the address book his mother kept beside the phone, he mentally selected S for stampede before pressing the button to flip open the organiser and get hit by the wave of realisation.

  “Run,” he croaked in a weak voice, his body locked rigid and his eyes stuck wide with fear staring out into the blackness ahead.

  “What?”

  “Run!” he said again, this time simultaneously scrambling for the ladder to climb down from the tower and add actions to his words.

  He didn’t make it to the ground, instead a shape leapt from the darkness to pluck him from the rungs with a noise that made Stu mindful of a bone-crunching rugby tackle.

  Shocked, confused and terrified, Stu swung the heavy lamp away from the distant village of survivors and towards the source of the earlier firework show. As the beam swung to carve a blinding swath through th
e night, it caught fast-moving shapes flying through the darkness far more quickly than any person had a right to move.

  He gasped as heavy impacts rocked the tower and one of the spectators let out a scream of terror, only for that noise to be cut short in a strangled cry as they disappeared from the platform. Breathing so fast he was close to hyperventilating, Stu turned back to the target area of the heavy lamp and tried to see, tried to understand what was happening.

  What he saw was the coiled form of a person, pale skin exposed where the striped red and black jumper had been torn in multiple places, and the black skirt hung in limp rags that was more absent than present. The tights beneath, once as red as the jumper he imagined, hung loosely from tears and the emaciation of the wearer.

  All of these details he marvelled at in slow time as the woman, hairless and baring her teeth widely as she flew at him, seared herself into his brain before her ballistic arc landed her body into his, complete with outstretched hands and feet looking for all the world as if her entire body were the foot and talons of an eagle about to snatch up prey.

  The heavy lamp was slammed aside to shatter and plunge the tower back into a darkness so deep that Stu could only smell and hear and feel the last second of his first life, before the cold skin of the monstrosity that had sailed through the darkness to knock him down sank her remaining teeth into the exposed skin of his face.

  He screamed foully, expecting to have to experience the unwelcome sensation of being eaten alive, but just as suddenly as the breath had been driven from his body, the same pressure lifted, and his attacker bounded away leaving him missing part of his upper lip and cheek.

  He screamed again, over and over as his hands dabbed at his ruined face, each time coming away feeling hot and sticky with his blood. He held his fingertips up in front of his face as if looking for the blood he expected and hoping he would see his fingertips not stained red. He hoped he’d imagined all of it, hoped he was going to live, but as the hysteria passed and his body flushed with a heat he’d only ever experienced when stepping off a plane on holiday, he stood and stripped off his jacket to feel the thundering of more feet passing by below.