“So, we find an appropriate boat and stick to the shore, getting up to Skye when?”
“Two days,” Xavier said with a shrug, “depending on a few factors and taking it steady.”
“We can stay on the boat to be safe, and any contact we can make with the people there will dictate what we do next. If there’s nobody home we have to assume they’ve already left or are, um, otherwise unable to assist us, in which case we carry on around the top of Scotland and head north east to Norway, past the Shetland Islands, and safely to…” he trailed off, looking at Larsen for her assistance to save him from mispronouncing the unfamiliar word.
“Haakonsvern,” she said.
“Ho-konz-van,” Johnson echoed, still missing the correct inflection but coming close enough.
“And we’re certain of finding friendly forces there?” Bufford asked. His tone wasn’t negative, more that he was asking the question simply because nobody else had.
“Certain enough,” Larsen answered unhelpfully. “Charlie heard me make radio contact with someone there,” she added with a nod to the corporal. Put on the spot, Daniels also wanted to show a little objectivity.
“I didn’t understand the words, obviously, but I heard the name of the place well enough.”
His words seemed to lower the expectations of those assembled but Johnson forged ahead.
“So, we start planning and preparing,” he said. “Supplies, food, equipment… work it out and collect up enough to cope, with a margin for error.”
“For how many?” Buffs asked, again being the voice of reason but coming across as the nay-sayer.
“What do you mean?” Kimberley asked, sensing some veiled criticism of the man she’d felt fond and protective of for a long time, but could now outwardly show it.
“I count fifteen of us here,” Buffs said, “and the fact of the matter is that only a few of us can be given an order to do anything.”
He was right. Of all of them only two men fell under Johnson’s command structure, and of the others, it was only marine Enfield who was there with a senior soldier, but that seemed an unlikely irrelevance as none of them could imagine him voluntarily leaving Sergeant Hampton’s side for long. The only other people there who felt they could make the decision for another were the girl Amber’s mother, and Peter’s older sister who still hadn’t quite grasped how much he had grown up since they were separated.
“Very true,” Johnson admitted, “so this will be a voluntary thing. All in favour of getting out of here and following the plan?”
Four people kept their hands down, although Johnson noticed how a few tentative glances were cast at others before some raised their arms to be counted among the volunteers. One of those, who watched to see Peter’s hand go up, stuck her own high into the air as if the higher she reached, the more chance she had of being selected.
Ellie, Amber’s mother, snatched her arm down only to cause the instant reaction of her other shooting up as if the girl was a machine designed for one arm to permanently be held in the air.
“No,” Ellie muttered, “we’re going to stay here where it’s safe.”
“I want to go with Peter,” Amber whined.
“No,” Ellie insisted, “we’re going to st—”
“I WANT TO GO WITH PETER,” the girl shrieked in temper, shocking all of them because the girl had barely done more than murmur for the entire time that they had known her. She fought her way down from her mother’s lap, resorting to the infuriatingly effective trick all small children seem to instinctively know how to do and collapsed her body weight to slither out beneath the woman’s grip. Ellie caught her arm before she could run away, adding her own instinctive reaction of a sharp smack across the girl’s legs.
The noise it made silenced the room and echoed in that vacuum of sound before tears welled in the young girl’s eyes and her feet danced on the spot as she fought the pain from seeking an escape. She lost that battle, bursting into tears before her mother wrapped her up in a tight embrace and whispered that she was sorry over and over again.
Ellie looked through the mess of Amber’s hair over the girl’s shoulder to shoot one last foul glance at the young boy before turning her withering stare on the squadron sergeant major before she left the room carrying her daughter with her.
Hands lowered in the uneasy aftermath of the incident, but Johnson had marked those who wanted no part of their plan, finding to his surprise that one of them was his own man.
“Any reason why, Duncan?” he asked, trying to keep the accusation out of his words.
“Sorry, Sarn’t Major, I…” he trailed off, guilt and embarrassment twisting his features as he struggled to find the words he needed. He didn’t have to bother, as Dean Johnson had seen it all in his face when he apologised; he wanted to rest. Wanted the quiet life. He wanted to stay in relative comfort with little chance of encountering the enemy again and wait for this whole bloody mess to blow over.
“It’s alright, lad,” Johnson said gently, although still with more than a little disappointment in his tone. He had never doubted that his own people – and by that he included those he had spent a bitter winter alongside after the devastation of the helicopter crash – would be by his side in the next challenge they faced, but as surprised as he was to see a soldier wanting to give up the fight, he was more shocked to see two of the civilians they’d found in their little safe haven with their hands raised.
His eyes settled on the Canadian woman who embodied the word petite by way of being what Bill Hampton described as ‘snack size’, and she answered his inquisitive look with a shrug.
“I’d like to go home,” she said simply. Johnson couldn’t argue with that one bit, but his thoughts were interrupted by an argument breaking out.
“You’d leave?” Xavier demanded of his crewman. “After everything we’ve bloody been through, you’d go?”
“I think you should come too, Captain,” Jean Pierre said stoically. “I think we should all leave. This place is not good for us, not forever, and there will come a time when too many of les morts come to here or we are forced to go out there. We are just ‘iding ‘ere, Mike.”
Xavier looked around at the assembled faces, some of them avoiding his gaze but most of them pleading with him to change his mind. Only one person stood beside him, and that was the stocky engineer from the Maggie who seemed to have no intention of going outside unless he had to.
“Let ‘em go,” he said acidly. “Means more food for us anyway.”
He led the small exodus with Steve Duncan following and wearing his shame like a cloak, leaving Xavier lingering for long enough to give one last look of utter disappointment to his friend before filing out after them.
“We can’t leave Amber,” Peter said as soon as they were gone. “Please, Mister Johnson, Kimberley,” he implored the two adults he trusted, “you have to talk to her mum and get them to come with us.”
“We’re sure this is the right thing to do?” Jessica asked, searching the faces of the others for any hint of what they weren’t saying.
“Yes,” Daniels told her. She looked at him for a long moment before nodding once and standing.
“Leave her to me then,” she said, standing to follow, evidently happy to leave the planning to the others.
As the splintered group began to make their preparations, other events were unfolding in the south of England. After the destruction of the village of Fairlight, as their meagre defences proved little more than useless when faced with a new enemy capable of leaping over the head height fences and sharpened stakes which had proved wholly adequate thus far, the new types of creature created accidentally by the mass deployment of the untested serum spread out.
Limas, newly turned survivors from the clifftop camp they thought impervious to attack, followed them in packs. The newer types, minus whatever hair their bodies still bore, stopped periodically to bark and shriek into the night and draw their jogging followers along with them.
None
went in the same direction, at least not after the first few miles when they split off, using main roads to move faster than the rolling countryside allowed, but one group kept the English Channel to their left as they hugged the coast and killed and consumed every animal they found that was unable to flee their approach.
The only things they didn’t eat were the other human survivors, as each of those was chased down or otherwise rooted out of their hiding places to be turned to join the ranks of the elite, intent on the annihilation of every living person on the planet.
NINE
“They know we’re somewhere around here, Captain Wolff,” Sergeant Cooper whispered without turning his head. Wolff found himself thinking Hauptmann, my rank is Hauptmann, then feeling petty for the thought, since it was the same rank, just a different language, and what difference could that possibly make now?
“This is true,” Wolff agreed in the same low whisper, “but is it not better to simply wait until they go away? Gunfire will bring more of them on to our heads, not to mention expose our precise positions to them.”
Down on our heads, Cooper thought irrelevantly. In truth, one of the biggest struggles he faced after being cut off and isolated on another part of the islands during the outbreak was spending every waking minute, and every sleeping one for that matter, with other people he wasn’t accustomed to.
Learning someone’s idiosyncrasies, growing accustomed to their annoying habits just as they had to cope with yours, took time for anyone, but being a man who had trained for long hours sealed up inside armoured fighting vehicles, Cooper was better equipped than many to cope.
There were six of them currently occupying the small attic room in what had been the part of the whisky distillery not open to the public. Six out of an original thirteen after the outbreak and the fall of the island. Some had stolen away in the night after whispering about getting a boat from the small pier one of them knew was nearby. Being evidently local, the ringleader of this splinter faction held no regard for the military men and wanted to forge their own path believing the presence of uniformed men with guns to be a hindrance more than a blessing.
They listened to their screams of terror as they were hunted in the darkness, and their disappearance was swiftly followed by a series of attacks by freshly turned Limas as they probed the small farm for weaknesses. The ensuing action and panicked flight to where they now cowered in silence had cost them four more lives, leaving only four civilians in the care of the two tank men; one English and one German.
To his credit, or perhaps as testimony to his character, the German tank captain never once tried to give acting sergeant Cooper an order, but as his ideas were always logical and well-presented, he hadn’t encountered a situation where such rank flexing was necessary.
“I’d rather not be trapped in here when the bastards giving the orders decide to deal with us themselves,” Cooper said. “It’s bad enough with the bloody Limas posted as sentries to watch us.”
Wolff made a small noise that seemed contemplative, but without the conviction of any kind of decision behind it. He had noted the odd behaviour of the other infected undead, opting to keep those observations to himself so as not to spread alarm, but Cooper’s astute nature had detected the very same facts and had no problem saying them out loud.
“We could break out,” Cooper went on, making a suggestion he wasn’t at all appreciative of, “but that leaves the question of where the bleedin’ ell we could go.”
“Again, Sergeant, this is true,” Wolff answered, still peering out of the crack between two bricks, “but it is depending on what our plan is.”
“I still say we get to the ferry port and go back to the mainland – get your tank and piss off from here.”
“I am liking this plan,” Wolff admitted, “that is assuming that the vehicles here are in good repair, but I still am not seeing where we are going after this? I agree that we must not stay here, and by here, I am meaning this island.”
“At least we can get to some radio equipment if we get back to the wagons,” Cooper responded, stopping himself from saying anything further as a muted crash sounded from behind their position. Both men turned, fearful that the sound implied their hidden existence in the attic was no longer a secret.
Their fears were washed away as the dim light showed them the wide, frightened eyes of a man frozen to the spot after knocking down a stack of old boxes. His left hand held a bottle of something which he hid behind his back as soon as he regained his composure.
“This man will be our deaths,” Wolff complained almost silently under his breath.
“What the fuck are you playing at, Todd?” Cooper hissed, seeing the man for what he was just as he suspected the German captain did. “You’d risk all our lives for a bloody bottle?”
“Sorry,” he said a little too loudly, earning angry hisses from the others to quieten him.
“Sit down and be quiet,” a woman muttered to him without taking her own eye from a windy crack in the roof as she kept watch for the monsters. “They’re out there,” she added ominously.
“We can’t stay here,” Cooper said to Wolff as he watched an American army uniformed creature sniff the air, “not if they’re searching the place for us.”
“We face the choices of leaving now or waiting to find out if they go away,” Wolff answered. “Both choices are dangerous, but I am thinking to go now is to be outside when it is dark, and we both know what this is meaning, yes?”
“Yeah,” Cooper answered, “but staying means they might come tonight anyway.”
“This is how you say the rocks and the hard place?”
“Damned if you do and bloody damned if you don’t.”
“It is not us who are damned, Sergeant,” Wolff gently admonished him, “but them.”
The choice as to stay or go was taken out of their hands by fate.
Fate which conspired with the selfish actions of a desperate man to wake them all from a fitful sleep and tear the still, cold air inside the attic with a slurred yell.
“Fuggin…NO!” Todd bawled groggily, flinging an arm over his body to bang the mostly empty bottle against a wooden support beam, following the loud sound with a shriek of, “geddoffme!”
Cooper wasted no time in leaping to his feet and dropping a knee onto the man’s chest to measure up in the dark and deliver an instinctive slap across his face to simultaneously wake the man and bring him to his senses.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” he snarled in a ripping hiss so close to the man’s face that the stench of sour whisky burned his eyes. Before Todd could respond, the answer came from outside in a flowing, rippling wave of screeching noises as the Limas posted around their position all took up the cry.
“Now,” Wolff said, “is when we must choose. Do we run, or do we stay?”
They ran. Part of their plan if they had to move immediately was to attempt to start one of the vans left outside, and given the choice between waiting in the attic for a Lima or worse to break in and risking a vehicle not starting, Cooper knew where he’d put his money.
Better to die trying than hiding.
“Follow me,” he said, leading the way down the stairs to hit the landing heavily and bring his weapon up. He had the stock folded to make the weapon slightly shorter and easier to use inside without bashing it off everything, and he whipped the barrel left and right as his breathing ran away without him.
Clutching one of their only working torches in his left hand against the barrel of the gun, he was rewarded with illuminated flashes of empty doorways which his brain kept telling him would soon be filled with the grotesque visage of a Lima. His pounding heart was louder in his ears than his bootsteps on the dry wooden floors were, but he reminded himself that speed was the order of the day and caution could get stuffed.
Pausing at an external door long enough to see that the others were still behind him, he braced himself and leaned his body against the release bar to issue an unavoidable but loud click of meta
l as the door unlocked and let in the sharp wind from outside.
Being a Scottish island, that wind carried a characteristic amount of stinging rain to pelt the skin of his face and make him squint his eyes against it. The gun came up, the torch still clamped against the worn metal, and immediately framed the pale face and open mouth of a woman running at him as though she were drunk.
Cooper didn’t hesitate. He fired a shot at her, missed, fired again by fully depressing the trigger and shifting the barrel slightly from side to side, imagining the projectiles hitting her in her open mouth. She dropped to slide forwards another two paces such was the momentum of her ungainly attempt to sprint.
He stepped out into the car park, swung the gun wildly left and right to search for more enemies and shouted for the others to follow. He stood his ground, eyes still scanning the gloom, as the others ran past him to pull open the van doors and pile inside. Cooper, a man accustomed to planning to a high level of detail, had already discussed their plan in whispers with the other survivors and had detailed someone to take the wheel while the only two soldiers in their group could protect their escape. As planned, one man got behind the wheel, and thanks to the efficient planning of the former staff there, used the keys for the correct vehicle to turn the ignition.
Nothing happened, but they had anticipated that.
The reason they had chosen that particular vehicle was that it was parked closest, with the nose of the van pointing towards the exit and the gentle slope beyond. The shout came back that the battery was dead, and the others all piled out as planned to begin pushing.
A shriek, animalistic and guttural, split the night and forced Cooper to spin around to search for the cause of it. He’d backed up towards the van which was only just beginning to inch away on soft tyres, when he was hit by a train coming from his left side.
Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 6
