“Fuckers are flanking us!” Enfield yelled, slinging the long rifle onto his back and pulling the L85 into play and aiming it at the rooftops in anticipation of an aerial attack. He moved himself protectively close to Peter, who responded by stepping clear of the marine sniper to give him enough space to use the small rifle if the opportunity arose.
“In the wagon,” Johnson barked, turning to face the building they were living in to bawl the names of the two females not outside with them.
“What about the gear?” Daniels asked, flinching as the big gun started up again in response to an enemy showing itself.
“Grab what you can but fast,” Bufford yelled back over his shoulder, turning his attention back to his front to spit two controlled bursts at shambling, running figures climbing the perimeter fence and exposing themselves.
Peter gasped, heard clearly by all of them courtesy of a gap in the gunfire, running hard for the building and disappearing inside, passing Kimberley and Jessica in the doorway. Jessica, bawling unheard words at her younger brother, tried to resist Kimberley’s efforts to drag her to the armoured vehicle. Johnson glanced between the girl and the half mile or more of perimeter fencing on which he knew for a fact the few of them couldn’t maintain a watch, trusting that Peter knew how urgent their departure was.
“There it is,” Enfield snapped, voice invested with emotion but devoid of anything resembling panic. He triggered off a handful of single, aimed shots before growling a curse under his breath.
“Never seen a Lima move like that,” Bufford commented, having seen the marine miss with his last rounds.
“That’s no Lima,” Johnson said darkly, knowing it to be true to his core but unable to voice the precise reasons why.
“What then? Something new?” Bufford retorted. “That’s hardly fair.”
“Not sure as fair’s got much to do with it,” Johnson told him, turning as Jessica’s voice rose again to scream at Peter, who re-emerged from the building holding Enfield’s rifle in one hand and a leatherette sports bag in the other.
“Let’s go!” he yelled, his shrill voice sounding as though a much older man was speaking through the body of a young boy. Daniels emerged behind him, overloaded with shopping bags stuffed with what looked like everything he could grab.
Johnson made the instant decision, banging his flat hand on the hull of the Warrior and yelling for Steve to stop firing. Waiting for the answering silence he climbed up, turning and dropping himself into the driving seat to pull the hatch closed over his head. Snatching up the headset, he adjusted the microphone position and made his intentions to leave the area clear.
The Warrior bucked as he fired it up and let out the power to make the heavy wagon rear up as it surged forwards. Crashing through the heavy gates to the compound as though they weren’t there he slowed, slewed the tracks to turn right, and hammered the power in the direction of the water and their exit from dry land they foolishly thought was safe.
“What the bleedin’ ell’s that?” Hampton pondered, standing upright to ease his back from the bent-over task of tightening the jury-rigged mount for the machine gun.
“Engine,” Ellie answered, turning to stoop and usher Amber inside the cabin with an instruction to go and hide. Ellie turned back to Hampton, her face now registering the fear she’d hidden from her daughter, and her features darkened into a display of questioning fear.
“It can't be good news,” she said, hoping she was wrong.
“Never bloody is,” Hampton grumbled, bending again to give the last nut on the contraption a few more turns with the ratchet in his hand before tossing it noisily into an open toolbox and allowing his hands to perform the familiar task of loading a belt of ammunition into the feed tray, slapping down the top cover and yanking the heavy handle back to ready the gun.
“JP,” he yelled, leaning back but not taking his eyes off the approach road to the docks.
The sailor poked his head out of the bit of the boat with windows where the controls were and grunted a response.
“We ready to go in a hurry?” Hampton asked him conversationally, but with an undertone of implying that they really needed to be ready to leave in a hurry, and that if they weren’t, then he should be doing everything he could to make it happen.
“We can go,” he answered, ducking back inside and giving his complete answer by coaxing the coughing engine to reluctant life. As the roar of the boat engine starting up subsided to a loud idle, the source of the other engine sound came into view in the form of the Warrior heading their way in a hurry. Larsen appeared from below, muttering something to Ellie and sending her down to be with her daughter before joining them on deck. She turned back, waving away the short Canadian woman who came to ask what was happening.
Hampton, a professional soldier to the core, kept his focus on the ground behind the approaching vehicle and on that ground waiting for whatever they were running from to show it’s rotting, ugly face, because they had to be running from something to be driving the way they were.
The Warrior stopped on the docks in front of them, turning on the spot to show the rear doors to him in full as he held his breath in worried anticipation. The rear doors opened, and his fear subsided when the first face to appear was his remaining marine. He checked off the faces, noticing three weren’t present. Given that the Warrior’s turret was still moving in search of any potential target, it had to mean that one of the tank men were in there, so he guessed which two people were missing.
An untrained man would want to ask what happened, but Hampton didn’t waste his breath or the time and concentration of the others as they scrambled to get up the ramp and onto the boat; he’d find out soon enough the reason for their panicked flight.
“Are we ready to go?” Johnson demanded.
“Yes,” Astrid told him, passing on the overheard information from their sailor, before flinching as Hampton rattled off two short bursts of heavy bullets. Johnson turned, gun rising, and body hunched slightly on instinct, to see what had prompted the gunfire.
“Limas,” Hampton reported. “More than a few!”
“They’re all Limas,” Johnson informed him solemnly. “All except one.”
On cue, the one made itself known by barking that hideous yelp again from the roof of a low building to their left. Johnson’s eyes went wide, trying to fathom how anyone – dead or alive – could’ve covered the distance he’d just driven at the breakneck speed he’d done it at.
He turned his attention to the ramp leading up to their revived boat and willed the others to hurry, even contemplating abandoning their few supplies in favour of a faster exit, but he held his nerve.
Hampton rattled off more fire now as the last person emerged from the Warrior. Steve Duncan rose out of the hatch, eyes wide and face so drawn he appeared halfway to being one of the undead already, but then slipped and fell forward with his left leg still inside the wagon.
Johnson heard, felt, the sickening crunch of the man’s knee giving way as his leg folded so unnaturally, so grotesquely, the wrong way before a shrill shriek of unspeakable agony ripped the air.
The gun still hammered away, joined now by the guns of everyone, including Peter who calmly spat bullet after small bullet toward their ravenous enemy. Duncan still howled, sobbing and screaming in unfathomable pain as he flopped to the hard ground followed by his flailing, useless leg.
Johnson lowered his gun, moving behind the other shooters to rescue the man as another group of Limas burst from a gap between two nearby buildings like an infected wound spewing forth thick pus.
“No time,” Enfield yelled in Johnson’s ear. Johnson gauged the distance between him and Duncan, between Duncan and the running bastards, and knew in a heartbeat that the marine was right.
He raised his weapon, taking aim through the iron sights to line up the man’s chest.
He fired. Two three-round bursts crushed and punctured his chest, tearing into his heart and lungs to kill him far faster than their
enemy would, and probably caused less pain than his leg tortured him with for the final second of his life.
The thought of him turning, of him limping around with one destroyed knee until he rotted away to nothing or else crawling around until the friction of the hard ground chafed away the skin and muscle until he was just a messy torso was too much.
It was a kindness, he believed that deep down, but it was a heavy burden to bear.
The boat surged, bubbling the water between them and the dock white as Lima after Lima threw themselves into the air to bridge the gap and get to their meat. One managed to leap higher than the others, a vestige of some height advantage over the others perhaps, and clamped the blackened fingertips of its left hand onto the edge of the railing before a small hand reached over the side and, with a lightning-fast efficiency of movement, stabbed a thin spike of metal embedded into a piece of wood through the monster’s eye and into the brain, shutting off the power to its grip and sending it down into the cold water below.
Peter retracted his arm, carefully keeping the gore-covered spike away from them and considered it for a moment before Johnson reached over and took it from his grip and adding a fatherly ruffle of his overgrown hair.
They watched as the docks grew smaller, seeing the Warrior swarmed over by a crowd of them, all seeking the source of the fresh scent, and standing tall on the building nearest the scene of their escape stood a single creature, tall and still and staring straight at them.
“Mine,” Enfield said, taking a knee and resting the barrel of the big rifle taken from his back onto the railing where dead fingertips had moments before clung on to.
They all stood on in silence, watching the marine seemingly do nothing for long seconds until he let out an exaggerated breath and squeezed the trigger.
Eyes shot towards the docks much slower than the bullet, reaching their destination just after the lethal projectile, but still in time to see the bald head explode on impact and topple the body off the roof.
The silence remained, broken only by the muffled hissing and growling of an unhappy cat coming from the sports bag Peter had carried.
“Do any of you want to tell me what this thing was?” Astrid asked calmly.
SEVENTEEN
Wolff sat in the room sipping coffee and waiting for what the Americans were calling his debrief. The coffee was weak and barely above room temperature but somehow, he felt that asking for a hot cup of adult strength wouldn’t be appreciated. An agent, a man who hadn’t even offered his name when the interrogation masked as a debrief began, sat before him with his collar undone and tie loosened. He looked exhausted and drawn, kept going by cigarettes and weak coffee alone.
“So, tell us once more, Captain, this… development… You think one of the infected subjects was giving orders to other infected?”
“Yes.”
“But,” another man said, bigger and more in control than the other, “the thing we don’t understand is how that’s possible. We’ve seen no indication of any cognitive ability, let alone displaying anything coming even close to communication.”
Wolff, back straight and manners impeccable when compared to the boorish men sitting opposite him, felt a hint of a snap in his temper.
“How many of the infected have you personally encountered, Agent?”
The man’s eyes bulged a little and a vein throbbed on his forehead, but he said nothing. Wolff controlled his own features effortlessly, having woken from a short sleep among the men of the US Navy’s special operations feeling remarkably refreshed, and regarded the walking epitome of stress attempting to bend the conversation to benefit his own agenda.
“As I have said,” Wolff went on, “the new kind of… infected, acts very differently to how the others are doing. It is both faster and stronger than them and appears to make the… how do you say, decisions?”
“So it’s what your guys were calling a Lima, right?”
“Not just this,” Wolff said patiently as though talking to a child. “These types are different again to the Limas. They make sounds like the dogs and the Limas move as if under their orders.”
The less stressed of the agents rubbed his brow with the hand holding the cigarette and not the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
“So it’s like a Lima, only it barks like a dog?”
“And this is telling the others what to be doing, yes.”
The agents looked at one another, something unsaid passing between them, before their attention returned to Wolff.
“Anything else you can tell us about them?”
“I have only closely had encounters with one,” he said carefully, “but it was clear to me that it – he – was only recently infected and I know this from the cleanliness of his uniform.”
“Uniform?”
“Yes. He was an officer of the British army, I believe.”
Both agents said nothing, exchanging another look but this time openly conveying a lack of other questions to ask.
“If there is nothing else,” Wolff asked, standing, “am I permitted to return to my quarters? I have had very little in sleep since…”
“Of course, Captain, of course. We’ll find you if we need to speak with you again.”
Wolff drew himself to attention and lightly clapped his heels together, showing the respect due to a senior officer but without the rigidity he would demonstrate if he knew for certain that man was indeed senior to him. He didn’t like the way the two shady men operated, which he imagined was a hark back to his childhood when men in dark coats without names did things of which in the name of his country he was not proud.
Fisher and Jacobs sat in silence for a moment in the stale air of the windowless compartment. Neither man had slept much since the unwelcome turn of events had been uncovered, and Jacobs – like a masochist – rose to slot a VHS tape into a machine under a small television screen and hit play before screwing up his empty cup and tossing it to bounce off the rim of the overflowing bin in the corner of the room.
The static on the screen wavered out, displaying jerky footage taken from the helicopter that had rescued Wolff. It rose from the ground, the operator zooming in on the ground as tracer rounds slashed downwards from another aircraft out of shot. The distant zoom combined with the shaky handheld nature of the footage to make it grainy and out of focus, but the parts that were clear were unsettling.
Fisher positively identified the bald, uniformed infected subject as one of the SAS men he’d seen with Colonel Kelly, at least to a degree of certainty, and the two men watched the footage again in silence.
Without the clear sound, they had to watch the body language, seeing that bald monstrosity standing back from the crowd of infected running with ungainly purpose toward the survivors where the heavy gunfire from above cut them down. As if responding to some unseen command, they took cover to avoid the bullets in whatever small obstacles the rocky landscape offered, until the helicopter took off from the ground fast and forced the footage out of focus again as the operator zoomed out to reacquire the enemy.
It cut out to static again, and Jacobs stood to replace the VHS with another, this one providing a different view from a much higher altitude and in different light to tell them it was filmed at another time.
A crowd of infected stood motionless, the images on screen vibrating slightly which they attributed to the aircraft’s motion, until a different person, or former person, emerged from a building. This one was as hairless as the last, only in place of the uniform it wore the dirty remnants of a shirt and tie, except with one sleeve hanging limply where there was no hand to anchor the cuff.
As one, the infected moved out ahead of the obvious shot-caller. Jacobs stood and killed the TV with a click that echoed in the small cabin they occupied, leaving both men in silence until the more senior of them lifted a phone and spoke quietly after a pause for it to be answered.
“I want one of the remaining lure devices prepped and ready to go. Constant aerial surveillance over the target
site and I need heavy guns trained on it ready to fire on my command… we’ll be there shortly… I don’t care, just get it done!” Jacobs slammed down the handset and swept from the room, saying nothing to Fisher, who rose and followed.
“Are we ready?” Jacobs asked less than thirty minutes later. They could hear the drone of the inside of an aircraft flying miles to their east through the open channel to the Hawkeye hastily sent up for the rushed mission.
“Shouldn’t we call this in first?” Fisher said, standing close to Jacobs to mutter his question so others couldn’t overhear.
“You want to call Langley and tell them we made this shit storm ten times worse, or would you rather wait to see if we can provide a solution to go with the problem?” Jacobs snarled, not caring if anyone heard him verbally slap him down.
“We’re ready, Sir,” a young officer in the control room said.
“Deploy the lure,” Jacobs ordered, lighting another cigarette and pacing the space he occupied.
Tense minutes elapsed, interspersed occasionally by Jacobs demanding an update from the surveillance plane to see if any of the infected took the bait so he could drop the hammer and have one of the navy’s destroyers obliterate the target site with heavy artillery.
“Negative, no… stand by…” came the last response over the speakers. “We have movement. Estimate two-zero, two-zero infected approaching…”
“Prepare to fire,” Jacobs ordered an officer sitting at a terminal, pointing at the man to make his point crystal clear.
“Stand by,” came the voice over the speaker again. “They’re stopping… estimate two third of the group are hanging back… they’re retreating…”
“Adjust aim and fire!” Jacobs snapped.
Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 11
