Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation

by Ford, Devon C.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The mission to the mainland had no shortage of volunteers. In the end it was decided that it was more of a specialist task, hence the addition of the more specialist soldiers selected to undertake it.

  A handful of civilians went along, all with knowledge of boats amassed over careers of varying lengths spent at sea, and that included their stoically unsmiling Jean Pierre.

  “I can help,” Peter assured Johnson, standing in his way to force an answer from the man. “I’ll stay on the boat and you know I’m a good shot.”

  “I know you can, and I know you are,” Johnson answered, careful not to sound patronising but trying to be firm with his kindness. “But you’re staying here this time. We’ll be back in a few hours with a new boat hopefully, then we can get out of here.”

  Peter sulked. In spite of his maturity he was still a ten-year-old boy being told that he couldn’t do something he was adamant that he wanted to do, but it was more that he didn’t want to be separated from the only grown men in his life he had ever trusted.

  “You’ll be fine here, lad,” Johnson assured him, bending down conspiratorially. “Besides, who’s going to look after Kimberley and Jessica?”

  Peter frowned, knowing that he was being played like a fiddle but unable to raise a valid argument.

  Johnson stood up straight, ruffling the boy’s shaggy hair as he turned away to swing one leg over the rail of the boat. Their plan was to find something larger and more capable of safely transporting passengers in greater comfort than having them huddle in common areas as they had on the small fishing boats that had brought them there.

  The argument, one which Peter had listened to through a crack in a door, went on for almost an hour about whether they should risk attempting to get another boat, but when the fact was pointed out that there wasn’t enough fuel left where they were to run both boats over the distance, nor was there a capacity to safely store and carry additional fuel, it was reluctantly agreed that a mission to the mainland was indeed necessary.

  That mission didn’t ned to be a large-scale one, but the discussion eventually fell on allowing Lieutenant Lloyd to take his remaining royal marines as a reactionary force in support of the mixed bag of specialists who would represent them all at the sharpest end of the spear.

  The two effectively homeless special operators joined up with the flotsam of the SAS patrol to reform as a foursome, which best suited their tactics. The plan was that they would sail to Lochinver, select an appropriate replacement for their smaller boats, and clear it using the special forces team as the marines provided support and cover should anything unwelcome come from the inland direction.

  As a plan it was simple, but it was simple purely because there were so many of the working parts they were unable to plan for, hence being more of an objective outline than an actual plan.

  Johnson, much to the dislike of the Palmers and his acting replacement Maxwell, insisted on going. This left the younger Palmer, who he had learned had stepped up and earned the respect of the men following his actions during the withdrawal and every day afterwards, in Stornoway to organise their supplies and the civilians opting to join them. The scattered remnants of their squadron, less than twenty men of the multitude they’d started out with, stayed there to make that happen under the young officer’s guidance.

  The captain, who was physically struggling far more than he allowed anyone to know, was in no fit state to be doing anything other than taking a gentle, assisted stroll to the docks, when he’d be wrapped up warmly and deposited in a cabin to endure the sea journey.

  As the SSM was neither part of the elite element, nor was he a marine, he allocated himself the position of managing the nautical and engineering element comprising their civilian volunteers.

  The journey was short, either that or his brooding silence filled with tumbling thoughts of the multiple ways this venture could go horribly wrong and what that would mean for those left behind.

  They had suggested searching the other ports on the large island for more boats, but the obvious absence of the vessels usually in port and the total lack of fuel for them indicated some mass exodus long before their arrival, making the likelihood of finding more resources elsewhere a slim possibility.

  As the port came into view, the abandoned profile of a much larger boat greeted them and even attracted a few cheers before a word from Bill Hampton silenced them immediately.

  “Still ain’t got the bleedin’ sense you were born with,” he growled, earning the marines who had cheered a few light slaps to the head from their comrades.

  “Hold here,” Bufford said to the man piloting their craft. “Enfield, get me eyes-on?”

  The sniper clambered to the highest point on the boat and lay flat with his legs splayed apart for stability as he leaned into the scope of the hunting rifle. Three minutes stretched into four as those not accustomed to the precise nature of his trade began to grow tense in the silence, with each passing second testing their nerve.

  “Some movement on the south end. Nothing obvious, just some crows flapping about something,” he finally reported. “Other than that we’re clear.”

  “Take us in,” Bufford instructed. “Put us aboard on the aft section, then pull back.”

  “What if you need to get out in a hurry?” the man asked.

  “Then we’ll jump off the bloody side and swim,” Dezzy answered for him. Bufford agreed with a nod and the four of them readied themselves for action.

  Johnson watched appreciatively, seeing them scale the short ladder descending from the rearmost section of the larger boat which they could reach with a jump on the small upswell of the waves. The last man to go up, being the only woman, made the jump on her own without the need of assistance from below that the heavier men had required, much to the disappointment of the marines sidling into position to offer her a supporting hand to the buttocks.

  They disappeared over the railing as the boat revved to bubble the water white and move them twenty paces clear.

  The silence of their journey and that of the time waiting for Enfield’s report was nothing compared to the stressful time spent waiting for them to reappear and declare the boat safe to board for the non-military personnel. The boat went closer again, with Johnson accepting a leg up before hauling himself aboard. The others followed, requiring much more help than all of the serving military personnel due to their lack of enforced physical training, with one man having to be simultaneously hauled upwards on a length of rope as two marines pushed from below.

  “The Captain’ll be happy,” Johnsons said over the rail with a smile and a point at the name of the boat emblazoned across her aft section. The name Annabelle was there in faded lettering, but the uncomprehending stares of the men looking back up at him said that they didn’t know.

  “It’s what his wagon was called, way back before everything,” he said, smiling once more before ducking away.

  They disappeared out of sight, going to get the engines of the Annabelle working and hopefully ensure their long-term survival, leaving many of the men anxious that they could neither see nor hear what was happening.

  “Movement,” Enfield said, silencing their low conversation and chilling them all to the bone in a heartbeat.

  “What have you got?’ Lloyd asked, his voice calm and low.

  “Something slipped from the high ground on my left,” he said. “Out of sight behind the houses now.”

  A gasp from the deck below told Enfield that something closer was visible now, and before he could switch his aim to locate it, he heard their officer order the boat to be docked.

  “Can’t fight effectively on deck,” Lloyd said. “We mount a defensive action on the pier and give them the time they need.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The journey back north had been long, in the way the newly created Echo marked time at least, but to the pack that followed it, there seemed to be no sense of time. Vague notions occupied the mind of the Echo, not in
so much that they were tangible thoughts or even memories, but more than instincts; feelings were somehow less impeded by their rebirth and certainly louder to the consciousness than before when their brains had been filled with the pressures of daily life and electronic gadgetry.

  The sensation it felt was that of returning… home, or at least it felt compelled to make its way back to the place it felt it should be at that time, and before it had been drawn away by a device it had no notion of, it had stayed in that area as if tethered by some unfathomable pull.

  The fact that the others followed it, the dumb ones, wasn’t curious at all. It somehow knew that they would, just as it knew that the basic commands it cried to them would be followed unquestioningly.

  Having returned to the place it felt was its own territory, it patrolled the area and hunted anything that moved, utilising the others as a way to herd whatever living creature caught its attention.

  That sense of home, that place where it felt connected, was the dock where it had worked for the last seven years of its life before it embarked on a new chapter as one of the ones who now followed it like a god.

  It had no sense of family, otherwise it might have returned to the modest three-bedroomed semi-detached ten miles away and looked down on the remnants of what had been their family pets before he, his wife and their two daughters devoured them prior to breaking out of the glass window in response to an unimaginably desperate need to seek out the source of the distant sound that drove them all crazy.

  Only he had emerged from the result of that huge gathering, and with that emergence came an awakening.

  Its territory was being invaded, quietly, by fresh meat travelling from the direction of the big cold, of the water, and ignoring the fact that so many living things could be infected and it could fulfil the desire it would never be able to put into words, it could not allow the incursion into its territory to go unpunished.

  It didn’t see the small-scale invasion as an insult, not in so much that it formed a complex thought backed up by knowledge and experience, but more that it felt its dominance challenged and that challenge had to be crushed.

  Two loud, shrill calls stopped its followers where they stood. Some turned their near-blind eyes up at where it perched on a low roof as others shuffled on the spot as if restless and wanting to launch the attack early. Another sound, more like a bark but falling instead of rising in pitch, was answered by huffing grunts as the others’ tension became almost palpable. A third sound, a clear, loud barking noise, sent a third of them off to the right between the houses on the higher ground while the majority of the remaining undead held their positions.

  The Echo slipped down from the rooftop to land with a meaty thud on both feet before uncoiling and standing taller than the pack surrounding it. They all bowed their heads, none of them willing or able to challenge their leader, as it stalked through their ranks. Growling at individuals close to it, the Echo turned and let out a final screeching yelp to launch the pack against the living before sprinting off to run a wide loop of the docks with a few chosen followers in tow.

  “Enfield,” Lloyd said, pointing up at a few shipping containers in single stacks. The marine nodded and started to climb up on smaller crates to reach the high point and set up their overwatch as another marine scrambled up behind him to act as his spotter.

  “Form up there,” the lieutenant added, pointing to the natural choke point leading onto the concrete pier where their prize was sitting. “Take cover.”

  He watched as the men dragged boxes and small crates onto the pier to use as cover and double as barricades, already their military mentality switched from instinctively seeking cover from fire to that of delaying a berserker infantry like they had faced too many times.

  Lloyd turned back to Hampton who was still struggling to clamber over the railing of the small boat and held up a hand to stop him.

  “Stay here on the gun, Bill,” he told him, dressing his concern as an order. “Cover our retreat should we need it.” Hampton nodded tersely, muttering a “Sir” under his breath in acknowledgement but recognising sympathy when he saw it and not liking it one bit.

  He was about to form a protest, about to rearrange the words so that they were appropriate now that he was back under military discipline after months of acting like a pirate, when the cold, still air of the eerily silent docks was split apart by the shrill barking sound they had all come to fear.

  “Make ready,” Lloyd snapped, pausing before adding the words that sent a chill down every man’s back. “Fix bayonets.”

  “What’s the hold up?” Johnson asked, barely able to see in the unlit depths of the passenger boat’s engine room. He had a torch on his equipment but cursed himself for failing to think of the needs of his civilian contingent.

  “Just taking some time to juice the starter,” a Scottish voice answered from the gloom. Johnson retreated up the metal ladder to where the sunlight made no difference to the temperature at all.

  “Try now,” a voice bellowed from below him, and the answering whirr and click from above made him hold his breath for maybe twenty seconds until a shudder rippled through the boat. That shudder became a strained rumble which transformed into a boiling cough as the engine finally struggled to life.

  Johnson released the breath he was holding in an exaggerated sigh of relief and climbed the few remaining steps in time to see a thick cloud of black diesel smoke drift inland from the exhaust. Over the sound of the engine he heard gunfire, his eyes going wide at the sight of a rushing infantry attack streaming down the pier, then his heart dropped into his boots as the engine note coughed once and died.

  More gunfire filled the air in the few seconds he stood on deck in shock before he ducked his head back down below and bawled for them to get the engine started again. If they couldn’t hear the gunshots, the unmistakable tone of his voice made going slow not an option.

  Running to the prow of the boat, he found the four special forces soldiers in various positions of comfort as they each began to line up shots and take them. Johnson joined in, aiming intentionally high over the heads of the royal marines as the SAS man to his left changed the magazine on the suppressed rifle he hadn’t seen until earlier that morning.

  “Come on, come on!” he snarled as he changed magazines and returned to firing indiscriminately into the approaching crowd. Over the coughing rattle of their suppressed guns and the heavy bangs of the marine’s rifles came the clattering of the GPMG still mounted to the rear rail of the fishing boat brought up from the south.

  Johnson stole a glance down to his right where that gun spat flame and tracer out through the small open window to fire without running the risk of hitting his own men.

  Further to his right, situated on a raised platform of shipping containers, he recognised the sharp crack of the heavy hunting rifle in the hands of their sniper, of his friend, and turned back to continue praying for the engine of the boat to come back to life.

  “You two stay here,” Bufford called to the two SAS men as he lowered his gun and gripped a thick rope to slide down to the docks below. Larsen followed, making every physical feat seem effortless, and Johnson went last, struggling to control his descent and burning his hands on the rope to join the defenders for the final push.

  “What do we do, Sir?” one of Lloyd’s men asked him. He was conserving his remaining ammunition now, allowing himself only single shots at head height into the advance as they poured over the fallen bodies of their undead comrades.

  “Shut up and do your job,” marine Foster answered on behalf of the lieutenant as he fired methodically with single, aimed rounds. Behind them, much to their palpable relief, the engine of the boat roared to life.

  As quickly as their elation soared it was dashed on the rocks like a floundering ship in a storm as the engine coughed and died again.

  “Hold the line,” Lloyd called out, repeating it twice more to strengthen the resolve of his men as much as his own, when in truth he wasn’
t certain how long they could maintain the defence. Just as he was considering ordering a retreat to the boat, the machine gun rattled to life to drive down the first two ranks of attackers.

  “God bless you, Bill,” Lloyd muttered to himself as he lined up the skull of another in his crosshairs only to see it snatched away with a fountain of gore exploding out of the right side of the creature’s head.

  “And god bless you too, Enfield,” he said.

  As if the sniper heard them, he began screaming at them from his elevated position and gesturing wildly to their left.

  Enfield saw the attack unfolding, began picking off the fastest moving of the pack as they barged and shoved their way through to the front rank. There had to be close to two hundred there, hidden behind the buildings and concentrated into a pack unlike the disorganised array of shambling corpses that he felt was more appropriate. Or at least fair.

  A slap on his left arm, something his newest understudy would never do, jarred his aim and forced him to almost shoot too high before his finger recoiled from the trigger like it was molten metal.

  “There! Look!”

  He looked, seeing a smaller but still sizeable group emerge from the high ground nearer the docks and begin tumbling recklessly down the slope where they threatened to fall on the defenders exposed flank in mere moments.

  “Warn them,” he snapped, hearing the marine begin screaming and yelling as he adjusted his aim and began picking off the greater threat one at a time.

  Headshots were almost impossible, even at that relatively short distance, due to the desperate way they threw themselves down the slope so instead he made do with a logical shot aimed to destroy a leg bone and at least remove their ability to run with anything resembling the speed of a living person.