“Steady as you go, lads,” he boomed out to them, MP5 cradled in his left hand and the mug of tea still in his right. Being exposed on the deck made having both hands full a risky business given the motion of the sea, so he drained the mug and flicked his wrist to toss the dregs onto the deck.
He filled his lungs, ready to bark out the boy’s surname and summon him back from the front line before he realised he had never learned what it was.
“Peter,” he said, earning an annoyed look from the boy at being singled out. Johnson changed his mind immediately, having been about to order the boy to take his cup back inside. He lifted the flap of a pouch on his webbing and threaded the handle through before reattaching it.
“Keep your eyes peeled, lad,” he ordered, seeing the pride and relief on Peter’s face as he was allowed to stay there with the men. He paced behind them, exchanging encouraging words and smiling but feeling with every inch closer to land they got that their hopes for safety would be dashed.
“Helicopter inbound,” came a shout from further towards the prow, turning every head that way for a look.
“That seems like good news to me, boys,” Johnson said with a smile in spite of the stress he felt under. “Don’t think a Screecher can fly a whirly-bird, do you?” The men laughed dutifully, still craning their necks for a view of the reported aircraft.
Johnson saw it. A speck in the sky at first but approaching fast. It banked as it approached them, swinging off to the port side over open water to fly past far beyond the range of their personal weapons, affording Johnson a snap shot of the scaffold frame style body stretching out far behind the bulbous glass bubble protecting the pilot.
All over the boat, men and women cheered and waved, the sound filling Johnson with the comfort his words had intended the men to feel. Just knowing that another person was out there operating advanced machinery after the hell they’d lived through held so much promise.
“They’re calling us,” a voice yelled from a window of the bridge slid back to expose the speaker. Daniels, far more adept at working a radio than any other person onboard, was waving Johnson over to him. Meeting Palmer at the window at the same time, they leaned in to hear Daniels’ words.
“Icelandic Coast Guard,” he yelled over the rush of the wind and sea. “They want us to identify ourselves and confirm we aren’t carrying any infection.”
“Tell them we’re—” Johnson stopped and looked at the lieutenant for permission to continue, which he gave with a smile and a gracious nod.
“Tell them we’re a bag of Liquorice Allsorts from Britain,” he said. “Tell them we have no infection and ask if we can continue to port.”
They waited as Daniels spoke back into the radio, nodding at the responses which doubtless came in better English than most of their men spoke, and turned back to them with a smile.
“We’re to drop anchor in the bay but not approach land,” he reported. “They’ll have crews transport us in small numbers into quarantine.”
“Are they evacuating to America?” Johnson asked, waiting for the relayed conversation to come back to him.
“In four days, yes.”
“Is that it?” Palmer said, sounding almost dejected in his surprise. “After everything?”
“Looks that way, Sir.”
“I say, Sarn’t Major,” Palmer said with an air of disbelief. “Did we actually make it?”
“I believe we did, Sir. I believe we bloody well did.”
TWENTY-NINE
True to their word, the men and women of the Icelandic coast guard deployed boats, most of them very overtly armed, to monitor their fishing vessel as it dropped anchor and waited for the smaller crafts to bring people off ten at a time and take them into quarantine on dry land beside the looming, skyscraper silhouette of a cruise ship docked nearby.
The weather was cold, colder than they’d experienced in both the south or the islands off Scotland’s western coast, but the cold was of no concern when faced with the disbelief of standing on land that was owned completely by the living.
The Palmer brothers, along with the marine lieutenant, were invited to speak with the civilian and military leaders, through thick glass as they were all sealed inside separate compartments to protect everyone from any potential infection.
Johnson was invited, as was Hampton, but neither truly had the stomach for it.
No personal items were permitted to be brought through, as their possessions, weapons and clothing were all sealed and abandoned as part of the process, and Amber had taken a long time to calm down following the loss of the filthy, threadbare lamb she rubbed against her face whenever she went to sleep.
“What do you think you’ll do when we get to America?” Kimberley asked, nudging Peter with her elbow as he still sulked at the loss of the rifle he’d been so recently gifted by a dead man. They’d all been disarmed much in the way that their dirty clothes had been shed as if leaving the ordeals they’d survived behind.
“Probably end up in an orphanage,” Peter mumbled. His words stung Johnson’s heart as the brave, resolute boy he knew was being eroded by the thought of returning to civilisation.
“You can stay with me if you like,” she said, not looking at Johnson who feared that, just like the boy, his current happiness and status would be surrendered on joining the world again. Peter grunted, glancing up at Jessica who was deep in conversation with Ellie. Both wore smiles as Amber slept in Ellie’s lap, her feet together and her legs open like a frog around the small cage carrying the annoyed cat who still seemed to feel aggrieved at its kidnapping.
“Hey,” Kimberley said, nudging him again, “don’t be a grump. We made it, didn’t we?”
“We did,” he answered, getting up and joining the forming queue, ready for their isolation pod to be processed after the required hours spent there following decontamination and wearing the odd white paper suits given to them all.
Johnson stood to follow him, holding out a hesitant hand for Kimberley who took it to be hauled to her feet with a smile.
“What do you think?” she asked him, eyes bright and intense.
“About what?”
“About him,” she said, pointing her chin at the sulking boy’s back.
“What about him?”
“Shall we have him with us? To live, I mean.” Johnson’s mouth dropped open, but no words came out. He was such a realist that he seemed like a pessimist in almost every situation unless intentionally giving hope to others. He never thought to assume their relationship would continue as it was, let alone develop, so to hear her making just that assumption nearly floored him.
“I, err…”
“I know,” she said mockingly, “it’s a bit early to be talking about kids, but this is the nineties now, you know?”
“I… yes. God, yes.” She smiled, the scarred side of her face crinkling her features in a way he found so utterly beautiful that he could’ve died in that moment and felt fulfilled. Joining the line behind Peter to where people exited one at a time into the third phase of quarantine which would see them onboard a ship heading for a new land, free of fear and the constant threat of death.
“Name,” a man or woman wearing a rubber hazard suit asked from behind the mask that completed their androgynous appearance.
“Dean Johnson,” he said, stopping himself before he automatically added his rank and unit with no idea why he left them off.
The suited person waved him through where another similarly dressed person pressed a disposable temperature strip to his head to confirm no fever had manifested since his naked body was thoroughly checked in the previous phase. He evidently passed that test and was waved through to wait in the next chamber. Looking back, he saw Kimberley leaning down and talking conspiratorially in Peter’s ear who, in turn, spoke to his sister behind him.
“Name?”
“Kimberley Johnson.” His eyes went wide as hers flashed mischievously, stepping through for her temperature to be taken and joining him.
“Name?”
“Peter… Peter Johnson.”
The wait was boring, and it was inevitable that the lack of activity for so many of them would combine with the gathering belief that they might actually survive, and it allowed for more than one breakdown; and even a few flare-ups between fellow soldiers and civilians who had carried the burden of unresolved conflict with them.
Johnson broke up a few of those conflicts personally, half lifting a man off the ground in one instance before good sense prevailed and he put him down with a firm warning to make himself scarce.
The wait was over when their turn came to load onto the cruise liner and begin their six-day journey across the Atlantic where a further quarantine camp awaited their arrival.
What Johnson didn’t know the Americans had, having never been there, was space.
They had entire counties’ worth of undeveloped land and so much space that so many of their states could house the entire land mass of England easily. That space was there to fill, and after completing all the forms and eating hot, fresh burgers with cheese and ketchup and mustard tasting nothing like any of them had ever experienced before, their allocation for housing eventually came through.
They were all changed by what had happened. Changed in so many ways.
They had survived where so many millions had not, and now they were offered the chance of a new life.
THIRTY
The weather was hot and dry, which for someone who’d so recently lived in the English countryside made the warm September days a welcome relief from the wind and rain the month usually brought them.
The afternoon sun felt like a warm summer to Peter, who stepped off the yellow school bus onto the neat, sun-bleached pavement that he had to remind himself to call a sidewalk now.
From the street where he caught the bus to the school where he was far from alone in terms of foreign refugees, his walk home took him past a park lined with tall trees that were just beginning to display the transition from lush green to brown. He knew they’d dry up and fall from the branches before long, much the same as autumn back home would have looked like, only here it was called fall, and here it was safe.
Turning the corner into his street, he stopped to watch as a car so long he would’ve thought it could carry a dozen people inside it rolled past with the windows down and some religious preaching coming from the radio inside.
He smiled before looking both ways and crossing the road to walk up to the house with three flags hanging from the porch. Almost every house down his street bore at least one flag, the familiar stars and stripes that his own home proudly flew, but beside that one was the union flag of Great Britain and beside that was a colourful badge with a crowned crest set in the middle, proudly displaying the fighting origins of the house’s owner.
A pickup truck was on the driveway, and behind it a car sat with the front wheels raised off the ground on axle stands. A familiar pair of legs protruded from underneath; the right foot tapping along with the classic rock coming from the radio playing inside.
It was a 1984 Camaro Z28, and after a day spent working on the engines of lorries—no, he corrected himself again, semi-trucks, the man underneath it took pride in restoring a perfectly working car to what he referred to as ‘his standards’ for the sheer enjoyment of doing it.
Peter’s shadow fell on the legs, and the foot tapping stopped long enough for the body to slide out and the eyes squint against the sunlight.
“Hello, lad,” Johnson said. “Good day in school?”
“Yeah,” Peter answered. “We played dodgeball.”
An amused hiss of breath through Johnson’s teeth was all the response he got, making Peter laugh.
“No, I did just fine.”
“Good, go on inside and get yourself a snack.”
Peter went in via the rear gate, walking through the open patio doors to be greeted by the smell of home cooking.
“Hello, love,” Kimberley said, kissing him on the head as she passed carrying something hot from the oven with thick mitts over her hands. “Nice day at school?”
“Yeah,” Peter said again.
“Go wash up,” she told him. “Amber, Charlie and Ellie are coming over soon.” Peter smiled, opening his mouth to ask where Jessica was when the doppler effect of a Bon Jovi song blared through the open front windows telling him to keep the faith. He knew without even looking that the squeal of brakes and loud music announced the return of his sister in her Chevy Nova; a car that he thought was hideous, but she adored for the freedom it allowed her.
She had talked about nothing else for the last year, ever since they’d moved from the immigration centres on the east coast to Kansas, and Peter was happy to see her happy. She ran inside, dumping her bag inside the front door, and Peter heard her jump onto her bed upstairs before talking into the phone, no doubt to her friend she had been speaking to less than half an hour before.
“Best bleeding thing I ever bought her, that,” Johnson said. “No chance of an unwanted pregnancy when she drives it…” he laughed at his own joke, walking into the kitchen to be shrieked at for touching things with oil-covered hands. The shrieking turned to giggling, and Peter imagined Johnson turning his grubby attention to her as he walked upstairs wearing a smile of true contentment at how his life turned out after all he’d been through.
He glanced down at Jessica’s backpack by the front door, for a brief moment feeling transported back in time to when they all routinely kept bags packed ready by the exits, should their hiding place be discovered. He imagined weapons rested beside those packs and stopped himself from reaching out to touch the smoothed wood of the pitchfork’s handle.
He reminded himself that he didn’t need it any longer. Didn’t need to make sure he went armed everywhere he went, and no longer had to sleep with his shoes on, ready to run.
He was safe, he knew that, but he also knew that what he had lived through, what he had experienced, would stay with him every day for the rest of his life. It made his heart beat faster just to think of it.
He was changed in so many ways, and as brutal as the life he’d lived for a brief time in his existence, he was better for it. That feeling made him selfish, he knew that, because an unfathomable amount of human life had been lost for him to be where he was, but none of that was his doing and none of it could be undone.
Ellie drove up twenty minutes later, parking on the street outside the house and opening the back door of her car to let Amber bounce down to run towards the house as she and the smiling Charlie Daniels followed.
Amber was tall, having shot up in the last year but seeming not to put any weight on, which left her as thin as a rake. She had endless reserves of energy and barrelled through the door beaming a smile from ear to ear. She hugged Peter briefly, acknowledging their eternal and unbreakable bond, before greeting everyone else and climbing up onto the kitchen counter to pick at the crust of the pie Kimberley had baked.
They were happy, in spite of everything they’d been through both as individuals and together, and they were a family.
Not the family they’d been given, but the one they had chosen.
Happiness wasn’t a given for all of them, however. As much as Peter enjoyed his life, he felt that his existence there was only temporary, because part of him would always remain back in the English countryside or on the harsh Scottish coast.
“I know that look,” Johnson said quietly from behind him. Peter sighed and glanced over his shoulder, his expression admitting that his thoughts had drifted off to a darker place.
“All that’s behind you now, son,” he reassured him.
“I know. Only it’s not over, is it? It’ll never be over.”
“It will one day,” Johnson promised. “It’ll just take some time.”
Epilogue
Spring 2010
The transport plane touched down at the place once designated as Raf Benson with a puff of tyre smoke and a high-pitched chirp as rubber fought
briefly against the tarmac. It slowed, turning towards the end of the runway to taxi on a left-handed loop to the main base.
Outside the two massive hangars, it came to a stop and the tail lowered to let in a gust of chill air laced with a light rain to remind the men stacking up to exit the aircraft that they were back in Britain.
With the exception of just two who were trying to hide their nervousness at landing in hostile territory for their first tour, the remainder had all been there on active service before. The man at the lead, calm and collected, like the concept of landing inside one of three reinforced strongholds was just another day, stepped down. The name tape across his chest read, ‘JOHNSON’, and the words he spoke showed his curious hybrid English-American accent.
“Fall in,” he called behind him over the screaming noise of the engines winding down, leading the nine other people away from the main hangar to a smaller building beside it. All of them were weighed down with heavy packs and half of them carried long, padded weapon cases on their backs in addition to the rest of their gear.
The man leading them, wearing the insignia of a sergeant of the US marine corps scout sniper division, stepped inside the building and stood to attention in front of the desk to offer a salute. The man behind it stood and returned the salute, smiled briefly, and extended a hand to shake.
“Good to have you back, Johnson,” he said, meaning his words.
“Good to be back, Captain,” Johnson answered. “What’s our AO and when do we deploy?”
“Eager beaver, huh?” the US marine officer answered. “Refit and weapons issue today, briefing oh-eight-hundred tomorrow followed by immediate deployment. Your role is to support the push east toward London and provide overwatch for the two/seven who are leading the advance.”
“No build-up training? No handover?” The captain shook his head sadly, his tightly pursed lips loudly not saying much to the hardened sergeant.
Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 20
