Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  Their nearest pub, ironically called the Fox Arms, which always made Peter ask the silent question to himself about foxes not having arms, stood quiet and brooding. His mother seemed oblivious to the air of brooding menace the building seemed to give off, as she spilled from the car with shaking hands and a pale visage displaying her annoyance at catching her son’s eye.

  “Stay here,” she said firmly, giving Peter the slight sense that he detected a waver in her voice.

  He stayed. He watched her stagger slightly as she made as straight a line as she could manage towards the front door of the building, disappearing inside and leaving him suddenly alone.

  His heart rate rising fractionally, Peter scanned his surroundings just past the dirty glass which was all that separated him from the outside world and all of the unknown frightening things which were happening there. Forcing himself to breathe and be calm, he assessed the things he saw and catalogued them. A tall evergreen tree swaying slightly, betraying the wind blowing higher up than ground level. The flashing lights of the railway crossing further up the road, not flashing now as no trains were imminent. The two other cars on the small patch of ground he occupied, both looking cold and still as though they hadn’t moved in a while.

  Slowly, he dared to wind down the window an inch, stiffening at the squeak the handle emitted when he first took up the pressure, and allowed more senses to come into play to build the picture of his immediate surroundings. Lifting his chin to take in a long breath through his nostrils, Peter added more information to the list.

  Birdsong, high in the trees. A slight chill on the breeze, bringing with it the smell of wet woodland which was very different to the wet grassland that was so familiar on the farm. More noises drifted to him then, both familiar and startlingly different.

  Glass breaking, muffled by distance and obstructions, but unmistakable. A shout, a bang.

  At the sound of the bang, his visual acuity snapped his head to the right and back to the door which he had last seen his mother disappearing into. She re-emerged then, her arms full of clear glass bottles containing liquid that looked like water, but Peter knew was not. In her panicked flight, he smirked as she fumbled one of the bottles held awkwardly in her arms and dropped it, to hop in an ungainly dance over the smashing glass, heard crisply and clearly now. He also heard the string of foul obscenities that spewed from her vile mouth and the smirk wiped itself from his face in case she saw and took her revenge.

  From the way she ran, or was trying to run, awkwardly with her arms full, Peter thought that she hadn’t paid for the bottles and associated the shouting from inside to mark that theft. His brain registered that he had only heard one voice shout, unmistakably that of his mother, but the omission of other sounds didn’t fully paint the picture that she described when she regained the safety of the cab.

  “He’s fucking nuts, that bastard,” she spat as she threw herself in, barely able to perform basic motor functions with her rapid breathing and red face. Throwing the four surviving bottles into Peter’s lap, she turned the key and crunched her way into first gear before slamming her right foot down and tearing out of the car park almost out of control. Revving each gear beyond comfort for as long as Peter could hold his breath, she suddenly slowed and stopped the car on the gravel verge, before fumbling with the sequence of the controls she needed to manipulate, and she stalled the pickup.

  She turned her furious eyes on him, and he snatched an involuntary breath, flinching to shut his eyes tight as her hand shot out towards him.

  Opening one eye to confirm what his ears had told him was happening, he stared at her as she sat next to him. Her desperate reach wasn’t to hit him, he realised, it was to make a grab for the one thing she needed most. The seemingly life-sustaining liquid in the bottle she now tore at feverishly to remove the screw cap from, and to tip it to her mouth. The roof of the cab prevented her from upending the bottle completely, forcing her to dip her chin and try to make her body smaller in an attempt to force the drink to flow. Pausing, she took three deep breaths to steady herself, then began her frantic guzzling once more, before a lack of oxygen forced her to stop and breathe. Slowly, her hands no longer trembling incessantly, she put the lid back on the now quarter-empty bottle with relative ease and closed her eyes as she let the drink flow though her body, as though she couldn’t think or function without it, as if it was the fuel she ran on. Opening her eyes, she turned to regard him and did the rarest of things.

  She smiled at him.

  He had seen it a few times in his life. Not the smile she cast on him when she was relishing the anticipation of punishing him, but a genuine smile of someone who was happy. Her sudden likeness to his sister stung him deeply, as though without seeing his mother look at him kindly, he had never noticed the family resemblance until that moment.

  “That’s better,” she said glibly, as if simple joviality could cover up her debauched need for the drink, and she thrust the bottle back at him to hold. He took it wordlessly, watching her restart the truck with deft hands and far more poise with the controls.

  “Next stop,” she announced gleefully, “shop. Hopefully nobody else tries to run me off today.”

  Peter knew that the shop meant a purchase of a whole carton of cigarettes from the Greek man who owned the franchised chain store with its attached single fuel pump. The local shop, as it was known, was local for a few hundred people spread out over miles and miles of farmland. There was another small shop of the same chain in a village that Peter’s bus to school passed through. He could see the same sign, the same flash of three simple colours, on the corner building where the houses of that village met the railway line. The same railway line that he had seen minutes earlier, in fact, just further down that line.

  This absent-minded train of thought covered the time it took for his mother, now renewed with a seemingly youthful energy and positive nature, to drive them to the shop.

  Getting out, she paused, leaning back down to issue the same growled threat to stay, but then she seemed to hesitate.

  “Come on then,” she snapped, albeit in a higher pitch than usual, which he guessed meant she was trying to be fun and companionable. Hurrying to release his seatbelt, he spilled from the car to stand upright and move his feet fast to catch her up, if only to hover just out of the reach of her arms.

  The forecourt of the shop-cum-fuel station was as deserted as the pub, but that didn’t mean anything there, the area being devoid of life at the best of times. He watched as his mother straightened herself, in his opinion a pointless and vain attempt to make an abusive alcoholic seem in any way respectable. She pushed open the glass and metal door to activate the tinkling bell suspended above the frame.

  Hovering just behind and beside her, Peter peered into the gloom as he held his breath. The harsh, ear-grating screech of, “Hello?” coming from his mother made him flinch involuntarily, but he focused his attention back on the poorly-lit interior of the shop in time to anticipate any answer.

  None came, and he followed her inside.

  EIGHT

  Dean Johnson took stock of his Yeomanry squadron of reservists, who were chatting amongst themselves in the big drill hall. He was both annoyed and secretly pleased to have found that none of the squadron’s officers had reported for duty, and he wondered if they had even received the call to ignore in the first place, or whether they simply hadn’t made it there yet.

  He was glad that none of them had arrived, apart from the Major, that was, because in his opinion they were either snot-nosed, entitled children who brought their genetically weak chins to dilute his beloved army, or else they were washed-out old Etonians with little to offer, other than second-hand officers’ mess stories. The Major was the exception to the rule, in that he had been a career soldier who had achieved the highest rank available to an enlisted man, then had his skills and experience recognised with a commission to attend Sandhurst on retirement, where he graduated with the rank of Captain. The Major was the man
who effectively ran the unit, along with his trusted Squadron Sergeant Major, as it certainly wasn’t the Lieutenant-Colonel, whose only talent was his insatiable appetite for port and afternoon naps, and Johnson looked up to the Major greatly.

  That wasn’t to say that Johnson wasn’t a man who inspired others. A heavy haulage mechanic by trade, he had joined the Territorial Army in his teens as he could never bring himself to give up his lucrative apprenticeship. By the time his training had been completed in his day job, he had risen to the rank of Corporal and was marked out as a young man capable of much more. When the pull to join the regular army threatened to take him from his civilian life, he could not bear to lose the huge difference in wages between the careers, so he dedicated himself to his territorial unit, and over eighteen years had risen to the rank of Warrant Officer class two and was awarded the high honour of becoming the Squadron Sergeant Major.

  Stepping stiffly up onto a small stack of ammunition crates, he cast his eyes over the almost seventy men who had mobilised when called. Less than seventy from a full complement of almost one hundred and twenty enlisted ranks and officers.

  It was, he decided, a fairly shit turn-out.

  The call was expected by many, so the excuse of men who claimed not to have been informed was unacceptable at the very least. Now, deciding that it was time he called the assembled men to quiet and explained their tasks, he stood tall on the wooden boxes and cleared his throat.

  It was a small noise, but he somehow made it echo throughout the large room and cut the air to silence numerous conversations mid-sentence. Almost as one, the men sat or stood still to listen to their Sergeant Major.

  “Gentlemen,” Johnson intoned solemnly, hiding his excitement at a live mobilisation behind the sheer gravity of the situation, “fall in, sit down, and shut up.”

  He waited as they did as they were told.

  “I’ll keep it short,” he began, “because you’ll be deployed as of sixteen-hundred tonight. Troop sergeants will draw up stag rotas. That said, numbers aren’t what they should be, so Four Troop will be disbanded to give full complements to the other three Sabre troops,” he said, meaning that of their four main fighting units, only three could be fully manned and sentries would be posted from that evening, “and we wi…”

  “Sorry I’m late, chaps,” burst a voice from the back of the room, accompanied by the bang of a door. The accent dripped with privilege, but as the young man strode into view, Johnson’s worst fears became realities.

  Second Lieutenant Oliver Simpkins-Palmer was everything Johnson hated in the officer classes. He didn’t dislike the officers as a general rule, and certainly respected many that he had met and worked with over the years, but this man was an aristocratic, elitist, stereotypical bloody Rupert who made his peers call him Olly and dropped the double-barrelled name for ease in the military setting and elected to go with Palmer, as was the male tradition in his family. He had, in Johnson’s not inconsiderable experience, been born with a silver spoon very far up his arse, and every word that dripped from him was languid and infuriated the Sergeant Major. He was a soldier. He had worked hard and earned his place. Palmer however, had been born to the right family, had never known hardship and would never know the value of money as he and his men did. His older brother, Johnson knew, had joined the army fresh out of university and had graduated Sandhurst, having made a name for himself as an intelligent young officer. He had been posted to the Household Cavalry, and all reports from the men there said that he had grown into a well-respected young Captain who was popular with his men.

  Lieutenant Palmer was the opposite side to that coin, he saw the men of the company as beneath him and treated them all as his personal servants. He had also finished university but believed that his career lay in entrepreneurial investments, instead of climbing the ladder through hard work. If Johnson were to believe rumour, which he listened to but didn’t read as gospel, then Lieutenant Palmer had inveigled his father into bankrolling his lifestyle, appeasing him by joining the reserves. He seemed to believe that rank, as pathetically junior as his was, offered him privilege far above his earned station.

  Respect the rank, Johnson told himself as the annoying twerp strode towards him, not the man.

  “Mister Palmer,” Johnson said through barely gritted teeth as he nodded his greeting to the young man, who stepped close to the boxes he was standing on, “I was just addressing the men, Sir, if you would like to discuss the matter afterwards?” he said, keeping his face neutral so as not to betray the hostility between the two men to everyone.

  “I’d like to discuss it before I address the men, if it’s all the same to you, Sergeant Major,” Palmer said acidly, and loudly enough for the closest dozen men to hear.

  Johnson stepped down without another word, wearing, however, a face which indicated a severe level of disapproval. Palmer smiled infuriatingly, forcing Johnson to swallow down his rising anger at the intrusion and control his face, as he strode ahead to the administrative offices with Palmer walking behind.

  “Talk amongst yourselves, boys,” he called over his shoulder and smiled internally in satisfaction as the ambient noise in the hall rose measurably. Palmer, singling out the nearest enlisted man, spoke condescendingly to him.

  “Find me a cup of tea, would you, Smith?” he said annoyingly.

  “I’m Parry, Sir,” the man answered, only to be dismissed with an irritated wave of the officer’s hand.

  As soon as Johnson walked inside the office, the door was pushed closed behind him. In almost mocking contrast of one another, Palmer lounged over the corner of the nearest desk with his legs apart, whereas Johnson stood ramrod straight as though he alone in the room took any pride in soldiering.

  “Who gave you permission to address the men?” Palmer asked. Johnson’s eyes moved slowly to fix the much younger man, who seemed to lack the courage of his convictions and quailed slightly under the gaze of the tough man.

  “Perhaps, Sir,” Johnson said with an emphasised sneer, “you don’t yet know how the army works. Perhaps, Sir,” he said again, putting yet more aggression into the false deference as he took a pace closer in order that the young man understood him properly, “you don’t know how things actually work in this squadron. You might not be aware that almost every decision made is made by sergeants in the HQ troop, or the admin troop or by the Sabre troop sergeants, or, Sir, by me.”

  He stepped back and seemed to relax, even allowing a small smile to spread across his face to signify that he meant no more hostility to the new officer.

  “In answer to your question, I do not need anyone’s authority to address my men. Now, I assume that you would like to know our disposition and orders before I pass them on?”

  Palmer, in betrayal of his arrogance, was not cowed by the reprimand and if anything, he seemed to have found the small interaction amusing. Johnson fought down the urge to slap the man less than half his age and send him to bed.

  “Please, Mister Johnson,” he said with yet more dripping sarcasm than the older man thought possible, “do apprise me of our situation and disposition.”

  Johnson sucked in a big lungful of air through his nose in order to settle himself and stop him from speaking for a few valuable seconds, then he let it out and spoke.

  “Of our six troops, we have a little over half strength,’ he began, “I’ve cut out Four Troop,” he explained, meaning that one quarter of their regular fighting units had to be disbanded, “as they have no troop sergeant and no Corporals deemed up to the task of replacing them. Those men have been distributed amongst the other three Sabres and the assault troop, and HQ have been merged with admin for the time being. We still have empty seats, and more vehicles than we have bodies to fill.”

  “That’s all wonderfully explained and I’m sure you can be pleased,” Palmer drawled in a voice Johnson could only describe as smarmy, “but I was rather hoping to receive an update about the rest of the country and what’s been going on,” he finish
ed, his rich and cultured accent bearing a trace of feminine gentility.

  Johnson looked shocked, as the man had clearly just rolled up without a clue what had been happening elsewhere.

  “Sir,” he began, a furrowed brow of concern showing above his shrewd eyes, “London and surrounding areas are gone. Wiped out. The entire Household Cavalry unit training at the camp have been deployed to roll armour straight down the bloody M3 into London. We have been mobilised and are on home defence duties effective from six o’clock this evening,” he said, intentionally simplifying certain elements of his report, as he doubted the fresh-faced aristocrat could cope with the full truth given in army lingo. Seeing the mask of smugness slip momentarily from Palmer’s face, Johnson went on.

  “You know what this is, don’t you?” he asked.

  “I rather doubt anyone knows what it is, wouldn’t you say, old boy?” he responded, infuriating Johnson again at being encompassed in his own lingo and branded as one of them.

  “No, I bloody wouldn’t,” Johnson snapped back, “there’s talk of some illness caused by infected animals from France, other rumours about some disease the Americans and the Russians were racing to perfect just so they can keep trying to kill each other quietly, and now there’s even the local loonies and god-botherers trooping their own colours and saying it’s bloody judgement day.”

  He took a half step back and calmed himself down before resuming in a more relaxed tone of voice.