Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  The noise that came from those three hundred mouths was directly from the worst horror film ever made. A few troopers even dropped their weapons to cover their ears, such was the painful volume it reached. The three crowds converged where their Leaders had fallen, all combining to become a single, feverish, screeching, roiling mass of flesh and teeth. The smell from those bodies even at a distance was sufficient to bring tears to their eyes, and the only way to render that threat safe was to do what they knew how to do best.

  The orders were given by hand signal, and the cupola of one Fox and one Spartan turned towards the crowd, and both gunners let rip.

  There were twenty troopers and soldiers at the fence, so the crews in the armoured cars sensibly drove to the flanks, where they could bring their weapons to bear without risk of hitting their own side. When those guns sparked into life, the odds rapidly swung in favour of the living over the dead.

  Both fired their GPMGs, the Spartan as it was the tank’s only weapon and the Fox as its secondary, coaxial gun. The two heavy machine guns, combined with small arms fire from the front, tore ragged and bloody swathes into the hungry mob. The gunner of the Fox, eager to employ his instrument of warfare to its fullest, then fired six quick shots through the 30mm Rarden cannon, as the barrel was traversed ever so slightly after each shot. The result of this, the 30mm coming somewhere between an extremely heavy machine gun and small artillery, was brutal, devastating and utterly awesome.

  As the six shells rocketed through the crowd in a slow-moving arc, each heavy piece tore down dozens of bodies and pulped anything it hit into instant, bloody ruin. The guns were designed to fire ammunition that would kill Russian tanks, not for crowd control.

  After those six shots, the gunner went back to intermittent fire on the coaxial GPMG, as there was little or no concentration of enemy remaining. The guns on the cars stopped, leaving the dismounted troopers to finish off anything that still moved with any kind of purpose.

  “Cease fire,” Johnson bawled as he approached the gate at a steady run, “cease fire!”

  What he saw when he got there could best be described as horrific. It was total and utter slaughterhouse carnage. It was a scene out of the deepest, darkest layers of hell. Stopping at the steaming, writhing pile of meat fanning out from where they had converged on the fence, he found himself locked into the stare of a pair of blind eyes as the creature’s right hand reached for him. The left hand was gone, along with that shoulder, and a diagonal line out of the torso culminating in a pile of oily intestines sitting atop the severed legs, which he couldn’t be certain even belonged to that particular Screecher. It opened its mouth as it craned towards him, hoping to cover the distance and somehow get through the chain link by sheer effort of will.

  Turning away, Johnson locked eyes instead with the next man to catch up with him, Sergeant Maxwell.

  “That settles it then,” he said, “we head for the island as soon as we are able to move.”

  Watching him walk away, no doubt to give the necessary order or to assure the civilians that they were safe, Maxwell turned around and looked down at the horror that was a quarter of a human being still trying to eat him, even though it no longer possessed enough of its body to locomote. Ignoring the good sense that he should save his ammunition or that the thing was no longer a threat, he raised his gun and fired a single bullet into its skull to end the hunger for good.

  “What’s going on?” shouted a woman as she fussed to keep her hands over the ears of two children.

  Kimberley also wanted, very much in fact, to know what was going on. The sergeant who had initially led them though to this large room, and who had organised two men to bring them a large rucksack containing a sleeping bag and some metal cooking tins, was standing at the doors, guarding them from going outside no doubt, and she knew he wouldn’t tell her a thing. She decided to approach the new man they had just been introduced to and pulled her hair down the left side of her face to hide the scars as best she could. Straightening herself to use her above average height to her advantage, she smoothed down her creased clothes and walked confidently towards the soldier who, she guessed, was about her age.

  “Excuse me,” she said, tapping him lightly on the shoulder and smiling as he turned around to face her, meeting the level of her eyes exactly. He returned the smile warmly, as though proper manners came easily to him, and those manners were so impeccable that when his eyes caught sight of the small patch of scar she could not obscure with her hair, his face did not register any disgust or flinch, merely switched back to her gaze and fixed her to the spot. One corner of his mouth curled up slightly, and he offered a hint of a bow to her.

  “Madam,” he said in a richly cultured accent, or at least an accent that others might find cultured, as Kimberley thought it made him sound like a smarmy dick.

  “Lieutenant Oliver Simpkins-Palmer,” he said, giving his full title in an attempt to make himself sound grand and important. He clearly had misjudged his audience, as Kimberley found herself in the unexpected role reversal of being repulsed by another person on sight.

  “Kimberley Perkins,” she answered curtly, unable to bring herself to be rude despite instantly disliking the man in front of her. “Lieutenant, might I enquire as to what is going on, and how long we are to be kept here?”

  “My dear Miss Perkins,” he crooned like some awful approximation of a character in an Ian Fleming novel, “if everyone can remain inside and let the chaps handle things, then all will be well, I assure you,” he continued, offering her another dazzling smile.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she responded, “but that answers neither of my questions.”

  Palmer’s smile barely quivered before he brought it back under control.

  “Madam, again I assure you that everything is under control, and everyone here,” she winced as he pronounced the word as hy’ah directly from his sinuses, “will be brought up to speed very shortly. Now, if you’ll excuse me?” he said, clearly desperate to find someone not immune to his upper-class charm.

  Kimberley was left standing alone and even more annoyed than before. Something inside her said that she needed to be ready to move and soon, so she returned to the space where she had slept in her new, thick green sleeping bag and rolled it back up to stuff it into her new army backpack to keep the metal tins from rattling around. Settling the large bag over one shoulder, she took herself to the long table that contained military clothing, because the skirt and heels were unlikely to be fitting for any kind of flight from the base, which she sensed would be coming at some point. Taking a bundle, after searching the piles for labels, she retired to the toilets designated for female use. She found a pair of green trousers that fit over her hips but weren’t quite long enough to reach all the way down the length of her legs. She countered this with a pair of boots, the tops of which covered the trouser legs. They were half a size too large for her, but laced up tight enough, she kept her feet from slipping. Abandoning her skirt, blouse, tights and heels, which went into her bag, she completed her new look with a white T-shirt with red hemming around the neck and sleeves. The only outer garment she could find was a smock, a kind of large blouse jacket, of stiff camouflage-patterned material which was at least three sizes too big for her. She also kept another pair of trousers and a few T-shirts, which she stuffed into the bag.

  When she returned to the main hall and propped her army luggage on a chair, she fetched one or two strange looks from the frightened people who were just cowering there waiting to be told what to do, and she helped herself to the stewed coffee from the pot which was permanently kept warm on a cycle. She was certain that the amount of coffee she was drinking couldn’t be good for her, but she doubted that the sudden influx of so much caffeine in her life would lead to her imminent demise, as she rather expected that to be something terrifyingly similar to what she had seen back in the town where she lived.

  Used to live, she corrected herself, can’t see that place being habitable a
ny time soon.

  Within twenty minutes, her predictions became reality when she saw entering the room a very stressed looking man with stripes on his arm and his hair tousled on one side, carrying a battered clipboard. He loudly announced that everyone needed to be ready to go very soon, then left the room under a barrage of shouted questions, with the young officer following.

  Smiling to herself, Kimberley watched as everyone scrabbled to grab clothing and throw things into their bags. ready to leave.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Peter, who had decided that his task for the morning was to climb a particularly tall oak tree, heard what he thought was thunder rolling over the undulating ground towards him. An experienced solider would have recognised it as gunfire, heavy gunfire at that, but Peter had no way of knowing. He had heard something very similar, only lasting longer, a few times the previous day, only from further away.

  Now, close to forty feet from the ground, he stood shakily to hold onto a swaying branch as he scanned the landscape in a roughly two-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc. He saw nothing, except the few farm buildings, the three houses of the Pines, the scary mansion further up the lane and the road itself in parts. Nothing moved, except for wildlife and the cows and pigs in the field below. Looking as far as he could see in the other direction, his brain did not register the brick building with its outbuildings and detached garage.

  He was so high up that he really could see his house from there, only that house no longer existed in his mind.

  After watching for long enough that his legs began to feel wobbly through a combination of tiredness and vertigo, he carefully monkeyed his way down to ground level, and dangled to endure the last drop from a branch the height of a full-grown man. Picking himself up out of the leaf mould, he brushed himself down and retrieved his bag and weapons which went everywhere with him, with the exception of the shotgun which he now intended to deal with.

  Had he been able to see through the higher branches and leaves of the tree, had he been able to look in the direction of the pub and the shop and eventually behind that to the town, then he would have been able to see the dark line smearing over the horizon where the dead had amassed and turned their faces towards the sound of the distant, rolling gunfire. Beginning their nearly thirty-mile cross country journey towards the source of their excitement, they began to trudge on a course that would lead them straight through the farm.

  Peter, totally unaware that by that afternoon the farm would be washed away by a tidal wave of dead, opened up the workshop again and went about some very illegal weapon modifications. First, choosing the hardest task to begin with, he broke down the gun and clamped the barrels into the vice, where he took the same hacksaw from the white wall and exposed the silhouette of the tool in black pen once more. Repeating the skills he had been grudgingly taught, he dragged the blade back towards him across the metal, planning to remove two-thirds of the length.

  That took him close to an hour, as he had to stop for frequent breaks and twice to replace blunted and broken saw blades. When he had finally taken off the section, he spent a further twenty minutes making sure that the ends were smoothed down, using the file again. That done, he turned his attention to the stock of the weapon and used another hand saw to take the shoulder stock off at the handle, effectively making the weapon one huge, double-barrelled pistol. Using a rasp file, he shaped the wood, intermittently placing his hand around the grip to see where he needed to reduce the profile to best fit him. When that was finally done, he used gradually finer grades of sandpaper to finish the wood and thanked the state school curriculum for insisting that design and technology be taught. Making things with his hands gave Peter a sense of achievement in a life generally devoid of success or happiness.

  Snapping the three parts of the gun back together, Peter turned his attention to the ammunition. This was a rare and illegal skill which his father had taught him on one of those occasions where he coincidentally enjoyed something he was forced to do, so didn’t realise it wasn’t being done for his benefit. Removing each cartridge from the belt, he placed them on the workbench and used the folding penknife he had taken from his father’s bedside table to prise open the crimped plastic ends. Having used a match from the box of long fire-lighting matches taken from the house that no longer existed to him, he lit three candles after he had finished opening each red shotgun cartridge, to leave them standing in a row with their brown wading exposed to the air.

  Lifting up that wadding each time with the tip of the knife, he poured in the dripping wax with painstakingly slow progress, until only three stubs of wax remained alight and his back ached from leaning over the bench for so long. Closing down the flared ends of the cartridges, he pressed them flat and added a small strip of green and yellow striped electrical earth tape to ensure the solid ball of wax and lead stayed inside until such time as it was needed. Restoring the cartridges to the belt, he loaded two and played around with how best to hold and carry the gun, deciding on cutting a small hole into his bag so that the barrels pointed down his back.

  “Quartermaster, where are we with those Bedfords for the civilians?” Johnson barked, not having the luxury of time to address the second highest ranking NCO in their squadron with the proper courtesies.

  In simple response, Staff Sergeant Rochefort held up both hands with all the digits splayed out after tucking the thing he was carrying under one arm. Luckily, most of the supplies they had brought with them were still stowed on the trucks, but they had not had sufficient time to organise the unloading of stores on the base to a sufficient degree to consider abandoning it. Now they had less than an hour to get those supplies loaded again, and all the while, more and more of the things were approaching the gate. Very few came from any other directions, but logic suggested the reason for this was that the gate pointed directly towards town in an easterly direction. Behind them was the tank proving grounds, where not too many of the local population chose to reside.

  The situation at the gate was beginning to cause some alarm, and Johnson thought for ten long seconds before snapping out of his torpor and ordering a bold move.

  “Sergeant Maxwell?” he boomed over the sounds of engines and the occasional gunshot.

  “Here,” Maxwell responded from behind him.

  “Take your troop out, if you’ll oblige me, head towards town, shooting intermittently, draw them away from here and take a longer route back round to the island. Can you have one of your chaps map it?” he asked, eyes wide with expectation and hope that Maxwell would get it done, and get it done right.

  He nodded, telling the SSM that he’d get it mapped en route, and called for his troop to mount their Spartans. Within minutes, the four tracked vehicles rattled and squeaked their way noisily out of the gate and down the road, where their cupola-mounted GPMGs barked sporadically to fire bursts of heavy 7.62mm into any Screecher that showed itself in the open. As their thunderous noise faded away, so did the intensity of the enemy encroachment as their attention was taken up by the moving sound generators that was the squadron’s reconnaissance screen of light armour.

  With the imminent risk reduced tenfold, Johnson was able to leave a single fighting troop on point duty at any one time, and to organise the others into ensuring that everything they needed was getting loaded somewhere. All of the admin troop now had their own Bedford four-tonne truck, which was being loaded with a combination of food, other supplies, ammunition, fuel jerrycans, not to mention to close to sixty civilians who had either been rescued, or who had trickled in after the squadron had been able to let people know to leave their homes immediately.

  Not that their current predicament was much better than being in their own homes.

  Fuel had been pumped into mobile tankers, the kind that resupplied them on the battlefield, and they had finally taken as much as they could carry. Calling for the civilians to be loaded into the Bedford trucks alongside whatever supplies were already on board, Johnson mounted his own armoured vehicle and kept
his head above the hatch with his hand on the machine gun.

  Their convoy, now twenty-two vehicles long and comprising twelve Foxes, one Sultan and nine of the big, green Bedford trucks, was not an easy thing to manage. For starters, they spread out to over a quarter of a mile in length from nose to tail and the interspersing of fighting units between the soft-skinned vehicles meant that very quickly their troop unit cohesion evaporated. Johnson was at the lead, or behind two Foxes of Two Troop, and he had placed Strauss’ entire troop at the rear, with the six remaining cars of Two and Three Troops mixed throughout the convoy to provide a screen, should they encounter enemy anywhere other than their front or rear.

  As they drove away, their progress was slow, because although even the tracked vehicle of Johnson’s was the slowest of them with a top speed only just north of fifty, the constant stopping to wait as the trucks and cars ahead manoeuvred, made them bunch up tight and remain stationary for long periods of time. Stationary vehicles, especially the soft-skinned trucks with no armour to hide behind, were a concern for Johnson. In conventional warfare, not that he should keep drawing parallels, such a concertina effect on a large convoy would be fatal as their entire force could be eradicated with a single artillery barrage or airstrike. He kicked himself for making that irrelevant distinction, as he was fairly certain that no corpse could operate instruments of war. Even if some of them could climb fences.

  The net result of their halting progress was an average speed close to about ten miles per hour. Given that the island was over thirty miles from their position, that progress was painfully slow and frustrating for all of them, and the SSM’s distracted thoughts were snatched back to the inside of his car by Corporal Daniels.

  “Sir, getting something on the Clansman,” he said, gesturing at one of the two radio sets in the relatively spacious interior for an armoured vehicle. Johnson let his hand slip away from the machine gun and dropped back inside.