Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  Turning back to the radio set, Daniels smiled ruefully at Johnson as though asking permission and responded in an equally poor accent, “Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full…”

  The responding hail was full of laughter and cheering, and deservedly so, because the two Sea Kings of the Commando Helicopter Force had just saved the cavalry.

  Epilogue

  The helicopters landed, and the crews and passengers were brought down the hill of the island by Bedford truck to the command centre adopted on a whim by Johnson. Being pilots, all of them were officers, but the few crew members including the air guitarist, were non-commissioned ranks. The second helicopter, the one that stayed up and away from the main danger, held a belly full of Royal Marines under the leadership of a Lieutenant and a Sergeant.

  The tanks’ crews, uncovered from their burial under dead flesh by the unorthodox actions of the Naval pilots and crew, had returned to the bridge, their vehicles were in a disgusting state and would need significant clearing, as entire limbs and torsos were caught in the running gear. But their eight men came out unscathed. The look of shock and child-like relief on Second Lieutenant Palmer’s face was almost embarrassing for the men close enough to witness the reunion of older and younger brother, and Captain Palmer’s effusive greeting to Squadron Sergeant Major Johnson was full of praise and admiration for the unit, the men, and the leadership displayed under the terrible circumstances. He had the good grace and manners not to mention that the squadron did well despite not having leadership, but Johnson was beginning to reckon that Palmer senior was nothing like Palmer junior, and that he rated men on merit. From what he had heard already, the man was competent and switched-on, and reports from Strauss and the tank crews had all reinforced the reputation surrounding him as positive. With that in mind, Johnson asked the Captain for a word in private.

  The two men stepped into a doorway and saw that Lieutenant Palmer made to follow them, but his older brother held up a subtle hand, which was accepted without malice. Seeing how easily he handled the brash young man impressed Johnson, which made it easier to say what he needed to say next.

  “Sir, now that you’re here, I should relinquish command of the squadron to you,” he said formally, expecting the effusive praise to continue and for his insistence that the Captain needed some recovery time and that the SSM should continue in his adopted role of commander.

  “You have my thanks, Mister Johnson,” Captain Palmer said, “both personally for keeping Olly in one piece and as a soldier for a job bloody well done,” Johnson smiled, anticipating his imminent field promotion, “I shall require a full disposition list to include staffing, both rostered, and whatever temporary promotions you may have had to make, as well as our supply situation and ammunition count,” Palmer said, sparking straight back into business.

  Johnson blinked, thrown straight back down the leadership ladder in a split-second.

  “I highly doubt our presence here will remain a secret to the enemy, even though we’ve likely cleared out most of the... what did you call them… the Screechers… in the county with that last little skirmish,” Palmer said. “I’ll address the men by troop tonight, no point in having a parade just to introduce the new Rupert, eh?” he smiled self-effacingly and continued, “Now, shall we bring in the Navy chaps?”

  Johnson nodded numbly, opening the door to invite the men inside.

  Introductions took a couple of minutes, even though the invitation was extended only to the four pilots and the Marine Lieutenant.

  “As far as we know,” Lieutenant Commander John Barrett announced, “the entire UK has been affected by the outbreak and only the odd pocket of resistance has remained… human, shall we say,” he scanned the eyes in the room to see that he hadn’t lost anyone yet, “Yeovilton was abandoned late this afternoon as it was deemed, ‘indefensible’ by the Royal Marines,” the young marine officer nodded his agreement, no doubt recalling the miles and miles of perimeter fence in need of guarding, “and air assets have been dished out where they are needed most.”

  “The Invincible is in the channel,” said the other helicopter pilot as he glibly gave the news of an aircraft carrier floating not far away. He was the same rank as Barrett. This pilot had introduced himself as Murray but answered his fellow pilots when they called him Ruby. He continued, “and command have doled out the birds all over the place. We have a small detachment on their way by road, carrying a tanker of fuel for our aircraft, and protected by the Marines.”

  Johnson nodded at him, conveying that the necessary requirements to meet and accommodate that convoy would be made.

  “Military bases are still active in Scotland,” said Barrett, but as of yet, we have no assets on the south coast except your Squadron, so here we are,” he finished with a smile.

  “What about Germany?” Captain Palmer asked quietly. Johnson kicked himself mentally then, recalling that Palmer was on leave from his own squadron based near Berlin.

  Barrett and Murray exchanged a look before Murray answered, “Gone. And our active units over the water,” meaning the thousands of personnel deployed to the conflict in Northern Ireland and beyond, “are reporting outbreaks of their own.”

  “So,” Barrett said with a clap of his hands and forced joviality, “we are to consolidate and rescue as many of the civilian population as possible whilst Her Majesty’s government decides what to do.”

  “What about the swarming behaviour of the Screechers?” Johnson asked. Smirks rippled around the pilots at his mention of the nickname, flashing anger behind the SSM’s eyes as Barrett laughed at him overtly.

  “Have you been face-to-face with one yet, Sir?” he asked gently.

  Despite the low tone that he had been careful to sanitise for any trace of hostility, the air in the room dropped a clear five degrees.

  “No, Sergeant Major,” he responded carefully, “I have not. Instead I fly the better part of ten tonnes of helicopter and am responsible for the lives of my crew and passengers. So, no, Sergeant Major, I haven’t been face-to-face with one, yet.”

  Barrett’s over-reaction to the question showed his embarrassment almost instantly, and he dialled back the hostility immediately and turned to Murray. The two seemed to be deliberating using only their eyebrows until Murray shrugged and turned to the soldiers.

  “They exhibit a kind of herding behaviour, and tend to amass around individual infected subjects, sorry - Screechers – in groups of roughly one hundred. Three times, that we know of, there have been mass clusterings in as many days. Two of them dissipated. The other, well,” he shrugged with a smirk, “the other ended up taking the long drop.”

  “The other two swarms dissipated by themselves?” Captain Palmer asked intently.

  “Indeed,” Barrett said, “it seems they are drawn by sound,” he explained, as though the soldiers hadn’t been able to figure that fact out yet, “and unless something really loud attracts their attention, the noise they make together sort of makes them lose interest and they wander off from the fringes.”

  “How do you know this?” Johnson asked, seeing the familiar exchange of looks as though he was asking for the combination to a safe.

  “The Americans have AWACS over us as of this morning,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “So,” Palmer interjected politely, “our colonial cousins are able to spy on us from a safe thirty-thousand feet but not offer any assistance?”

  “Captain,” Barrett said, “it isn’t just the Americans… It’s all of NATO, or at least those who are still intact and not fighting their own war. They suspect either a direct Russian attack or at least the threat of nuclear bombardment. Europe is falling to this disease and the Americans have to stop it spreading across the Atlantic. We would do the same.”

  They would, Palmer thought as he glanced at Johnson and conveyed just how unhappy he was when politics was added to the already toxic mix they swam in.

  They bloody would.

  Peter, the sole of one shoe still
flapping loudly on the roadway, slowed his run as he had not heard any of the faster ones and reckoned he had run far enough away to stop and think, without the slower ones catching him up. It had been a mistake, he knew, and not a mistake that he would make again, because he did not wait long enough to watch the houses for signs of movement.

  One of the faster ones, in some bizarre approximation of corpse popularity, had gone into the bungalow opposite and the crowd with it had followed. As soon as he had made a noise breaking into the house, they had screeched and lumbered towards him. He had no idea where the faster one was, but he hoped it was stuck inside the house by its own followers being clumsy and blocking the doors.

  Having annoyed himself at expending energy without finding food or a warm, dry place to spend the night, he looked around for anywhere to hole up in relative safety.

  His luck, he thought with a wry smile of relief, was going to run out soon if he didn’t stop making these mistakes that offered such valuable learning opportunities.

  Turning at a right angle to the direction he had come from, he took the next small road to his left and walked straight down the middle. In the old world, walking down the middle of the road was tempting fate and would likely get a young boy killed, but in this new world, walking between low walls and stationary cars where dormant corpses could spark to life and bite him was a far bigger risk than being run over by a car.

  Nothing jumped out on him, even though he was ready with his pitchfork, and nothing drove down the road. Although a vehicle might have been a good thing, so long as it didn’t run him over.

  He found a detached cottage on the edge of the village he had wandered into, with a neat thatch roof which hung down low over the front door. Peter watched and waited, listening and smelling the air like one of the things he was trying to avoid, and when he was sure it was safe, he waited some more. Eventually deciding to open the door and rap the handle of his pitchfork on the cobbled path, he waited, but nothing came lurching and groaning from the house straightaway. Creeping inside, he repeated his process of searching the house, then locking himself in to take what he wanted.

  His luck struck again, and he found the room of a boy about his own age, judging by the size of the clothes. He ate, changed and restocked his backpack before settling down to listen to the same song on the tape in his new cassette player. He didn’t know who the singer was, but he smiled at the coincidence of the song’s lyrics and the small pot of green army figures on the shelf. He took them down, looking at each one in turn as he organised them as per their poses.

  The crawling rifleman.

  The soldier throwing a grenade.

  The kneeling man aiming his long gun.

  The officer standing and pointing his pistol.

  He mimed along with the words, learned as the routine had established itself in his mind to listen to the song as he settled down in a new home for the night. He lined them all up, then used his finger to poke them and make them topple.

  “…like toy soldiers…” he sang softly in time with the music.

  This concludes Apocalypse, but Aftermath, the second book in Toy Soldiers picks up the story, and the battle is just getting started!

  Can Peter survive on his own with the dead snapping at his heels?

  Will the island remain safe for Johnson and the assortment of military now calling it home?

  What will happen as the plague of undead ravage other parts of the world?

  Find out what happens next!

  Grab Aftermath now!

  Part Two

  Aftermath

  Prologue

  “Sir, I have Castlemartin on the horn now,” said the radio operator in a distinctly southern states accent. The way he pronounced the name, Cassulmart’n, was an assault on the ears of Commander Ethan Briggs of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.

  The ‘Sir’ being addressed wasn’t Briggs, he was merely there as liaison to the United States Navy, having been transported by one of the two Sea King helicopters belonging to the American destroyer. It had been sailing back from active service in the Persian Gulf, where it had been patrolling as protection for the oil drilling operation and found itself diverted to a crisis with infinitely further-reaching consequences than petty squabbles over natural resources.

  “Okay, apprise them of our situation and request that they monitor this channel for orders,” came the steady, almost flat voice of the ship’s captain.

  Briggs, as much as he hated the way they pronounced Castlemartin, breathed a small sigh of relief that nobody had referred to the area by its county of Pembrokeshire. Twice he had been on the inexplicable verge of raging at the American crewman on the radio for saying it as three distinctly clear and separate syllables of Pem-Broke-Shire as though the place was a village in a Tolkien novel.

  “Commander Briggs?” the captain asked politely. “How are we set?”

  Briggs checked his watch and flicked his eyes back to the pad in front of him before answering.

  “Sir, there is no way the convoy can make it back in time without assistance,” he responded, seeing the captain merely nod and keep his eyes facing resolutely forward at the distant shoreline of south western Britain, as if his vision could detect this new and unfathomable enemy.

  He turned back to the radio operator again to ask, “Are the air assets a go or not?”

  The man looked up from the control panel he was staring at in that curious way people did to hear better.

  “Negative, Sir,” he said sternly, making Briggs wonder whether the concept of melodrama had been an entirely American invention, “Harrier strike group still engaged on the continent.”

  “Well, shi-it,” the captain said, drawing out the word into two long syllables, “Crewman, send in the tanks.”

  Briggs’ eyes met the captain’s.

  “Never thought I’d ever give that order,” he said with a rueful smile. The crewman manning the radio nodded once and answered, “Aye, aye, Sir,” before chattering into the microphone.

  Briggs felt an overwhelming sense of dread at potentially having to use up that resource, but he saw no other way to ensure the success of the mission.

  The swarm was still out of range of their guns, the use of cruise missile strikes had been vetoed at the highest level, despite assurances of their accuracy, and they had no chance of a rescue by helicopter without abandoning almost every man in the convoy and exposing their precious cargo to hazards beyond their control.

  That helicopter rescue was still an option, but it was a last ditch attempt that wasn’t their call to make.

  It was a plan that Briggs didn’t want to consider using, as it would mean the deaths of more than thirty men that his plan had placed in harm’s way.

  Damned if they do, Briggs told himself, and damned if they don’t… but I rather suspect we are all damned.

  ONE

  “Wind right to left, gentle,” said the mound of green and brown brush behind Marine Enfield in a low voice, “distance six-hundred yards.”

  “Six-fifteen,” Enfield muttered back, his right eye not leaving the large scope on top of his Accuracy International, or L96a, sniper rifle. His right hand moved on muscle memory, making the finite adjustments as he clicked the dials on the big optic, all the while keeping the target in sight. They were far enough away that the likelihood of being detected by the sound of the impending gunshot was small, but still they couldn’t risk not relocating after taking out a target.

  The teamwork displayed by the two marines, Craig Enfield being the shooter and Martin Leigh his spotter, was exceptional and spoke of the many hours they had spent together in uncomfortable silence and danger. They had both missed out, as they saw it, on seeing deployment to the Falklands seven years before, as they’d still been in their first year of training together, but the pair had seen more than enough of the green landscape and streets of Northern Ireland.

  Now, instead of their enemy being terrorist bombers or shooters, instead of being the mighty stee
l boot of the Soviet Union stamping towards Europe, an enemy they had been training for years to combat should the Cold War turn hot, they were now stalking zombies.

  Screechers, as the army lot had called them, and it had stuck as a name they used for them, mostly because when the things detected you, they let out a squealing hissing, ripping noise. They didn’t know if it was excitement or, more frighteningly, a call to other zombies to advertise the presence of food, but they did know it was a fucking awful sound that stopped if you stuck a bayonet through their eye.

  “I’ve got it,” Enfield said, in a cool murmur as the reticule of his scope hovered just above and to the left of the head of the Screecher.

  “Zero, this is Whisky,” Leigh said softly into his radio, “we have a Lima in sight, over.”

  Limas. The military’s pathological need to provide a nickname or a phonetic tag for something ran deeper than the coded letter and number designations they gave to all of their weapons and equipment. Lima meant a fast one, the Leaders as they had been dubbed. Until the Marines had landed in their helicopter on the small island a fraction off the south coast, they hadn’t encountered one of these before.

  Studies of their new and unexpected enemy had shown that they operated some kind of biologically-determined rank structure of their own, and each Leader would somehow gather up to a hundred Screechers who followed them around like ducklings. The Leaders weren’t just faster, they were smarter too. Some reckoned they could open doors, and there was even an emerging theory among the joint army, navy and marine forces that they had some way to give orders to their followers.

  Those followers were deadly in numbers, but on their own weren’t too difficult to kill. A heavy blow to the head, one strong enough to crack the skull, would usually render them inert, but that kind of swing burned a lot of energy and anyone trying to survive out there using a sledgehammer would find themselves tiring too quickly, and probably being eaten. The careful application of bayonet to brain was far more civilised, but a bullet would do the trick just as easily. The problem with bullets, especially the heavy ammunition that the RMPs 7.62mm SLRs or Self-Loading Rifles fired, was that they tended to be accompanied by lots of noise.