Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  The design was intended to keep an unthinking human body wrapped up until such time as a man with a fixed bayonet could render it safe.

  He completed his rounds, finding the materials in place for the other defences, but the work not yet underway. He was pleased to see that three men were at the beaches, alert and confident. Being in a civilian vehicle allowed Johnson to drive past slowly and not interfere, and it also allowed the men to pretend that they hadn’t seen their commander and continue their vigil. He found the troop sergeants, giving them the written orders to reinforce the difficult words he said.

  “Jesus,” cursed the commander of the assault troop, Maxwell, “really?”

  “Afraid so, Maxwell,” Johnson answered solemnly, “anyone outside the wire from now on has to go to into quarantine for three hours, which we think is more than enough time to be sure there aren’t any infections.”

  Maxwell nodded his understanding, with his discomfort evident on his face.

  “I need you fit for the morning, Simon,” Johnson told him in a tone of voice that conveyed his confidence in the sergeant and his men. “I need two wagons from your troop to run the operation.”

  “Just two?” Maxwell asked him with a furrowed brow.

  “Yes, two Spartans and two Bedfords with the marines. Your men can help get a few Saracens up and running, hit the ammo dump, then everyone moves out.”

  “Everyone?” Maxwell asked, letting Johnson know that some communication between army and navy clearly existed.

  “Apart from a few who will be waiting for the helicopters to load another few tonnes of kit,” Johnson confirmed.

  “But you want the armour gone by that time, obviously?” Maxwell asked him, not imagining that his commander would risk having vehicles in the open with the sound of two helicopters attracting every Screecher inside a wide area directly onto them.

  “Indeed I do,” Johnson answered, “five a.m., if you please,” he finished, giving the time as a statement and not a question. Maxwell nodded, and the two men broke away.

  Johnson spoke with the officer commanding the marines, reiterated the plan, then checked the troop guarding the causeway and turned in for the night.

  Because he had won the argument to lead the mission leaving in the dark pre-dawn.

  Peter froze, almost unable to comprehend what his eyes were seeing. The child was no longer crying, but simply staring at him and giving an occasional spasm of inward breath with a trembling lower lip, as her dark golden hair was stuck to one side of her face. The startling similarity between her and the woman he had seen being dragged away made it clear to him that there was an obvious family connection.

  Peter turned away, hearing a gasp and a small sob, so he turned back and took a step towards her, which made her whimper and take an involuntary step backwards. The sporadic gasps of inward breath that made her small chin convulse had slowed now, but her red-rimmed eyes still stayed locked on Peter, despite their puffy appearance. Slowly, Peter crouched to put down the pitchfork and bag, then slipped one arm out of the straps of his backpack and swung the bag to his front, all the while keeping his eyes on the girl in case she bolted. Reaching carefully inside, he found the thing he wanted near to the top and pulled it out.

  Holding out the sagging, tired-looking stuffed lamb towards her, he gave it a small shake as though trying to entice her with it. Its limp limbs wobbled comically when he shook it, and she rewarded him with a tiny giggle and took a hesitant half-step towards him. The two, both on the same eye level as Peter was still crouching down, were separated by only ten feet of open air and the threshold of the broken house when another noise sounded.

  It tore the air, making both of them jump as the hissing, screeching shriek struck fear into him and sheer terror into the girl. He snatched up his things as he moved forwards seeing her shrink away but not run; evidently her mind recognised that some things were more frightening than others. Peter thrust the lamb into her arms as he threw the bag back around onto his back, then readied his pitchfork after pushing the door closed without being able to shut it.

  Nothing happened. Behind him the girl stiff sniffed and sobbed very softly but did not cry out loud; probably a reaction she had been forced to learn quickly or she wouldn’t have survived that long.

  When Peter could no longer stand the tension, he rose slightly and handed the girl the other bag he couldn’t carry if he wanted to use both hands on the weapon, and he nodded to reassure her as she took it awkwardly. He ushered her towards the nearest door and tried to get her inside, but she shook her head and her chin began to tremble once more. Peter knelt before her, telling her in a tiny whisper that it was okay and that he wouldn’t hurt her and that she should stay inside and be very quiet. He told himself he was saying anything just to get her to hide in silence, but when he promised her he wouldn’t leave her, something hardened in his heart and he realised in that tiny, split-second moment that he meant those words.

  The shriek sounded again, closer this time and from just the other side of the shattered door frame. Peter pushed the girl backwards and closed the door in her face to plunge her into the darkness of the pantry cupboard, then stepped quickly to the side of the entrance that led directly into the kitchen. The door pushed open, tentatively at first, then harder as the thing outside must have smelled them. It stepped inside and swept its head to the right just as the fingers of Peter’s left hand found something behind him on the wall.

  On instinct, snatching up the small bunch of keys from the hook, he tossed them out ahead of him and watched as the thing took two fast, staggering paces towards the sound the keys made as they hit the wooden floor.

  Then he struck.

  Taking his own strides into the fight, he thrust upwards just as the thing turned. Both spikes of his pitchfork had been aimed to penetrate vertically into the skull of the monster via the neck, but the speed with which it turned threw off his aim and resulted in the prongs coming out of the face without damaging the brain. The hideous image this gave took away his courage momentarily, but at least the injury he had inflicted served to keep the beast’s maw firmly closed as it tried to close its fingers on him. Taking his right hand off the shaft of the pitch fork he reached for the single spike, once a piece cut off the tool which he now carried as a weapon, and he twirled it in his fingers to reach upwards and spear the stinking thing in its left eye.

  The struggle ended instantly, with the zombie sinking to the ground as he withdrew both weapons. Only then did he see the monster as the person it used to be. A young woman, younger than the one he had seen dragged not long before from the very house he was in now. She was wearing the light blue tunic of a nurse and she had the curious look of half a perm, as the left side of her hair was matted to her skull with dried blood. He read the badge on her chest, Joanne, and the logo of a care home for the elderly he had seen when he had first walked into the village a few days before.

  A creaking noise made him ready the weapon again and bare his teeth in natural response to a physical threat, and he dropped both instantly when he saw the little girl had pushed open the door of the cupboard he had put her in.

  Stepping around the kitchen counter that luckily blocked her view of the dead thing, he took her hand and led her out of the back door.

  SIX

  A clear thirty minutes before the four a.m. wake up in readiness for the start time of their five a.m. mission, Dean Johnson had already risen, shaved in a small sink of cold water, dressed for combat and was finishing his second cup of coffee.

  That was his normal morning routine; get up, drink coffee, go about his business and drink another coffee. On the days when he really meant it, he could get himself squared away so efficiently that he could pour both drinks from the same kettle and drink them both hot. He was not a man, as he put it, to fuck about. When there was work to do, he always had the mindset of getting it done as quickly and efficiently as possible, then when there was nothing left to do, finding something worthwhile un
til the end of the day.

  In his civilian life, that of being a skilled mechanic working on the larger engines of heavy haulage trucks, he was so far ahead of his peers because by the time they rolled into work, he had already done three hours’ worth and had broken the back of the day’s tasks before his first break. In stark contrast to his military career, this hard work left him working on the shop floor and not scaling the ladder to management, simply because he was too damned valuable where he was. That wasn’t to say they didn’t pay him well, and most of what he learned was useful in his military time, as the armoured vehicles of the British army weren’t especially known for their reliability.

  Now, seemingly wearing his SSM persona in a permanent way, he opened his mouth wider to take in the very end of his coffee, which he drank in the NATO-standard milk & two, just as he took his tea, and he made the same mistake that everyone did in their life at some point and underestimated how much liquid was left. Putting the cup down with his cheeks inflated like a greedy hamster, his eyes widened as he forced down the large swallow and coughed slightly.

  The small billet he had been allocated was a thin but tall town house near to the causeway entrance and the small square that housed the official pub of the military personnel, as well as the hall that was used as their mixed-forces headquarters. Being the only three senior NCOs, he, Rochefort and the naval Chief Petty Officer were allocated a room each. The houses next door had been offered as more spacious accommodation to the officers, which Johnson was glad that he didn’t have to endure, as no doubt they would turn it into an officers’ mess at some point and try to out-brag each other with their exploits.

  The exception to both rules lay with the Royal Marines, as both their officer and their sergeant insisted on billeting with the men, crammed into three houses in the next street. The island was inhabited to about a third of its usual population, the other portion having upped and left to God only knew where when the fur began to fly. The remaining people, about four hundred of them, had welcomed the soldiers cautiously but had treated the refugees they had brought with them like honoured guests and integrated them quickly to replace the families who were not expected to return. The refugees numbered close to a hundred families, friends and other survivors who the soldiers had found along the way. Now there was the better part of a thousand people living on an island that easily catered for almost three thousand. Given that the single causeway road bridge in and out now had no parapets protecting it from the short drop into the swirling current and was blocked by a Chieftain tank, the human traffic of regular movement had all but stopped.

  Johnson knew that the food and supplies issue would raise its head again soon, likely that afternoon. But that morning was about sustenance to feed something more important than the now-unemployed civilian population. Today was about finding bullets to feed their machine guns.

  In their few skirmishes prior to the battle of the bridge, they had expended phenomenal amounts of ammunition to counter the massing hordes of stumbling corpses, and they were down to enough rounds per wagon to barely equip them for another defence. They had expended a fair amount of the larger 30mm rounds for the cannons on the Foxes, but 7.62 was the magic number. They had twelve Fox cars, four of the quick and light tracked Spartans in Maxwell’s assault troop, as well as the two larger versions of those tracked vehicles in the two command Sultans. Each of those eighteen vehicles had a big, reliable GPMG machine gun, and that was before the two Chieftain tanks counted their two per wagon. On top of that, the SLRs of the small Royal Military Police and the new SA80 rifles of the Royal Marines took different ammunition again. The men of the Yeomanry squadron were relatively well-off for the 9mm rounds to feed their personal weapons but seeing as their specialist form of fighting didn’t primarily involve being outside of their armour too much, that wasn’t a priority. Their stockpile, however, still needed doubling to be on the safe side.

  There were also rations, fuel, tools, spare parts all to be considered and that was where he had managed to force his way onto the mission.

  Captain Palmer, as capable and quick-witted as he was in contrast to his obnoxious and spoilt younger brother, saw the benefit in Johnson’s claim and also knew with utter certainty that he had been played like a fiddle.

  “It’s not a matter of seniority in command, Sir,” Johnson told him in a placatory voice, “it’s simply that I know instantly what the parts for the vehicles are and how many of what we need.”

  “And,” Palmer said as he completed the thought out loud, “we can’t very well both of us go as we would be leaving the remaining soldiers without army leadership. God forbid our chaps should come under navy control.”

  So it was agreed. Palmer would stay and ‘quarterback’ the whole mission via the command headquarters. His choice of words made Johnson frown as he thought of how to phrase the question. Palmer saw the look and told him anyway.

  “My first posting in Germany,” he said, “was with an American unit as liaison. I spent more time in an Abrams than I did in a Chieftain for a little under a year before my chaps deployed for a large training exercise and I got to go back. Some things one just, sort of… absorbs, if you follow my meaning?”

  Johnson did, and if he was honest with himself, he was a little jealous. Shaking that away, he tried not to smile too much at having shoe-horned himself into a key position before the bureaucracy of the military served up another plate of humble pie for him to eat and forced him back down the chain of command even further.

  He was surprised that hadn’t happened already, as there was obviously an element of command and control still in play and apparently, floating at sea, was a growing fleet of allied nations becoming involved. He was certain that, after the arrival of the navy and marines bearing the knowledge that senior commanders were still in charge, they would send a Major at least or a Colonel to take over command of the army’s resources on land.

  That hadn’t happened, and over the coming days it was clear that their little green slice of southern England was relatively unimportant to the bigger picture, where the disease had already spread over Ireland and mainland Britain. There were pockets of survivors here and there, according to the eyes very high up in the skies, but anything resembling a large town or city was destroyed. The main concern, Johnson had soon realised, was the spread over continental Europe.

  He was entirely ignorant of the ʿhowʾ part, and he doubted that if anyone floating out in the Channel knew, they would bother to tell a reservist Warrant Officer, but the disease which was believed to have originated in London had found its way to a Paris outskirt within a day. His mind ran riot, thinking that it could only be that someone who was infected had got onto a boat or passenger ferry, and been inadvertently taken to France, where they had started biting people like there was no tomorrow.

  That was how the British Army of the Rhine was so heavily engaged, and why the thought of their return to British shores to eradicate the outbreak there was an impossibility.

  They were, for the most part, on their own.

  What he didn’t know and could probably have worked out for himself, had he been in a sufficiently dark mood as to contemplate such things, was what was happening in the wider world.

  The United States, as was sensible, had ceased all movement into the mainland. Traffic in and out of Canada was allowed, but their southern borders were closed by a massive mobilisation of the National Guard, and their seaward borders were patrolled day and night by the combined might of the navy and coastguard. There was a widespread decree from their president that there was ‘no way on God’s green earth’ that disease would enter their land. There was widespread outcry for the US to bring her troops home to fight the good fight, but on that subject the president was ominously silent.

  The south American continent, much in the same way, mirrored those actions. As did Australia and many African provinces, and Japan, along with any island nation in possession of their own naval forces or under the protectio
n of another country.

  What was most worrying, however, was the posturing of the Soviet Union.

  “Morning, chaps,” Johnson said in a low voice out of respect for the ungodly hour. The assembled marines, almost all of them, he guessed, were clustered together near the two Bedford trucks parked ready the previous night to carry them to the camp. The same camp that the army had sensibly abandoned, before the tide of dead had swelled to a size that would have washed over those thin fences and swept them away.

  He received the expected grunts in response, some calling him ‘Sir’ and others using his rank but none of them offering any disrespect. The smell of hexi-blocks, the solid fuel used to heat water in their mess tins, mixed with a waft of cigarette smoke as he passed the men. Maxwell was ready, using the wagon that he had fixed in record time under interesting circumstances during their recent battle. He’d had to repair the gearbox linkage before their tenuous position had come under friendly fire and forced them to abandon the vehicle and give themselves yet another obstacle to overcome. He had made the repair, incredibly, and had limped home to regain the safety of the island just before the horde had reached them.

  The reason Johnson had chosen Maxwell, other than the fact that he was a capable leader of troops, was that he commanded the faster tracked vehicles and the other sergeant he trusted had lost a man the day before. Putting the remaining men of One Troop straight into another mission was out of the question, and Johnson had to admit to himself that although the men of the other two troops were effective at performing their conventional roles, he didn’t think they had fully switched on to their new reality. Leaving those men as steady guards of their island and confident that they could serve their guns effectively should the need arise, he elected to take the men most accustomed to dismounted reconnaissance.