“My missus and my boy, yes, Sir,” he said as his face darkened slightly, and he coughed to clear his voice, “they’re billeted with Sergeant Maxwell’s family.”
His face stayed shrouded in worry, as though the mention of his family gave a sharp reminder of what he had to lose. Johnson recognised that the man had been through enough, more than enough, and told him to rest up. His eyes met the marine’s and the slight flick of his head summoned him to follow outside.
“Stay where you are, mate,” he told Ashdown as he set his drink on the table and slipped the rolled-up cigarette back in his mouth, “I’m going to see if any of my muckers are about to help.”
Outside, and a good few paces away from the house, marine and warrant officer stood in momentarily awkward silence as both sought the appropriate words.
“You have my thanks,” Johnson said, wincing at what he felt was an overly formal tone. He meant the words, however, and was truly grateful that his man wasn’t dead or worse.
Marine Sealey shrugged away the heartfelt words nonchalantly, not sharing his own fears that the man he didn’t know wouldn’t wake and he would be forced to put him down. That would have potentially pushed the subtle enmity between marines and squaddies to boil closer to the surface, if only he and a dead man had known the truth of things. But luckily, that had not happened.
“It must be only the teeth, I reckon,” he told Johnson.
“The teeth?”
“Yeah, I mean, the scratches didn’t infect him, not with the Screecher virus or whatever anyway, and the teeth didn’t break the skin, so I reckon it’s something about the teeth,” he explained simply before adding a warning, “But he’ll definitely need some antibiotics; God knows what shit has got into him otherwise.”
“I’ll pass that up, thanks,” Johnson told him, then asked if he was okay to sort moving Ashdown to where his family was temporarily living.
“I think your mate has ideas there, Sir,” he said, pointing to the approaching sergeant Maxwell, “If you don’t need me anymore, mind if I find my oppos?” he asked hopefully, meaning his friends and fellow marines.
“No, thanks again, marine,” Johnson said and offered him a hand.
Sealey shook it, replying, “No problem, I’m hanging after lashing up your Pongo,” he finished with a goading grin before trotting off to find his ‘oppos’.
Johnson smiled at the liberal use of marine slang, which he suspected was either partly for his benefit, or that marine Sealey had joined young and been transformed into the rare beast of a Royal Marine Commando and embraced their unique language as his own.
Maxwell joined him and asked, “Did that Bootneck just call us Pongos?”
“Yep,” Johnson replied with amusement, smirking at the marine’s name for the apparently foul-smelling soldiers of the British Army.
“If it ain’t bad enough with the arabs…” Maxwell said, using their own inside terminology meaning Arrogant Regular Army Bastards. The rift between the regulars and the reservists, although not noticeable since the brief bar fight, had not come to a head for one simple reason in Johnson’s opinion; there were more reservists than regulars to make it a fair fight. He had hoped that the kind of territorial pissing contests of different military units and branches in one confined space wouldn’t affect them, given the unprecedented depth of shit they found themselves in, but it seemed that wasn’t to be the case.
The marines were fine. They were led by a competent officer and sergeant and while they kept themselves to themselves, they weren’t hostile in the slightest.
And besides, he thought to himself, I’d be worried if there wasn’t a bit of inter-service piss-taking.
“Anyway,” Johnson said as he snapped out of his small reveries and changed the subject, “Ashdown says his family is with yours, that right?”
“Yes,” he answered simply, then frowned and turned to Johnson with wide eyes, “What? He spoke?”
“He’s fine, Simon,” Johnson told him, “said Bootneck reckons he’ll need antibiotics, but the thing didn’t manage to bite him. He’s still himself.”
“Sir,” Maxwell acknowledged as he simultaneously excused himself to run to the door and throw it open.
Johnson smiled, knowing that the man would be cared for, but reminding himself that he should be watched closely by someone with a bayonet handy until he was fully restored. He wandered to the building used as both the guard house, as it was the closest to the bridge, and because it was large enough to accommodate their sleeping needs it was also the billet for the Monkeys, or RMPs, seeing as they were neck-deep in unofficial terminology.
Johnson found Swift, the beleaguered sergeant, and decided not to add the pressure of guarding an injured man located higher up the island to his list of worries.
“Good work earlier,” he told him, not sure if he meant with the main quarantine work or because he’d had the balls to tell Johnson himself that he had to follow the rules. Swift nodded his acceptance of the ambiguous compliment and watched as Johnson turned to walk back uphill to find the headquarters building.
There he found Palmer sitting beside the radio operator, who was now Corporal Daniels, having evidently replaced Mander at the shift change organised by another of his reliable NCOs. Palmer leaned back in the chair to stretch his aching spine as Johnson walked in, offering him a tired smile of welcome.
“All is well, I trust, Mister Johnson?” he asked.
“It is, Sir,” he responded as he glanced around the room for anything hot and wet to ease his throat, “Ashdown’s recovered.”
Palmer sat bolt upright and fixed him with an excited look. Keeping his eyes on the SSM, he spoke over his shoulder politely to Daniels.
“Corporal, I’ll keep an ear on the radio, would you mind fetching up a brew from somewhere?”
Daniels acknowledged him, rising to leave the room as he had clearly been ordered to act as servant and told to leave the room because the grown-ups were talking. But he did so happily because Captain Palmer had a way of getting people to do things without ordering them about.
“Fully recovered?” Palmer asked. “No infection from the bite?”
“No bite,” Johnson said as he scraped chair legs on the floor to spin a seat around to face the officer, “the thing cracked his collarbone, but it bit him on the webbing strap and didn’t break the skin. The scratches were a concern, but they don’t seem to have spread the disease.”
“Interesting,” Palmer said as he put forefinger and thumb of his right hand to his top lip and picked in absent-minded gentleness, “and where is he now?”
“Sergeant Maxwell is going to set him up in the billet where their families are, and I’m going to have a man with him at all times until he’s recovered.”
Palmer nodded enthusiastically, glad that Johnson had evidently pre-empted his thoughts on the risk still remaining.
“The marine who patched him up did a good job, but he doesn’t have the antibiotics we need,” Johnson went on hopefully, “Any chance we could ask our new command structure for a doctor and supplies?”
Palmer mused for a moment, opening his mouth once and closing it again as though he changed his mind about what he was going to say. He went to speak again but the door banged open and both men turned to see Daniels backing his way into the room using his backside to push the door ahead of him. He pivoted on the spot to reveal the two mugs in his hands before crossing the room and looking at each hand to decide which drink was which. His frown remained as he glanced between the left and right mugs, then handed one to each man. Daniels left the room, no doubt to retrieve his own drink and slip outside to smoke in peace and stretch his back.
Both men bent their faces to the mugs, unable to differentiate between the strong, dark liquids by sight but smelling that they had each other’s drinks.
Johnson passed the tea with two sugars to Palmer, who in turn passed over the coffee with two to Johnson.
“I’m waiting for them to get back to me,
” he told the SSM conspiratorially, “and that’s one of the things they are sending. The other is a new boss for all of us.”
TWELVE
Ellie and Pauline kept quiet company, in the intervals when Ellie wasn’t crying pitifully for the loss of her daughter, screaming murder at their captors or sleeping off the blow to her head. The older woman tried to hush her, to comfort her, but she hadn’t spoken a single conscious word for three days, other than to promise every vengeance known to mankind if they didn’t take her back to get her daughter.
When the tears finally ran out, when the crippling acceptance sunk into Ellie’s mind, she became nearly catatonic. Pauline had initially misunderstood her when she had cried over the loss of her baby, assuming that the young woman, like so many, had seen loved ones pulled down and killed by the devil that now inhabited the bodies of the infected. After the rants against the guards, after the pleading to be allowed to go back and find her, she finally plucked up the courage to risk upsetting her and ask the question.
“She isn’t dead, is she? Isn’t one of them?” she asked the girl.
Ellie sniffed and turned her red, emotionless eyes towards her and stared, then rolled away. Pauline sat back, not wanting to push the issue any further, but the voice sounded low and soft from the bed opposite her own.
“We hid in the house for almost a week,” she said in a flat voice that croaked after the effort of her screams and tears, “we stayed upstairs, kept quiet, and I taught my baby not to cry and make a noise.”
She sniffed, pushed herself upright and cuffed at her face with both sleeves pulled over her hands. Sitting up and tucking her heels into her thighs, she hugged her knees tightly.
“A massive crowd of them came through,” she went on, her eyes staring at a spot of nothing on the floor, “they literally shook the houses there were so many of them. More of them came on behind for about a day, like they were late to the party, and two of them must have smelled us or something because they camped outside and just kept walking into the front door like it would magically open for them. I threw a load of things out of the back window, you know, to try and get them to go away, and it worked. The microwave made a massive noise and they loved that. It gave us just enough time to get out of the front door and into the car…”
She sniffed again, wiping away the fresh tears of memory with her cuffs.
“We got about two miles out of town when I ran over a few of them at once and the car got stuck. We had to run and leave the car.”
She stopped talking, never taking her eyes away from the spot she was staring at, as if it was the invisible anchor tethering her to reality no matter how harsh it was. Pauline waited to see if the pause was an intentional one, then decided to prompt for more.
“What happened?”
Ellie’s head snapped up to meet Pauline’s gaze, startling her slightly with her sudden alertness and a fire behind her eyes that quickly extinguished itself.
“What happened?” she spat. “We were doing fine, that’s what happened. We moved around a short distance at a time and Am…” the word, the name, seemed to catch in her throat, “my baby was doing really well; she never made a noise to attract them. Then these,” she pushed herself up on her hands and shouted, “fucking bastards, came and dragged me away from her.”
She buried her head into her knees and sobbed again for a long time until the reserves of tears ran dry again. She raised her head, the same vacant, capitulating look in her eyes.
“My beautiful baby, my Amber, she’s gone now. There’s no way she’d be able to survive on her own,” she intoned flatly.
Pauline didn’t know what to say, but blessedly the door banged open and a man stood in the doorway.
“Time for work,” he said, leering as Pauline stood and smoothed down her clothes. As she passed by, she reached out a hand and placed the lightest touch of her fingertips on Ellie’s knee.
Pauline Earle, widow and manager at a historical site with its own hotel, had been rounded up early on after the world fell apart. She had survived the initial phase of apocalyptic proceedings on simple geography, sheer luck alone, as her modest home was part of the hotel-cum-museum on the windswept seafront on high ground far from the town. She’d lived there ever since her husband had passed away, selling their house and accepting the job with its accommodation and company. There, she’d anxiously watched the news reports as she sat alone on the day when only two of the employees arrived for work to care for the single pair of guests present.
In her unthinking panic, she had stopped off via the village shop a few miles from her home, and for a week she lived on the overstocked amount of bread and milk that her subconscious brain forced her to buy.
She had nothing to drink in the house, not that she ever drank much anyway, and wouldn’t think of going to the hotel wing to drink their stocks. The stress of the situation made her think of turning to alcohol for a solution. It was probably a good idea she hadn’t found anything, as that night she saw the first one of them. Had she drunk most of a bottle of wine as she’d felt like doing, she probably would have gone outside to investigate and ask why they were trespassing. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the curious way they were walking, their jerky movements and the way that the head snatched from side to side whenever different sounds echoed around her little hilltop haven. That decision not to drink, the possession of her full faculties, inevitably saved her life as she made the choice not to go out there. She had stayed frozen still in the window and watched as the thing walked up to the glass and banged its face into the rain-smeared pane. Pauline gasped in horror, unable to move through a morbid fascination and fear, and couldn’t believe it when a bird flew down to land lightly on the grass nearer the sea. The thing in front of her, wearing a green waterproof and walking gear with one gaiter torn away above its right boot to show a ragged chunk of blackened flesh missing, turned and watched intently as the bird hopped along. It lurched towards the cliff edge, head cocked to one side and hands reaching out for the pastel-grey dove as it went about its business, undisturbed by events unfolding in the wider world. It remained utterly undisturbed until almost too late when the sudden burst of movement behind it forced a panicked leap out over the edge of the drop towards the sea and freedom. The person, the thing, chasing the dove fell headlong over the edge and made Pauline shriek out loud in shock. She ran outside, lay flat on the damp, windswept grass to peer over the edge and saw the body only thirty feet down and stuck in grotesque parody of a ballerina with legs and arms broken in different directions. The face showed that it recognised her appearance, and a shriek rang from the mouth in between the snapping of teeth. She almost thought to try the telephone again to bring help, until her mind registered what her eyes had seen. The face looked up at her, full of malice and hate, but the body was still face down on the rocks. Only then did she realise what the world was facing.
Three days passed by without any updates on the static screen of her television, and a nervous young man working in the hotel knocked on the door of her small cottage to ask if she would join them for a meeting. The meeting, such as it was, comprised Pauline and two young local men who worked there, and the couple of guests who had been caught out while on a walking holiday along their famous Jurassic coastline. The silence had been awkward, the introductions stilted, until they started to relax around one another, and they all agreed that they had to shed the bounds of normality and wait at the hotel for the whole unpleasant business to all be over.
That bubble of British stoicism burst spectacularly when one morning about a week after the televisions stopped broadcasting, three men drove arrogantly up to the very front of the main entrance to the visitors’ centre of the historical hilltop monument and ruins. They walked around, appearing to be conducting an appraisal, apparently liking what they saw. Pauline looked out of her window, barely able to hear the exchange of words with the two employees who walked out of the front door of the hotel to greet the visitors.
&n
bsp; Pleasantries were given and received, hands were shaken, and questions asked.
Questions that, at least in their current suspicious frame of mind, would raise the alarm.
Questions like how many people were there, what supplies they had and what weapons were in the building.
Questions which, when answered, prompted the bearded man loitering by his car to turn and wave his hands in an exaggerated gesture down the hill. The five members of the reluctant group who had yet to realise the cruel world they were now living in watched in confusion. That confusion turned into fear and disbelief as the noise of a loud engine rattled up the hill to them. The throttle surged, whistling and growling in peaks and dipping low to rise up again until the most unexpected sight burst into view.
A tank. A dark green tank with wide, irregular swathes of black and brown painted over it. The tank, so unnatural and out of place in the idyllic setting, was followed by half a dozen other vehicles including two vans and a digger, forming a ragtag collection that oozed danger. The tank stopped, the engine rattled into silence, and a hatch opened to let a man climb out. Everyone watched in terrified awe as he jumped lightly down, holding a machine gun with a long magazine sticking out of the left side horizontally. He held the weapon by the grip in his left hand, letting it swing casually and recklessly. Everything about him screamed a warning of violence and cruelty. As if to compound the implied sense of doom, the man surveyed the area.
And smiled crookedly.
The next few weeks were tough. Every room was thoroughly searched and ransacked for the items the half dozen men wanted, and the carefully maintained grounds of the historic site were systematically ruined as the centuries-old defences were deepened and widened in their neat rings which had once been dug to the same depth and width to prevent Vikings from reaching the hill top.
One of the reasons that site was so important, and had been for as long as humans had graced the south coast, was that the hilltop had its own natural water spring. The Anglo-Saxons of Wessex could hold that hilltop for a fortnight with only two hundred and fifty men, given that they only had to carry their weapons and food on their backs, and they could not be starved out easily. Each day, the besieging army would be forced to raid further and further away for their own food and water.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 31
