Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant,” Palmer said, “but that isn’t the priority for today. If we are sent any specialist troops, I doubt they would fall under our domain anyway. For now, we are tasked with planning and executing a mission some sixty miles inland to escort an engineering team to and from a target.”

  Looks were exchanged but everyone kept quiet to wait for the rest of the information.

  “You may have noticed, gentlemen,” Palmer went on, “that, as disciplined as we are being, our lights are still on.” He looked around the room to see the admission on their faces that they hadn’t considered that fact so often taken for granted. To keep from attracting any unwelcome and cannibalistic attention, they had been operating good light discipline and only using lights that couldn’t be seen from the outside. That prompted the central switch for the streetlamps on the island to be switched permanently off, and this led them to live their lives mostly in the dark anyway, so the lights remaining off wasn’t that noticeable.

  “That is courtesy of a nuclear power station, and yes, you guessed it, sixty miles inland,” Palmer finished.

  “Where’s the engineering team coming from?” Lieutenant Commander Barrett asked.

  “America,” Palmer answered simply.

  Lieutenant James Morris, Barrett’s co-pilot smiled and affected a Brit’s attempt at a southern states accent and said, “Now, wwhhut can they teach us about our own power station?”

  “A good deal, I should imagine,” piped up a nasal voice from behind the navy pilots as Second Lieutenant Palmer walked in to hand a sheet of paper to his older brother, “seeing as they designed and built it for us about ten years ago.”

  Johnson’s eyebrows lowered slightly as he fought against the natural urge to narrow his eyes in suspicion that the most junior officer was in possession of information that the others had not yet been given. The balance of power was tentative, although the officer classes were too polite to mention the vulgarity of who should be in charge, as the navy pilots were army equivalent ranks of majors and captains themselves. Command of ground activities, however, had been devolved to Palmer as the most qualified. For all the men present, all of them were very aware that the Captain’s younger brother was tolerated under sufferance only due to his older brother, just so long as he didn’t get in the way of anything. For him to swan into a senior officers’ meeting and act as he did set every spine in the room firmly on edge.

  “Thank you, Second Lieutenant,” Captain Palmer said with a chilly tone of official annoyance, then scowled gently at his brother’s back as he left the room. He was too well bred to offer an apology for his sibling’s words, so he continued to explain.

  “The yanks have sent a carrier,” he said, his expression meaning nothing derogatory as he clearly had an affinity with the Americans after working with them in Germany, “and they’ve apparently pre-empted our nuclear needs. They built two for us, and they believe that both of them will be at risk of overheating or some such problem in the near future. We need to get them there safely, clear out the place, then keep them safe until they can stabilise the reactors and do some kind of witchcraft with cooling.”

  Lieutenant Commander Murray whistled low, looking to his naval colleagues, who seemed to understand. He saw the two army men looking at them expectantly and explained.

  “If the Americans have sent a carrier, that must mean they’ve sent an entire carrier strike group,” he said, seeing that this news still hadn’t sunk in.

  “That means a carrier,” he said as he checked off on one finger, “at least one destroyer, a pair of frigates, half a dozen support ships and,” he glanced at the other pilots, “a nuclear attack sub.”

  Then it sunk in, and their faces showed fresh nervousness.

  “Any word from the Soviets?” Johnson asked in an uncharacteristically taut voice.

  “Nothing,” Palmer said with equable seriousness, “and nothing from the Chinese either. It appears that Communism doesn’t want to speak to Democracy, even when hell empties and all the devils are here.”

  Palmer’s lapse into Shakespearean prose betrayed just how much time he had spent glued to the planning board and the radio. He was tired, not just physically but emotionally, and his own personal war was being swallowed by the global politics in play. Everyone around the table understood the potential severity of the response that the Soviet Union could feel forced into. Even though the Cold War was, as they all believed, in its dying stages and intelligence reported that the Union was close to collapse, none of them could even begin to predict what a desperate government would do, given the current climate, if they felt threatened. The arrival of a carrier strike group and an American nuclear attack submarine only a few hundred miles away in the English Channel ran the obvious risk of disaster.

  “Why haven’t we spoken to them yet?” Lieutenant Lloyd asked the room rhetorically, “Surely they can see that what’s going on is bigger than countries fighting each other?”

  “One would have hoped so, but that is somewhat beyond our control for now,” Palmer answered to move the conversation onwards, “Now, they should be here by tonight, I’m assured, rendezvous with the joint fleet in the Channel, and will send their men in tomorrow morning to us. I assume via helicopter, even though the means haven’t been confirmed to us as yet. I can only presume that we might be expecting our new commanding officer and his entourage at that time, so I would fully anticipate being evicted from here. Whatever other personnel come with them, if any, will be our responsibility to house and feed but I highly doubt they will become our men to instruct. So,” he paused, “assuming the mission will go ahead, I propose that I lead it via one of the Sultan wagons,” he said as he kept his eyes down and away from Johnson’s, “I’m sure we can all agree that taking my Chieftain would be slow going and possibly be a touch of overkill, but I want a troop of the Fox cars with me and one quarter of your marines,” he added, looking up to Lloyd and receiving a nod, “Your sergeant will suffice, and I presume we can spare a man to drive them in a Saxon?” he asked, finally making eye contact with Johnson, who was just waiting to be told he was sitting that one out. He nodded, going over the particulars, which mainly encompassed routes and alternatives, and left the actual entry, assault and clearance of the power plant as general intentions rather than specific actions, as the men coming from America knew the plant intimately and would be needed to make those calls.

  “If I may, Sir?” Johnson asked politely, having calmed down from his initial annoyance of not being allowed out to play. Palmer gestured for him to speak.

  “I’d suggest splitting your marines over two Saxons, with an engineer in each,” he said simply, leaving the obvious reasons out of his explanation.

  “Very good, Sarn’t Major,” the captain answered with a nod as he saw the logic in the recommendation instantly, “tomorrow then, we should know more when they arrive, but I’d like men ready and briefed. Thank you.”

  Johnson left, trying to decide whether to throw Sergeant Strauss back into the lion’s den or to put trust in others he wasn’t totally certain of.

  FOURTEEN

  Pauline finished her allocated work duty of cooking and cleaning in the hotel’s modest kitchens. There were over thirty people there now, half of whom would leave if they could guarantee success in finding somewhere safer to be. It was the lesser of two evils. When she returned, she found Ellie in the same position; sitting on the bed with her heels tight into her thighs and her forehead rested on her knees. She didn’t look up when Pauline was shown back into the room, not even when she placed a wrapped meal of fresh bread sandwiches in front of her.

  Pauline went into the bathroom of their hotel room-cum-cell, and when she came back out, she saw Ellie eating the food with her cheeks puffed out and her jaw working almost desperately as she raised the fingertips of one hand to her lips.

  “Sorry,” she said through her full mouth, “I just…”

  “Don’t be silly, my lovely,”
Pauline told her kindly as she sat down opposite her, “I brought it back for you anyway, you need to get your strength up.”

  Ellie chewed and winced as she swallowed her mouthful too soon and had to force the lump down her throat.

  “The bread,” she gasped before snatching another bite, “where did it come from?”

  “I made it,” Pauline said simply, “the kitchens here still work fine, and all I have to do is make food. They don’t make me do anything else,” she went on, pausing hesitantly before continuing and speaking faster to change the subject, “and they keep the people out, so it’s a fair enough trade…”

  Ellie looked at her seriously with dark, red-rimmed eyes.

  “You think it’s fair?” she asked dangerously, “They snatch people away from their families and you think it’s fair?”

  “No,” Pauline said carefully, dropping her own smile, “I don’t think what they’ve done is fair at all, but I don’t know what I’d be doing if they hadn’t come here. I’m just trying to get by, and I don’t think I can… I don’t think I can kill people.”

  “Well I’m bloody ready to,” Ellie responded. Eager to change the subject, Pauline pointed at the battered paperback book on the low bedside table beside her.

  “Did you read any of that?” she asked, hopeful that she had been given a lover of literature to share a room with.

  “No,” Ellie answered through another mouthful of food, “I haven’t got my glasses and I can’t hold it far enough away to see it.”

  Her words were full of regret and annoyance, but any response Pauline could make was stopped by the knock at the door.

  The two women looked at each other before Ellie shrugged, and Pauline shouted for whoever it was to come in.

  One of the first men to turn up there stood in the doorway, not stepping inside, and politely asked for Ellie to come with him.

  “Why?” she shot back, full of venom.

  “Because our Boss would like to talk to you,” he responded.

  Pauline expected more anger, more revolt and even imagined them having to drag the woman out of the room, but Ellie simply stood, brushed off the crumbs from her dirty and stained clothes, and followed him.

  Ellie walked tall, pride and anger keeping her from unravelling. She was shown to the door of the big hall in the historical building and the man who had escorted her there gestured for her to go inside. That was evidently as far as he was taking her.

  She walked in, looking around at the high ceilings and decorated walls, and a voice cut through to her.

  “Good afternoon,” came a man’s voice from her right. She looked to see a man of average height and build, with an unremarkable face. His voice had nothing unique about it either, but there was something intangible about the man that made him appear strong. He didn’t ooze malevolence or physically dominate her; in fact, he kept a respectful distance as he spoke.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said, “but I know a simple apology won’t help you at all. Believe me when I say that I know the loss you feel right now…” He gestured to an ornate chair beside one that he took, inviting her to sit with him. She sat, her face a mask of neutrality.

  “I want you to know that I sent men back to where you were and had them search until they were forced to come back, but they found no sign of her. My own daughter was lost very early on,” he said with eyes turned down, “even before most people realised what was happening. We’d been visiting family near Portsmouth and, well, I don’t need to tell you…”

  “I’m very sorry,” Ellie said, seeing him look up to smile at her. That smile faded when her face contorted, and she spoke again.

  “But your daughter wasn’t left for dead by thugs who knocked her mother out. Your daughter didn’t die alone and terrified. My daughter did. She’s dead because of you,” she finished, spitting the words at him with a jab of her right index finger. When she had finished, her body betrayed her and brought on angry tears caused by adrenaline, and it opened the floodgates once more.

  The man sat back and just watched her cry. He didn’t force his words on her, didn’t tell her that the men were simply being clumsy and ham-fisted about following his orders to bring back survivors to the safety of their hill. They had never encountered anyone who didn’t want to be rescued, so the thought never occurred to them that people might want to be left alone. He wanted to say that he would have done things differently, that he would have brought the girl back with them and listened to her, but felt the words were empty so he didn’t say them.

  He also didn’t tell her that his men had found a dead zombie in the house, which he doubted a little girl could have achieved. He didn’t tell her that he believed someone had found her before his men had got back to them. She appeared to have decided and accepted that the girl was gone, so he saw no need to drive her insane with renewed hopes and fears, deciding that it was better to let her accept the loss and move on.

  “I know there’s nothing I can say to make this better,” he told her, “but you have my word that nothing like this will happen again.”

  “You’re right,” she sniffed, “nothing you can say will help.”

  With that, she stood and walked from the room with steps that gathered pace until she broke into a run just before the doorway.

  The man, John Michaels, leaned back in the chair and sighed. He longed for men who had the intelligence to follow orders but reminded himself that he had to adapt and work with what he had. The tale about his daughter was true, but he left out some pertinent facts.

  Facts such as his daughter turning in the car as he sped home, his wife in the back seat holding her as she convulsed with the fever. He left out that the girl had opened her eyes suddenly and bitten her mother hard, tearing out a golf ball-sized chunk from her neck and sheeting the inside of the car with arterial spray from her torn blood vessels. He didn’t tell her that he had crashed the car in his sudden and terrifying blindness, and that his unrestrained daughter had flown through the windscreen on impact to roll to a bloody and broken mess thirty feet from the wreck. He didn’t tell her that when he came around from the blow to his head, that his wife was reaching for him but unable to do more than hook a single fingernail into his clothing and try to pull him towards her milky eyes and gnashing teeth. He didn’t say that he fell from his car in terror, scrambling backwards on his backside to put distance between himself and the horror. He didn’t say that the horror only grew infinitely worse when a crackling, gargling sound came from the ground behind him and he turned to see his daughter dragging her shattered and twisted frame towards him an inch at a time, as though sheer determination and hunger could force her ruined body to move.

  He was ashamed of himself for what he did afterwards, and when he went back over a week later with the resolve to end their perpetual suffering, he found his daughter had moved close to a mile away from where she had last reached out to him. Her minute progress had been unceasing as she followed the direction that her last meal had gone in. He dispatched her, freed her from her useless body, with a single shot to the back of her head from the Browning semi-automatic he had removed from the armoury. He used the same method to kill his wife, shooting her in the temple through the back windscreen of the car as she turned to try and locate the source of the sound. He left their bodies where they were, no longer considering them to have been the people he loved and satisfied himself that whatever part of them that was left had been set free.

  He returned to where he had parked the van he was using and drove back to the place they had fortified, having narrowly avoided being swept away by the massive horde that had inexplicably gathered and stormed across the countryside, leaving filth and destruction in their wake. He used the van because the other vehicle he had scavenged was a little too high profile for everyday use.

  He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t reported to the camp, not that he had been home to receive the call anyway, and instead, he’d watched it until it was empty and sneaked in to steal
weapons and the Warrior tank. He didn’t know why he felt it necessary to abandon his duties, especially seeing as the army was the only family he had left, and the men of his Sabre troop would have been his responsibility as much as his daughter had been.

  He decided that he’d had enough of being part of the machine, as he illogically blamed that machine and its masters for his family dying. Instead he drank until he was sick, drank again, and dreamt up a new way of life.

  FIFTEEN

  The alarm went up shortly before three in the morning.

  The alarm, such as it was, was the massively loud mechanical, metallic chattering of the coaxial machine gun on the turret of the Chieftain tank blocking the road. The radio sparked to life, fire support was requested, and the standby troops poured from their billets to form up at the threshold between the island and the bridge.

  The direction of the enemy was given, and the two Fox cars stationed permanently on the two bluffs of higher ground erupted into life as they added their own bursts of automatic fire to the fray.

  Sergeant Horton, taking his turn to sleep in the tank with all but the commander’s hatch down to preserve their heat in the dead of night, was woken by the two members of his crew who were awake and taking turns to look through their handheld optics to stare at the empty roadway. Only at that time it suddenly wasn’t empty.

  The thin tripwire rigged at the far end activated the flares attached to the bridge with an echoing pop to bathe the area in a soft glow.

  The reticuled display hazed into a grainy collection of shapes as a stumbling, shuffling group of zombies materialised, making the man babble a string of incoherent noises in surprise before he got his brain into gear and snatched up the controls of the weapon to stitch a burst of 7.62 into them.

  The two sleeping men, one being the tank’s commander, leapt instantly to life and in seconds, the second machine gun on the tank rattled out its own shots.