Peter withdrew the weapon with a grunt and a sharp pull, and the repulsive lump flopped back into the low, murky water. The cat had stopped hissing but stayed utterly motionless and kept its eyes on the thing, with only twitches of a hugely puffed-up tail betraying that it wasn’t a statue. Amber just looked blankly at him.
Then he remembered the warning she’d given him, as cryptic as it was, and he held out a hand for her to cross over to him. She didn’t hesitate and skipped across the bridge lightly to join him, then looked back at the cat who hopped down and stalked over the bridge to follow.
“How did you know?” he whispered to her as his head swivelled to locate any other unwelcome surprises, “Did you see it?” he asked, worrying that he had looked and hadn’t seen it there. She didn’t answer, so he stole a glance at her to check. She shrugged, a genuine ʿI don’t knowʾ shrug and smiled back at him.
Peter didn’t know what he expected, so he guessed the shrug was what he deserved. He pointed at her, then to his side and waited for her to nod. Stalking out into the road with her beside him, he crept along in the open so as not to be surprised by any more jack-in-the-box zombies in close quarters. He made for the largest house he could see, stopping once to listen intently as Amber stood still in total silence as though she wasn’t even breathing. The cat had disappeared again but that was hardly his priority at that point.
He saw three cars parked on the road at nearby houses which seemed to be so old in construction that they didn’t have driveways and noticed something was somehow off about them. They were at unnatural angles, because people usually parked their cars vaguely straight. Their wing mirrors were bent backwards or pushed in, depending on whether he could see the front or the back of the cars, and all of them were smeared with dried streaks of black.
Sneaking towards the house and the taller than average front door, he pointed for Amber to wait on the other side of the big car and waited until she moved. Exchanging a look, he left her there and tried the front door.
He’d once seen a television programme where the woman with big curly hair claimed that crime was up so high that people were afraid to leave their doors unlocked any more. That struck Peter as a stupid thing to say, because if locks weren’t necessary, why did every door have them? Personally, he was glad to live in the country for two reasons. One, the only city he had ever been to was London, which had burned down in riots a month ago, from what he had seen on the news, and two, around there a lot of people actually did leave their doors unlocked.
The big house was one of them. He turned the round, brass doorknob and was rewarded by protesting springs until a click denoted it was open. Pushing it gently inwards, he stood back two paces and raised the pitchfork.
“Hello?” he called into the house as loud as he dared, and hearing no reply. He looked over to Amber, seeing the top of her head from the nose up as she peered over the front of the car, and tried to figure out what to do, to try and decide whether he should take her inside on a house search and put both of them at risk if they had to run away.
Just then, he realised what the signs outside had meant, and what had happened there. It also went some way to explaining how a naked zombie found itself stuck in a low brook, and he knew in that instant that there wouldn’t be a single one of them there unless it was trapped.
That horde which had nearly consumed him in a flood, that swarm of corpses that had steamed across the countryside like a roller had been through here in some form. It had filled that road outside and swept inexorably onwards, and anything that was free to shuffle or walk or crawl would have been taken along with it. With renewed confidence in his logic, he called out louder into the house.
“Oi,” he yelled, “zombies!”
He smiled to himself as he said it, knowing that he was showing off for Amber and not caring. He smiled because it was the first time he had used the word out loud and when he did, it seemed to take some of the fear and stress out of the situation.
Nothing happened inside the house, so he waved her to him and walked inside. It had five bedrooms, an office, wardrobes that seemed more like bedrooms in size, without windows, and a door to another room where the washing machine and a tumble drier were built into the same worktops as the kitchen had. There was a door from that room that led into the big garage where there were tools and camping things and an old car with no roof.
He checked every room, every cupboard and every possible place that a person could hide in, as though it was a high-stakes hide and seek tournament.
Loser gets eaten, he thought grimly, but he was right, and the house was empty.
As impressive as it was, as huge and luxurious as the kitchen was, which he guessed was about the same size as the entire ground floor of his old house, it yielded about a day’s worth of food for them, which meant that he would have to check the other houses in the village. He was happy to do that, hell he’d been doing it for a few weeks before he met Amber, but at least he would have somewhere for her to stay when he went. The one good thing was that the garage contained plastic bottles of water, which meant that they wouldn’t be drinking from toilet cisterns for a while.
They roamed the house looking for things and Peter checked the flow of the taps to see if they worked, purely out of interest. To his utter disbelief, and by some miracle, the tap he turned flowed strongly with water.
Water that, to his great delight, was getting hot.
NINETEEN
“Ward, where are we with comms?” Hadlington asked, with a hint of desperation in his voice.
“Still nothing, Sir,” she said coolly, but inside she was screaming for a way to warn the two teams of SAS and SBS that they were heading directly into a complete shit storm. She blamed the Americans, naturally, as they had been late in relaying the information to their own command, who had then passed it directly on to the land-based control room for that area. Had the information come only thirty minutes earlier, she could have contacted the helicopter pilot and ordered the abort, but the teams were on the ground and totally unaware what was coming for them.
“Fucking hell,” Hadlington swore under his breath, “get me command,” he told her, “and send a runner to fetch me the Colonel. I need him to sign an order for these men to drive into the lion’s den.”
The four men comprising Charlie-One-One had climbed in silence back aboard the helicopter that had been sent for them and held on to the hanging straps as the bird’s nose tipped towards the east and powered away. Technically they weren’t back on board, as this helicopter, while being the same model, was a fully-fuelled one that had come via a gentler speed as their first ride was blasting back to its floating home. This one was tasked with dropping them off in south London, where they were due to rendezvous with Charlie-One-Two, who were infiltrating up the Thames, no doubt in order to provide additional options should any team have an issue getting in or out. The team and their boats would have been inserted by helicopter in the wider stretches of the river to the east for them to slip into the city quietly.
The other team had been at their own small base on the south coast when the shit hit the fan, and as they were so few in number, they were forced to take to the Channel in their rigid inflatable boats to escape the enemy masses on dry land. When the navy began to congregate in the relatively narrow waterway between the English and French coasts, they were picked up and rapidly portioned off into individual patrols to be made available for use wherever command saw fit.
Of that four-man team, two had seen warfare in the East Falklands in 1982 and constantly reminded the others of that. All of them were formerly Royal Marines, as were all troopers of their four squadrons, but one had taken the unusual route of joining first the Royal Navy, before becoming enamoured with the elite reputation of the marines. He had quit after four years because he was told there was no possible way to transfer. His branch had been at manning balance, and not surplus, so there was no way he could transfer, he was told. So he had left, signed out and wal
ked off base to go straight into the forces careers office to sign on as a Royal Marine recruit, then waited in cheap accommodation outside Plymouth for five weeks until the next recruitment process began. It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t pass recruitment and selection.
That confidence, which some of the training staff saw as arrogance, saw him through the Commando course and onto an accelerated path to his first promotion, due to his previous experience and capabilities. Some thought him career-driven, but those who worked with him knew him to be all work at work, and all play outside. After another four years in a new coloured beret, he again had his head turned when his unit had encountered members of the UK Special Forces in Northern Ireland.
They were kept separate in the barracks, with its anti-mortar mesh and high walls, and they were ordered not to talk to them or ask about their activities. He had disobeyed that order, finding a man who had greeted some of the older marines in his unit. Finding out that the man had previously been one of them, he asked him outright who he was with.
The Special Boat Service became his next goal, and his request for selection followed as soon as he returned to the UK. In his usual style he passed selection on his first attempt, relishing the gruelling physical and mental pressure of being tested beyond the expected limits of human performance and resolve.
Now, despite his previous experience and time spent as a special forces soldier, he was still referred to as The Matelot. Alex Bufford, Sergeant Special Boat Service, preferred to be called Buffs. He was tall, fit and strong as one would expect from a former marine, but he found that the majority of his fellow special forces soldiers were often short and wiry, in contrast to his big shoulders and thick arms. His strength was overt, whereas others seemed more like tough goats or ants that seemed able to lift ten times their own body weight.
Buffs, a newly-minted Sergeant through exceptionally hard work, led his team of four in two rigid inflatable boats up the filthy Thames river, which was thick with floating corpses that bobbed on the surface, bloated and rotting. Their engines were only turning at less than half their capacity for two reasons: to keep a lower noise profile and to allow them to avoid the worst concentrations of dead bastards. On more than one occasion they were forced to power up and then lift their propellers from the water to bump over the bodies without blending them.
With two men in each boat they were well below capacity, but the likelihood was that they were their own ‘exfil’ and a rescue was about as possible as finding a decent bar open in the city.
They found the small pier they wanted by the GPS co-ordinates and cut their engines in unison to float the rest of the way in silence. Tying off their crafts, they slipped onto dry land and stalked effectively forwards as their guns came up to cover all angles.
Straight ahead, third right, second left, first right, first right, he repeated to himself, going over the map in his head which correlated to the one in his leg pocket. The map was totally unmarked and folded to its original lines so as not to even betray the area they were operating in, in case they were captured. Operational habits of basic mission secrecy were so deeply ingrained in them that even the inability of their enemy to read a map would not encourage procedure to be abandoned.
They made the turns on his lead, taking each turn as they had in training and real-life, until they reached the innocuous double doors of their target location.
A bird noise, piercing and subtle yet alien to the environment, sounded to their right. It came from a fire-damaged corner of a building on the first floor, where the partly destroyed glass offered a wide view of the street below. Buffs stopped and dropped to one knee, looking up at the window not at anything he could see, but at the place where he would have placed his own team if he had arrived first.
“One-Two,” he said softly, waiting for a response.
“One-One, coming down,” came the reply, before the slightest shirt in the shadows moved behind the damaged glass. Moments later four men emerged dressed and equipped similarly to them, with the addition of beards that only served to make their eyes seem brighter, as they were framed by unruly darkness.
The man at their point nodded to him in a curt but efficient greeting, then stopped to take a knee beside him.
“Downes, Hereford,” he introduced himself.
“Bufford, Poole,” Buffs responded.
Pleasantries exchanged, they stepped through the double doors and slowly descended the steps towards the underground lab that nobody knew was there, let alone responsible for the end of days. They clicked on the bright torches attached to their weapons to illuminate the pitch black where sunlight could not penetrate and found the outer door of the lab.
The MP5 had no bayonet, so dispatching the single lurching corpse who stood resting its face against the thick security glass of that door could not be done at distance unless with a bullet. Given that even suppressed shots make noises, especially in cavernous underground areas, Buffs dropped his weapon to hang on its strap and held up a hand to signal the other seven men not to fire. Just as the zombie turned in response to the approaching lights and footfalls to leave part of its face glued to the glass and expose bright white bone on its forehead, Buffs slipped the small pioneer axe from the belt loop on his right hip and swung the small weapon to bury the pointed end downwards into the skull of the creature to crumple it down to the ground.
Downes watched with evident respect for the display and the weapon, using his weapon-mounted torch to regard the short-handled axe to see a brightly polished head smeared with dark gore. The axe had clearly been a display piece somewhere, but questions about it would have to wait. He stepped forwards and tapped repeatedly on the glass until a suspicious pair of wild eyes set in a dishevelled face appeared.
“Open. The fucking. Door,” Downes said slowly, with a visible finger pointed downwards to the lock, carefully mouthing each word until the unmoving man inside finally snapped into reality and turned a ship-style handle inside to unseal it.
The eight men stepped inside, weapons up and scanning as they fanned out to search the collection of rooms, which stank beyond compare. It was not enough to assume that the lab was made safe just because someone else was in there, they had to see for themselves.
“Professor Grewal?” Downes asked, placing a hand on the shoulder of the man and crouching slightly to try and force eye contact, “Professor Sunil Grewal?” he tried again, with a shake as Buffs closed the door behind them.
“Sunny,” Grewal said, as he seemed to emerge back into consciousness. Downes winced at the man’s breath.
“Okay, Sunny, we’re getting you out of here. Do you have the samples?” he asked.
Grewal nodded and pointed to a large specialist case. Downes nodded to one of his troopers, who picked the case up with evident difficulty.
“Mac?” he said, then, hearing the response from behind him, “find the computers.”
Mac did, tipping over the heavy desktop units and smashing open their cases and prising out the huge internal drives. Dezzy was collecting all of the 3½ inch floppy discs and stuffing them into a black bag indiscriminately, while Smiffy began to pour acrid smelling fuel onto key things such as paperwork. Meanwhile, two of Buffs’ team assisted by piling things into easier piles.
Just then, the telephone on the wall rang a shrill chirping noise. Grewal giggled to himself, as though the telephone being real was a sudden shock to him, and Buffs picked it up.
A short conversation ensued, during which pertinent questions were asked.
“How big? …Location? …Direction? …How long? …Understood.”
Just as he replaced the handset and opened his mouth, a shout came from the door they had come through.
“Company,” was all it said, and company didn’t come close to accurately describing what was out there.
“How many?” Buffs asked in a low voice, considering whether the two teams could cover the mile through the city to their boats and get out ahead of the leading edge of
the wave. Eight men and one civilian who would probably need carrying, he imagined, along with the heavy sample case.
Left, left, second right, third left, straight ahead to the boats, he thought to himself as he mapped the return journey in his mind. Just as the answer told him that making a run for it was out of the question.
“Err, all of the fuckers, I think,” came the bleak response.
Because the swarm was already in the city.
TWENTY
The AWACS patrolling the area had been diverted towards Poland, where the Soviets were apparently performing heavy carpet bombing of the whole eastern edge of the country to create a no-man’s-land of death and rubble in a desperate bid to prevent the disease from walking into the motherland. The bombing, the incessant mortar and artillery fire, had served only to attract every hungry dead person on the European continent towards them, and it was becoming a question of what would run out first; the enemy or the ordnance.
While that report was fed back to the US via their carrier fleet just outside the English Channel, the early-warning aeroplane had its eyes off the mainland UK.
The mission to recover the virus research from London had come via joint command but was a direct order from the US forces, and moreover, came from people who did not give their name with an order; simply where they worked. In this instance, ‘Century House’ gave the orders, meaning that British foreign intelligence was calling the shots, despite its UK headquarters seemingly overrun and abandoned.
It was simply beyond the paygrade of any one of the military personnel involved to know the truth that the outbreak was as a direct result of poor containment protocols, after the US and UK governments collaborated to produce a biological weapon to use as a doomsday option and an alternative to nuclear bombardment in the Cold War against the socialist states in the east.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 37
