Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  “Where’s Amber?” Astrid asked from the other room, seeing that the two people other than herself who the little girl gravitated to were engaged in the cooking.

  “She’s right here,” Peter said, “she’s helping me, isn’t that right?” he turned to pull a face at her as she was sitting up on the kitchen worktop out of sight of the lounge area. She pulled the face back playfully, but still didn’t say a word.

  They ate together, testimony to the sheer size of the house as all eight of them could sit around the massive dining table set in the kitchen and still feel as though the house was empty. When they had finished, Johnson and Hampton went with the three who would be leaving in the morning, and Amber went back upstairs to watch the Care Bears movie for the third time that day. Peter, uncomplaining, took the plates and rested them in the large sink beside the pans. He shoved the sleeves of his top up his arms again, not bothering to rectify it when they slid down immediately afterwards, and he ran the tap. Kimberley got up, taking a flat sponge and holding it under the water, which had already run warm, then turned to clean down the table.

  He washed, armpits resting on the sink edge and sleeves dropping into the soapy water, as she dried.

  “Who taught you how to do this?” she asked, full of curiosity.

  “My sister,” he told her after the briefest of pauses as though he was deciding whether to tell her or not. “She did a lot of cooking. She showed me how to cook the pasta and test it, but she didn’t let me open the tins because I could cut myself on them.” He left out that she liked to use the jagged slices of metal to score lines in her own arms.

  “She showed me how to wash up as we went along, and she made my sandwiches for the next day as we did it.”

  Kimberley, her heart breaking with each word he spoke, resisted the urge to patronise him. He was clearly very resilient, and to make out that his survival was extraordinary was to invite doubt into his mind.

  “Were your parents working then?” she asked, seeing the boy turn and regard her quizzically.

  “No,” he told her, “they watched TV and drank and smoked cigarettes. We weren’t allowed to watch the TV most of the time.” He went back to washing, his sponge making squeaking noises on the plate as he wiped circles of soap suds onto it. Kimberley didn’t know what to say, but she found herself asking the question she knew she shouldn’t.

  “Peter, where is your sister now?”

  He paused, thinking, then resumed the squeaking on the plate.

  “She went away, to hospital, so she’s probably there now. I’ll try and find her after this has all finished.”

  Before Kimberley could even start to figure out what to say to that, Peter asked his own question.

  “What happened to your face?”

  She froze, hearing the question asked so blatantly and innocently when people usually never had the courage to ask her.

  “It was an accident,” she told him quietly, resting down one clean plate and picking up another to dry.

  “Was it an accident doing a new roof?” Peter asked, “Only I saw when we had a new roof on the pig shed at home, and someone accidentally poured hot tar stuff down their hand and it looked the same.

  “No, Peter, it wasn’t an accident with roofing tar, it was…” she trailed off.

  “What?” he asked her, a concerned look on his face as he turned to her.

  “Someone hurt me,” she told him, “someone I should have been safe with, but I wasn’t.”

  “Was it your parents?” he asked, “did they hit you, too?”

  “No,” she said, a tear forming in her eye, not for her own mistreatment but for the terrible reality the boy had lived before zombies roamed the country, “it was my… my husband. I got married very young, you see, and he wasn’t very nice to me.”

  “Oh,” Peter said, clearly sad for her, “did you tell the police?”

  “In a way,” Kimberley said, snapping out of her reverie and scrubbing the tea towel at the plate once more.

  “Did someone hurt him back for you?” Peter asked as he washed up.

  “I did it myself,” she blurted out before she could stop herself.

  Peter stopped, thinking about it, then continued scrubbing. “That’s good. You shouldn’t let bullies keep hitting you. I did that once, hit him back, and he didn’t try it again.” Peter’s eyes went vacant for a moment as his mind followed the logic that the bully was probably no longer alive.

  Kimberley said nothing, simply put the dry plate down and folded the damp tea towel before giving the boy a gentle flat palm on the head as she turned away. She didn’t trust herself to speak lest the tears come again. She hadn’t talked about what had happened for years, and moving to the country had been her way of leaving it behind her, in the past with her married name.

  The planning conversation had ended during the time she had been with Peter, so when she walked into what she thought was an empty room with red, puffy eyes and her chest heaving with the effort of keeping her tears at bay, she wasn’t expecting to find the two men standing mutely staring at her.

  “This one will be fine for me,” Hampton said in a stage voice as he took the closest book to him, a hardback Catherine Cookson that didn’t seem like his kind of thing at all. He made his limping escape from the room, his injured leg still rendering him less useful than he wanted to be, leaving her facing an embarrassed Dean Johnson who seemed as though he didn’t know where to look.

  “Um…” he started, looking left and right for escape and finding none. He began to edge away, leaving the distressed woman to cry in peace, but she threw herself down to the sofa and let out a high-pitched growl of frustration.

  “I’ll, err, just be going…”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said, wiping angrily at the tears on her cheeks, “I promised myself I’d stopped crying about this years ago,” she said as she waved a hand over the scarred side of her face, “but I just got reminded of something and it caught me off guard.”

  Johnson sat carefully beside her, fearful that she would be annoyed with him, and dared to reach out for her hand.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he tried tentatively. She looked at him, the mask of cool resolve falling back into place despite the puffiness of her red face.

  “It seems stupid now,” she said, “like it doesn’t matter anymore. That little boy in there has been through so much and he doesn’t complain, doesn’t fall apart…”

  “Don’t be silly,” he told her gently, “some injuries never heal, not properly.” She regarded him oddly then, trying to marry up the tough, bearded soldier with the kind and caring words of a therapist.

  “Peter asked me about the scars,” she said after a moment. Johnson nodded, looking at her intently as she spoke, as though he could lose her if his concentration wavered and the spell broke.

  “I was married when I was eighteen,” she began, “to a soldier. It was wonderful and new, but when I got pregnant my father insisted that we got married. We did, and as soon as we’d had a two-day honeymoon, he started hitting me.” Her eyes locked with his, burning brightly with strength and pain in equal measures. “I lost the baby, which he blamed me for. My whole life was gone in an instant; I wasn’t allowed out, I couldn’t wear the clothes I wanted to wear, I had no friends…”

  “Did he do that to you?” Johnson asked, his anger barely under control as he suspected the answer already, as his hand raised slightly towards the hair covering the puckered skin.

  “Yes,” she said, “he’d been court-martialled and discharged not long after we got married. He had a tendency to drink and get into fights. That made him worse. I’d burnt his food, according to him anyway, so he grabbed my hair and pushed my head down onto the hotplate. ‘you don’t listen’ he told me.”

  Johnson breathed in hard through his nose to try and tame the indignation and rage he was feeling at how this beautiful, strong and kind young woman had been so badly treated.

  “So you went to the police?
” he asked.

  “Not directly,” she said in a neutral tone, “but they were called. By the neighbours, I think. I stabbed him in his sleep a week afterwards, not that I remember doing it. He survived, unfortunately, and I spent four years in prison for it. Apparently, I was given a lenient sentence, on account of my temporary insanity. You know how many times I’d been to the local hospital in the year I lived with him?” she asked. Johnson opened and closed his mouth, unsure if the rhetoric needed a response.

  “Thirteen,” she told him flatly, “thirteen times in twelve months with injuries I got from him. They asked me if I was sorry at the trial, they asked me to show remorse,” her lip curled in disgust, “I told them I wished I had never met the bastard.”

  She stayed sitting there, staring off into painful memory for a while before she sniffed abruptly and stood up as though electrified.

  “And there’s me feeling sorry for myself, when a nine-year-old kid has survived this on his own literally, looking after a toddler. Put things into perspective, doesn’t it?”

  FIFTEEN

  The two women and the girl tried to be as quiet as possible as they squeezed and pushed the mattress through the window of their room. When it was two thirds of the way out, hanging over the void, the lighter was clicked until the flame took hold. The foam scorched, melted, then caught in a sudden, toxic flash of flame which made them all choke and push at the burning lump with renewed energy to force it out of the window. Black smoke hung in the suddenly hot air of the small room as they all fought to crane their necks out of the opening at once to see where it landed. Their disappointment was palpable, as the burning mattress had landed fire side down and extinguished their attempts at arson.

  “Grab more,” Ellie said, “rip pieces off.” They tore at the other mattresses, Jessica using the sharpened edge of her stolen teaspoon to slice at the stretched sections until they came apart in her hand. A kind of conveyor belt system established itself within seconds, with Jessica cutting pieces away using her adapted tool and Ellie passing them to Pauline, who set them on fire and dropped them one after another out of the window to the mattress below. They caught, spreading the fire until the darkness outside took on an eerie orange glow and an acrid smell sapped the oxygen from their immediate world.

  “More,” Pauline hissed, “keep it coming.”

  They did, and by the time shouts were reverberating loudly around the building, they had shut the window to their room, with only one mattress remaining. They had bundled up their few possessions and clothes into pillowcases and tied them together like bags, waiting for the commotion to build up. They put their coats on over their layers of clothing, holding their nerve collectively as they didn’t want to be discovered.

  Shout of ‘fire’ rang out loudly over the noise of doors opening and slamming and footsteps running fast down the corridors. They waited, breath held until some undetermined time when they should make a break for it. Their eyes met, darting between the three of them like electricity, until Ellie made the decision for them.

  “Go!”

  They went. Stepping fast along the corridor and down the stairs as doors opened and closed all around them. One man blocked their way, eyes wide and wild in the low light of the emergency bulbs, and he demanded to know what was happening.

  “Fire!” Pauline yelled, repeating the panicked call that rang through the now busy building. The word was infectious somehow, spreading the disease of fear faster than the bites of the zombies ever could. People ran and jostled, pushed and shoved on the stairways to demonstrate their primeval terror of the untameable element. Nobody noticed their subtle luggage, nobody stopped them to question why they were fully dressed and wrapped up warmly against the cold night air when others were in disarray and clutching blankets around themselves. They continued the shout, using it as a catalyst for the panic and confusion that spread faster than the fire.

  Outside, among the milling crowd of terrified people who were foolishly all looking inwards when logic should have told them that the bigger threat came from the bright flames and the noise attracting attention from elsewhere, louder shouts of authority took command. One voice stood out above all of them, barking orders to some and instructing others to get out of the way. Water buckets were found but the frozen surface of the small pond there proved yet another barrier until someone who wasn’t panicking found a large rock to drop in to break the icy surface.

  As this activity churned, three figures slipped towards the back of the group, waiting again for the unfathomable right time to act. When the double echoing boom of consecutive shotgun blasts rang out from the approach road and the answering screams of fear rose and gathered momentum, the three figures knew that the time was right.

  They didn’t run, they simply faded away from the group and turned towards the darkness.

  “What the hell is going on?” Michaels snapped at Nevin, who was still lacing his boots as he shouted orders.

  “Fire,” he said, “other side of the building on the outside. I’m having people put it out now.”

  “Fire?” Michaels asked incredulously, “How?”

  “Haven’t got that far yet, maybe we should put it out first so we don’t burn the whole place down, and then we can figure that out afterwards?”

  “It’s a solid stone building, you moron,” Michaels condescended nastily, “the worst that will happen is a few scorch marks if the fire is outside.”

  Nevin said nothing, only shot the man a murderous look that was mixed of embarrassment at not figuring that out and anger at being talked down to again.

  “It’s a diversion,” Michaels told him after a moment of thought, “get every guard on the perimet…”

  BOOM, BOOM.

  The two men’s eyes met in the poor light cast by the weak, yellowy bulbs. No words passed between them but instead a communication on a deep, almost telepathic level flashed as though they were speaking in the same high-frequency data-burst transmissions as the military radio sets. They ran towards the sound of the gunfire, Michaels pausing only to grab one of his armed men and order that every one of their guards be set to the perimeter immediately.

  It was just one of them, passing by on their slow-motion travels in the freezing cold weather, and attracted by random chance to the noise and the smells and the bright orange flames licking up the side of the building. It turned towards the attractive sounds, its unthinking brain associating the disturbance with food, and it shambled uphill away from the road.

  What remained of its nose was turned up into the air to sniff, and it detected the sweet scent of fresh flesh. Before the ravaged vocal chords could issue the high-pitched screech of attack, a bright blossom of flame and noise showed ahead. It rocked backwards, the torn rags of the shirt it had been wearing so many months before being blown away along with most of its right shoulder. The right arm hung limply, the muscles and tendons severed to make the two-handed reach only fifty percent effective. The second shot, the beautiful and deadly bloom of fire and lead erupting from the end of the shotgun’s barrel took the entire left side of the face off the creature. As gruesome as the inflicted injures looked, they were far from effective at rendering the former person less dangerous. The shocked and terrified guard fumbled with cold fingers inside thick gloves that denied him the sense of touch in locating a pair of fresh cartridges to charge the double-barrelled weapon again. He was forced to look down, to locate the new ammunition with eyesight in the poor light, and when he looked back up, he let out an animalistic squeal of pure horror.

  With one useless arm hanging by gristly threads and half of what had once been a face scoured from the bone by the flensing shot, the thing bore down on him and drove him to the ground. He held the gun across his chest, screaming in short, pathetic gasps as he pushed the weapon out to keep the snapping jaws away from the exposed skin of his face. The rotting jaws opened and closed repeatedly, trying to find purchase and fulfil its sole purpose in life. It gave up trying to reach the face, i
nstead turning and burying the broken pegs in its mouth into the thick sleeve of the waxed jacked the man wore. The bite force was unreal, sparking a howl of agony from the frozen sentry, but something inside him knew that the fight wasn’t over; knew that the teeth hadn’t broken his skin and told him that he still had a fighting chance to survive.

  He abandoned the attempts to push it directly away from him, instead allowing the arm it was biting to drop and rolled it over away from him. He flew to his feet with a speed and flexibility he didn’t know he possessed, struggling in a hideous tug of war which ended in the glittering of once-white teeth cascading through the air as the gripped sleeve was torn free. He staggered backwards a pace, righting his momentum, reversed the shotgun and brought the butt down savagely hard, twice, three times, until he stood and allowed the tears of fear and adrenaline to flow freely down his face.

  He looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps; multiple and moving faster than any undead attack would have a right to. He smiled weakly at his reinforcements, grateful of the living company to tell his ordeal to, but blanched when he saw the face of the man who looked at him. Michaels regarded him coldly, eyes darting from the ruined head of the zombie to the man clutching at the arm which was already bruised by the sheer bite force of the attack. Something flashed between their eyes, another instant of communication, but this one was wrong.

  “It didn’t bi…” the guard managed, before Michaels raised the barrel of his gun and fired a bullet into his skull from three feet away.

  Michaels and Nevin looked down on the two bodies lying at their feet, happy in their ignorance that they had contained any potential outbreak before it had started.

  “Stay here,” Michaels told Nevin, “I’ll send someone to take over.”

  He walked away, thinking that he had a bad feeling something more sinister was happening.

  “I’m stuck,” hissed Ellie after she had helped Jessica over the barbed wire strands of a fence that had been recently repaired and reinforced. Pauline turned back, trying to help free the snagged denim on her thigh as the younger woman tried not to cry out from the stabbing pain.