Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  “Hurry up,” Jessica warned them, watching back up the hill in the direction they had slipped away from as louder shouts drifted down to them.

  “Got it,” Pauline told Ellie, shaking her hand to try and numb the pain of the metal stabbing into her thumb. Ellie’s other leg went over the fence just as another hiss of warning came from the girl.

  “They know,” she said, her whisper an octave above where it had been previously, “they’ve got torches.”

  They did indeed have torches, and in the frost-covered grass of the slope leading away from the hilltop prison was a thick line of disturbed ground showing darker than its surroundings. The three women moved with renewed urgency as the threat of instant pursuit spurred them on. No more gunshots had come from the hill, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any more if they were discovered.

  “Which way?” Ellie asked as they reached a thick hedgerow at road level. Pauline didn’t answer, she simply turned left and followed the line of the thick foliage for over a minute until she stopped and ushered them over a wooden style in a man-made break in the hedge. It was overgrown, but the gap was still big enough to let them through. They dropped down onto the roadway, the surface icy under the sharp crunch of old snow yet to thaw.

  “Come on,” Pauline hissed at them, taking off down the road at an uncertain pace due to the treacherous footing. They made as much ground as they could, slipping and helping one another when they lost their feet. Steam gathered around them in a haze as the moonlight illuminated them in a way that they couldn’t see under the weak lights at the hilltop. Bathed in a shiny purple ethereal glow, they moved quickly, with their ragged breath coming in gasps. They knew they had to move fast, to put distance between those chasing them and themselves, but with each step the fear grew that they would be caught.

  Jessica said nothing, but she was forced to stop when she was winded. She had no breath left and the painful stitch in her side doubled her over and made her recovery even less effective. Ellie noticed first, sensing that there was one set of footfalls too few, and turned back to her. Pauline hadn’t noticed them stop, hadn’t heard Ellie’s hiss of warning, and with each second the gap between them grew wider. Ellie didn’t dare shout, for there were still things out in the countryside that were more frightening than men with guns, but she was stuck between the two people she had fled with. She was closer to Jessica, and knew that Pauline would surely stop and wait for them when she realised she was alone. As Ellie walked to Jessica, seeing the girl grimace and stand tall to try and catch her breath, she saw a curious haze of light behind her. It took her the half a dozen steps to reach her before her brain computed what the growing glow meant, and when she reached the girl she grabbed her and dropped to the ground, rolling them both into the ditch where the trickle of ice-cold muddy water threatened to take the breath away from them both. Jessica gasped, but the sound was barely audible over the grumble of an engine moving slowly along the road, following their obvious tracks.

  The engine note waned, idled, then picked up again as the lights passed by Ellie and Jessica. Both of them squeezed their eyes shut tightly, hoping that if they couldn’t see their pursuers, then perhaps their pursuers couldn’t see them. Ellie realised as soon as the truck had passed and left them in darkness again that the tracks they’d left must have been confusing, but they hadn’t stopped so instead the truck carried on.

  Only one set of footprints left? Ellie thought. What if one person was carrying the other?

  Quite why she reasoned the logic on behalf of the people hunting her she didn’t know, but perhaps understanding your enemy was the key lesson.

  “We need to go, now,” she whispered in Jessica’s ear. The girl’s eyes shone brightly back at her as they reflected the power of the fat moon high above them. She nodded once, understanding what they now both knew.

  They couldn’t help Pauline.

  They forced their way through the hedge to emerge in the field on the far side, then set off in a straight line across the dark countryside at an oblique angle to the road.

  Pauline saw the road ahead of her grow lighter, just as the unmistakable rattle of an engine reached her ears. She slowed, then stopped, and turned to face her impending humiliation and punishment as the truck lights illuminated her with full beams and made her turn her eyes away to save being blinded.

  She had lost the other two somehow, but she had not seen or heard how or when they had disappeared. She knew it was some time ago, because all she could see as far as the distant lights were her own footprints; clear and very singular.

  The truck stopped in front of her, the sounds of doors opening and closing, and a torch was shone directly into her face.

  “How many others ran with you?” a voice demanded. Pauline said nothing, but smiled a sweet smile that had ‘fuck you’ emblazoned all over it. The man behind the torch hit her once, a brutally hard backhand that caught her between jawbone and cheek and sat her down with a sickening thump into the slushy snowmelt.

  “How many?” the voice growled again, the promise of more pain evident in the tone.

  “Five,” Pauline lied with no idea why she said what she did, “three men and three women. We all split up.”

  Silence met her lies, underpinned by the chugging rattle of the truck engine.

  “Bring her back,” the voice said, “she can be an example.”

  As she was dragged to her feet and thrown into the hard back of the pickup truck, the man climbed in behind her and rested his cold, wet boot soles on her body.

  “You cost us a guard,” the voice of that bastard Nevin said, “and Michaels won’t be pleased with you for that.”

  SIXTEEN

  Dawn saw activity all over the region. The four-man SAS team deployed to seek more food and resources to both survive the winter and in preparation of making a very long and uncertain journey by road.

  The three-person team slipped from their fortified village base with no fuss and even less noise, taking their van on a long-range scavenging run in the hopes of staving off starvation.

  Nearer the coast, burnt wreckage and scorched mattresses were shoved over the cliff as the clean-up started at the hilltop. The rotten corpse of the lone attacker was discarded over the edge, along with the rest of the detritus but the dead sentry, dead at the hands of Michaels as everyone had heard, had apparently been popular. The others wanted a proper burial for him. They wanted to challenge the man over his account of their friend’s death, as not one bite mark was evident on his body.

  “You dig a bloody hole in frozen ground then,” Michaels had spat at them, “because I wouldn’t bother.”

  They did bother, despite how difficult and backbreaking it was, and questions began to be asked about the woman who had been dragged back up the hill during the night. The people wanted to know what Michaels was going to do with her, and Michaels responded by telling the people that he would do whatever he damned well felt like doing, and if they didn’t want to find themselves out on their ungrateful arses, then they would do well to stop questioning him. Those with questions faded away, and even some of those trusted with guns began to side with the majority.

  Michaels, that evil bastard who was always beside him and who seemed to share the same mutual hatred for everyone and everything, and half a dozen others all clustered closely as though they could sense the change in mood.

  The mood faded as most of those men left in vehicles to search for the missing men and women who had apparently fled in the night. Sneering down at the people who watched him leave, Michaels reached above him and pulled down the heavy hatch before the small tank he rode in drove away.

  “Contact, north west,” Mac called softly from his standing position with binoculars pressed to his eyes, “looks like multiple Screechers, standby…”

  “Talk me in,” Smiffy said, having abandoned his imitation of a television personality the instant Mac called the threat out.

  “Past the stone cottage,” Mac said, having
widened his view to include the foreground briefly so that he could accurately describe the location to his sniper, “hedgerow following wes…”

  “Got ‘em,” Smiffy cut him off, “just two by the look of it…” he went quiet as he watched the targets approaching them from a long way off. Downes and Dezzy were behind them somewhere, clearing out a larger building which would be useful for storing and sorting the supplies when they called the marines and the remainder of the squadron in.

  “Don’t seem that rotten,” Smiffy said skeptically, “probably hibernated inside.”

  “Drop ‘em,” Mac instructed him, demonstrating his opposing ethos to their Major when it came to the undead. Downes was of the opinion that if they weren’t close enough to threaten them, then it was a waste of a bullet, whereas Mac wanted to put down every one he ever saw, because it would need to be done eventually anyway and he wasn’t one for putting off today’s job until tomorrow. Smiffy took two longer, deeper breaths as Mac heard the click of the safety catch disengaging on the stolen Soviet rifle. He watched through the binoculars at the distant figures shambling over the field, waiting to see their fuzzy shapes drop in response to the sharp crack he expected to hear.

  “Hold up,” Smiffy said, “something ain’t right with these…”

  “What’s not right?” Major Downes asked as he emerged silently behind them onto the low rooftop they occupied.

  “Two dead bastards,” Mac said, “coming in across country.”

  “Specify, what ain’t right, trooper.”

  “Don’t look that dead, Boss. Only… only sort of half dead,” he replied, prompting silence as everyone brought out their optics to try and see what their shooter had seen.

  “You know what, Smiffy?” Downes asked from behind his compact binoculars, “I think you might be right. Mac, Dez; left flank along hedgerow. Smiffy; with me.”

  Jessica didn’t speak as she walked, just as Ellie behind her kept silent. Both of them were frozen to the core, filthy and soaked from the ditch water which hadn’t dried from their clothes, despite having walked all night and through the dawn. Both were exhausted to the point of collapse, but neither wanted to stop as the fear of pursuit was constant in their minds. As they crested the rise and looked down into the shallow valley towards a small collection of houses and what looked like a village hall, Ellie simply pointed the direction they should head in and both trudged onwards, shivering in silence.

  A crackle of twigs sounded ahead, making Jessica and Ellie snap their heads upwards to find themselves looking in the same direction. Both of them froze, and Ellie looked around on the ground for anything she could use as a weapon. Kicking at a lump of rock, she prised it from the stiff earth with difficulty. She hefted it in her right hand, pushing Jessica behind her, who clutched at the pathetically small sharpened teaspoon retrieved from her boot.

  Nothing moved. No more sounds came from the thick hedgerow ahead of them, and their breath began to slowly return to normal.

  “Put down your, er, rock, please,” came a cultured and strong voice from over their left shoulders. Ellie yelped and spun, trying to push Jessica behind her again and only succeeding in tripping the girl, who fell to the frozen ground behind her and was too weak to get up. Jessica yelped then, seeing two men dressed in black clothing and carrying machine guns emerge from the bushes. Behind her, Ellie found herself looking into the clear, bluey-grey eyes of a tall man with his hands held out to show open palms. A gun hung on his chest, and various other dangerous looking items adorned his torso and waist, but his eyes pierced through everything to convey a message to the young woman that she was safe now.

  Ellie dropped her rock, sinking to the hard earth beside Jessica, and both sobbed with exhaustion and relief.

  Michaels had stopped talking to Nevin, solely because the man was annoying him. He wanted to go back, wanted to show strength in front of the others back at the Hilltop and maintain their control over the people. Michaels thought the man wanted to get back behind their defences and hide in the warmth, which was no bad thing in his opinion, but Michaels desperately wanted to find the people who had escaped his rule.

  He had no idea it was just two women, or a woman and a girl, who were unaccounted for, but any loss was galling to him and he found himself pathologically unable to let it pass.

  He had forced Nevin to stop their cramped armoured scout car, the Ferret with the thirty-calibre machine gun mounted on top and told the man to get out. The two of them walked carefully around a frozen, deserted village with their weapons held low but ready. Neither expected to be set up by any of the dead bastards out in the open, not in those temperatures, but it didn’t pay to be complacent at any time.

  That caution, that alertness, paid off when they both heard the sound of an engine at the same time. Their eyes met and, despite their almost obvious dislike for one another, both men recognised the need to work together. The Ferret was too far away, parked down a side street as it was too much of a giveaway to leave on the main road, and both men instinctively sought appropriate cover more attuned to the dangers of Northern Ireland than to a frozen southern English village amidst the undead apocalypse. The engine note grew, splitting into two distinct sounds with one lower, heavier note and another higher-pitched with a slight rattle. Michaels looked over at Nevin and caught his eye. He showed him a flat hand and waved it down in the cramped confines of the doorway he occupied. As awkward as it was, the signal for ‘take cover’ was obvious enough. Nevin nodded back, sinking out of sight into the shadows.

  They waited for almost a minute before a dusty and frost-free box van rolled through the village. Michaels saw a flash of blonde hair, long and naturally straight, in the cab. Following after that, at a distance he could only describe as tactical, was a dirty beige Montego with a single male driver. Michaels waited until they had passed into silence, then rose to see Nevin emerging on the opposite side of the road.

  “See the woman in the truck cab?” Nevin asked him. He nodded, having his guesses firmed up by Nevin’s information.

  “And what do you reckon was in the truck?”

  “Well the signage said something catering, so…”

  Michaels smiled, seeing that the two vehicles had left wide, black tracks in the freshly fallen dusting of snow that a blind child could follow.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s follow those tracks.”

  Downes and his men left Lieutenant Lloyd with the village they had cleared as they tried to keep the woman and the girl out of sight in the back of their adopted Land Cruiser. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust the marines, it was more that they saw no further need for excitement. They did consider requesting a loan of Marine Sealey, the only surviving medic from the island, but Smiffy said that he was capable of looking after them.

  “It’s just a bit of mild exposure,” he said casually, “nothing a warm-up and hot drinks won’t cure.”

  Water had been boiled on a small fire fuelled by solid white blocks that burned with a chemical intensity, and powdered hot chocolate was found in the hall. Dezzy found two mugs, added sugar liberally from the sachets he found in the kitchen area before pocketing as many as he could grab, and brought the drinks out to them, where they were safety wrapped up in blankets. Neither of them baulked or even pulled a face at the amount of sugar they were being force fed. Downes filled Lloyd in on their find, made their excuses and drove the frozen refugees back to the house. Neither spoke over the almost one hour they spent in transit, and both fell asleep leaning on one another, much to the annoyance of the two soldiers cramped in the boot space on top of their kit and radio. At least neither of them felt the urge to ask if they were nearly there yet.

  Arriving back and threading the emplaced defences which visibly marred the approach to the attractive house, Downes looked back the way they had come. Fresh snow had fallen here when none had been seen in the valley they had searched, and their tyres made wide, dirty scrapes in the earth, which was adorned with vast coils of ba
rbed wire strung between fenceposts driven into the ground at uneven angles between the neat excavations of earth from the trenches. In the frozen snow it looked just like the pictures he had seen painted from memory by the survivors of the Great War. The thought left him under a dark cloud, as already the death tolls of the two conflicts were horribly uneven.

  “We’re here,” he announced, glancing at the woman and the girl, who had regained consciousness to blink and stare out of the windows. Neither of them answered him, not that he expected them to, given their recent ordeal, and they were ushered through the house to the warmest part, which had always been the kitchen.

  “Sergeant Major Maxwell,” Downes said comically, referring to Denise and not her husband through the intimate use of formality. The two had spoken at length on more than one occasion as they sat at the heavy butcher’s block work surface. He found her to be every bit as reliable and essential to the effective running of the house as her husband was, having been thrown into the role of the senior NCO after the tragic loss of the Squadron Sergeant Major.

  “Clive?” she answered quizzically, looking up from her task in the big, deep sink to stare at the bedraggled pair he guided into the room and steered towards the massive range, which radiated heat. “What’s all this?”

  “Found these two young ladies this morning, both rather wet and cold,” he told her.

  “Who are they?”

  Downes hesitated a fraction longer than was normal, arousing suspicion in the woman. “They haven’t spoken yet,” he answered, worried that Denise would think he was palming off a problem onto her. She shot him another look, one that bordered on disappointment, and turned to the shivering arrivals.