Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  “Fall back,” Strauss yelled, startled by the sudden appearance of so many undead heading directly for them from close range. His driver threw the wagon into reverse and propelled them backwards as Strauss shouted the warning over the radio.

  Hearing the news of a mass of dead directly ahead, the first they had encountered other than one or two half-frozen Screechers posing little or no threat, Palmer roared for the rest of his convoy to stand-to. The radio sparked into life again, this time Strauss giving them the bad news that in their haste to withdraw backwards, his driver had beached them on the wrecked remains of a car.

  “Get clear, leave us,” Strauss instructed. Palmer had no intention of abandoning any of his men, regardless of how long for, and he ordered everyone out to form line.

  Like some echo of infantry from hundreds of years prior, Palmer lined the men up shoulder to shoulder to face the onslaught and slug it out toe-to-toe.

  “Make ready,” he ordered loudly as he pushed himself into the very centre of their line and extend the stock of his Sterling, “aim…”

  As one, all of the assorted weaponry of his men drew up level to aim at the oncoming undead who advanced with their mouths open to emit the hideous shriek that had earned them their nickname. Their musty stench ranged ahead of them like a picquet, turning the noses of the armed men and threatening to double them over in repulsion ahead of the main wave of attack.

  Palmer filled his lungs, intending to call the order to fire loudly and whip his men into action. Before he could give the order, a great bark of diesel engine filled the air as a main battle tank, huge and loud in the confines of the town’s streets, revved and rolled towards them on squeaking tracks. Stunned, the dismounted men held their fire and stared in confused awe at the arrival of such a heavy hitter, then watched as it spun on its tracks to turn up the road and rolled forward again, straight into the advancing enemy to crush them down under its sixty-tonne weight. It went ahead, stopping when the tidal wave of undead ran dry, cracked off two short bursts from the mounted MG3 similar to their own GPMGs. The clattering gun went silent as quickly as it had started, and the tank clunked into reverse to go back over the crushed wave of stinking corpses.

  “Give them room,” Palmer instructed, dispersing his men so that they didn’t become living victims of the unfamiliar heavy killer. The tank stopped, nudging its bulk to the side to shunt the stranded Fox off the wrecked vehicle carcass it had bellied out on, like a larger tortoise stopping to nudge a smaller one free of a troublesome rock, then it continued backwards to stop near the rest of the convoy. The hatch opened, and up popped a crisply overalled man with a moustache and a black beret adorned with a silver badge of the tank he commanded.

  He climbed down, stamping to attention as the heels of his boots clacked together.

  “Good afternoon,” he announced in accented English, “Hauptmann Hans Wolff.”

  Palmer took a stunned step forwards, lowering his weapon and raising his hand to return the salute that the man was offering.

  “Captain Julian Simpkins-Palmer,” he answered, unsure what was happening, “how did you… where did…”

  Wolff smiled, disarming his English counterpart.

  “Captain,” he said, “we hear you would be heading this way and we have been intending to do the same.”

  “From who?”

  Wolff held up a hand to calm the questioning.

  “I apologise, Captain, perhaps I should be starting in the beginning?”

  Barrett’s tired Sea King flared in to land on the flat surface directly outside the small control tower of Broadford airfield. Designed for small, light aircraft only, the navy pilot was shocked to see the dull green fuselage of heavier military transport planes, and could only imagine the high-stakes pressure of that landing, which would only be described as ‘tactical’ as the pilot pretty much slammed the plane on the deck and hauled on full reverse to save over running the small stretch of tarmac. On their swoop in he saw what looked like ground works going on to extend the runway, and that kind of investment made him feel happier that this place was designed to stay infection free.

  They were met at gunpoint. Nothing overly hostile, but the intention to use the arrayed weapons was clear.

  “Nothing to be alarmed about,” called a gruff but cultured male voice via a loudspeaker horn, “we need to observe quarantine rules first.”

  Men in biohazard suits came forward, ushering the helicopter passengers away one by one as they were led inside to be stripped, checked, given a fresh jumpsuit and left behind clear plastic curtains where large metal urns bubbled ready for their hot drinks.

  Barrett, Sergeant Ashdown and the rest of his crew in tow, called out for the officer in charge.

  “That would be me,” said the man with the speaker, “Colonel Kelly, British Army.” He wore a sandy brown beret with the famous winged dagger badge visible as it reflected the weak sunlight. Barrett replied with his own rank, introducing the others with him.

  “We’ll catch up when you’ve been processed, Barrett,” Kelly said, turning away.

  They waited their turn, going into another plastic curtained room to strip off and leave their clothing to be burned. The civilians had no issue with this, but the men of Her Majesty’s forces were a little more precious over giving up their uniform. They were assured that they would get replacements, but their reluctance was made worse when they went through to the larger waiting area and found themselves wearing the same plain coveralls as the civilians. Their bearing marked them out as military, and Colonel Kelly approached them on the other side of the thick, clear plastic.

  “Gentlemen,” he greeted them before he was interrupted by a loud voice.

  “Now look here, man,” crowed the voice of their own Colonel, the half-insensible man from a Scottish regiment, who probably hadn’t seen any real soldiering since the Korean War, “tell your man to give me back my father’s claymore!”

  Kelly looked at him, glancing back to Barrett and receiving an apologetic shrug by way of explanation, before ignoring the man as an insignificance.

  “Major Downes didn’t come with you?” he asked the pilot.

  “Not enough room on board and not enough fuel for two trips, Sir,” he answered. Kelly nodded.

  “So, they’re travelling by road then?” Barrett nodded through the plastic curtain in response.

  “The Wolfpack?” a junior officer asked Kelly.

  “Wolfsrudel,” he responded, correcting him with a smirk, “but yes, please do put them on alert.” He turned back to the quarantined men and added, “one hour in here, then you’ll come with me to our HQ to be debriefed.” He announced it as though it was already fact, as though it was written in stone because he had decided it. He gave off an air of arrogance, but one matched with a brutal competence and confidence in his abilities and the abilities of his men that such arrogance was almost instantly forgiven.

  “But I warn you, gentlemen,” he said ominously, “the situation may not be as rosy as you were hoping for.”

  Epilogue

  “Doc, are you certain that you can create more of the virus from the research material the Brits recovered from your lab?” drawled the man in the grey suit with an accent that could only be narrowed down to somewhere on the lower east coast.

  Professor Sunil Grewal bit back the correction that he hadn’t been a mere doctor for over ten years. Something told him that the man in the very plain suit with the very plain face wouldn’t have cared anyway. The men and women of the CIA all had one thing in common when it came to him; none of them seemed to give much of a damn about what he said or thought, only what he could do.

  “I am certain that I can,” he said, “but the question remains of why you would want me to.”

  The suit didn’t answer his question, but simply turned away and gestured at the doorway where another suit was bringing in a bespectacled man in a lab coat, clutching a leather satchel to his chest. Everything about him said that he wasn’t th
ere by choice.

  “Doc Grewal, Doc Chambers,” the suit said, introducing them. Grewal knew of Professor Richard Chambers by reputation. He was an immunologist who had spent most of his life working on vaccines. Scientifically speaking, the two men were opposite sides of a coin; Chambers had devoted his life to stopping nature’s destructive will, whereas Grewal had enhanced and weaponised it. The two professors nodded a wary greeting at one another, as though they were both waiting for the punchline, when the suits began to file out of the lab.

  “Make more of it, then figure out how to kill it. The president needs a vaccine in a month to start rolling out production. Make no mistake, gentlemen, it’s not a case of if this virus reaches the United States but when. I suggest you use your time wisely.”

  With that, he left and shut the door. Through the glass section Grewal could see the uniformed guard standing mutely in place. He turned to Professor Dick Chambers, holding out a hand to be shook and opened his mouth to speak.

  Chambers hit him in the face with a nervous and tentative right-handed jab, shocking them both. He hit him again, harder this time as his confidence grew, and rocked the man back on his feet. He hit him a third time, dropping his satchel and putting his body weight into the blow to knock the other scientist off his feet to land hard on his backside.

  Grewal dabbed a hand to his face, feeling lips already swelling and taking his fingertips away from his nose covered in a film of oily blood.

  “Are you finished?” he asked as he looked up at the tearful, red face of his attacker.

  “Yes,” Chambers said, “now show me what ungodly mutation you’ve cooked up, and I can see if I can undo your god-damned Frankenstein’s mess.”

  Part Five

  Adaptation

  Prologue

  “Absolutely not, Professor,” said the man in the grey suit, with a cold finality to his words. He didn’t raise his voice, but the intensity was there. “No way. No how. No chance whatsoever.” He stabbed an index finger onto the desk to underline his point in case he hadn’t been heard clearly. “No.”

  “But,” Professor Sunil Grewal whined, annoyed that the bureaucrats lacked the ability to comprehend that what he was asking for was vital, “without subjects to conduct the research on, Professor Chambers and I simply won’t be able to confirm whether or not the serum works, let alone what side-effects it might have on—”

  “He’s right,” Chambers agreed reluctantly from the only other chair in the room, which he’d occupied without offering to his colleague. The two men hated one another, or at least Chambers despised Grewal, as he’d been personally responsible for creating the unnatural abomination which had wiped out what he guessed would be more than half of the world, by that point. “Without a test subject, a series of test subjects ideally, we can’t be certain of anything.”

  “I’m confused,” said the suit who called himself Agent Fisher, as he leaned back at his desk and steepled his fingers. “You assured me that the recipe you cooked up in the lab killed the virus ten times out of ten. Explain to me how that’s now wrong.”

  “It’s not wrong,” Grewal snapped petulantly. “Tests in a petri dish are very different from tests in live host subjects. Already there have been reports of… variations in the behaviour of some infected subjects, and we aren’t even close to beginning to understand or explain why that is. If you’d simply allow us to study a series of captured specimens a—”

  “Study?” the CIA man enunciated coldly. “Captured Specimens? Professor Asshole, I’m not sure you fully understand the ramifications of those words, so let me lay it out for you.” He whipped a hand up and snapped his forefinger and thumb together, indicating to Grewal that he should keep his lips firmly together while the man spoke.

  “Studying a captured specimen means constructing a purpose-built lab with strict control and containment procedures. That holds significant risk to the United States Armed Forces personnel involved in every aspect. Furthermore,” he said loudly, repeating the gesture with his fingers to stop Grewal from interrupting when he saw the opportunity. “Capturing those specimens would require missions in hostile territory to return an infectious host subject to US soil and jeopardise those personnel on the mission. Moreover, we would threaten the safety and security of the entire United States by bringing even one of those things back here, so no, Professor, you can’t ha—”

  “What if we don’t have to bring them back here?” Chambers asked quietly from across the office, his eyes staring upwards at the ornate patterns chasing themselves over the ceiling. Grewal and the suit looked in his direction, waiting for the rest of his thought. Chambers leaned forwards in his chair, eyes back on the two men and his hands moving with the words he used to air the idea out loud.

  “There’s a secure, military-run base in Britain, right?” he said, waiting for a reluctant nod from the CIA man, who wondered which one of the people at the facility had been talking too much. “So we task their military to capture the specimens and we do the testing over there. That way the whole Atlantic sits between them and home.”

  The suit sat back, watching Grewal out of the corner of his eye before turning to fix him with a direct stare and a crooked smile.

  “I’ll run it up the chain of command,” he said, pretending that he wasn’t a very senior shot-caller and not convincing either of the scientists, “but I’d say you two need to pack up and get ready to fly to Scotland.”

  ONE

  Squadron Sergeant Major Dean Johnson couldn’t sleep. He didn’t sleep much at all anymore. He stood in the morning air, the pre-dawn chill tightening his skin and reminding him that he was alive, sipping from a mug of tea as he thought about the day’s work to come. Exchanging a curt nod of greeting with the evidently cold man standing guard and eagerly awaiting the arrival of his relief, he stared out over the low, rolling landscape looking inland over the half-hidden profile of the Warrior emplaced to guard the single approach road.

  Leaving the Hilltop wasn’t an issue for him as the place had never even remotely been home; home was with his squadron and what he had learned via radio from one of the few people of his former life still alive made him feel like a nomad.

  The crunch of feet on gravel made him stiffen, until he reminded himself that he wasn’t in danger, wasn’t out in the battleground that was anywhere not protected or fortified against the remnants of the population who had died yet continued to walk the Earth. Turning, he saw the expected sight of Peter stepping in his direction; his small feet treading lightly, as if suggesting the boy had evolved and adapted to this new and brutal world as much as the faster type of Screechers had. He gave his young companion a nod, warmer than the one he’d given the sentry, and softened his usually harsh features with a small smile.

  “Can’t sleep either?” he muttered in a low voice, sympathetic to the fact that almost everyone else there was still slept.

  “Never do,” Peter answered in a tone of voice that made him sound forty years older than his mere decade. His brow furrowed slightly as he thought about it. “Didn’t before, not really, and finding out about…”

  He trailed off as though saying the words out loud would make the knowledge of his sister’s survival and subsequent disappearance all too real. Johnson reached out his huge left hand and rested it gently on the nape of the boy’s neck, giving him a light squeeze of reassurance in an attempt to convey how he felt.

  So many emotions ran through him at that moment. He felt a heavy loss for the boy and, if he were honest, for himself. He felt a burning and fierce pride for the sacrifice of the two Royal Marines who had held their own long enough to allow him to drive the box van away from their small sanctuary and save the lives of the two children and the others, and that pride swelled inside him when he learned from Daniels that they had made it out alive somehow.

  “I know, lad,” he said, feeling the words to be wholly inadequate but needing to voice his understanding. “I know. We won’t give up yet, though.” He looked
down to meet Peter’s eyes with his own. “You believe me?”

  Peter gave a sad smile which seemed to say that he knew Johnson meant the words but he was just too pessimistic, too broken by the events of the last months, and indeed all of his life before, to allow himself to believe anything good could ever happen again. He let out a long, resigned sigh.

  “If she’s survived this long,” the boy said as he shrugged his shoulders to hide his neck from the cold air, “then I’m sure she’ll manage a little while longer.”

  Johnson felt a wave of sadness at his words because he realised they were given to reassure the old soldier and not to provide the child beside him with any form of comfort.

  The boy’s resilience and maturity humbled Johnson. He’d seen more good sense and practicality from him than from many soldiers he’d commanded in his years, and could only imagine what Peter would have become if he’d had a better start in life. If he’d had the opportunities and education which had been wasted on Oliver Palmer, he’d have quite likely become an intelligent and capable leader, like the infuriatingly arrogant second lieutenant’s older brother was.

  Both of those men were gone now; travelled north to Scotland, according to Daniels. He let out his own sigh and wondered if he’d ever meet up with them and the other members of the squadron again.

  “I’m sure she will,” he said quietly, bringing his attention back to the world and the boy’s words. “I’m sure she will.”

  Peter seemed to shake his own dark mood off in the same moment and rolled his shoulders to stand taller, as though he’d banished the frightened child inside him to his room without dinner.