Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  Test subjects, he thought sourly, huffing to himself and earning a mild look of query from Fisher. He shook his head to deflect any questions, and instead began organising where he wanted the equipment unpacked.

  “When can you start collecting specimens?” Chambers asked, standing near to Grewal but wearing an expression of distaste to make it clear that their being on the same side wasn’t by choice on his part.

  “This evening,” Fisher answered simply. “You’ll have something to work with tomorrow. The MRIID guys will run the security side of this facility and they have orders to put down anything not under direct and total control. That understood?”

  The two scientists caught each other’s eye for a fleeting second, then both nodded, sharing an understanding in that moment that they were on the threshold of something either very important or else very dangerous.

  The plan was simple. They would take samples from infected hosts and run the same tests that they had against the pure viral strain back in the labs on the other side of the Atlantic. Those updated samples, or ‘real world’ samples as Grewal called them, could throw up any number of complications to spoil their perfect world lab results. Numerous factors could affect the viability or severity of the infection, making it more or less resilient to any possible ‘cure’ they could devise. As if reading his thoughts, Fisher asked them both a question.

  “Don’t give me long answers,” he warned them, “but can you make a cure we can use?” Chambers and Grewal looked at one another

  ‘Cure’ was a subjective word, given that those infected would be killed off, but technically speaking it could cure the rest of the world by killing the infection in the hosts. Chambers sucked in a breath and pursed his lips, radiating anger that his years of experience and research were treated like everything was a yes or no answer when it came to anyone from the military or the government. Grewal adopted a different approach.

  “If our compounds work the same in the field as they did in the lab, then yes,” he told the agent simply, having gone over this very subject with the man more than once already.

  “If,” Fisher answered. “Lot of ifs involved with things nowadays…”

  “Well,” Grewal said in a tone of voice designed to end the conversation, “if we don’t get any test subjects, there will be some definite nos.”

  SIX

  Johnson was more comfortable driving the Warrior than he expected to be. It was a vast improvement on the previous generation of fighting vehicles he’d driven before, and combined all of the things he liked and added a whole raft of new tricks and gadgetry. He still had that unavoidable fifteen metres of limited vision when he drove closed-down, with the hatches sealed to protect them from anything outside that felt like biting them. He mused that they—the developers of such mighty war machines—would only solve that problem when they gave the drivers television sets with externally mounted cameras, so that they could play the most expensive of arcade games.

  “Left at the next T-junction,” came Bufford’s voice through his earphones. “Left, left.”

  The repetition was something so familiar to the military men; men who could ill-afford a mistake when half hearing words with a subtle difference such as ‘no’ and ‘go’. Johnson acknowledged the instructions, grateful for them, because he couldn’t make out the road signs clearly after such a short time without the routine cutting back of trees and hedges. Even after the bitter winter had forced so much life to retreat in the exceptionally low temperatures, nature was rapidly reclaiming the land.

  Another voice cut through to him, this one female and curious in accent and inflection, but the tone of it made things clear to Johnson that the speaker was suffering.

  “We have to stop,” Astrid Larsen said, her voice sounding thicker and more sluggish than usual.

  “Is everything okay back there?” he asked, concerned that something was wrong in the rear troop-carrying section of the armoured beast he was nursing along the relatively smooth roads.

  “The fuel tank,” Larsen said with evident difficulty. “It is moving and making us all sick.”

  Immediately Johnson eased up on the controls, more like those of an aeroplane rather than a conventional car, to slow their ride and hopefully reduce the effects they were feeling. He cursed himself for not recalling the rumour around the base when these new vehicles arrived for testing; that their transparent fuel bladder caused seasickness to those sitting next to it in the back.

  He paused at the junction, seeing a pub on the opposite side of the road with an almost empty car park and he decided that it was more than open enough to offer them a chance to rest. He called it out to Bufford sitting behind and above him in the commander’s position, waiting as the man assessed the ground through his viewport before he agreed.

  The Warrior rolled in, turning almost on the spot instead of looping a wide arc to swing around like a car would, and came to a stop in the middle of the open tarmac.

  “Is it clear?” Larsen’s voice came over the radio. Johnson peered out of his own limited view, seeing nothing to cause him any worry, and waited for the SBS man to give the word.

  “Looks good,” Bufford declared. “Let’s take ten minutes.”

  Hatches open, rear doors wide, the armoured fighting vehicle looked oddly out of place in the semi-idyllic setting of the country drinking hole. The two abandoned cars sitting on flat tyres, and the overgrown, neglected feel of the building and beer garden spoiled it somewhat, but those in the back didn’t seem to care for those small things as they spilled out to steady themselves and gratefully suck in long breaths of chill air.

  Johnson and Bufford, both with weapons in hand and eyes constantly roving for threats, didn’t ask them such stupid questions like enquiring if they were okay; merely allowed them the time to settle their stomachs after sitting beside a huge, sloshing fuel tank for the past hour. Peter, clambering down the dappled green hull, jogged to Amber and knelt down to her. He asked if she felt sick, but the girl just smirked and shrugged one shoulder up to her ear as if to say that she was fine and couldn’t understand why Astrid and Kimberley were so affected.

  The sight of the two children interacting, still a welcome novelty that made the adults both happy and at the same time tragically sad to watch, was interrupted by the sound of glass breaking.

  It wasn’t a smash, not a shattering blow of a window imploding under force, but was more of a ringing, snapping sound, as if someone had leaned on a single pane too hard. All heads whipped towards the source of the noise and saw nothing coming from the building to indicate an immediate threat, but still they readied their weapons as Peter ushered Amber back towards the safety of the vehicle.

  Guns up into shoulders, with the exception of Kimberley and Peter, who held their melee weapons with sweating palms and formed the second rank of their small defence, they held their ground to see if anything presented itself.

  Nothing happened. The eerie quiet of the car park told them nothing, as sweating hands gripped weapons tighter in preparation for an impending confrontation with the dead, as feet shuffled nervously to adopt the perfect stance in readiness. A gentle change in the breeze pushed the light wind into their faces and carried with it a hint of sweet, necrotic flesh that they recognised all too well.

  “What the hell are we doing?” Peter asked in a hushed whisper from the back of their formation. “Why don’t we just leave?”

  The solution to their peril, so simplistic and easy to recognise for someone so young and logical, stunned the trained soldiers for a heartbeat. Their heads had been filled with angles of fire, approach routes of the enemy and their numbers; with the risk of the faster ones being in play, and all manner of other problems that Peter’s mind wasn’t encumbered by through an overload of knowledge.

  Johnson spoke first, mimicking the same low whisper that Peter had adopted.

  “Everyone inside the wagon,” he hissed. “Nice and slow.”

  As they turned to file back inside the
safety of so many layers of metal armour, a new noise broke the spell. A loud bang with an accompanying crack, followed quickly by a second with a louder, more worrying sound of smashing glass and the tuneful tinkle of the broken shards hitting the ground below. As one, their eyes roamed slowly upwards to the first-floor window, breath catching in throats as a collective series of gasps fired like a ragged volley.

  From that window, only fractionally too small for a fully grown adult to squeeze through, protruded the head and left arm of a Screecher which moaned at them and gnashed white teeth set in receded, black gums.

  “Now would be good,” Bufford said as his feet propelled him towards the side of the tank. He dropped his weapon to turn and hoist Peter high up to grasp the top of the hull and begin to pour himself through the open hatch. The sound of the rear doors closing came loudly, but not as loudly as the splintering of wood and more breaking glass as the unseen door holding back the hungry monsters gave way.

  Johnson, moving lithely for a big man with all the encouragement of a gruesome death at his back, knelt on top of the Warrior and slipped the short-barrelled shotgun from his shoulder to point it in the direction of the building.

  His intention was to provide cover, should any of the bastards break ranks and make for one of his group before they were safely ensconced, but if he was honest with himself, he relished the prospect of firing the gun to relieve some of the pent-up rage he had been bottling up inside himself for far too long.

  “We’re in,” Bufford reported. “Let’s go!”

  “Hold on,” Johnson said, telling himself that he was in little danger and that he needed to satisfy a curiosity that had just presented itself to him. He wanted to know, after such a brutal winter, which had followed the hot end to the previous summer and the short, sharp shock of a brief autumn season, how the ones preserved inside had degraded. They’d seen well enough how those zombies stuck in the open had turned out. They were generally ragged, emaciated and pale-to-the-point-of translucent skinned. But his curiosity, mixed with a hint of bloodlust, kept him in position atop the armoured vehicle.

  Behind him, on the higher section of the hull, he heard the hatch bang shut and lock to indicate Bufford’s escape to safety. His own hatch, to the front and left of the vehicle, was open and inviting for him to step down into, but still he didn’t make a move.

  “Come on!” Bufford’s voice yelled from inside, the sound travelling out through the open hatch to him. He turned to look at the hatch again, only spinning back to face the pub at another, far more insistent noise than the shouting of his comrades. A boot-sole crunching stone—one of those sounds that the mind understood deep down far more quickly than the brain could verbally identify —followed by the desperate sucking inwards of breath in what he knew was preparation for the ungodly shriek the things let out.

  It never got the chance to finish the call to arms, as Johnson’s blast took it full in the chest to throw it down in broken ruin. He’d loaded the gun with the heaviest of hunting shot, effectively launching a handful of small ball bearings into the body at brutally short range before the pattern of the projectiles had time to spread out. The body hit the ground, landing on its back with a crunch as a second, heavier sound copied it. That sound, Johnson saw with disgust, was the head-first impact of the mindless monster from the upstairs window finally wriggling itself free to plummet the short drop to the car park, where it met an instant end, the inertia of the weight of the body cracking the skull to switch off the lights for good.

  More spilled out around the corner of the pub and just as Johnson pumped another cartridge into the chamber on instinct, good sense prevailed as his mind recognised the danger he was putting himself—putting all of them—in, as one of the tightly-packed crowd of overstaying late-night drinkers was leaping over the front ranks with inhuman agility to reach its canned meal first.

  Johnson turned, heading for the hatch just as a mechanical whirring sound above his head forced him to duck underneath the swinging barrel of the main gun. Bufford, likely just as eager for some payback as Johnson was, swung the cupola towards the threat just as the SSM threw himself inside and slammed down the hatch.

  The deafening, chattering racket of the main coaxial chain gun hammering rounds into the mob blotted out every other sound in the world until the hatch was sealed. That gun, firing at the closest range it could manage with the barrel fully depressed, tore bloody ruin through the pack to turn the previously quiet car park into a butcher’s shop in seconds.

  Johnson threw on the headset to hear the tail end of Bufford’s opinion.

  “…oody hell are you playing at? Get us out of here!”

  Johnson fired up the massive engine, throwing it into gear and taking off fast enough to buck the Warrior’s nose up into the air and force the still-firing gun to tear great chunks of stone out of the building in a sweeping arc as they made their escape.

  He didn’t let up until they were half a mile down the road, then he realised he’d gone in the wrong direction and slowed to report his error to the others.

  “We’ve gone bloody east,” he reported, annoyance heavy in his words of self-criticism. “I need to turn us around and go back past the pub. Buffs?”

  “Oh,” the SBS man chuckled, “I’m ready for another pass. Still not letting me use the artillery?”

  Johnson ignored the quip, only giving a low growl in response, not wanting to expend a valuable piece of ordnance by sending a high explosive shell into a pub housing a few Screechers and a now-deceased Lima.

  “Give them another pass with the co-axial,” he said. “I’ll stick to the far right of the road to give you space; make sure none of them gets near us.”

  “My bloody pleasure,” Bufford responded.

  The pub came into his limited field of view in under a minute, and he didn’t slow to allow his gunner the time to enjoy himself, but blasted past at close to their top speed amid a roar of diesel engine revs. The gun began barking and burping its rounds at the strung-out crowd milling about in search of the promised meal that had vanished before their eyes. Johnson steered to the furthest side of the road away from the building to keep his distance, but was still forced to line up two of them to be crushed under his right side tracks.

  In a fleeting moment, they were past, and even though the cupola had swung all the way around to continue firing on the move, the gun quickly fell silent.

  Johnson took a few deep breaths, settling himself back into a more sedate cruising speed, and let out a sigh. In his earphones, he heard amused chuckling rising into uncontrollable laughter which went on for slightly longer than he wanted to tolerate.

  “What’s so bloody funny?” he snapped at Bufford.

  “I… I was just thinking…” Bufford replied in a voice that implied he was wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s probably got to be the longest pub lock-in of all time…”

  SEVEN

  Professor Grewal, along with Professor Chambers and his small team, set up the lab equipment in readiness for having something to work with. As per their requests, banks of fridges and freezers filled one wall of the former livestock barn under bright lights and their samples of potential vaccine cultures had been painstakingly transferred to the freezers from mobile cold storage, using liquid nitrogen.

  Grewal, finding himself at a momentary loss for useful activity, wandered over to where the stainless-steel urn bubbled away keeping the water warm for their drinks. He used a plastic spoon to shovel a decidedly unmeasured amount of instant coffee into a polystyrene cup, before splashing the almost-boiling water in. He looked around for sugar and fresh milk to accompany it, instead finding only an off-brand powdered creamer. He picked it up, inspecting it as he might a particularly virulent strain of bacteria, and decided against contaminating the drink with lumps of the stuff.

  “Yo, Doc,” barked a loud voice from behind him, forcing a small yelp from his lips as he jumped and turned around to face one of the men from the US Army department re
sponsible for all matters regarding infectious diseases.

  Grewal opened his mouth to explain for the thousandth time that he was a professor, and hadn’t been a mere doctorate holder for well in excess of a decade, when he saw the inane look on the man’s face and decided not to waste his breath.

  “Yes?”

  “The frogmen are on the horn, saying they’re coming in hot with a couple of new buddies for you.”

  Master Chief Petty Officer Ryan Miller was unhappy about his orders. He made representations about those orders, even so far as requesting a meeting with the base commander prior to shipping out, only to arrive at the commander’s office to find the man’s desk chair occupied by a guy in a grey suit that screamed ‘Langley’ directly into his brain.

  As soon as he met the man, Fisher, he claimed to be called, although Miller always knew his type to have forgettable fake names, he also knew that arguing was pointless. Orders were orders, and it looked like his orders came directly from the CIA.

  He’d changed his approach then, and instead of standing to attention and addressing a senior officer as he had planned to do, he removed his headgear and flopped into a seat without asking for permission. Treating the man like an equal, even if the son of a bitch was technically in charge, set Miller’s stall out plain as day.

  “So,’ he mused in a tone of obvious annoyance. “You want us to fly to butt-fuck nowhere, England—”

  “Scotland,” Fisher interrupted annoyingly.

  “—butt-fuck nowhere, Scotland, and take a boat to the mainland where we’ll be capturing live specimens of infected humans. I got that right?”

  “In a nutshell,” Fisher told him, politician’s smile not wavering.