The Warrior bucked, pitching the Lima forward to break its nose and knock its remaining teeth out on the metal, before tumbling it back into the slower ones in its wake; just in time for the heavy tracks to crush and crunch them into the straw-strewn dirt. The weak barrier of wooden doors didn’t slow their escape for even a second, as the dry timber exploded outwards in far less spectacular fashion than in any action movie.
Accelerating away and flattening the rearmost stragglers, Johnson saw a flash of bodies through his viewport until the road ahead was clear of obstructions. It was like a snapshot his mind took, which didn’t even allow him the time for the image to develop. He thought fleetingly of the instant cameras he’d seen which could do this. His snapshot revealed to him some explanation for why the last few were late to their surprise breakfast meeting.
A woman, age unfathomable given the decaying ruin of her face and sagging, emaciated body, stumped towards them with both arms reaching out as if begging for their help. She had an exaggerated, lop-sided limp due to the fact that her right foot was missing from mid-shin. The thing beside her, two heads shorter and destroyed to the point of appearing androgynous, walked with a wobbling gait as the broken bones of its legs threatened to give way with each step.
Twitching the controls fractionally to his left, Johnson made sure to put both of them under the tracks to save them the trouble of having to walk any longer.
“We’re clear,” he announced. Over the headset he’d hastily thrown over his ears, he could hear heavy breathing but no panic or distress. “Peter, was that Daniels calling us?”
There was no reply.
“Peter?”
“He’s not here,” Bufford said breathlessly, with more than a hint of panic in his quiet words. In response, their forward momentum was cut violently enough for shouts to come through as those in the rear section were slammed into the separation. He began to turn the vehicle around, spinning it on the spot, with the tracks churning the ground up in opposing directions, just as a loud thud sounded on their roof. That thud was accompanied by a second, slightly louder, and two sections above their heads were being scratched and clawed at in animalistic desperation by what could only have been the faster ones; the ones who still retained just enough cognitive ability to understand where their quarry had gone to ground, and who were now trying to dig them out.
“Larsen, is he there with you?” Bufford asked. A pause hung heavy with hesitation before any reply came.
“He is not,” Astrid answered, her own voice sounding broken by the stupidity of their unforgiveable mistake. Two of them were Special Forces soldiers, trained to a staggeringly high level and accustomed to working in small teams. The very core of their ethos was to always work as one and never leave anyone behind. More thuds and shrieks sounded as their Warrior was swarmed by the remains of the crowd, which had swelled to a far larger number than they had originally thought.
“We’re going back,” Johnson announced, delivering the statement as if daring anyone to countermand his decision. They rolled forwards, not even feeling the bumps of those undead bodies crushed under the weight of their wagon, until Johnson stopped and stared forwards through the limited view he was afforded. He swallowed, feeling a lump in his throat he hadn’t experienced for a long time, as he saw the hundreds of Screechers flow around the barn with the ruined door and head directly towards them.
Bufford saw it too, wishing he could reach out and squeeze the sergeant major’s shoulder to reassure him with the words he carefully chose.
“Going back for him signs his death warrant, Dean,” he said. “We need to lead the rest of these rotten bastards away and come back for him. We’ve got to trust he’ll know to keep his head down, and that we’ll come back for him.”
Johnson said and did nothing for a long time, but simply stared ahead. He couldn’t see the dead ground in front of them, but it was filling up with the tightly packed undead, who pawed impotently at their armoured skin like a cat scratching at a patio door in the rain.
“Sit tight, lad,” Johnson said with a wavering voice. “I’m coming back for you.”
The revs rose aggressively as the Warrior shot backwards and slewed left, before loud clunking noises indicated their switch of gears to launch them forwards and down a tree-lined single-track road, away from the farm.
“Light those fuckers up, Buffs,” Johnson snarled, no longer able to hide the sound of his sniffing nose betraying the fact that he was crying for the first time in as long as he could recall. “Let ‘em have it and don’t bloody stop until they’re all done for.”
Peter couldn’t sleep during the night. Almost everyone else was so exhausted that sleep wasn’t something they had to find, merely submit to. He was tired too, only something about their location set his nerves on edge and prevented his heartrate from slowing enough to even consider slumber.
Sleeping in a barn made him reminisce the early days of being all alone, and the logical train of thought took him back further to the arrival of the first Screechers he’d seen and the subsequent interactions with his mother.
It wasn’t the horror of what he had seen that put him on edge. It wasn’t the immediate loss of his childhood—what little there had been of one—or any other such self-absorbed sorrow; it was more a reminder of the existence he’d suffered and survived before the dead came back to life and tried to tear the living apart.
He finally began to understand that it was his fear of those living people from whom he’d been unable to escape in what he considered to be his former life. With this thought came the further realisation that he genuinely preferred his current existence, and all that it had given him, to everything prior. This realisation brought on a wave of nausea so profound that he had to stand upright and lean against the side of their small tank to steady himself.
That nausea turned to a grumble in his stomach, so threatening it couldn’t be ignored. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom inside the barn, showing him a slither of silhouette and the barest of reflections of light from the axe head in the hands of the person taking their turn to keep watch.
He remained still, hoping that he hadn’t disturbed Kimberley and taken her concentration away from her task. Reaching down slowly for what had been his pillow, he scooped up his battered backpack by the loop on the top and carried it with him as he tiptoed towards the creaking stairs leading up to the mezzanine level. He had to move so slowly, taking each step with infinite care and precision so as not to wake them all up. But the only alternatives were to go outside—not high on his to-do list—or else perform the basic bodily function that was nagging at him in front of the others. Given the option of climbing the rickety stairs and doing what he needed to do in private, he elected for that choice.
Reaching the dusty, dark privacy of the upper level, which looked as if it had been abandoned for its original purpose many years before, he used the precious possession of the green metal torch and its red-filtered lens to bathe an eerie glow on his task.
Reaching into his bag and working by feel, he pulled out the item he needed and used the sensitive tips of his fingers to locate the edge of the cellophane wrap and stretch out a length of it, then he used his teeth to cut the plastic and pull away a square to lay it on the ground. Carefully unfastening his belt, he lowered himself into position with the empty plastic bottle held in place for the secondary function, and tried to stay silent while he did what he needed to do. When he’d finished, he used some of the precious toilet paper flattened inside the top pocket of his pack. Wrapping the unpleasant bundle to seal the odour inside, so as not to attract the unwelcome attention of anything less than alive, he added a second layer of plastic wrap to the package and settled it neatly in a crevice far away from anywhere it could be found, allowing himself a smirk that perhaps one day, when their country was reclaimed, someone would find the preserved remains and open it for an unpleasant surprise.
Feeling much lighter and less uncomfortable, he settled himself again
st a pile of old, dusty sacks and found the spot more comfortable than he had been at ground level with the others. Despite the scratchy feel of the old, rat-eaten material, he found his eyelids getting heavier by the second as the crack of starlit blackness through the doors grew ever so slightly grey, until he drifted off into a light sleep that would last for barely an hour.
The dull crackle of a radio speaker tickled his consciousness, making him think that he hadn’t tuned his clock radio properly to one of the four stations he could get from his room. He reached out with his right hand, expecting to find the long, rectangular button that would allow him just a few more minutes of sleep before he really had to get up or face the consequences of having to be told to do something twice by either of his parents.
He groaned as he stretched, reaching out further to find his school clothes to pull them towards him and slip them on under his covers, but his hand didn’t touch folded cloth like he’d expected. Instead, it found the worn-down grip of the sawn off shotgun resting on top of the rough material of his pack. His small fingers explored it as his eyes stayed closed, finding the metal of the trigger guard cold to the touch, which served to send a bolt through him, like it was electrified.
His eyes flew open as the shouts of alarm from below cut through his reverie. Grabbing his bag with a gasp of panic—because any one of his companions shouting meant that there was imminent danger—he leapt up to join them, totally forgetting his environment and slamming his forehead hard into an exposed wooden beam of rough wood.
The blow didn’t knock him out, not out cold anyway, but it dealt enough of a blow to stun him sufficiently that he could only watch through a wide crack in the warped floorboards. He saw the rear end of their Warrior surging out of the barn in a cloud of thick exhaust smoke, to rip the doors off and let in a wash of dawn light. It also exposed the invading crowd of Screechers left moaning and following their escape to step and stumble over their crushed and partly destroyed comrades alike.
Peter didn’t move. He hoped they wouldn’t be able to detect him where he was, relying on the smells of so many warm-blooded people there, mixed with the thick fumes from the Warrior in the confined space, to sufficiently confuse the ones who remained there.
He watched, still face down on the exposed boards of the treacherous mezzanine, as the few who lacked the sense to follow the mobile can of zombie spam milled about beneath him like lost souls;
He didn’t panic, at least not at first, but instead watched one Screecher with fascinated interest as it moved uncertainly beneath him. It took three or four staggering steps in one direction, before stopping and throwing its head wildly from left to right in search of something, only to repeat the process over and over.
Inside the safety of his head, Peter gave a commentary to the Screecher’s behaviour, chuckling to himself as it amused him to imagine what it was thinking, if it could think. He watched it fly forwards again, knocking over his sticker—his modified pitchfork that had seen him through a number of sticky situations—as it froze and looked about, bewildered.
What the bloody hell did I come in here for? He heard in his head. The thought spoke in his mother’s voice, which didn’t bother him at first, but when the confused zombie repeated its behaviour, he heard the words spoken again with more venom, as if it was his fault that his mother had walked into a room without knowing why; blaming her only son instead of her alcoholism or her sick mind.
He scoffed involuntarily, and through the wide split between the two wooden boards where his right eye had a clear view of the ground below, he saw the confused zombie freeze and crane its neck awkwardly upwards until it stared straight at him. He didn’t breathe, waiting for the awful, ripping noise of the shriek he fully expected at any second. That shriek, he knew, would attract more of them. He could see it playing out from start to finish in his mind with brutal clarity. They would try to climb the old stairs, collapsing them and trapping him on the upper level. Even if any of them made it close enough to reach him without falling, he knew he could defend that narrow staircase until the end of time with nothing but a plank of wood.
If he had an endless supply of water and food, that was.
He knew he only carried enough water for a day or two, but after that he would be too weak to make any attempt at escape with a chance of survival above zero.
In a moment of realisation so sudden and overwhelming, he knew he had to escape now or else be trapped to die of dehydration over days of agony, when he would grow weaker and more delusional by the second.
Snatching up his backpack, he stood, not rising to his full height as the drying blood on his forehead, leaking from just inside his hairline, served as a harsh reminder, and he made for the stairs just as the noise hit him.
It wasn’t the noise of a shriek. Wasn’t the battle cry of a Screecher calling out the location of food to every other undead bugger in earshot. Instead, it was the very loud and oddly reassuring sound of heavy machine gun fire barking out big bullets a way down the road from him. He watched through the gaps in the floor again as the handful of confused undead still stuck in a time loop inside the barn made directly for the exit to follow the sounds of gunfire.
Granted the slightest of reprieves, Peter threw himself down the stairs as fast as he could, to break through a broken board five steps from ground level. He thumped down hard, banging his face painfully into the dirt, to be rewarded instantly with the taste of blood in his mouth. He scrambled to his feet, his fumbling right hand grasping desperately for the shaft of the pitchfork, to throw himself from the barn and turn instinctively in the direction where he saw the fewest undead shambling towards the building.
He ran, stopping and slipping in a painful slide that left him on his back as his feet backpedalled desperately to avoid another group rounding a corner further ahead. He got back to his feet, diverting his route towards a ladder set against the side of a large, low building and he attacked the rungs with as much speed as he could muster. Reaching a flat roof larger than the barn three times over, he lay on his back and listened to the sounds of gunfire getting further away with each echoing burst.
“They’re leading the herd away,” he told himself in a quivering whisper. “Then they’ll come back for me.” His eyes screwed shut and his mouth contorted as his body betrayed him and he began to break out in tears. He forced it away, managing to keep it at bay for a few seconds but then the tears came in a flood that he was unable to stop.
He cried angrily and silently to himself as he lay flat on his back on the roof, his chest heaving and his diaphragm spasming like an inconsolable toddler, all the while hearing the sounds of the engine and the gunfire fade away, as the only people he’d ever trusted since his sister was taken from him left him all alone.
THIRTEEN
“In English, Doc,” Fisher said with a smirk that Grewal guessed was intended to make him seem confident. It didn’t, instead lending the American an added air of arrogance that made him marginally less likeable than he had previously been. Grewal sighed, not in an exhausted way in spite of the few hours’ uncomfortable sleep he’d had, but in a mentally tired way that conveyed just how much he enjoyed explaining complex matters to his intellectual inferiors. He sat, sucked in a breath and looked the CIA man in the eyes.
“The serum works within the very small and confined tests we’ve conducted. There is still a very long way to go to ensure that its lethality is fine-tuned sufficiently, bu—”
“That’s getting away from English again…” Grewal swallowed down the retort he knew his tiredness threatened to unleash, before answering in a measured tone.
“Stage one looks good,” he said in a strained voice that bordered dangerously on being too sarcastic. “Stages two to four need to go just as well before we can say we have a cure. What I really wan—”
“You dragged me all the way down here to tell me that you’d what? Got a gold star in a third grade math test?”
“I’d have come to you, only I’m
not permitted to leave the facility,” he answered through gritted teeth, continuing before Fisher could interrupt again. “That’s not the breakthrough we’ve made, however.”
At the mention of the word ‘breakthrough’, Fisher shut his mouth and shot an expectant look at the scientist. Taking his uncharacteristic silence as permission to continue, Grewal spoke.
“I won’t bore you with the details,” he said sarcastically. “However, we made an unexpected discovery during testing yesterday.”
“This is how one of your lab rats ended up with a forty-five through the dome?” Grewal ignored the interruption, knowing Fisher’s silence was too good to be true.
“The subject became so animated that it literally broke itself apart trying desperately to get to the source of a simple noise.” Grewal held up both hands to keep Fisher quiet long enough to complete the report. “A soldier was trying to tune a radio set and stumbled on a patch of static that was barely audible to us. That frequency sent the subjects quite literally wild. It was like a feeding frenzy; like the phenomenon of sharks sensing blood in the water and becoming almost mindless with bloodlust. We need to harness that sound and utilise it to draw all of the infected into central locations where we can re-infect them with the completed serum.”
Fisher sat still, eyebrows almost meeting in the middle as he processed what he’d just been told.
“Sooo,” he answered, “you’re telling me you know their personal phone number? Their magic frequency? You know the sound that drives them wild and you want to use it as a lure?”
“The sound itself isn’t necessarily the real trigger, probably more likely that it simply simulates one of them, getting it agitated as it hunts or kills an uninfected host… like I said: blood in the water.”
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 91
