That silence didn’t last long, as the renewed moaning and shrieking from below forced them both to snap back into action again.
“We cannot stay here,” she said to him, whipping her head left and right to both keep watch and look for a viable alternative to their current predicament. Peter calmly levered over the catch to break the shotgun in half and up-ended it to allow two spent cartridges to drop to the rooftop. Slipping the bag from one shoulder he thrust a hand into the pouch where he knew the full cartridges would be. He slipped the reloads into the barrels, hearing the satisfying pop each side and gripped the chopped-down stock to flick his wrist and snap the breech closed. Restoring the gun to the top of the bag and the bag over both shoulders, he stooped to pick up his pitchfork and nodded at Astrid to signify that he was ready.
As he caught her eye, he saw how hers flickered to her left—his right—and turned to see another two pairs of mottled grey hands breach the high ground.
“Silage,” Peter said as he pointed to one of the longer sides of the building. She didn’t understand the word or his meaning but followed anyway, seeing as an idea she didn’t understand was better than no idea at all. Reaching the edge of the roof with the boy at her side, she saw the twenty foot drop to the tops of low, black plastic covered mounds.
He turned to look at her face, seeing the confusion and scepticism evident.
“It’s just grass,” he explained in rapid words, “cut and piled up there with plastic over the top. It’s to feed cows,” he added as though the purpose of the practice would assist her understanding.
“And this is a safe thing to land on?” she asked him. Peter couldn’t say yes for certain, but when another shriek behind them from the direction of the ladder added to the chorus of moans from the other side, he guessed they didn’t have much in the way of options. With a shrug, he stepped off the rooftop, throwing his legs out ahead of him to fall a few seconds before landing hard on his backside.
The landing was much, much harder than he’d expected.
It had been one of the games he played on the farm where he grew up, climbing on the great mountains of cut grass as his father reversed a tractor up and down the steep slope in order to crush it down and squeeze out as much air as possible. When those great slopes of squashed grass filled the slots between the rough concrete walls, they spread huge sheets of thick, black plastic over them to seal in the grass and let it rot just enough to be exactly what the cows wanted over the winter months.
What Peter hadn’t taken into consideration was the fact that this grass had been there for months longer than usual, and the added time left to ferment provided a lot less cushioning than his childhood games told him there would be.
He landed hard, knocking the wind out of himself and shooting a pain up through his spine from his tail bone that threatened to make him vomit, on top of losing the ability to breathe temporarily. A thud beside him warned of Astrid’s arrival at almost ground level and her melodic voice hissing curses in a language he didn’t understand made it obvious that she’d also expected a softer landing.
If their impact was painful, the meeting of running zombie and rough concrete just above them was catastrophic. It had gained the rooftop just as Astrid’s blonde ponytail had disappeared from view. Breaking into a run to catch the escaping food, it sailed clear over the ledge of the roof and overtook the woman as she’d dropped vertically downwards. The momentum of the reckless run took it past the small covered mounds to slam it into the hard ground below. As it rose, broken leg bones crunching when it struggled mechanically to regain its feet, the top of its head fountained outwards as the head snapped back to start the slow, spinning descent to the ground. Peter looked to his left to see Astrid lying flat on her back with a pistol in her hand sprouting a fat pipe on the end of the barrel. She scanned that barrel left and right before dragging herself to her feet with a hiss of pain. Peter followed, not waiting for any invitation to move, and the two of them fled across the farmyard to seek higher ground.
“Why are there so many of the fast ones?” Peter gasped quietly to her in between sucking lungsful of air.
“This,” Astrid replied, also out of breath, “is what I am thinking also. There!” she said, pointing out a tall, steel structure standing forty feet off the ground. Peter saw it, recognised a grain storage silo when he saw one, and also knew that if they were seen going up there they’d never be able to come down again.
“No,” he said, tugging her sleeve back while all around them, the shrieks and moans echoed ominously. “We’ll be trapped.”
“Trust me, Peter,” she said. “We just need to stay off the ground long enough for them to come back.”
“Where the fucking fuck are these fuckers fucking coming from?” Johnson roared in impotent rage as he crunched the Warrior over another group staggering down the single track road.
“There’s something going on,” Bufford answered from behind him. “This ain’t right; not even for the shit-show we live in. And why are they all the fast bastards?”
They had turned around twice now, or at least they’d tried to, and the decision to save ammunition had long ago been made as they faced three or more Screechers for every bullet they carried. Using the heavier 30mm ammunition was even less sensible as they’d probably attract more than they killed with each heavy, percussive shot. Johnson idly wished they still made canister for their guns, or the more modern flechette ammunition, effectively turning their small cannon into a giant shotgun. One shot of that could clear a hundred or more of the bastards, packed tightly as they were on the road, following the noise of their engine.
“Go left here,” Buffs interrupted Johnson’s daydreaming as bodies still crunched under their tracks. The Warrior slowed and lurched slightly as the junction was taken too fast to be comfortable, not that comfort was their main concern at that point, and Johnson trusted Bufford to read the map to direct him back towards the farm, after their circuitous route to lead as many of the mob away while crushing those in the road as a bonus.
As he drove, fighting away the worry and panic and banishing it from his mind, since that would serve only to reduce his effectiveness, he allowed his mind instead to wander towards other questions that needed answering.
Why has another swarm appeared now? After a winter of seeing very little activity, he had begun to hope that they were dealing with a few stragglers and had turned his attention towards the potential of more living enemies.
And why, he asked himself, angrily echoing his question to Buffs, is almost every one of these buggers a Lima?
“Left ahead,” Bufford said, interrupting his thoughts, “single track for three miles. Staggered crossroads; left again.”
“Roger,” Johnson acknowledged, happy that he was effectively driving a box around the area to head back for the boy and female commando he was trying not to think about, in case his guilt overcame him.
“Twenty minutes,” Buffs told him in an attempt at reassurance.
“Twenty minutes is a long time,” Johnson whispered to himself as he narrowed his eyes and focused on driving as fast as he could without crashing.
TWENTY
“There! I heard it again!” Jessica said excitedly.
“Okay,” Daniels told her, “I believe you. Just get your bloody head back inside before something takes a bite out of it.” Reluctantly, she lowered her body away from the open hatch, for the spot to be re-occupied by the tall, quiet soldier who carried his weapon like it was a prized possession. Or his first-born child.
“She’s right,” Enfield said after a few moments. “Towards our ten o’clock. That’s seven-six-two if it’s anything.” Daniels, having seen the marine for what he was, took that assessment as pure fact without question. Instructing Duncan to look for roads branching off in the direction of their ten o’clock, he fought with the map until he was looking at the right section for their general area.
There were far too many zombies around for his liking, and more t
han one person had voiced an opinion that something was going on, because there was no reason for every dead person in the county to suddenly up and decide to head in one direction. He didn’t know anything about that, but he did know that he was much happier heading back into a fight with the two royal marines on his side.
“Mortars?” The marine sergeant, Hampton, pondered aloud. Daniels, the sound so familiar to him as to be ingrained in his psyche, answered before Enfield’s mouth could even form a word of response. “That,” he announced confidently, “is the sound of Mrs Rarden birthing six of her most troublesome daughters...” When silence greeted his poetic musings, he sighed, “I’m wasted on this audience. That’s 30mm on full auto. One of ours. The SSM’s over there.”
It took them over half an hour to battle their half-blind way through the country lanes towards the last place they could guess the sounds were coming from. No more gunfire sounded, which made the task of hunting down the original source difficult, but eventually they rounded a bend in the lane and saw a small crowd of dead clambering over one another to form a rising mound of once-human bodies, all of them reaching upwards for what looked like two small shapes clinging onto the fragile frame of a metal silo.
“Sarge,” Enfield said urgently. He didn’t raise his voice, merely spoke with an increased intensity that cut into everyone crammed inside the small space of the armoured vehicle.
“What do you see, lad?” Hampton asked with mirrored urgency.
“Need you on that gun. Two friendlies up high, and two metric fuck-tonnes of Screechers underneath. My nine o’clock.”
Hampton didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t describe himself as a brave man; that self-awarded description was for people who craved recognition for the things they did. Bill Hampton was simply the personification of a no-bullshit attitude that allowed him to get the job done. He didn’t act how he did to get his men to like him; instead, he just did his job to the best of his ability and the men loved him for it, just as they didn’t perform to avoid his punishments, but out of a need for the sergeant to like them; to tell them they did well.
Without questioning the matter of his personal safety, he undid the hatch and squeezed his wide shoulders out of the gap to swing the big machine gun in the general direction of the things he didn’t like and started blasting away.
He fired in short, controlled bursts like he had always been taught. In fact, the only time he had ever fired one of these beasts on fully automatic for an entire belt was eight years prior when he’d lain on his back on the high ground at San Carlos bay and fired a full belt at an Argentine fighter plane wreaking havoc on the vulnerable ships at anchor. He hadn’t told anyone the story, and those who had seen him do it weren’t encouraged to repeat the tale, because it wasn’t necessarily something he was proud of.
He was proud now, he realised, but he knew that he didn’t need anyone else to be proud of him. He felt no remorse for the dead because they had no souls. They fought for no cause and had no regard for anything. Their war would rage until the end of humanity and beyond. The dead weren’t the sons and daughters of people any longer. They weren’t just like him, only on the other side of the battle lines, and he unleashed hell on them with a stony expression.
Two hundred rounds of ammunition, to the uninitiated, sounds like a lot of bullets. In truth, two hundred rounds is not nearly enough to get many jobs done. Hampton stopped to attach another box of ammunition and feed it through, before yanking back the warm metal of the charging handle to resume his one-man onslaught.
The growing mountain of dead became a sea of twice-dead, and the reaching hands stopped reaching upwards and began reaching towards him. The gunfire paused long enough for him to lean back and shout down through the gap that perhaps their driver would kindly reverse for roughly fifty paces. At least that was what Steve Duncan chose to hear and not the actual words used, which could only politely be described as ‘salty’.
The incessant, percussive rattling of the machine gun started up again until the remainder of the zombies were spread out in a reducing cone towards their vehicle.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” a voice Hampton recognised shouted at him. Looking up again and recognising the shape of Astrid Larson with her shock of bright blonde hair, he realised he was obviously just as noteworthy to her, although he imagined himself to be significantly less attractive.
“Saving your arse,” he yelled back. Enfield chose that moment to emerge from the other hatch and bring his small rifle to bear on anything in their immediate surroundings still moving. A sharp bark of laughter drifted back to him in answer.
“Where’s everyone else?” he yelled.
“How about I tell you when you get us off this thing?”
“Fair point,” Hampton grumbled to himself as he leaned inside again to give instructions. The Sultan crept forwards, crunching over the bumpy obstructions, which were mostly physically immobilised and not actually dead again. As soon as they reached the foot of the metal grain silo, the two refugees clambered down to drop onto the hull of the vehicle. Hampton’s big gun stayed silent but Enfield continued to spit small bullets into skulls whenever anything threatened their perimeter.
“We’ve got more coming,” he warned them as they obviously weren’t getting inside quickly enough for his liking.
“Are they the fast ones?” Larsen asked breathlessly.
“Don’t look like it.”
“Good. Time to get out of here.” Hampton dropped down and helped Astrid inside the Sultan, where she immediately banged her head and her elbow on exposed metal, providing enough of a distraction that the others didn’t notice the smaller of the rescued people enter. The hatch was closed, plunging them into a darker setting until Enfield closed down his hatch too, to remove the last of the daylight.
“Where are the others?” Hampton asked.
“We got separated,” Peter said. “I was… I was left behind when we were attacked. Astrid came back for me…”
“Johnson took the others to lead away the swarm,” Astrid explained, taking up the recounting. “There seems to be an unnatural number of what you call the Li—”
“Peter,” a voice said from nearer the front. The word was muffled as though the name had been uttered from behind the speaker’s hands, which they had.
“J… Jessica?” Peter asked, but he already knew it was her. He broke down and sobbed like the young boy he was deep inside, pushing his way through the press of bodies as the tears started to flow more freely than they ever had. He clawed his way the short distance to his sister and threw himself against her, until she wrapped her arms around him and cried just as hard and freely as he did.
The two children, reunited against all odds, would not let one another go in the gloomy interior of an overloaded armoured vehicle, and the only other sound to fill the space was the quiet sob of another occupant.
“Where’s my Amber?”
Johnson’s concentration had never been more focused than it had been on that drive. He pushed twenty-five tonnes of armoured fighting vehicle through the overgrown lanes. At the staggered crossroads Bufford had warned him about, he had to throttle back and decide the best way to navigate the obstacle of three cars which had collided so many months ago.
From twenty feet away, he saw the dried-up remains of the driver of a Vauxhall Carlton turn to face his approach.
“Hold on,” he said unnecessarily as he ran the left side tracks over the front of the car with much less discomfort than he expected. Accelerating away, he looked out for signs of the upcoming left turn Bufford had called out to him. Overgrown road signs were barely visible but the faded white lines in the road gave subtle clues to the presence of adjoining roads, if a person knew what to look for. When the centre line turned a solid white, he slowed, looking for the tunnel created by the trees hanging down where the branches hadn’t been forced back by the passage of people in vehicles.
Those branches snapped away as the Warrior forced its wa
y through like they were nothing. The close confines of the narrow road made the going much slower as he fought with the huge machine to keep it out of the ditches either side of them, driving their speed down even more and increasing Johnson’s stress levels. The hull scraped and banged with the noise of their aggressive progress until they emerged from the wooded tunnel into the harsh light of the full dawn. Before them, the edge of the farm opened up with the sprawl of low buildings seeming to grow outwards organically. Everywhere before them lay the crushed and broken remains of so many former people they had destroyed.
Only they weren’t. These had been cut down by gunfire moving in the other direction and couldn’t have been from their escape. Just as Johnson opened his mouth to call this information out to the others, with fears of another Nevin incident surging to the front of his mind, Bufford beat him to it.
“Armoured vehicle,” he snapped as the turret hummed to swing towards the unexpected intruder, “nine o’clock, fifty yards.” Johnson stopped the Warrior and immediately threw it into reverse out of habit. His conscious mind caught up with the subconscious in time to tell him that the likelihood of him having been drawn into an ambush was slim to non-existent. But training born of repetition took just as long to undo as it did to become second nature in the first place. He stopped, realising that he was highly unlikely to get an instant profile recognition, as the man in the turret wasn’t a cavalryman. He hesitated, experiencing a rare moment when he didn’t know the right thing to do; and then the radio came to life.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 96
