His vision of these new enemies was jolting and fleeting at times, but each small visual clue left him with a growing sense of dread and revulsion. New flashes of horrific and bloody injuries seared his eyeballs as his mind lost valuable thinking capacity through imagining how those wounds could have been inflicted. His reverie was snapped back to the present by a request from the rearmost car to open fire on the Screechers.
“Tell him no,” Johnson said loudly to the radio operator. “Save the ammo.”
As they pushed deeper into the outskirts of the town, the pillar of black smoke became more and more visible from the direction of the hospital, which sat atop a small rise. Calling out the change of destination for it to be relayed, he steered his column away from that area and towards the centre of the town. Pushing slowly through the tighter streets, and nudging cars and vans clear of the road every few hundred yards, their progress had slowed through a combination of shorter sight ranges and more obstructions than there had been on the wider roads outside of the built-up area.
Realising his mistake, Johnson called a full stop and ordered them all to cut their engines.
Sitting near to the main square of the town, its origins going back hundreds and hundreds of years to a time when the town walls kept out the invading Vikings, the sudden silence felt oppressive in the surroundings. High-sided buildings of cut stone and cobbled side streets held the last echoes of their big engines for so long that he thought he was imagining it, until it finally dissipated and left him feeling almost alone. He wasn’t, he knew, he had close to forty men with him, and they were all safely ensconced behind thick armour plating and looking down the barrels of heavy machine guns and some even larger weapons to their rear. But still, despite the logical facts of being safe and protected, he still felt very much alone.
Perhaps that isolation was more about the burden of command than about the physical aspects of being lonely.
The silence he heard, or more that he felt, wasn’t a true silence. There were still the ticking and clanging noises of the ten engines cooling down, as well as the echoing ambience of a town thrown into sudden silence by the absence of normal daily life; but other sounds began to creep into his consciousness.
A bird call, raucous even at a long distance away. A building alarm, an insistent bell ringing, from somewhere indeterminate due to the confusing sounds that bounced between the rows of tall stone buildings. A shout, high pitched and pleading, from somewhere up ahead. Or behind. Johnson’s head whipped back and forth to try and locate the sound and not be tricked by the echo. He heard it again; a woman’s voice, shouting at the top of her voice and dragging the word out excruciatingly.
It said, help. More precisely, it swore.
Poking his own head out of the hatch on the other spacious − or at least spacious by light tank standards − Sultan armoured car behind, Palmer’s eyebrows almost met in the middle as he watched Johnson snatch off his helmet and headset and fling his head wildly from side to side.
“What the devil…?” he muttered to himself, just as the radio burst into life and he could read the lips of the man speaking.
“One troop, form a rear guard at this position. Assault troop, advance one hundred metres and cut engines; listen for survivors,” he snapped, looking in the direction of the troops he was talking to as he gave the orders. All around them, big engines barked into life and belched clouds of black smoke into the air. The four smaller tracked vehicles bucked and reared as they drove ahead, and Johnson gave a rapid order to his driver to follow, meaning to halt his small section of two vehicles at the mid-point between the Fox cars and the Spartans. Hating being a spectator again, Johnson was forced to listen to the action unfold as the light tanks blocked his view.
“Female, second floor window. Stand by,” came Maxwell’s clipped voice over the radio. “She’s indicating something to us… contact, enemy front, wait out.”
Johnson, unknown to him but watched intently by his radio operator, pressed down gently on the topmost bullet in the spare magazine on his webbing. The rough, hardened skin of his right thumb rubbed the exposed brass smooth as he repeated the gesture over and over. He knew there was no point in demanding an update from them, even less sense in driving up to them and losing visual contact with the other half of his current fighting strength, so he had to supress the urge once more to push his way to the front of the queue and get his bayonet wet. The seconds ticked by, then the radio sparked to life again, only it wasn’t what he was expecting to hear.
“Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha this is Foxtrot-One-Zero, contact rear,” the voice rabbited, giving the information in a single word with barely a pause in between.
Momentarily torn, Johnson’s logical brain kicked in to ask the question into the mic before he even knew he had decided on it.
“Foxtrot-One-Zero, stand by. Foxtrot-Five-Zero what is your situation?” He said, telling the panicking voice behind them to hold on until he knew what Maxwell was doing.
The rearguard was sealed up tight behind armour, whereas his vanguard had civilians in the open and would have to open their doors or put lives at risk.
“Twenty plus approaching, civilians preparing to come out. Enemy not responding to warnings,” came Maxwell’s terse reply. Behind that report were the sounds of various troopers going through the motions of their training and following the rules of engagement.
They had these rules of engagement drummed into them over and over. They could not use any more force than the minimum necessary, as ambiguous as that was, and they were told time and again to fire only aimed shots, that automatic fire could only be used against identified targets, and that a verbal warning should be given whenever possible.
Johnson knew how impractical those rules could be, even with an enemy who could hear and respond, but he also knew that his men found comfort in the repetition of training and that comfort allowed the rest of their actions to flow smoothly. Like training the cupola on a target, like calling out their firing arc and reporting ready, like asking for permission to open fire.
“Automatic fire,” Maxwell announced, “go on.”
The gunners, as inhumane as it would have seemed to the uninitiated, smiled as thumbs pressed down on controls and the four GPMGs sparked into boisterous life to cut down the approaching waves of shambling and screeching enemy.
The bullets these guns fired, even though they were the smallest armament their armoured column carried, unleashed their destructive power on the gathering crowd. A single GPMG, with a thousand rounds of belt-fed 7.62, could bring down a small house. Four of them, vehicle-mounted and interlocking their arcs of fire where every other bullet streaked a fiery-red line towards their enemy, wreaked savage and unholy devastation on the slow-moving forty or so blood-streaked people stumbling at them, their mouths open and returning their own salvo of spine-numbing shrieks and hisses.
In seconds, the rippling gunfire that appeared visually like a series of lasers ceased as there were suddenly no more bodies to convert from living to dead. Johnson watched on as Maxwell organised the recovery, just as the radio sparked to life again.
“Permission to engage?” came the request in a tone of sheer panic. Panic, in Johnson’s opinion, was more dangerous to his troops than enemy fire could be.
Fire could serve to rally his men against their foe.
Fire could be ineffectual, and the inaccuracy of incoming rounds could serve to raise the morale of his men.
Panic, however, did not miss. It was one hundred percent accurate, one hundred percent of the time.
They were trained for chemical warfare, as every soldier was, given the tensions with Russia. Any man or woman in uniform on the western side of the Berlin wall was on a moment’s notice to pull on their thick, rubbery protection suits. They were trained to seal themselves up inside their armour to escape nuclear fallout and other such horrors of modern warfare, but the only thing that could penetrate that armour was panic.
Panic and fear, Johnson
corrected himself, but fear wasn’t an immediate danger.
“Negative,” he responded coolly, “report.”
“They’re coming from bloody everywhere!” came the cry of response, “all around us,” Johnson heard the irregular pounding of meaty hands on the outer hulls of the armoured car where the transmission originated, along with the mechanical whine of the car’s turret rotating. Closing his eyes and holding his breath momentarily, Johnson resisted the urge to enquire as to the height of the radio operator and to opine that he was unaware shit could be stacked that tall. Instead he gave his orders very simply and calmly.
“Foxtrot-One-Zero, advance through the enemy one hundred metres and hold fast. Acknowledge?”
A pause on the other end, then, “Foxtrot-One-Zero, roger. Advance through enemy lines one hundred metres and hold,” came the response of Maxwell’s voice, much more calmly than whoever had spoken before. Then he heard the sound of the Jaguar engines roaring up their revs to power away. Johnson didn’t want to, didn’t need to look to know that the four heavy wheels of each vehicle would be crushing the bloody bodies of the attackers. Pushing the thought away, Johnson turned his attention back to the front. He knew that the sixteen men now moving through the town would be safe inside their vehicles, not only safe but actually offering yet more protection to the rest of the column by attracting the Screechers through the noise they would be generating,
Maxwell, in Johnson’s opinion one of the very best combat leaders in the squadron, had organised one crew to dismount and source alternative transport for the civilians. Watching as the window to a van was broken, Johnson saw a trooper lift the locking pin and pull himself up behind the wheel, which he wrenched hard to snap the steering lock, then shout something at the rest of his crew, who began to push the vehicle. Johnson knew what he would be doing; handbrake off, clutch down and gearstick into second. As soon as the momentum was enough, he dropped the clutch out and the engine sparked to life.
SIXTEEN
Kimberley Perkins leaned out of the second-floor window of the bank she worked in to shout at the very top of her lungs. Over and over she called for help after the stone canyons of the town centre echoed loudly with the reverberating barks of engines. From the second she heard the noise, like a squeaking, rolling thunder. Having worked for the last four years in the bank where they now sought refuge, she knew that it was more than the regular noise of everyday vehicles.
Hollering until her voice gave out, she was finally rewarded when the four green wedges shot towards her on their tracks. Turning to the almost fifteen people trapped inside with her, she smiled with a confidence she didn’t truly feel, but needed to display to calm them down.
She had never been able to endure people’s inabilities to adapt and had always faced any situation with an almost implacable strength of character. When the screams had started, Kimberley was the only cashier working, as half the bank staff hadn’t even turned up for work. She, like everyone she knew, had been following as much as she could of the emerging situation in London, but was as clueless as the others about what it meant for her. Having been born in London and initially raised there before fate conspired to move her west along the southern coast of England, she recognised some of the streets and landmarks in the background of the news reels, and a small stab of homesickness pricked at her heart every time. When the horrific realisation of the TV blackout hit her, it was already too late.
Living in the centre of town anyway, and it being only a short walk to work, Kimberley’s world was, geographically speaking anyway, incredibly small. She noticed nothing on her short walk to the bank, not even the absence of the regular amount of foot traffic, but the first hour of the day made her skin tingle with a slight feeling of dread, as the anticipated morning rush never came. After that came the sounds of sirens. In itself, the sound of a siren wasn’t unexpected as the bank was in the town centre where the ambulance station, fire station and police station were all a short walk away. She didn’t even hear the sirens any more, not really, since her apartment was in the same location and she had long since become accustomed to the noise.
But today was different, because the sound of sirens had been constant for ten minutes straight, and then faded to nothing. Not nothing, precisely, but a void. A vacuum. A hollow space that seemed both absent of any real information, but similarly full of noise that confused her. That vacuum soon filled with noises which were discernible from the general cacophony, and the eyes of the non-staff of the bank began to fix on each other’s as screams sounded in the town. When half a dozen people bundled in, pushing and shoving each other as they ran, and begged for help, then she finally knew it was happening.
She still didn’t know what it was, but it was a safe bet that whatever had prevented the flow of information out of the capital had found its way to their town. It had a soundtrack, even if it didn’t have a name, and the soundtrack that accompanied the disorder was riddled with screams and hisses and metallic screeches ripped from human throats.
“Upstairs, everyone, now,” she called aloud as she stood, directing the staff and newcomers towards the heavy metal door that led to the secure part of the building.
“Miss Perkins,” snapped the deputy assistant manager, a peevish man of her age but only half her presence. He had relished the lack of staffing that day as he took charge. “Members of the public are not allowed in the restricted part of the bank,” he whined.
Before she could respond, the answer was given loud and clear from outside in a far more effective way than she could have explained.
A young man, his face a sheet of blood from a torn scrap of skin and hair that flopped over his forehead and his eyes milky white, slammed his whole body into the heavy plate glass, and slowly worked his jaw as he tried to chew his way through the impenetrable barrier that kept them safe. Everyone inside the bank froze and stared at the man, his greasy coveralls slicked red with fresh blood. But a woman joined him with the same percussive slam as her body bounced off the glass, only to return immediately and cause a long, squeaking noise to vibrate through the room, as her top lip was pulled upwards by the resistance of the glass. Her teeth were smeared red, which extended down from her mouth to discolour the light blue shirt she wore over a navy, knee-length skirt. Her eyes, the same opaque cloudy orbs as the man’s, bored through to them.
“Upstairs!” Kimberley shouted again and, as though their heads were on the same piece of taught string, the two people chewing at the glass snapped their heads in perfect synchronicity to lock onto her. They needed no further encouragement, and as one, they surged for the heavy, reinforced door that was opened with a combination to swing outwards. No sooner had the first five people bundled through that door amidst shouts and noises of panic than another three loud thumps reverberated from the front window.
Kimberly was the second to last person at the door, the last man being the peevish manager for the day, who was counting people through for no particular reason she could discern. He flinched but did not turn to see what had caused the new noise.
He looked at Kimberley’s face and slowly began to mirror her emerging look of dread. Not having the courage to turn and face whatever new horrors had arrived to shatter his orderly world, he kept his eyes down and pulled the heavy door closed.
Others in the town centre weren’t so lucky. Only the banks had windows that didn’t shatter and implode under the onslaught of hungry, feverishly aggressive mouths. The number of infected rose with each step closer towards the emergence of the virus, and those attacked weren’t always lucky enough to escape with an infected bite to die at home as the fever burned through their bodies. When attacked by three or four of the things, often their victims would fall where they were attacked to be torn apart.
Looking out of the window high above the street below, Kimberley saw exactly that happen before her eyes. A woman, wearing the brightly coloured uniform of a travel agent in the style of that company’s air hostesses, ran into the street s
creaming foully, only to be hit hard from three different directions and have the air driven from her lungs when they took her to the rough ground. The three attackers bit her, clawed at her with their nails and pulled chunks of her flesh away where they could gain sufficient purchase on it. Kimberley ignored the shouted questions, the hysterical tears and the screams of panic and confusion which sounded from behind her and watched as the three cannibalistic attackers stopped in perfect unison.
They just stopped, for no evident reason that she could understand, and turned their attention elsewhere as they looked for something, someone, else to attack. As they rose and melted away stiffly, Kimberley was left watching the bloodied and torn body of the woman, who she could see, even at that distance, had previously been adorned with a perfect face of makeup before the blood had splashed to mar the overall effect. The eyes, unclear as the two floors in height separated them, stared upwards blankly in death until the view was obscured by a sudden cloud of condensation covering the window. Kimberley, in her shock at seeing a murder in the street below her, had forgotten to breathe until that point when the part of her brain that took responsibility for such things restored order, and forced her lungs to inflate. She watched, fixed intently on the body of the woman in a state of semi-shock, as a way to cope with the screaming debates that raged behind her. She had no idea how long she remained there, minutes at least in her wide-eyed catatonia, but the next terrifying turn of events woke her to full alertness.
That same part of the brain that forced Kimberley to breathe again, not that she could know it, also kicked in to high gear in the woman lying in the street below in a large puddle of her own blood. Thinking that she had imagined it at first, she saw the ravaged body of the woman twitch once in a full body spasm. Trying to ignore that as a trick that her confused and frightened brain was playing on her, she visibly jumped as the body convulsed electrically once more. Now convincing herself that it was a process of her dying, Kimberley rationalised what her eyes had told her brain. But what she saw next could not be rationalised, nor could it be explained.
Death Tide Page 12
