Johnson, left alone for a few brief seconds of self-reflection, had to admit that the privileged little prick had something of a point. Also, said prick might actually learn how to manage men and wage warfare against the Queen’s enemies if he understood the orders he gave and, more importantly, why he gave them.
Hearing his name shouted in summons, Strauss went back inside.
“Tell me,” Johnson instructed.
“We gunned down the first wave, moved forward and repeated, then withdrew and held until a third wave came. Mix of thirty-mil and GPMP. After that,” he shifted and cleared his throat, “the Lieutenant decided that it was time to go home.”
“He lost his bottle?” Johnson asked quietly.
“Can’t say, Sarn’t Major,” Strauss said woodenly, “but we had a difference of opinion when I ordered the troop to engage the last wave coming from the town.”
“And then another when you took the long way back?” Johnson asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Very much so,” he said, “did the, er… did the Lieutenant say anything else about me?” he asked timidly, making Johnson glare at the man to try and determine the true meaning of the question.
“Other than the fact that you disobeyed his orders, Sergeant? No. He did not, but perhaps a lesson in how to manage officers is in order for you?”
“Very good, Sarn’t Major,” he said, with a ghost of a smile on his face.
“Anything else?” Johnson asked.
“Actually, yes,” Strauss said as he relaxed and scratched his chin, “the Screechers aren’t all the same.”
That got Johnson’s full attention. “Explain,” he said tersely.
“They seemed to be following a leader, every time they came,” Strauss said, “when they got close, one or two would break out ahead of the crowd and run instead of walk, like they were faster or smarter… stupid really because they were easy to pick off, but I’d be a lot more worried if they came at us in the open without our armour…”
He trailed off, leaving the implication unsaid. Johnson put that fact to one side for now, not that he was overly eager to be amongst the Screechers unless he was behind armour.
“And no sign of being followed back here?” the SSM asked, with obvious stress behind the words.
“Nothing,” he said with a hint of pride, “two ambushes put in on the way back, done in silence, no sign.”
“Good work,” Johnson responded before looking at his watch, “your troop has night duty, so get some rest.”
He watched as the man marched out, then the others filed back in to resume the tasks they’d been performing before they had been sent away so as not to hear. Johnson was left thinking again, only this time about tactics. Being an armoured squadron, they weren’t in the habit of training for being followed and how to ambush their own trail as the infantry did; they were more accustomed to using their advance reconnaissance vehicles, the faster and more agile Spartans of the assault troop, to lure enemy armour into a position their Foxes had smothered with their heavy 30mm cannons. Strauss’ comment that he had stopped to ambush their own trail was logical and sensible, ensuring that he didn’t unwittingly lead a whole crowd of the things to their door. That thought prompted him to issue a standing order to the room for dissemination.
“Spread the word,” he told them, “I need silence as far as we can manage on base. Noise and light discipline during darkness; no point in advertising our presence to them, is there?”
And as soon as he said it, he knew their long-term survivability depended on their ability to find somewhere else to be.
NINETEEN
Peter had no high metal chain-link fences to hide behind. He had no armoured vehicles to keep him safe from biting teeth and clawing nails. He had no light artillery or heavy machine guns. He had no comrades.
He was totally alone, living in a breezy hay loft with a dwindling supply of food and was armed with a modified pitchfork and a shotgun that was too large for him to use.
On the third morning of his new life he woke with the morning sun and went about his new morning routine. He brushed his teeth and put on clean underwear, then did his early chores before eating. He went to the river and checked the three static lines to see if they had yielded anything overnight. One had, but the catch was small. It had also perished on the line, no doubt exhausting itself to go belly up after fighting against the hook caught in its mouth, but Peter would not say no to fresh fish. Refreshing the lines with a new worm on each hook, selected from the plentiful supply he found from lifting any of the small hen houses nearby, he reset his water traps and carried his pathetically small haul back to the barn.
He was young, but he wasn’t stupid. He never struck a flame inside the hay barn as he knew that fire and dry hay tended not to mix.
Actually, he corrected himself, they mixed a little too well. They got on like a house on fire.
Using the electric four-ring cooker inside the small office-cum-kitchen to warm a frying pan, he messily cracked in two eggs as he ran a sharp knife along the underside of the small fish to remove its guts. Chopping off the head and the tail and splaying it open, he scraped out the spine and the little bones running off it and threw the fish in with the eggs. Putting all the waste to one side for the chickens, because those horrible things ate whatever he gave them, he allowed the pan to cool before he ate the contents straight from the cooking surface with a spoon.
Finished, he took his pan outside and turned on the tap which gushed a heavy, almost pressurised stream of water onto the dry, pale concrete. Peter didn’t know that the flow was so strong because those few outside taps ran straight from the mains water, nor did he care, but he had learned that if he turned the tap on full, the flow was hard enough to dislodge anything that he had burnt onto the pan and blast it clean, ready for the next usage.
His stomach full, biology began to let him know that the effects on his digestive system were imminent. Going to the place he had chosen for his toilet, he did the things he needed to do. For some reason unknown to him he chose not to use the actual working toilet on the farm, and instead, the spot he had chosen had some logic to it, as it was the furthest place downstream he went to fish, and hence in his mind did not contaminate the river that provided him with a source of food. Something in his mind had switched and told him that he had to turn his back on the safety of home and its modern trappings, even if he didn’t realise he was still fully embracing those same modern trappings, just on the slightly juxtaposed setting of the farm.
If he had been more aware, maybe more educated or just more experienced in general life, then he would have recognised that it wasn’t modern comforts he was escaping or avoiding, but just the house he had lived in. He had lost his sister and father to some unknown fate, and his mother had become a killer and forced him to do something that he felt guilty about.
He didn’t feel guilty about killing her, but he did feel terrible guilt that he didn’t feel guilty about it. That absence of guilt, the lack of any feeling about killing his own mother, burned at him deep inside, but his only way to deal with that was to bury it.
To deny it ever happened.
To close the door on the event, on the truth, and never go back to it.
That was how his young, fragile mind coped with what had happened to him.
Still early, he returned to the barn and put everything in order by making his bed and policing up his rubbish and empty wrappers to get rid of them. Something in his head, perhaps the lesson on smell betraying prey to predator, had told him that he needed to eradicate the smell of food from where he lived so as not to attract anything to him. That same logic was what led to his morning toilet routines, and what made him naturally difficult to hunt.
Going for his morning lap of the farm to make sure everything was as he expected, he ignored the now pained and somehow annoyed lowing of the tall-backed black and white cattle who lumbered slowly towards the metal gateway when he walked by. He didn’t stop, and he walk
ed more quickly to get himself out of their eyeline so that they quieted down. He turned a corner behind a brick building where the pigs were kept, what few of them there were, and he saw that they had already gone out of their shelter to enjoy the early morning in the field. Their small trotters had turned an expanding cone of the grass away from the building into a swathe of dry dirt in honour of the deep mud they had created in the wetter weather.
Peter walked into the small lean-to, basically a three-sided shed with a roof, and bent down to pick up a bag of feed. Straining and pushing his legs to haul the long, cylindrical bag up, he walked awkwardly towards the fenced field whilst leaning his head to the left to see where he was going. Tipping a quarter of the bag as he sidestepped to the left in an ungainly way, he poured the brown pellets into the long trough, to be rewarded with the thundering noise of small feet running, overlaid with the insistent grunting of a dozen pigs as they pushed their snouts into the food.
Retreating to restore the bag to the lean-to, he cast an eye over the other bags and guessed at the nearly four and a half months of food he had left for them.
One bag, he thought to himself, four days… thirty-three bags…
He thought hard, first dividing the total number in half and then half again, then using his fingers to come up with the rough estimate. Quite why he planned to keep feeding the pigs and other animals when nobody else had stayed behind to look after them, he didn’t know, but he knew he needed to have a purpose. Peter’s purpose, he decided, was to keep the farm running when his father and the others had all gone.
There was nothing he could do for the cows, not to milk them anyway because the big dairy machinery took three grown men to operate twice a day, and not to feed them because the grass was plentiful and would be for months to come. The pigs had feed and were doing just fine with access to the building and their shiny tin arcs in the field. The chickens were much easier as their feed was far more plentiful, because they ate the corn that was in the tall, aluminium silos. That supply of corn was seemingly endless, which meant that the chickens would last longer than the cows or the pigs, and that saddened Peter because he hated the chickens.
Finishing his rounds with the animals, he went back to the barn. Propping his sticker, the once-pitchfork he was secretly very proud of, against the wide doorway he climbed the ladder to sit in his den, where he pulled out a book and worked on his reading.
After a lazy afternoon fishing before his second round of the farm later that day, he retired to the barn for another makeshift meal before tucking himself down in his shelter for the night.
That evening, just as the sun set fully, the rolling noise of the pained cattle, who were calling pitifully in the field, made him release his grip on the soft lamb pressed to his cheek, and wrap the pillow around his ears to block out the sounds of discomfort that he was powerless to stop.
“Sir!” came the panicked call that ripped SSM Johnson from his sleep. He had finally turned in around zero-one-twenty, after hours spent planning possible priority and non-priority missions as well as war-gaming through various situations and theorising on the enemy’s capabilities. Betraying years of soldiering, he rubbed his eyes once and blinked away the sleep to look at his watch, realising that the thing he had called sleep was, in fact, a little under three hours.
“What is it, Trooper?” he croaked, then cleared his throat and followed up his words with, “Report.”
“Sir, the fence, Sir…” gasped the young soldier in panic, “they’re fucking everywhere!”
Johnson looked at the trooper, Nevin. His eyes were as wide as saucers and he couldn’t keep his feet still.
Johnson took a deep breath and held it, then blew it out to signify that the waking-up process was complete. He swung his legs sideways off the cot where he had elected to get some sleep, and poked his feet into his boots, which he laced quickly before he stood to fasten his trousers and shrug himself into his smock and webbing, before picking up his helmet and weapon. Nodding to the agitated Trooper Nevin, he followed the younger man’s lead to go out into the cool night air. Covering the distance to the gate at double-time, he soon found himself face to face with Sergeant Strauss, who had rested his Sabre troop and gone back on stag in the time before Johnson had even got something to eat, let alone had any sleep.
“Sir?” Strauss said in confusion as he recognised the big man jogging out of the darkness towards him.
“Sergeant,” he responded, “what’s the situation?”
“We’ve, er…” he said as he glanced between Johnson and Nevin, “we’ve got a crowd of them come to the fence. There was one of the faster ones here first and a trooper shot it,” he said, glancing again at Nevin, who seemed to know that he had jumped the gun by deciding to fetch help without having been instructed to do so.
“Sergeant,” Johnson asked calmly, “did my orders about noise discipline not filter down to the men?”
“They did,” Strauss answered equably, “but the shot was necessary. The bloody thing was scaling the fence like a spider monkey.”
That silenced any further protest from the senior NCO, who glanced towards the fence-line which was out of sight to him at that distance in the dark.
“And the others?” Johnson asked as he turned back to him, “Are they slower like before?”
“Yes,” Strauss told him, “follow the leader again,” his words making Johnson nod pensively.
“Fix bayonets, dispatch the followers quietly,” Johnson told him.
“Orders already given,” Strauss said, looking acidly past the SSM at Nevin. “Trooper, did I give you permission to leave your post?”
“No, Sarge,” Nevin replied. “but I thought you’d need the Sarn’t Major for…”
“If I needed the Sarn’t Major, you useless bag of wind, I’d send for the Sarn’t Major, would I not?”
Nevin danced on the spot again, as though he was desperate for the toilet or was standing on ground that only he found uncomfortably hot.
“Fuck me sideways with a deck chair, Nevin,” Johnson snarled, “did your mother have any children who survived?”
Nevin, even in the low light, gave him a visibly shocked look.
“I shall spell it out for you, Trooper,” he said in a savagely mocking tone. “Fix your fucking bayonet, reach down with your right hand and check you still have a pair of balls.” He paused to apply a gentle slap to the specific area and was rewarded with an instant sound of a man slightly winded. “Report to your fucking post and start sticking Screechers in the fucking eyes. GO!”
Noise discipline be damned, Johnson wanted to tear his own strip off the waste of oxygen that passed for one of Strauss’ troopers before the sergeant got his own turn. As the terrified trooper stumbled off into the dark towards the enemy, simultaneously proving that orders had to be obeyed and that the dead were less frightening to even the weakest soldier in their squadron than the SSM was in a foul mood, Johnson realised that he could hear the low moaning sounds interspersed with hisses and the occasional screeching noise.
Those screeches, usually ripped from the tortured throat of one of the things when it came face to face with a living person, were mostly being cut short, which he hoped was due to the application of eight inches of steel bayonet.
“Night vision?” he asked Strauss.
“Maxwell’s got it sorted by your Sultan. Thermal camera is good for nothing because these things don’t give off heat. The image intensifiers are helping,” Strauss told him, meaning that the relief troop sergeant, which was assault troop under the leadership of sergeant Maxwell, was using a portable set of light-enhancing goggles at the line where the vehicles were arrayed. Johnson thanked Strauss and left him to do his work as he turned and double-timed towards the hulks of the armoured vehicles, which he knew would be ready to open up with their four GPMGs, should their quiet tactics not prove sufficient to stem the flow of attackers.
“Maxwell,” Johnson hissed as he approached.
“Here,
Boss, on your right,” Maxwell answered, directing the SSM towards him. He had the heavy set of goggles pressed to his face, telling Johnson that he had directed him towards his position by sound alone as he concentrated.
“What have we got, Simon?” he asked, using the sergeant’s first name in a rare display of camaraderie which he didn’t often let people see.
“About a hundred of them, tops,” Maxwell reported, “first one came in, screeching like a bitch on heat, and the fucking thing jumped halfway up the fence and began to climb, so Swinton slotted the bastard. After that, his bloody pals showed up in force. The boys are slotting them through the fence easily for now, but if another one of those faster fuckers comes at us where we aren’t defending, then we won’t know if it’s inside.”
Maxwell didn’t say anything that Johnson hadn’t instantly intuited from the quick verbal report, but the truth of his words was still stabbing its harsh reality into his brain like the shower scene in Psycho.
“Too much perimeter,” Johnson answered almost poetically, “not enough soldiers.”
“That’s the long and the short of it,” Maxwell answered.
Shaking away the longer-term problems, Johnson asked for the goggles. Maxwell handed them over and the SSM’s world turned a bright green colour that carried with it a high-pitched whine. He saw troopers methodically placing the tips of their fixed bayonets to the faces chewing at the fence and thrusting forwards, then stepping smartly aside to repeat the process. Looking further afield, he saw no second wave or reinforcements coming to support the vanguard of the infected dead.
“When that’s cleared,” Johnson said, “your troop take point and One Troop will stand down. I’ll have Two Troop roused.”
Maxwell accepted and acknowledged his orders simply, mentally preparing to push his men up and dismount to monitor the fence line with their personal weapons. It always hurt an armoured cavalryman to leave his mount, but needs must, he told himself.
Death Tide Page 15
