Johnson jogged away from the front line, stepping smartly into the soldiers’ barrack block, and quietly ordered another troop of soldiers usually equipped with four Fox armoured cars to deploy as infantry, with their Sterling sub-machine guns loaded and safetied, and their bayonets fixed.
The darkness was a time for the wet work, and Johnson had no clue how many nights they could keep it up for.
First order of business tomorrow, he told himself firmly, reconnaissance of a defensible position.
TWENTY
By morning, and having enjoyed no more sleep, Johnson was slightly irritable. His irritability was not helped by the fact that close to one hundred bodies were piled up against the perimeter fence and the civilians were not accustomed to such sights.
None of them was accustomed to anything like it, he admitted to himself, but soldiers of the British Army were expected to be made of far sterner stuff than your average Joe.
Deciding that he could only deal with one of those pressing issues at once, he decided to allow the young Lieutenant the opportunity to be useful.
Useful, that was, in a setting other than combat, where his lack of experience and poor judgement could lead to the lives of the men being endangered. Striding to the mess hall, where the men having just been relieved from their night duties were tiredly eating a subdued breakfast, he returned the nods from the few men and NCOs who offered them, pretending not to notice the others who avoided his gaze, so that they were spared from having to acknowledge him. Making his way directly to the only man sitting alone, his back to the room in a display of mixed fear and arrogance, he cleared his throat and spoke in low tones.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Johnson said, “when you’re done, if you could oblige me with something?”
Palmer rose, drained the dregs of his china cup, and turned to face the SSM.
“Good morning,” he drawled through a half smile, seeming to infer that their heated exchange from the previous day hadn’t happened, “ready now, Sergeant Major, how can I be of service?”
Grateful that the officer was complying, although annoyed that he automatically left the cup and plate on the table for someone else to pick up after him, he explained as he walked towards the exit doors.
“If you could, Sir,” he said, “I need you to keep the civilians inside whilst the men finish the clean-up operation,” he said as they stepped outside, and he gestured at the far gate where dark mounds had piled up in places. As he squinted towards the fence, he saw that at least three figures were stumbling across the open grassland towards their base and would soon be on them and in need of dispatching. Just then, Johnson knew that they had to move, and quickly. Remembering that he was still with the young officer, he turned to face him again.
“Sir?”
“Right away, SSM,” he said, choosing not to take his tasking to the civilians as a banishment. “What is the official line?”
“The official line, Sir?” he said in confusion. “We tell them the truth.”
Palmer thought for a second, then nodded sagely and turned to make his way towards the building that had been used to house their refugees.
Johnson watched him walk away for a dozen paces, then turned on his own heel to stride towards the gate at a fast march.
“Povey, ‘ware right,” he snapped at a trooper who was closest to a Screecher approaching the fence. Trooper Povey looked to the SSM, then to his right, then hopped backwards to settle himself ready for the thrust of the bayonet that dispatched the dead woman who had shuffled up to his position as his back was turned. Johnson paused for a beat, seeing that his men had reacted instantly to their new situation, regardless of their ‘day’ jobs on civvy street. The world truly had gone to shit, but his tiny part of the mighty green machine was still operating.
It won’t be for long, though, he thought to himself with a growing feeling of dread, not unless I can get these people somewhere else and soon.
Trusting his sergeants had been the right thing to do, as the tactics had been adapted overnight to dismount each crew with the exception of a single gunner, then use those dismounted troopers to constantly patrol the perimeter of their secure section. This had kept the initial crowd off the fences. From the reports he had received and the intelligence he had first hand, he believed that the only threat to their immediate safety lay in the faster ones who could apparently climb the fence, or enough of the shambling Screechers showing up so that they could collapse the fence. He exchanged a few words with the duty troop sergeant, recognised that his presence was not needed, and left to return to the command centre.
Walking in, he startled a Corporal, who turned with two full tin mugs of steaming tea and jumped, as he did not expect anyone to be there, let alone his ranking leader. Recovering, he seemed to hesitate as he furrowed his brow, and started to hold out one mug to the SSM, then retracted it and offered the other, then shook his head and offered him the first one again with a smile.
Taking it with one hand and offering the Corporal his Sterling sub-machine gun in exchange, he sipped the too-hot tea and nodded at its strong, starchy flavour and sweetness of the added sugar.
“Where are we, gentlemen?” he asked the room loudly.
“Sir,” Corporal Daniels said from under a radio headset, “Yeovilton have got back to us, they are reporting mass movement of enemy all over the south east, and their Marines on-base have had engagements.”
“You’ve passed on everything we know about the fast ones? The Leaders?” the SSM asked him.
“Yes, and they’ve reported that they are planning a withdrawal by air, if necessary, to the south west and then onto naval vessels,” Daniels answered.
“Ah,” Johnson said out loud and instantly regretted pulling back the curtain on his thoughts through tiredness, “can they extract our civilian population?”
Daniels turned back to the radio to have the exchange necessary to get that answer, as Johnson turned to a Lance Corporal who was poring over a large-scale map of the area they occupied. They all knew that area well, as, they lived within a sensible distance. Moreover, they had spent numerous weekends practising their vehicle patrol drills in the urban training areas as well as the large, open landscape of the windswept cliffs above the English Channel, where their live fire exercises were conducted.
Johnson, keeping his immediate fears to himself, looked at that familiar section of coast portrayed on paper and forced himself to decide. That decision came only moments later, but he knew that any decision arrived at so quickly was merely the very bones of an idea. It was a concept, not a plan. A plan, he knew, required other brains able to see the problem and the solution in a different light. Deciding to use those brains now, he sipped his tea and cleared his throat for attention.
“Gather round, chaps,” he said, hearing another cough for attention at the doorway and seeing Sergeant Maxwell hovering for permission to enter.
“Come in, Simon,” the SSM said genially, before addressing the assembly. The air in the room hung heavy, and that seemed to make their combined cigarette smoke linger above the dimly-lit central desk where the map was laid flat, which gave their meeting an air of an illicit gambling den, or a French Resistance meeting during the Second World War.
“Our problem,” he began, “is that our current location is not viable in the long term,” he said, pausing to let that fact sink in, “so we need an alternative. Today.”
Silence hung for a few seconds before Maxwell offered his opinion. As the sergeant in charge of the assault and reconnaissance troop of the squadron, he was a man everyone knew, and his opinion was almost always worth listening to, unless it was on the subject of music, as the only cassette he owned was by Kenny Rogers.
“It’s not a case of looking for a traditional spot for our cars,” he explained, “because our enemy doesn’t use armour or artillery. We need somewhere that we can block off and hold, like a high wall or one way in and out,” he paused, scanning his eyes down the coastline until
he evidently found the place that Johnson was already sizing up. “There,” he said as he stabbed a finger onto the map.”
“The island?” the tea-making soldier asked.
“It’s connected by a causeway,” Johnson said, “one heavy road bridge over fast-flowing water. Low ground to the immediate front, high cliffs rising either side of that. Low water for access to sea-faring craft, and enough of an infrastructure to keep us equipped until we are resupplied.”
The others listened to him in silence, making him wish that he had kept his opinion to himself until the others had spoken. Usually, he would offer his thoughts and then the Captain and the Major would consider alternatives, but without them present, nobody wanted to seem as though they were disagreeing with the SSM. Having stopped the discussion unintentionally, he now asked them to come up with alternatives as their task, as though the decision to occupy and fortify a small island immediately off the coast wasn’t a done deal.
“No,” said another Corporal from the HQ troop, “I like it. Take the barriers off the side of the road bridge and barricade it with a wedge, and that way, anything like the crowds that came at us last night would go straight in the drink.”
“Air assets?” another asked. “Is there room for a bird to land up there?”
“The top of the island, by the lighthouse. You could land a Chinook there, although more than one might be a stretch,” offered the Corporal.
“And we’re assuming that the disease hasn’t affected the population yet?” Maxwell asked.
“It’s further west than we are, and a bit out of the way,” another said, “they might have been lucky.”
Just then, Daniels called the SSM by name.
“What is it?” he asked, waiting for the response from the Navy pilots.
“They’ve asked where they are supposed to take them,” he explained. “They are operating under the impression that the country is going to be overrun very soon. They are flying pilots in so that they can get enough of their air assets out of the base before they are overrun themselves.”
Johnson resisted the urge to swear and give his opinion of the Fleet Air Arm, and instead, calmly requested the loan of a single rotary wing for reconnaissance and transport. The request was recited, the pause as it was contemplated was long, and the response was simple. They couldn’t guarantee it, but they would allocate an asset if and when one became available.
The silence that this news left in the room didn’t last long, because it was shattered by shouts from outside as the troop radio crackled into noisy life. The only thing louder than the shouts, louder than the unmistakable reports of multiple calibres of gunfire, was the massed chorus of screeching.
Just as the clean-up operation was being organised, the few irregular stragglers dispatched as soon as they stumbled close enough, shouts of alarm rippled along the section of fence to the right of the gate. Those shouts, ill-disciplined given that their new enemy operated on sound to acquire their location, spread panic. That panic, however, was both understandable and justified.
From what Strauss and his troop had seen the previous day, the Screechers seemed to have their own rudimentary rank structure. Most of them that the troop had encountered were the hissing, moaning, shuffling ones that moved like a drunk with slightly better balance. However, they seemed to group up into roughly the size of an infantry company under the guidance of one of the god-awful ones that the soldiers had started to call Leaders, who seemed to have retained a little more of the motor functions of a living human. They were coordinated enough to run and, evidently from the attack on the camp in the night, climb. For each of those, came their followers of a hundred or so shuffling monsters, and when they reached sight of the men working at the fence line, the Leaders let out their piercing shrieks and broke into a run. Not only did that whip up the other Screechers into a slower-moving frenzy, but it sparked the faster ones themselves into a kind of bloodlust which made them moderately hard to kill.
By the time the troopers had been made aware of the incoming threat, and organised themselves to defend against it, the Leaders were at the wire and scaling it. The echoing, gassy reports of the troopers’ Sterlings were punctuated by the far harsher reports of the SLRs, the heavy-calibre Self Loading Rifles belonging to the RMPs at the gate. Only when that first ragged volley had cut down the three leaping corpses with their pink-foamed mouths hanging open in death through a combination of frothing saliva and blood, did the troopers switch on to the danger that close to three hundred Screechers were almost at the wire.
The noise that came from those three hundred mouths was directly from the worst horror film ever made. A few troopers even dropped their weapons to cover their ears, such was the painful volume it reached. The three crowds converged where their Leaders had fallen, all combining to become a single, feverish, screeching, roiling mass of flesh and teeth. The smell from those bodies even at a distance was sufficient to bring tears to their eyes, and the only way to render that threat safe was to do what they knew how to do best.
The orders were given by hand signal, and the cupola of one Fox and one Spartan turned towards the crowd, and both gunners let rip.
There were twenty troopers and soldiers at the fence, so the crews in the armoured cars sensibly drove to the flanks, where they could bring their weapons to bear without risk of hitting their own side. When those guns sparked into life, the odds rapidly swung in favour of the living over the dead.
Both fired their GPMGs, the Spartan as it was the tank’s only weapon and the Fox as its secondary, coaxial gun. The two heavy machine guns, combined with small arms fire from the front, tore ragged and bloody swathes into the hungry mob. The gunner of the Fox, eager to employ his instrument of warfare to its fullest, then fired six quick shots through the 30mm Rarden cannon, as the barrel was traversed ever so slightly after each shot. The result of this, the 30mm coming somewhere between an extremely heavy machine gun and small artillery, was brutal, devastating and utterly awesome.
As the six shells rocketed through the crowd in a slow-moving arc, each heavy piece tore down dozens of bodies and pulped anything it hit into instant, bloody ruin. The guns were designed to fire ammunition that would kill Russian tanks, not for crowd control.
After those six shots, the gunner went back to intermittent fire on the coaxial GPMG, as there was little or no concentration of enemy remaining. The guns on the cars stopped, leaving the dismounted troopers to finish off anything that still moved with any kind of purpose.
“Cease fire,” Johnson bawled as he approached the gate at a steady run, “cease fire!”
What he saw when he got there could best be described as horrific. It was total and utter slaughterhouse carnage. It was a scene out of the deepest, darkest layers of hell. Stopping at the steaming, writhing pile of meat fanning out from where they had converged on the fence, he found himself locked into the stare of a pair of blind eyes as the creature’s right hand reached for him. The left hand was gone, along with that shoulder, and a diagonal line out of the torso culminating in a pile of oily intestines sitting atop the severed legs, which he couldn’t be certain even belonged to that particular Screecher. It opened its mouth as it craned towards him, hoping to cover the distance and somehow get through the chain link by sheer effort of will.
Turning away, Johnson locked eyes instead with the next man to catch up with him, Sergeant Maxwell.
“That settles it then,” he said, “we head for the island as soon as we are able to move.”
Watching him walk away, no doubt to give the necessary order or to assure the civilians that they were safe, Maxwell turned around and looked down at the horror that was a quarter of a human being still trying to eat him, even though it no longer possessed enough of its body to locomote. Ignoring the good sense that he should save his ammunition or that the thing was no longer a threat, he raised his gun and fired a single bullet into its skull to end the hunger for good.
“What’s going on?” shouted a
woman as she fussed to keep her hands over the ears of two children.
Kimberley also wanted, very much in fact, to know what was going on. The sergeant who had initially led them though to this large room, and who had organised two men to bring them a large rucksack containing a sleeping bag and some metal cooking tins, was standing at the doors, guarding them from going outside no doubt, and she knew he wouldn’t tell her a thing. She decided to approach the new man they had just been introduced to and pulled her hair down the left side of her face to hide the scars as best she could. Straightening herself to use her above average height to her advantage, she smoothed down her creased clothes and walked confidently towards the soldier who, she guessed, was about her age.
“Excuse me,” she said, tapping him lightly on the shoulder and smiling as he turned around to face her, meeting the level of her eyes exactly. He returned the smile warmly, as though proper manners came easily to him, and those manners were so impeccable that when his eyes caught sight of the small patch of scar she could not obscure with her hair, his face did not register any disgust or flinch, merely switched back to her gaze and fixed her to the spot. One corner of his mouth curled up slightly, and he offered a hint of a bow to her.
“Madam,” he said in a richly cultured accent, or at least an accent that others might find cultured, as Kimberley thought it made him sound like a smarmy dick.
“Lieutenant Oliver Simpkins-Palmer,” he said, giving his full title in an attempt to make himself sound grand and important. He clearly had misjudged his audience, as Kimberley found herself in the unexpected role reversal of being repulsed by another person on sight.
“Kimberley Perkins,” she answered curtly, unable to bring herself to be rude despite instantly disliking the man in front of her. “Lieutenant, might I enquire as to what is going on, and how long we are to be kept here?”
Death Tide Page 16
