“My dear Miss Perkins,” he crooned like some awful approximation of a character in an Ian Fleming novel, “if everyone can remain inside and let the chaps handle things, then all will be well, I assure you,” he continued, offering her another dazzling smile.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she responded, “but that answers neither of my questions.”
Palmer’s smile barely quivered before he brought it back under control.
“Madam, again I assure you that everything is under control, and everyone here,” she winced as he pronounced the word as hy’ah directly from his sinuses, “will be brought up to speed very shortly. Now, if you’ll excuse me?” he said, clearly desperate to find someone not immune to his upper-class charm.
Kimberley was left standing alone and even more annoyed than before. Something inside her said that she needed to be ready to move and soon, so she returned to the space where she had slept in her new, thick green sleeping bag and rolled it back up to stuff it into her new army backpack to keep the metal tins from rattling around. Settling the large bag over one shoulder, she took herself to the long table that contained military clothing, because the skirt and heels were unlikely to be fitting for any kind of flight from the base, which she sensed would be coming at some point. Taking a bundle, after searching the piles for labels, she retired to the toilets designated for female use. She found a pair of green trousers that fit over her hips but weren’t quite long enough to reach all the way down the length of her legs. She countered this with a pair of boots, the tops of which covered the trouser legs. They were half a size too large for her, but laced up tight enough, she kept her feet from slipping. Abandoning her skirt, blouse, tights and heels, which went into her bag, she completed her new look with a white T-shirt with red hemming around the neck and sleeves. The only outer garment she could find was a smock, a kind of large blouse jacket, of stiff camouflage-patterned material which was at least three sizes too big for her. She also kept another pair of trousers and a few T-shirts, which she stuffed into the bag.
When she returned to the main hall and propped her army luggage on a chair, she fetched one or two strange looks from the frightened people who were just cowering there waiting to be told what to do, and she helped herself to the stewed coffee from the pot which was permanently kept warm on a cycle. She was certain that the amount of coffee she was drinking couldn’t be good for her, but she doubted that the sudden influx of so much caffeine in her life would lead to her imminent demise, as she rather expected that to be something terrifyingly similar to what she had seen back in the town where she lived.
Used to live, she corrected herself, can’t see that place being habitable any time soon.
Within twenty minutes, her predictions became reality when she saw entering the room a very stressed looking man with stripes on his arm and his hair tousled on one side, carrying a battered clipboard. He loudly announced that everyone needed to be ready to go very soon, then left the room under a barrage of shouted questions, with the young officer following.
Smiling to herself, Kimberley watched as everyone scrabbled to grab clothing and throw things into their bags. ready to leave.
TWENTY-ONE
Peter, who had decided that his task for the morning was to climb a particularly tall oak tree, heard what he thought was thunder rolling over the undulating ground towards him. An experienced solider would have recognised it as gunfire, heavy gunfire at that, but Peter had no way of knowing. He had heard something very similar, only lasting longer, a few times the previous day, only from further away.
Now, close to forty feet from the ground, he stood shakily to hold onto a swaying branch as he scanned the landscape in a roughly two-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc. He saw nothing, except the few farm buildings, the three houses of the Pines, the scary mansion further up the lane and the road itself in parts. Nothing moved, except for wildlife and the cows and pigs in the field below. Looking as far as he could see in the other direction, his brain did not register the brick building with its outbuildings and detached garage.
He was so high up that he really could see his house from there, only that house no longer existed in his mind.
After watching for long enough that his legs began to feel wobbly through a combination of tiredness and vertigo, he carefully monkeyed his way down to ground level, and dangled to endure the last drop from a branch the height of a full-grown man. Picking himself up out of the leaf mould, he brushed himself down and retrieved his bag and weapons which went everywhere with him, with the exception of the shotgun which he now intended to deal with.
Had he been able to see through the higher branches and leaves of the tree, had he been able to look in the direction of the pub and the shop and eventually behind that to the town, then he would have been able to see the dark line smearing over the horizon where the dead had amassed and turned their faces towards the sound of the distant, rolling gunfire. Beginning their nearly thirty-mile cross country journey towards the source of their excitement, they began to trudge on a course that would lead them straight through the farm.
Peter, totally unaware that by that afternoon the farm would be washed away by a tidal wave of dead, opened up the workshop again and went about some very illegal weapon modifications. First, choosing the hardest task to begin with, he broke down the gun and clamped the barrels into the vice, where he took the same hacksaw from the white wall and exposed the silhouette of the tool in black pen once more. Repeating the skills he had been grudgingly taught, he dragged the blade back towards him across the metal, planning to remove two-thirds of the length.
That took him close to an hour, as he had to stop for frequent breaks and twice to replace blunted and broken saw blades. When he had finally taken off the section, he spent a further twenty minutes making sure that the ends were smoothed down, using the file again. That done, he turned his attention to the stock of the weapon and used another hand saw to take the shoulder stock off at the handle, effectively making the weapon one huge, double-barrelled pistol. Using a rasp file, he shaped the wood, intermittently placing his hand around the grip to see where he needed to reduce the profile to best fit him. When that was finally done, he used gradually finer grades of sandpaper to finish the wood and thanked the state school curriculum for insisting that design and technology be taught. Making things with his hands gave Peter a sense of achievement in a life generally devoid of success or happiness.
Snapping the three parts of the gun back together, Peter turned his attention to the ammunition. This was a rare and illegal skill which his father had taught him on one of those occasions where he coincidentally enjoyed something he was forced to do, so didn’t realise it wasn’t being done for his benefit. Removing each cartridge from the belt, he placed them on the workbench and used the folding penknife he had taken from his father’s bedside table to prise open the crimped plastic ends. Having used a match from the box of long fire-lighting matches taken from the house that no longer existed to him, he lit three candles after he had finished opening each red shotgun cartridge, to leave them standing in a row with their brown wading exposed to the air.
Lifting up that wadding each time with the tip of the knife, he poured in the dripping wax with painstakingly slow progress, until only three stubs of wax remained alight and his back ached from leaning over the bench for so long. Closing down the flared ends of the cartridges, he pressed them flat and added a small strip of green and yellow striped electrical earth tape to ensure the solid ball of wax and lead stayed inside until such time as it was needed. Restoring the cartridges to the belt, he loaded two and played around with how best to hold and carry the gun, deciding on cutting a small hole into his bag so that the barrels pointed down his back.
“Quartermaster, where are we with those Bedfords for the civilians?” Johnson barked, not having the luxury of time to address the second highest ranking NCO in their squadron with the proper courtesies.
In simple response, Staff Sergeant Rochefo
rt held up both hands with all the digits splayed out after tucking the thing he was carrying under one arm. Luckily, most of the supplies they had brought with them were still stowed on the trucks, but they had not had sufficient time to organise the unloading of stores on the base to a sufficient degree to consider abandoning it. Now they had less than an hour to get those supplies loaded again, and all the while, more and more of the things were approaching the gate. Very few came from any other directions, but logic suggested the reason for this was that the gate pointed directly towards town in an easterly direction. Behind them was the tank proving grounds, where not too many of the local population chose to reside.
The situation at the gate was beginning to cause some alarm, and Johnson thought for ten long seconds before snapping out of his torpor and ordering a bold move.
“Sergeant Maxwell?” he boomed over the sounds of engines and the occasional gunshot.
“Here,” Maxwell responded from behind him.
“Take your troop out, if you’ll oblige me, head towards town, shooting intermittently, draw them away from here and take a longer route back round to the island. Can you have one of your chaps map it?” he asked, eyes wide with expectation and hope that Maxwell would get it done, and get it done right.
He nodded, telling the SSM that he’d get it mapped en route, and called for his troop to mount their Spartans. Within minutes, the four tracked vehicles rattled and squeaked their way noisily out of the gate and down the road, where their cupola-mounted GPMGs barked sporadically to fire bursts of heavy 7.62mm into any Screecher that showed itself in the open. As their thunderous noise faded away, so did the intensity of the enemy encroachment as their attention was taken up by the moving sound generators that was the squadron’s reconnaissance screen of light armour.
With the imminent risk reduced tenfold, Johnson was able to leave a single fighting troop on point duty at any one time, and to organise the others into ensuring that everything they needed was getting loaded somewhere. All of the admin troop now had their own Bedford four-tonne truck, which was being loaded with a combination of food, other supplies, ammunition, fuel jerrycans, not to mention to close to sixty civilians who had either been rescued, or who had trickled in after the squadron had been able to let people know to leave their homes immediately.
Not that their current predicament was much better than being in their own homes.
Fuel had been pumped into mobile tankers, the kind that resupplied them on the battlefield, and they had finally taken as much as they could carry. Calling for the civilians to be loaded into the Bedford trucks alongside whatever supplies were already on board, Johnson mounted his own armoured vehicle and kept his head above the hatch with his hand on the machine gun.
Their convoy, now twenty-two vehicles long and comprising twelve Foxes, one Sultan and nine of the big, green Bedford trucks, was not an easy thing to manage. For starters, they spread out to over a quarter of a mile in length from nose to tail and the interspersing of fighting units between the soft-skinned vehicles meant that very quickly their troop unit cohesion evaporated. Johnson was at the lead, or behind two Foxes of Two Troop, and he had placed Strauss’ entire troop at the rear, with the six remaining cars of Two and Three Troops mixed throughout the convoy to provide a screen, should they encounter enemy anywhere other than their front or rear.
As they drove away, their progress was slow, because although even the tracked vehicle of Johnson’s was the slowest of them with a top speed only just north of fifty, the constant stopping to wait as the trucks and cars ahead manoeuvred, made them bunch up tight and remain stationary for long periods of time. Stationary vehicles, especially the soft-skinned trucks with no armour to hide behind, were a concern for Johnson. In conventional warfare, not that he should keep drawing parallels, such a concertina effect on a large convoy would be fatal as their entire force could be eradicated with a single artillery barrage or airstrike. He kicked himself for making that irrelevant distinction, as he was fairly certain that no corpse could operate instruments of war. Even if some of them could climb fences.
The net result of their halting progress was an average speed close to about ten miles per hour. Given that the island was over thirty miles from their position, that progress was painfully slow and frustrating for all of them, and the SSM’s distracted thoughts were snatched back to the inside of his car by Corporal Daniels.
“Sir, getting something on the Clansman,” he said, gesturing at one of the two radio sets in the relatively spacious interior for an armoured vehicle. Johnson let his hand slip away from the machine gun and dropped back inside.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Daniels said loudly with a frown, “intermittent and broken, but definitely not one of ours; they’ve all reported in when called.”
It was Johnson’s turn to frown. What other military units could be calling up in this area? There was almost nothing between their area and the Navy bases in the south west, certainly nothing green army, but his contemplation was ceased by Daniels answering another radio hail.
“Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha receiving,” he said in that implacable tone of voice that born radio operators possessed, before pausing to listen to the response. “It’s Sarn’t Maxwell, he’s reached the island and is holding firm on the road bridge…” he paused to listen again, “low concentration of enemy… no Screechers coming from the island towards their noise.”
“Good,” Johnson growled, “tell him to push inland one mile and secure some higher ground. Tell him we are,” he looked at his watch and glanced to the map on the inside wall of the hull to gauge their speed and distance, “ninety minutes away at least.”
Daniels nodded and turned to his radio sets to relay the information, then Johnson paused as he went to raise himself up and out of the hatch again, as the Corporal switched dials on the radio sets and spoke intently.
“Last callsign, repeat, I say again, repeat,” he said, giving their squadron callsign and disposition briefly, then stayed still and silent waiting for a response which must have come through garbled, because he repeated his last transmission word for word before waiting again. Giving up he shook his head and went back to the switches and dials.
Feeling satisfied with himself, Peter’s little bubble of happiness was burst by the sudden rise in noises from the farm. He had always been accustomed to the sounds of cattle and other livestock, but the tone and desperation of the noises coming from the cows made his chest feel tight and cold. Running out of his barn and skidding to a stop to turn and run back inside, he snatched up the camouflage backpack that he knew must go everywhere with him and must always be packed ready. In that bag he had snacks, a canteen of water, his sleeping back and the stuffed lamb belonging at one time to his sister, and the belt of ammunition for the shotgun, because it was too big to fit around his slim waist. The folding penknife never left his pocket unless he was using it, so he was ready to go as soon as he snatched up his pitchfork.
Rounding the corner of a building, he couldn’t help but gasp out loud as the sight that greeted him was worse than anything he could have imagined.
It had started somewhere miles away, and as each new addition to the group was drawn towards the sound and movement of the others, so too were they all tugged inexorably towards the sounds in the distance. Those ripples of rolling thunder made the few more alert ones of them sniff the air in that direction and move, dragging the slower ones on with them, as if they were being towed. Every infected corpse they passed reacted to the presence of the growing crowd of dead, and the cycle continued as more and more of them added to the noise, which drew yet more in from areas unaffected by the direct path they took.
Those who had been almost dormant from the lack of noise or movement to spark their feeding instincts, suddenly came alive with renewed intensity to join the hunt, as hundreds of them moved together and none of them could know where they were going or why.
Their direct path took them thro
ugh the woodland and the shallow river into a farm, where things started moving and making noises. The Leaders at the front, half a dozen of them, sniffed greedily at the air and went into a frenzy as the smell of flesh excited them. They threw themselves forwards, some leaping the chest-high fence entirely, and fell upon the innocent cattle mercilessly. Their pitiful bellows tore the air as teeth chewed through thick skin and blood flowed in thick globules down to the dry dirt, where it soaked in to make a dark red mud that the following zombies trampled into unthinkingly. They too now had their arms reaching out, and their mouths opened wide to peel back their lips and show teeth as they saw flesh. The wooden fence, a simple and strong enough barrier, splintered like toothpicks under the combined crushing weight of hundreds of bodies, some of whom went down with the obstacle to be trampled flat by their careless comrades.
The cows stood no chance and were all pulled to the ground and devoured. One lumbering beast, her eyes wide in terror at the stench of blood, kicked out and scored a lucky hit on one attacker to crush its skull and drop it lifeless to the wet dirt, but the temporary reprieve did little for her long-term survival, and the next one in line simply took the place of the ruined skull and bit down hard.
Peter, rounding the corner to see this emerging carnage, could luckily not be heard over the terrible noise, but something made two of them turn towards him. Perhaps his smell, perhaps some other sense, but two of them had locked on to him and began to move his way.
He forced his feet to respond to the messages his brain was sending desperately, finally getting them to stumble him backwards. A third zombie, eyes cloudy and pale and the white shirt under his grey suit a mess of both fresh and dried blood, burst from the mass and also went after him, but this one did so with more coordination and at a much faster pace.
Death Tide Page 17
