Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  Peter ran. He ran as fast as he physically could. He ran faster than he ever had before, even when he was unencumbered by a heavy bag, a sawn-off shotgun and an awkward pitchfork in one hand. Hearing the sound of footsteps approaching behind him even over the rasping of his own breathing and the blood pumping through his ears deafeningly, he instinctively turned to his right to fall through an open stable doorway. The thing chasing him shot past and fell hard to the concrete yard, making a sound like meat hitting a chopping board, and Peter managed to kick the door closed behind. The man in the suit had already got to his feet and banged hard into the half door, reaching over and down to try and grab Peter. He thrust forward with his pitchfork, skewering the man straight through the throat and having no effect whatsoever to stop him. The end of the weapon’s handle slipped from his grasp and flung around to hit him on the head twice. His own screams of fear mixed with the screeching, hissing noise the thing made as it leaned further over at him. The pitchfork prevented the man in the suit from getting to him, as the end wedged tight against the pitted ground and held his head upright.

  Which gave Peter just enough time to reach high above his head and grasp the newly-smoothed handle of the shotgun. Unthinking, he pulled it free, aimed it upwards and pushed the safety catch off with his thumb. Reaching his small index finger forwards to reach one of the triggers, he snatched at the thin metal.

  The responding boom of the gun going off inside the confined space was huge. He was blinded temporarily, deafened and left in total shock by the savagery of the report. The gun had flown backwards as it fired, slamming the barrel back into his shoulder, where the padded strap luckily prevented any serious injury.

  Before his vision went white from the blast, he was left with a brief snapshot of the suit man’s head vanishing. The headless body flopped over the stable door, and Peter took three ragged breaths before his survival instinct kicked in again. Part of him knew that the noise would bring more, that he had to run and hide, and that part of him dragged him to his feet and forced him to pick up the discarded pitchfork. Pushing open the half door with difficulty as the headless body was partly obstructing it, he ran just as four reaching hands grabbed at his clothing.

  He had no idea how many were chasing him, but one was one too many. He tore blindly through the collection of mismatched buildings until he lost his footing and fell headlong to the hard ground, where he slid without slowing down.

  What he slid through was ankle-deep animal shit. It got in his face and forced him to close his eyes. It got in his mouth and he turned his face away, which caused the slimy filth to collect in his right ear and deafen him on that side. Skidding to a stop he retched and shuddered, spitting out the disgusting contents of his mouth. He rolled sideways to try and escape his pursuit by cramming himself under the small section of air between the rough ground and the raised floor of a building. Reaching to his waist he managed to free the canteen of water which he poured on his face to swill his mouth and stop him from vomiting.

  As his wits were restored to him, he noticed feet about three paces from his face just at the edge of the building. He froze, not wanting or daring to move or breathe, just hoping that they would go away.

  Then he remembered the way they sniffed the air.

  He could hear them snuffling, knowing that something they could eat had gone this way and disappeared, trying to detect it through smell. But they couldn’t. Peter stayed exactly where he was, not daring to move in case he made a sound or changed his smell in some way. He rested his head slowly to the ground, slowed his breathing, and watched as feet after feet traipsed past him. He lost count of how many in the first few seconds, and only a few details remained in his mind. Like the size of some of the feet being smaller than his own, or the red high-heeled shoes with both heels snapped off making the already jerky movements seem even more ungainly.

  Peter stayed there until the herd had become a trickle and stayed still even when that trickle had faded to nothing. When the sun first began to set, he tentatively crawled out from under the building and raised his pitchfork to sweep the area for any stragglers that had got left behind. Creeping out from behind the building, he let out a strangled cry and felt his knees give from underneath him. He fell down, cracking the film of dried shit from his skin and refreshing the smell. The scene before him was horrific, even worse than the torn mess of the dog he had tried to tell himself he hadn’t seen.

  The big, docile and harmless creatures had been ravaged and torn apart to be left in ruin where they fell. The flesh had been flensed from their bones, leaving great arcs of white bones from the ribcages. At the sound he made, a gargling, bubbling groan escaped from the far side of one of the poor, dead cows. One of the things, slow-moving and fat-faced with wobbling jowls, rose awkwardly to its feet and began to hobble towards him. It was slow because of its weight, and the fact that one of its feet was turned to face backwards and made a sickening crunching noise as it moved.

  Just as the bones in the ankle of the fat creature had gone, something inside Peter snapped then.

  He straightened, twirled the pitchfork, then stepped towards it and ran the two spikes through its eyes to burst straight out the back of its skull. It fell backwards like a tree and he let the weapon go for it to bounce out of the skull when it impacted the ground with a slap. He stepped over, picked up his weapons and, for the first time in his life, listened to the total absence of sound as every animal on the farm was dead.

  And he could not stay there one minute longer.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Eight vehicles from the front of the convoy, Kimberley tried to ignore the cramp and the discomfort of travelling in the back of a very industrial truck. It was not designed for comfort, but then again everything she had seen in the last couple of days indicated that Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, or the army at least, did not rate personal comfort high on their agenda. Finally, unable to suffer the annoyance of her loose hair bouncing into her face with every lurching turn or juddering gear change, she tied it back into a ponytail and thanked the gloomy interior for obscuring that part of her face that she had kept covered for the last three years whenever there were other people around her. The journey seemed to take forever, with the truck constantly halting to a stop amidst the protesting shriek of brake pads. The first few times the brakes had made that high-pitched sound after they had warmed had made her heart lurch into her stomach and her eyes grow wide with the adrenaline that forced her breathing to speed up. Realising that the screech was of brakes and not torn from the throat of a flesh-eating and insane former person, she relaxed and each time it happened she reacted less and less. Recognising that fear was debilitating her and having an effect on her body, she forced herself to remain calm through sheer will, and wait.

  Just wait, she told herself from behind her eyelids, everything ends eventually.

  “Unknown callsign, this is Victor-Three-Zero. Identify yourself. Over,” barked Daniels with more authority than before. “Confirm disposition.”

  “Hello, Victor-Three-Zero, this is Delta-Two-Zero minus. We are a detached heavy callsign. Over.”

  Hearing the callsign he named, Johnson dropped back inside as though he had been shot and stared at the operator with eyes wider than the exhaust on a Chieftain tank, because that was precisely what he associated with that callsign.

  His impatience almost killed him, but he did not let himself down by interrupting the exchange. Instead, he waited until the necessary information had been exchanged and grid coordinates swapped. Calculating distance and speed very roughly in his head, Johnson reckoned that he had perhaps another hour before the slower moving units, realistically only able to move at half of their top speed, could combine with them.

  “Give them our objective,” he ordered Daniels, who nodded and relayed the information and then signed off.

  “Two Chieftains,” he said, confirming Johnson’s hopes. “They were part of the armour sent to London, but they said they never got further t
han Southampton before they were swamped. Their Captain reckons th—”

  “Their Captain?” he interrupted, betraying his own nervousness at his tenuous command of a squadron and fearing that he would be forced to relinquish control.

  “Yes, Sir,” Daniels said almost sympathetically, intuiting the cause of concern on his SSM’s face, “he reckons they can be here in three hours, but they’ll be very low on fuel by then.”

  “Replen?” Johnson asked, checking if it was necessary to send a resupply fuel wagon to meet them.

  “Possibly,” Daniels said as he thought, “when those things run low, their fuel filters get choked up and die,” he mused, temporarily wearing his day job hat and thinking as a mechanic. “Let’s see what we have at the island and then decide?”

  Johnson nodded to agree to the logical course of action, then turned his attention back to their route ahead and tried to push away the nagging sense of self-doubt as he prepared to justify his orders to a senior officer.

  Second Lieutenant Oliver Simpkins-Bloody-Palmer was too junior to test an NCO of his experience, but a Captain in an armoured division would be far more likely to have something other than fine lace and dance steps between his ears. That introspection lasted until his scanning eyes rested on the long, straight approach road leading to the lump of rock just off the coast.

  That rock, not that he yet knew it, would soon become the most contested piece of land in many miles.

  “Sir?” the driver of the lead tank said into the microphone on his headset to get the attention of their Captain.

  “Everything okay, Wells?” the officer asked in genuine concern as he peered forward to where their Lance Corporal was enduring the awkward driving position forced on him by being closed down. Closed down was the term for having their hatches firmly secured, and it was the only reason they all still lived.

  “She’s juddering, Sir,” Clive Wells answered from his seat at the front which required him to be lying almost flat on his back, “under throttle. She doesn’t like something.”

  The Captain frowned, rechecked their position on the map in the cramped confines, and called for a full stop to his crew’s loader, who also acted as radio operator, which he relayed over the group radio. The second tank, with her complement of four, also ground to a halt behind them for their roaring engines to drop to a low rumble at idle. Checking all around, the Captain opened up the hatch to climb out and converse with the other crew, commanded by a Sergeant named Horton.

  “We’re starting to get engine problems,” the officer explained.

  “We aren’t much better off, Sir,” the sergeant responded in a voice laced with angry disappointment. “We’ve lost our gears and are on emergency ones.” Both of their wagons, the only surviving armour from their massed foray to rescue the capital, were splattered with dried gore and were less than fresh on the inside too. They had barely felt safe enough to open the hatches in days for more than a few minutes at a time, because the creatures would emerge to clamber up their low hulls and claw at the closed hatches. Because their tanks weren’t that fast moving, getting one of them stuck on the top was best avoided. They had all seen what had happened to the other armour in their column, not to mention the occupants of the soft-skinned and canvas-backed vehicles, when they had stopped moving and were overrun by the crowds.

  There were two reasons why their pair of green and black painted tanks had escaped from that swarm of bodies. One was partly down to luck in that they had stopped to inspect a minor repair, and as no tank would be left alone, the pair arrived at the very tail end of the halted convoy. The other was down to the very quick thinking of the officer who had been thrown into their crew at the very last minute, the column having been formed in a hurry. He had presence which gave his orders an authority which prompted instant obedience in the men. He had ordered them to close down and reverse, which they did, and now they had survived and not been overrun or stranded on mounds of bodies.

  Hearing and then seeing a pair of jets overhead as they reversed their course made them try a hail, which eventually got them in touch with a large Naval air station. They, in turn, advised them of army units active at the place where their own journey had begun, so they made to return there. Attempting at regular intervals on their slow journey to raise the base, they eventually made contact and altered course to head for the spit of high ground separated from the mainland by a causeway bridge. The Captain knew the area to be a small town, more of a village really, with some farming and a lighthouse. Given their unexpected predicament, the choice of location made instant sense to him and he made a note to congratulate the man who came up with the idea. His own wagon, named Annabelle by the men of A Squadron, was fitted with the heavy plough that they had anticipated needing for clearing abandoned vehicles out of the city streets. That had been useful when needing to clear the way of lumbering corpses, but it added weight to them and ultimately reduced their speed and increased their fuel consumption.

  “Confirm our location,” the Captain said to his radio man, “contact that armoured unit and request a resupply of fuel. Vehicle mechanics too, if they have any, because I’d rather like to keep these two ladies in the fight.”

  The man nodded, enthused by the short speech and infectious good nature of the man who was not his officer, but had quickly proven himself to be one of the best. Still a young man, as well-bred Captains often were, he seemed to possess a depth of character that lent him the air of an older man.

  The Captain hefted his gun and invited Sergeant Horton to join him on stag to protect their crews.

  “Sarn’t Major?” Daniels called out to bring Johnson back to the Sultan.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s the armour, Sir,” he explained, “I’ve got grid co-ords for them, but they are stranded, requesting replen and vehicle mechs if we have them.”

  Johnson had no REME, no men of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers or other army mechanics to deploy, but he was certain that he could fix the issue himself. Kicking that thought aside, as much as he would have loved to go and perform a battlefield repair and get his hands dirty, he was forced to attend to the more pressing matters.

  “Ask Strauss if he’s up to it,” Johnson told the radio man, knowing that the sergeant was both a steady leader and had a few half-decent mechanics in his troop, “and if he is, he should top off his tanks and go now.”

  Now that he thought about it, given their vehicles’ inclinations towards mechanical failure, he reckoned that most of his squadron were half-decent mechanics by that point.

  Turning his attention back to the long, straight stretch of road leading directly to the island, Johnson raised the binoculars he had borrowed from a trooper in Three Troop and scanned the small town on their rock.

  What he saw made him laugh. He dropped the binoculars in disbelief, raised them again and let out another involuntary chuckle at the sight. Keeping them in focus and finding yet another thing to amuse him, he could no longer contain himself and he burst out in almost uncontrollable belly laughs. All around him, troopers and NCOs exchanged awkward looks of fear as their senior man had finally lost the plot and spilled whatever was left of his marbles all over the road.

  “They’re…” he giggled as he wiped a tear away from his eye, “they’re…”

  “Good God, man,” snapped Lieutenant Palmer incredulously, “what’s got into you? Pull yourself together!”

  Still laughing, Johnson passed the binoculars roughly into Palmer’s chest. Puzzled, he looked through them for the source of the hilarity and soon found it.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed, “oh my word, whatever do they…” he broke off to giggle, “I say, do they think we’re…?”

  He dropped the binoculars away from his face and joined the Sergeant Major in laughing until one of the troopers asked him what the joke was.

  “Trooper,” said Palmer in a high-pitched voice brought on by the humour, “the townsfolk are surrendering to us!”

  I
t started with just one person who ran to the highest window in their house and threw it open to wave the white tablecloth into the wind. Others soon copied when the word had spread, and the people on the island looked down on a large column of tanks and other military vehicles which had stopped short of the town, and which were just looking up at them. Fearing some invading force, the townspeople had elected to show that they offered no resistance and hopefully avoid the bloodshed they feared.

  “Lieutenant?” Johnson asked as he dried his eyes.

  “Sarn’t Major?” the young officer responded in the style of the men, which seemed to make him ever so slightly more human.

  “Could you oblige me by letting the good folk of this town know that we are on their side, and aren’t here to conquer them?”

  Palmer bowed low in playful sarcasm to accept his task as though it were a dare on tour.

  “Load up, boys,” he said to the crew of the second Sultan as he skipped to climb up the tracks, “let’s be the heroes, shall we? I say, does anyone have The Ride of the Valkyries to hand?” his rhetorical joke drew a smirk from the men and Johnson had the slight inkling that if the posh little twat survived long enough, he might actually learn to do some good.

  Eventually.

  “Maxwell,” he said, turning to the man in charge of the four tracked vehicles of their reconnaissance assault troop, “push out a picquet line if you would, four hundred yards?”

  Maxwell nodded his understanding, relishing getting back to one of his primary trained roles and acting as scouts for the heavier guns of their squadron. He shouted his orders, teased and cajoled his men into action. Johnson gave orders that left another four Fox wagons blocking the road with their guns set into defensive arcs and sent all of the other fighting men and the HQ troop with their laden Bedford trucks up the hill into the town.

  The SSM trusted Palmer, and he could not believe he actually used those words, to charm and pacify the frightened locals, and he also trusted the Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant to arrange the necessary accommodation and storage, and he trusted all of the men to ensure that none of the Screechers were on that island, as it was his job to make sure that the roadway stayed closed to their enemy.