Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention but, in Johnson’s opinion, it was war. War made people come up with sudden inventions and ideas. War made people find new ways of staying alive and new ways of killing others, and war made people as resourceful as MacGyver locked in a store cupboard full of innocuous items, taking them to build a rocket launcher.

  Now, with no engineering team or necessary tools, he ordered the bridge cleared, and detailed the 30mm gunner on one Fox to destroy the parapet. The display was, they all had to admit, impressive. Using what they had in the limited time available, they formulated the fastest way to safely achieve what they needed to. They needed the parapets broken so that the road could be blockaded and anyone, anything, pushing against the stop would fall off either side down into the fast-flowing current of the coast.

  That was the theory, anyway, and any number of things could still go wrong.

  Up in the town, Sergeant Croft had reported by radio that there was no infection, and that there was plenty of room for men, vehicles and equipment up there. The defences were simple, in the same way that medieval castle defences were simple. There was one way in, and they just had to kill anything that tried to use it. Johnson remained on the lower slopes of the island, watching over the troop of Fox vehicles, and using the binoculars to range further out into the distance to cover the two low hulls of the Spartans that he could see. He knew that the men out there, those he could and couldn’t see, knew their jobs and were well led enough to not need his help, or interference, depending on how one looked at it.

  His mind cast further out, away from the island they had successfully navigated to and begun to fortify, to where the five wagons he had sent were bumping along the tarmac towards the two silent hulks of armour and their massive 120mm guns. The Chieftain was, in Johnson’s opinion, one of the finest instruments of warfare ever created. It was right up there with the Harrier jump jet. The only thing he would maybe have chosen to change, the small wrinkle in the silk for him, was the fact that the most reliable thing about the engines in those tanks was that they were guaranteed to break down regularly. Sending a troop out to refuel and help fix up two of the beasts was worth the risk on any day, and he was confident in Strauss’ abilities. Already his mind’s eye was planning for the added weight in defence in having the two tanks with them, even if it meant relinquishing his overall command to the Captain.

  He thought on that, believing for a moment that he wouldn’t mind that as long as he had confidence in this Captain to lead the men well, and a big part of him looked forward in happy anticipation to getting back to what he saw as his real job of running the squadron in its entirety, without being bogged down by the daily grind of making every command decision. Dragging his mind back, he looked out at the defences and knew that the plan had to be kept very simple.

  The road was blocked, and the parapets would need tidying up for certain, and they could even try to rig a two- or even three-stage defence up at some point in the future, with outward-opening barriers that joined at an angle like a wedge to keep the Screechers out. Looking behind him, he saw only two shallow beaches where they could wash up randomly, and simple fencing could keep that issue at bay when combined with a quick reaction force on standby twenty-four hours a day and a morning search sweep. They would need to foray out for supplies and other survivors, obviously, but they could be safe there. He stayed there, assessing the approaches and vulnerabilities, until the time crept onwards and he began to worry about his absent soldiers.

  Just then, his recce screen reported contact on the radio.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Sir, I hear armour coming,” Wells warned the Captain in a low voice, who had heard the engine notes just as the man spoke.

  “I hear them,” he responded, “let’s be ready, boys.”

  Their eyes were alert over their weapons, even more so given the increase in noise with the arrival of their resupply mission, and they had learned the hard lessons about bringing the bastards down on them by simply being too loud. The relief they felt, if not overtly shown, when the lead Fox bounced into view, was palpable. The lead car went straight up to them, with another going past and one driving off to the side, while the last about-turned and guarded the direction they had come from. The other vehicle with them was a fuel resupply one and drove in between the two silent tanks for maximum efficiency.

  “Strauss, Yeomanry, C Squadron,” said the tall sergeant as he held a hand out to the officer.

  “Julian Simpkins-Palmer,” the Captain responded, “Household Cavalry,” then smiled hesitantly as the sergeant’s face dropped and his features went slack in disbelief. Captain Palmer, as he went by for ease in the long tradition of the military men in his family, incorrectly suspected the source of the man’s incredulity lay in the lack of the rest of the cavalry, and he offered a small shrug of apology.

  “Best we could do in a tight spot, I’m afraid,” he said, “still, can’t imagine your Major would turn his nose up at a pair of these, eh?”

  “No, Sir,” Strauss said, “we don’t have a Major, Sir.”

  “Oh? Who is your Captain then? Perhaps I know the gentleman,” Palmer tried, fearing that the man staring at him was being intentionally obtuse.

  “Sir, my apologies,” Strauss said, shaking himself out of the daze he was in and gesturing for the officer to walk with him. The sergeant produced a packet of cigarettes and offered one to the Captain, who surprised him by accepting one and producing his own lighter to put flame to the NCO’s smoke before his own. Both men sucked in a lungful and exhaled slowly, then Strauss tried again.

  “We are led by our SSM, Sir,” he told him, seeing the mixed look of shock and distress on the Captain’s face, “but we do have an officer…”

  Just then the penny dropped.

  “C Squadron?” Palmer asked, “You may have met my younger brother, he joined the reserves late last year,” he said happily, then added, “but the little blighter had himself a weekend with the boys in London, that’s why I jumped in with the first column headed that way, you see? Get things back under control.”

  “Sir,” Strauss said, “your brother isn’t in London…”

  Palmer’s face registered shock, then heart-warming happiness as though something he believed he had lost was found safely all along.

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes, Sir, he’s with the squadron,” Strauss told him. Palmer’s eyes glazed slightly, and he insisted on shaking Strauss’ hand again to thank him for the most welcome news.

  “Sergeant Horton? Did you hear that?” he called over his shoulder as quietly as he could to prevent the noise carrying, although they were far more protected than they had been previously, “These fine fellows have my younger brother safe, he’s a Lieutenant in the reserves.”

  Sergeant Horton smiled and nodded, then returned his face to the scowl it had been before he was spoken to. He didn’t dislike the officer one bit, in fact he thought the man was bloody competent and owed him a lot for thinking fast and getting them out of there. It was more that he was busy trying to the get the two tanks refuelled and restarted so they could get the hell out of there, and he didn’t think that some baby Rupert not being dead was worth the interruption.

  The fuel was pumped and given a few minutes to settle into the engines before the ignition process was started, with elation and smiles all round as both beasts sparked to life at the first attempt. The convoy of now seven vehicles lumbered its way back at half the speed of the inbound journey, but then again none of the wagons that had made the outbound journey weighed close to fifty tonnes.

  That wasn’t strictly true, Horton allowed, as they weren’t carrying all their really heavy sabot anti-armour artillery ammunition. Seeing as they had been deployed to show strength and restore the Queen’s peace to the streets of London, they weren’t issued with the tank-killers they carried whenever they were deployed in Germany, ready to head east at a moment’s notice.

 
Feeling safer, given their slower progress and increased firepower, Strauss allowed himself the luxury of not being closed down on the return leg. He smoked a few cigarettes as they rolled on with Palmer’s tank called Annabelle, which made him smile in genuine happiness for some unknown reason, taking the lead. With the pace set by the first tank, the other wagons only had to tick over at low revs, with the other tank at the rear in no danger of being outpaced and left behind. Taking double the time to get back and having only encountered sporadic enemy activity, they were forced to close down as the weather began to darken and the wind picked up to blow a stinging rain into their faces. That rain and wind made clear promises to bring more and far worse with it, and just as the weather brought them misery, they found their way blocked by a knot of shambling Screechers heading away from them. Hearing the engines, the group stopped and rotated to face the new source of sound that sparked their interest. They could smell no flesh, and simply stared at the stationary tank to see if it became edible. From the centre of the group, one of the creatures stepped out to push its way through the cluster of dead. They had all encountered the faster ones, the fresher ones, but none of them had seen one that was so small yet. The girl must have been no older than eight, her plaited hair swaying as she tilted her blood-soaked face to regard the hulks of metal. She took two tentative steps forward, far more controlled and coordinated than the others clustered around her, and she peered hard at the forward hull.

  Inside the tank, Captain Palmer took his eyes away from the goggles providing his view ahead and rubbed them.

  “Wells,” he said tiredly, apologetically, “drive on, please.”

  Wells sighed, selected a forward gear, and eased the tracks over the group to flatten them all in a rolling, crunching, hissing mess that left their hearts heavy.

  Reaching a junction in the road that was the demarcation line between heading west and them needing to turn directly south, Sergeant Horton in the rearmost tank swore loudly over the radio, before following up with a rushed report.

  “Enemy rear, fucking thousands of them, go, go!”

  As they were already moving at close to their top speed, firing themselves up to move faster was something of a pointless exercise. Strauss tried again and again to raise anyone on the radio, but something in the rapidly worsening atmospherics was garbling his transmission.

  Peter ran.

  He clearly saw the direction of the herd trampling their way over the landscape, so he turned a right angle away from that line and he bolted across country to escape. He ran into the gathering storm and darkening skies to cross fences and duck under hedges, until he was so exhausted that he dropped to the wet dirt and stayed there, letting the rain just fall on him.

  He hadn’t uttered a sound since the gasp back at the farm, and still kept his mouth firmly closed. He was lost, but that didn’t bother him. Being lost only mattered when you had somewhere to be, somewhere to get back to, but seeing as he no longer had a home, the concept of not knowing where he was seemed like an irrelevance that held no feelings of fear for him.

  Home was a theory. Something from the past that didn’t feature in the present, but which might do one day in his future. Getting to his feet, his face a rictus of determination and his eyes devoid of emotion, he put one foot in front of the other and carried on.

  Arriving at the outskirts of a village, Peter crouched in the hedge, watching and listening as the rain soaked him, until he was sure that nothing was moving before he slipped low towards the first house. He tried the door, marvelling that the first one he went to yielded. He moved the pitchfork out in front of him as he crept into the hallway. Looking down, he saw that the floor was polished wood with the last of the day’s light glowing along the length of it, and the warm orange glow made him feel somehow safer. Standing tall and sucking in a deep breath through his nose, he rapped the handle of his pitchfork loudly on the wooden floor four times and waited.

  He counted off the seconds in his head, waiting for the hissing and the moaning to start that would tell him how many were there and where they were. Nothing answered his loud taps, so he repeated them with even more volume than before.

  Still nothing answered, so he slowly walked through the small house and checked the rooms one by one. Returning to the front door, he slid over the heavy bolt and checked that the back door was similarly secure, before he slipped the bag off his shoulders and went to the bathroom, where he stripped his soaking wet, shit-caked and filthy clothes and ran a sink of cold water to clean himself with a flannel and a bar of soap.

  Using the soft, white towel rested over the radiator, he dried himself and stopped, trying to figure out when he had stopped hating being cold. He stood shivering, naked and barely clean, and realised that something so simple as just being cold no longer mattered to him. It was as though that part of him, the scared child he had been, was gone. Relishing being cold and feeling his skin tighten with the early evening air, he wandered into the bedroom and rested his eyes on the portable cassette player and headphones beside the bed.

  The bed wasn’t made, and he only then had the impression that he was intruding for the first time. He took the cassette player and returned to the bathroom.

  Wrapping the towel around him, he padded back downstairs and emptied out his backpack to find the set of fresh clothes he had thought to pack. He had decided to give up on the set he had been wearing, thinking that their prolonged contact with the various noxious substances was taking viable wearing of them again a stretch too far.

  Dressed, he used the kitchen sink to clean his pitchfork before leaving it on the table with the rest of his collection of kit, and then opened the cupboards to take out the things he could eat.

  After a cold supper of rice pudding eaten straight from the can, Peter dragged duvets downstairs to make a warm, soft den on the large settee. Before he drifted off to sleep, he listened to the song on the tape over and over, feeling the sadness of the female lyrics and the power of the chorus course through him, and he decided that this was the way forward for him from now on.

  With the fuzzy coverings of the flimsy earphones over his head, Peter could hear the thunderous sound of rolling gunfire booming heavily and desperately on the distant coast.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Roger,” Daniels spoke into the radio, before turning to Johnson and giving a confident thumbs-up. Johnson knew that he was talking to Maxwell’s picquet, the armoured screen deployed ahead of their position, and that they had just reported the arrival of their Sabre troop with the resupply wagon and the two main battle tanks.

  Johnson allowed himself a small sigh of relief as the constant garbled transmissions had begun to cause him some stress. Raising the binoculars to the tracked vehicle he could see at the very end of the road, he saw the long barrel of the tank’s massive gun bob into view and stop next to the Spartan. The tank stopped, then Daniels spoke in response to the radio that had burst to life excitedly.

  “Stand by, one,” he said, turning to Johnson and wearing a wide-eyed look of fear, “Sir, units report heavy concentration of enemy moving along this road.”

  Johnson’s face stayed resolutely still and expressionless. ‘This road’ led only one place, and that was directly at him and his men on their very newly-acquired island. Raising the binoculars, he looked directly ahead to the furthest limits of his view.

  “Well, isn’t that just fucking marvellous…” he sighed to himself, prompting Daniels to ask, “Sir?”

  “Pull them back,” he said, looking ahead to the valley with its high ground on each side leading to the sea, “there’s nowhere for them to go, so we mount a defence here and set a killing field at the land side of the bridge.”

  Daniels looked, knowing that a concentration of fire on the roadway would likely ruin the surface and make life difficult, but he decided against offering that opinion, as a heavy concentration of enemy marching up the road to eat them would likely make life even more difficult.

  Orders were
given, armoured cars moved into position all over the lower parts of the town where they could bring their guns to bear on the approaching horde. Johnson ordered the two Fox wagons out of the roadway and asked, via Daniels on the radio, if their two new additions would oblige him by blocking the road with the higher-profile back ends of their tanks. The request, not an order because a) they weren’t his troops and b) they had an officer down there somewhere, was acknowledged.

  Only then did the problems truly begin.

  The four Foxes and their fuel resupply wagon rolled over the bridge, luckily one sturdy enough to cope with eighty tonnes of tank, otherwise it would have meant a revision to their plan. The tanks pulled aside at the landward edge of the roadway to allow the Spartans to squeak and trundle their way through the gap.

  Only the last one, too far away for Johnson to hear, juddered to an ailed stop a hundred or so paces from the threshold. Daniels bent to his radio, no doubt receiving a transmission that would mean he would update the SSM as soon as he could, but Johnson’s nerve broke first.

  “Mechanical failure?” he asked the man, who was forced to try and listen to two people at once.

  “Stand by,” he said quickly into the radio, then spoke rapidly to Johnson, “gearbox linkage,” he said, “and something else, they can’t even roll it out of the way,” then turned his attention back to the radio to speak again.

  Shit, shit, shit, Johnson thought to himself, wasting precious seconds before turning back, “Tell them to dismount and leave it. Get their arses back over here and ask one of the Chieftains if they can push it aside.”