Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “What about the swarming behaviour of the Screechers?” Johnson asked. Smirks rippled around the pilots at his mention of the nickname, flashing anger behind the SSM’s eyes as Barrett laughed at him overtly.

  “Have you been face-to-face with one yet, Sir?” he asked gently.

  Despite the low tone that he had been careful to sanitise for any trace of hostility, the air in the room dropped a clear five degrees.

  “No, Sergeant Major,” he responded carefully, “I have not. Instead I fly the better part of ten tonnes of helicopter and am responsible for the lives of my crew and passengers. So, no, Sergeant Major, I haven’t been face-to-face with one, yet.”

  Barrett’s over-reaction to the question showed his embarrassment almost instantly, and he dialled back the hostility immediately and turned to Murray. The two seemed to be deliberating using only their eyebrows until Murray shrugged and turned to the soldiers.

  “They exhibit a kind of herding behaviour, and tend to amass around individual infected subjects, sorry - Screechers – in groups of roughly one hundred. Three times, that we know of, there have been mass clusterings in as many days. Two of them dissipated. The other, well,” he shrugged with a smirk, “the other ended up taking the long drop.”

  “The other two swarms dissipated by themselves?” Captain Palmer asked intently.

  “Indeed,” Barrett said, “it seems they are drawn by sound,” he explained, as though the soldiers hadn’t been able to figure that fact out yet, “and unless something really loud attracts their attention, the noise they make together sort of makes them lose interest and they wander off from the fringes.”

  “How do you know this?” Johnson asked, seeing the familiar exchange of looks as though he was asking for the combination to a safe.

  “The Americans have AWACS over us as of this morning,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “So,” Palmer interjected politely, “our colonial cousins are able to spy on us from a safe thirty-thousand feet but not offer any assistance?”

  “Captain,” Barrett said, “it isn’t just the Americans… It’s all of NATO, or at least those who are still intact and not fighting their own war. They suspect either a direct Russian attack or at least the threat of nuclear bombardment. Europe is falling to this disease and the Americans have to stop it spreading across the Atlantic. We would do the same.”

  They would, Palmer thought as he glanced at Johnson and conveyed just how unhappy he was when politics was added to the already toxic mix they swam in.

  They bloody would.

  Peter, the sole of one shoe still flapping loudly on the roadway, slowed his run as he had not heard any of the faster ones and reckoned he had run far enough away to stop and think, without the slower ones catching him up. It had been a mistake, he knew, and not a mistake that he would make again, because he did not wait long enough to watch the houses for signs of movement.

  One of the faster ones, in some bizarre approximation of corpse popularity, had gone into the bungalow opposite and the crowd with it had followed. As soon as he had made a noise breaking into the house, they had screeched and lumbered towards him. He had no idea where the faster one was, but he hoped it was stuck inside the house by its own followers being clumsy and blocking the doors.

  Having annoyed himself at expending energy without finding food or a warm, dry place to spend the night, he looked around for anywhere to hole up in relative safety.

  His luck, he thought with a wry smile of relief, was going to run out soon if he didn’t stop making these mistakes that offered such valuable learning opportunities.

  Turning at a right angle to the direction he had come from, he took the next small road to his left and walked straight down the middle. In the old world, walking down the middle of the road was tempting fate and would likely get a young boy killed, but in this new world, walking between low walls and stationary cars where dormant corpses could spark to life and bite him was a far bigger risk than being run over by a car.

  Nothing jumped out on him, even though he was ready with his pitchfork, and nothing drove down the road. Although a vehicle might have been a good thing, so long as it didn’t run him over.

  He found a detached cottage on the edge of the village he had wandered into, with a neat thatch roof which hung down low over the front door. Peter watched and waited, listening and smelling the air like one of the things he was trying to avoid, and when he was sure it was safe, he waited some more. Eventually deciding to open the door and rap the handle of his pitchfork on the cobbled path, he waited, but nothing came lurching and groaning from the house straightaway. Creeping inside, he repeated his process of searching the house, then locking himself in to take what he wanted.

  His luck struck again, and he found the room of a boy about his own age, judging by the size of the clothes. He ate, changed and restocked his backpack before settling down to listen to the same song on the tape in his new cassette player. He didn’t know who the singer was, but he smiled at the coincidence of the song’s lyrics and the small pot of green army figures on the shelf. He took them down, looking at each one in turn as he organised them as per their poses.

  The crawling rifleman.

  The soldier throwing a grenade.

  The kneeling man aiming his long gun.

  The officer standing and pointing his pistol.

  He mimed along with the words, learned as the routine had established itself in his mind to listen to the song as he settled down in a new home for the night. He lined them all up, then used his finger to poke them and make them topple.

  “…like toy soldiers…” he sang softly in time with the music.

  This concludes Apocalypse, but Aftermath, the second book in Toy Soldiers picks up the story, and the battle is just getting started!

  Can Peter survive on his own with the dead snapping at his heels?

  Will the island remain safe for Johnson and the assortment of military now calling it home?

  What will happen as the plague of undead ravage other parts of the world?

  Find out what happens next!

  Grab Aftermath now!

  Part Two

  Book Two

  AFTERMATH

  ©2019 DEVON C. FORD

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Dedicated to SC.

  Defying modern medicine at every turn and thriving on sheer stubbornness.

  Preface

  All spelling and grammar in this book is UK English except for proper nouns and those American terms which just don’t anglicize.

  Prologue

  “Sir, I have Castlemartin on the horn now,” said the radio operator in a distinctly southern states accent. The way he pronounced the name, Cassulmart’n, was an assault on the ears of Commander Ethan Briggs of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.

  The ‘Sir’ being addressed wasn’t Briggs, he was merely there as liaison to the United States Navy, having been transported by one of the two Sea King helicopters belonging to the American destroyer. It had been sailing back from active service in the Persian Gulf, where it had been patrolling as protection for the oil drilling operation and found itself diverted to a crisis with infinitely further-reaching co
nsequences than petty squabbles over natural resources.

  “Okay, apprise them of our situation and request that they monitor this channel for orders,” came the steady, almost flat voice of the ship’s captain.

  Briggs, as much as he hated the way they pronounced Castlemartin, breathed a small sigh of relief that nobody had referred to the area by its county of Pembrokeshire. Twice he had been on the inexplicable verge of raging at the American crewman on the radio for saying it as three distinctly clear and separate syllables of Pem-Broke-Shire as though the place was a village in a Tolkien novel.

  “Commander Briggs?” the captain asked politely. “How are we set?”

  Briggs checked his watch and flicked his eyes back to the pad in front of him before answering.

  “Sir, there is no way the convoy can make it back in time without assistance,” he responded, seeing the captain merely nod and keep his eyes facing resolutely forward at the distant shoreline of south western Britain, as if his vision could detect this new and unfathomable enemy.

  He turned back to the radio operator again to ask, “Are the air assets a go or not?”

  The man looked up from the control panel he was staring at in that curious way people did to hear better.

  “Negative, Sir,” he said sternly, making Briggs wonder whether the concept of melodrama had been an entirely American invention, “Harrier strike group still engaged on the continent.”

  “Well, shi-it,” the captain said, drawing out the word into two long syllables, “Crewman, send in the tanks.”

  Briggs’ eyes met the captain’s.

  “Never thought I’d ever give that order,” he said with a rueful smile. The crewman manning the radio nodded once and answered, “Aye, aye, Sir,” before chattering into the microphone.

  Briggs felt an overwhelming sense of dread at potentially having to use up that resource, but he saw no other way to ensure the success of the mission.

  The swarm was still out of range of their guns, the use of cruise missile strikes had been vetoed at the highest level, despite assurances of their accuracy, and they had no chance of a rescue by helicopter without abandoning almost every man in the convoy and exposing their precious cargo to hazards beyond their control.

  That helicopter rescue was still an option, but it was a last ditch attempt that wasn’t their call to make.

  It was a plan that Briggs didn’t want to consider using, as it would mean the deaths of more than thirty men that his plan had placed in harm’s way.

  Damned if they do, Briggs told himself, and damned if they don’t… but I rather suspect we are all damned.

  ONE

  “Wind right to left, gentle,” said the mound of green and brown brush behind Marine Enfield in a low voice, “distance six-hundred yards.”

  “Six-fifteen,” Enfield muttered back, his right eye not leaving the large scope on top of his Accuracy International, or L96a, sniper rifle. His right hand moved on muscle memory, making the finite adjustments as he clicked the dials on the big optic, all the while keeping the target in sight. They were far enough away that the likelihood of being detected by the sound of the impending gunshot was small, but still they couldn’t risk not relocating after taking out a target.

  The teamwork displayed by the two marines, Craig Enfield being the shooter and Martin Leigh his spotter, was exceptional and spoke of the many hours they had spent together in uncomfortable silence and danger. They had both missed out, as they saw it, on seeing deployment to the Falklands seven years before, as they’d still been in their first year of training together, but the pair had seen more than enough of the green landscape and streets of Northern Ireland.

  Now, instead of their enemy being terrorist bombers or shooters, instead of being the mighty steel boot of the Soviet Union stamping towards Europe, an enemy they had been training for years to combat should the Cold War turn hot, they were now stalking zombies.

  Screechers, as the army lot had called them, and it had stuck as a name they used for them, mostly because when the things detected you, they let out a squealing hissing, ripping noise. They didn’t know if it was excitement or, more frighteningly, a call to other zombies to advertise the presence of food, but they did know it was a fucking awful sound that stopped if you stuck a bayonet through their eye.

  “I’ve got it,” Enfield said, in a cool murmur as the reticule of his scope hovered just above and to the left of the head of the Screecher.

  “Zero, this is Whisky,” Leigh said softly into his radio, “we have a Lima in sight, over.”

  Limas. The military’s pathological need to provide a nickname or a phonetic tag for something ran deeper than the coded letter and number designations they gave to all of their weapons and equipment. Lima meant a fast one, the Leaders as they had been dubbed. Until the Marines had landed in their helicopter on the small island a fraction off the south coast, they hadn’t encountered one of these before.

  Studies of their new and unexpected enemy had shown that they operated some kind of biologically-determined rank structure of their own, and each Leader would somehow gather up to a hundred Screechers who followed them around like ducklings. The Leaders weren’t just faster, they were smarter too. Some reckoned they could open doors, and there was even an emerging theory among the joint army, navy and marine forces that they had some way to give orders to their followers.

  Those followers were deadly in numbers, but on their own weren’t too difficult to kill. A heavy blow to the head, one strong enough to crack the skull, would usually render them inert, but that kind of swing burned a lot of energy and anyone trying to survive out there using a sledgehammer would find themselves tiring too quickly, and probably being eaten. The careful application of bayonet to brain was far more civilised, but a bullet would do the trick just as easily. The problem with bullets, especially the heavy ammunition that the RMPs 7.62mm SLRs or Self-Loading Rifles fired, was that they tended to be accompanied by lots of noise.

  Noise, especially gunfire, carried a long way and noise was what attracted the Screechers like flies to shit.

  Another theory about the Screechers was that they were blind, or at least had very poor eyesight, because anyone who had seen one up close reported the dead look in their cloudy eyes.

  But noise was what got people killed. It was what attracted them to group together, as one stumbling zombie would knock into something and attract another nearby zombie to the noise. Those small noises they made would keep them clumped into a group, and each group of any more than a dozen of them almost always had a Lima in the middle of them, ready to break out and run at anything still living. The reverse characteristic of that strange attraction they had was that when the Lima got taken out, the Screechers tended to bumble around until other noises caught their attention and they simply wandered off to find more groups or get stuck somewhere on their own.

  Three times there had been reports of mass-gatherings, or swarms as they had been called. The early warning plane that the Americans had been flying over the UK at an altitude so high that it couldn’t be detected by the naked eye or ear, had watched these swarms gather, reporting that on two occasions those massed crowds had simply dissipated, as though the Screechers had lost interest or the noise they made collectively was simply too confusing and overwhelming to hold their attention.

  The third swarm, luckily as they had later discovered, was the smallest by far, and it had gathered and massed in their direction as the sound of an armoured convoy had attracted them after more than one rolling battle. The small cannons and heavy machine guns of the Yeomanry had taken a devastating toll on the army of the dead, but they had made too much noise in doing so, and brought every infected corpse within a fifty-mile radius directly to their doorway.

  The marines of 40 Commando, deployed to protect the assets of 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron who flew the attack helicopters, had been splintered off from their main group and hastily ordered into two Sea Kings from the naval airbase they were def
ending.

  Their most senior command, seemingly being run from the huge flagship aircraft carrier floating in the channel, had issued the squad of marines, some of whom had been volunteered for the ground convoy bringing supplies and fuel for the two helicopters, with orders to reinforce the light tanks and await further orders. Apparently, command had decided that the only intact armour squadron on mainland Britain deserved a sprinkling of Royal Marines to add flavour and diversity, not to mention adding some firepower to complement the aircraft.

  Of the suspected inter-services rivalry, there had been precisely none. No man in his right mind would think to raise an objection at being given an order by an Admiral instead of a General, given their current and unprecedented situation, nor would marines on the ground show disobedience to the officers and NCOs of the army unit.

  The only rivalry, the only source of inter-forces discontent, had come from within. The only elements of the army that were regulars, in that they were full-time soldiers and not reservists, were the two tank crews led by the unsmiling and permanently unamused Sergeant Horton, and the charismatic and effective Captain Palmer. The main downside to Palmer was his entitled and condescending younger brother who, by some cruel twist of fate, was the only officer of their Yeomanry squadron to have made it when they were called. In contrast to the quick mind and tactical instincts of Julian Simpkins-Palmer, to use their full family name, Oliver Simpkins-Palmer was a spoilt boy with little or no sense of self-preservation and an abundance of aristocratic arrogance.