Nothing happened. Behind him the girl stiff sniffed and sobbed very softly but did not cry out loud; probably a reaction she had been forced to learn quickly or she wouldn’t have survived that long.
When Peter could no longer stand the tension, he rose slightly and handed the girl the other bag he couldn’t carry if he wanted to use both hands on the weapon, and he nodded to reassure her as she took it awkwardly. He ushered her towards the nearest door and tried to get her inside, but she shook her head and her chin began to tremble once more. Peter knelt before her, telling her in a tiny whisper that it was okay and that he wouldn’t hurt her and that she should stay inside and be very quiet. He told himself he was saying anything just to get her to hide in silence, but when he promised her he wouldn’t leave her, something hardened in his heart and he realised in that tiny, split-second moment that he meant those words.
The shriek sounded again, closer this time and from just the other side of the shattered door frame. Peter pushed the girl backwards and closed the door in her face to plunge her into the darkness of the pantry cupboard, then stepped quickly to the side of the entrance that led directly into the kitchen. The door pushed open, tentatively at first, then harder as the thing outside must have smelled them. It stepped inside and swept its head to the right just as the fingers of Peter’s left hand found something behind him on the wall.
On instinct, snatching up the small bunch of keys from the hook, he tossed them out ahead of him and watched as the thing took two fast, staggering paces towards the sound the keys made as they hit the wooden floor.
Then he struck.
Taking his own strides into the fight, he thrust upwards just as the thing turned. Both spikes of his pitchfork had been aimed to penetrate vertically into the skull of the monster via the neck, but the speed with which it turned threw off his aim and resulted in the prongs coming out of the face without damaging the brain. The hideous image this gave took away his courage momentarily, but at least the injury he had inflicted served to keep the beast’s maw firmly closed as it tried to close its fingers on him. Taking his right hand off the shaft of the pitch fork he reached for the single spike, once a piece cut off the tool which he now carried as a weapon, and he twirled it in his fingers to reach upwards and spear the stinking thing in its left eye.
The struggle ended instantly, with the zombie sinking to the ground as he withdrew both weapons. Only then did he see the monster as the person it used to be. A young woman, younger than the one he had seen dragged not long before from the very house he was in now. She was wearing the light blue tunic of a nurse and she had the curious look of half a perm, as the left side of her hair was matted to her skull with dried blood. He read the badge on her chest, Joanne, and the logo of a care home for the elderly he had seen when he had first walked into the village a few days before.
A creaking noise made him ready the weapon again and bare his teeth in natural response to a physical threat, and he dropped both instantly when he saw the little girl had pushed open the door of the cupboard he had put her in.
Stepping around the kitchen counter that luckily blocked her view of the dead thing, he took her hand and led her out of the back door.
SIX
A clear thirty minutes before the four a.m. wake up in readiness for the start time of their five a.m. mission, Dean Johnson had already risen, shaved in a small sink of cold water, dressed for combat and was finishing his second cup of coffee.
That was his normal morning routine; get up, drink coffee, go about his business and drink another coffee. On the days when he really meant it, he could get himself squared away so efficiently that he could pour both drinks from the same kettle and drink them both hot. He was not a man, as he put it, to fuck about. When there was work to do, he always had the mindset of getting it done as quickly and efficiently as possible, then when there was nothing left to do, finding something worthwhile until the end of the day.
In his civilian life, that of being a skilled mechanic working on the larger engines of heavy haulage trucks, he was so far ahead of his peers because by the time they rolled into work, he had already done three hours’ worth and had broken the back of the day’s tasks before his first break. In stark contrast to his military career, this hard work left him working on the shop floor and not scaling the ladder to management, simply because he was too damned valuable where he was. That wasn’t to say they didn’t pay him well, and most of what he learned was useful in his military time, as the armoured vehicles of the British army weren’t especially known for their reliability.
Now, seemingly wearing his SSM persona in a permanent way, he opened his mouth wider to take in the very end of his coffee, which he drank in the NATO-standard milk & two, just as he took his tea, and he made the same mistake that everyone did in their life at some point and underestimated how much liquid was left. Putting the cup down with his cheeks inflated like a greedy hamster, his eyes widened as he forced down the large swallow and coughed slightly.
The small billet he had been allocated was a thin but tall town house near to the causeway entrance and the small square that housed the official pub of the military personnel, as well as the hall that was used as their mixed-forces headquarters. Being the only three senior NCOs, he, Rochefort and the naval Chief Petty Officer were allocated a room each. The houses next door had been offered as more spacious accommodation to the officers, which Johnson was glad that he didn’t have to endure, as no doubt they would turn it into an officers’ mess at some point and try to out-brag each other with their exploits.
The exception to both rules lay with the Royal Marines, as both their officer and their sergeant insisted on billeting with the men, crammed into three houses in the next street. The island was inhabited to about a third of its usual population, the other portion having upped and left to God only knew where when the fur began to fly. The remaining people, about four hundred of them, had welcomed the soldiers cautiously but had treated the refugees they had brought with them like honoured guests and integrated them quickly to replace the families who were not expected to return. The refugees numbered close to a hundred families, friends and other survivors who the soldiers had found along the way. Now there was the better part of a thousand people living on an island that easily catered for almost three thousand. Given that the single causeway road bridge in and out now had no parapets protecting it from the short drop into the swirling current and was blocked by a Chieftain tank, the human traffic of regular movement had all but stopped.
Johnson knew that the food and supplies issue would raise its head again soon, likely that afternoon. But that morning was about sustenance to feed something more important than the now-unemployed civilian population. Today was about finding bullets to feed their machine guns.
In their few skirmishes prior to the battle of the bridge, they had expended phenomenal amounts of ammunition to counter the massing hordes of stumbling corpses, and they were down to enough rounds per wagon to barely equip them for another defence. They had expended a fair amount of the larger 30mm rounds for the cannons on the Foxes, but 7.62 was the magic number. They had twelve Fox cars, four of the quick and light tracked Spartans in Maxwell’s assault troop, as well as the two larger versions of those tracked vehicles in the two command Sultans. Each of those eighteen vehicles had a big, reliable GPMG machine gun, and that was before the two Chieftain tanks counted their two per wagon. On top of that, the SLRs of the small Royal Military Police and the new SA80 rifles of the Royal Marines took different ammunition again. The men of the Yeomanry squadron were relatively well-off for the 9mm rounds to feed their personal weapons but seeing as their specialist form of fighting didn’t primarily involve being outside of their armour too much, that wasn’t a priority. Their stockpile, however, still needed doubling to be on the safe side.
There were also rations, fuel, tools, spare parts all to be considered and that was where he had managed to force his way onto the mission.
Captain Pal
mer, as capable and quick-witted as he was in contrast to his obnoxious and spoilt younger brother, saw the benefit in Johnson’s claim and also knew with utter certainty that he had been played like a fiddle.
“It’s not a matter of seniority in command, Sir,” Johnson told him in a placatory voice, “it’s simply that I know instantly what the parts for the vehicles are and how many of what we need.”
“And,” Palmer said as he completed the thought out loud, “we can’t very well both of us go as we would be leaving the remaining soldiers without army leadership. God forbid our chaps should come under navy control.”
So it was agreed. Palmer would stay and ‘quarterback’ the whole mission via the command headquarters. His choice of words made Johnson frown as he thought of how to phrase the question. Palmer saw the look and told him anyway.
“My first posting in Germany,” he said, “was with an American unit as liaison. I spent more time in an Abrams than I did in a Chieftain for a little under a year before my chaps deployed for a large training exercise and I got to go back. Some things one just, sort of… absorbs, if you follow my meaning?”
Johnson did, and if he was honest with himself, he was a little jealous. Shaking that away, he tried not to smile too much at having shoe-horned himself into a key position before the bureaucracy of the military served up another plate of humble pie for him to eat and forced him back down the chain of command even further.
He was surprised that hadn’t happened already, as there was obviously an element of command and control still in play and apparently, floating at sea, was a growing fleet of allied nations becoming involved. He was certain that, after the arrival of the navy and marines bearing the knowledge that senior commanders were still in charge, they would send a Major at least or a Colonel to take over command of the army’s resources on land.
That hadn’t happened, and over the coming days it was clear that their little green slice of southern England was relatively unimportant to the bigger picture, where the disease had already spread over Ireland and mainland Britain. There were pockets of survivors here and there, according to the eyes very high up in the skies, but anything resembling a large town or city was destroyed. The main concern, Johnson had soon realised, was the spread over continental Europe.
He was entirely ignorant of the ʿhowʾ part, and he doubted that if anyone floating out in the Channel knew, they would bother to tell a reservist Warrant Officer, but the disease which was believed to have originated in London had found its way to a Paris outskirt within a day. His mind ran riot, thinking that it could only be that someone who was infected had got onto a boat or passenger ferry, and been inadvertently taken to France, where they had started biting people like there was no tomorrow.
That was how the British Army of the Rhine was so heavily engaged, and why the thought of their return to British shores to eradicate the outbreak there was an impossibility.
They were, for the most part, on their own.
What he didn’t know and could probably have worked out for himself, had he been in a sufficiently dark mood as to contemplate such things, was what was happening in the wider world.
The United States, as was sensible, had ceased all movement into the mainland. Traffic in and out of Canada was allowed, but their southern borders were closed by a massive mobilisation of the National Guard, and their seaward borders were patrolled day and night by the combined might of the navy and coastguard. There was a widespread decree from their president that there was ‘no way on God’s green earth’ that disease would enter their land. There was widespread outcry for the US to bring her troops home to fight the good fight, but on that subject the president was ominously silent.
The south American continent, much in the same way, mirrored those actions. As did Australia and many African provinces, and Japan, along with any island nation in possession of their own naval forces or under the protection of another country.
What was most worrying, however, was the posturing of the Soviet Union.
“Morning, chaps,” Johnson said in a low voice out of respect for the ungodly hour. The assembled marines, almost all of them, he guessed, were clustered together near the two Bedford trucks parked ready the previous night to carry them to the camp. The same camp that the army had sensibly abandoned, before the tide of dead had swelled to a size that would have washed over those thin fences and swept them away.
He received the expected grunts in response, some calling him ‘Sir’ and others using his rank but none of them offering any disrespect. The smell of hexi-blocks, the solid fuel used to heat water in their mess tins, mixed with a waft of cigarette smoke as he passed the men. Maxwell was ready, using the wagon that he had fixed in record time under interesting circumstances during their recent battle. He’d had to repair the gearbox linkage before their tenuous position had come under friendly fire and forced them to abandon the vehicle and give themselves yet another obstacle to overcome. He had made the repair, incredibly, and had limped home to regain the safety of the island just before the horde had reached them.
The reason Johnson had chosen Maxwell, other than the fact that he was a capable leader of troops, was that he commanded the faster tracked vehicles and the other sergeant he trusted had lost a man the day before. Putting the remaining men of One Troop straight into another mission was out of the question, and Johnson had to admit to himself that although the men of the other two troops were effective at performing their conventional roles, he didn’t think they had fully switched on to their new reality. Leaving those men as steady guards of their island and confident that they could serve their guns effectively should the need arise, he elected to take the men most accustomed to dismounted reconnaissance.
Half of his assault troop were in their two chosen Spartans, with another four of them designated for the front seats of the Bedford trucks that would transport the Marines. Johnson climbed aboard the front Bedford’s cabin, relegating his trooper to the breezy canvas-backed rear section, and he opened the window to rest the barrel of his Sterling sub-machine gun on the ledge. The driver, the round-faced and smiling trooper Povey, was rolling a cigarette when Johnson climbed up, and he turned to see Povey offering the little cylinder to him. Johnson didn’t smoke as a habit, but he was known to feel the urge from time to time.
“Thanks,” he said, reaching out and taking the smoke, allowing the trooper to light it before leaning back to watch him roll a replacement with deft fingers. The men knew that the time for hot drinks and cigarettes would end soon, as they would be observing ‘hard routine’, just as they would in any danger area, because they couldn’t run the risk of attracting the Screechers through something as unnecessary as tea or a smoke.
Just as the sun began to rise, Captain Palmer stepped out of the headquarters building and raised a tin mug in salute to the big man riding shotgun in the big, green truck as they set off gently down the slope.
SEVEN
The phone rang, shattering the underground silence and echoing terribly. The man in the white coat ran for it, snatching up the handset and hunching down as he cradled it with both hands for the precious promise of life that it could bring.
“Hello? Hello?” he hissed into it desperately, hoping that he hadn’t imagined it again and that there was actually someone there this time.
“Professor Grewal?” enquired an efficient and polite female voice from the other end.
“Yes,” he croaked, then cleared his throat, “yes, I’m Professor Grewal, who is calling?” he asked, wincing as he heard the mania in his voice but was powerless to prevent it escaping.
“Hold, please,” was all he heard, then a click on the line and he was certain that he’d imagined it. He flopped backwards against the wall next to the phone and slid down to sit on his heels. If he wasn’t rationing his food to the point that he was borderline hypoglycaemic constantly, he might have had the tears to spare but as it was, his body would not part with anything it could still use. He sobbed with dr
y eyes as he suffered another minor panic attack, reliving the terrifying events of the last three weeks spent underground.
He had been mostly underground for a few months before it all went wrong, but before his experiments for the government, the government of which country he couldn’t be entirely sure, went wrong and released hell on earth, he had at least been free to leave.
He had no clue how severe the outbreak had been, but he knew enough to realise that nobody had come to rescue him yet, so that meant things obviously weren’t going too well topside.
He was a leading expert on biological outbreaks, with a background in applied chemistry, which had allowed him to create and test the perfect pathogen to destabilise a foreign country. That knowledge sadly offered him little solace now, not knowing what was happening outside of his underground lab, which he had managed to secure by some small miracle.
By combining a particularly aggressive strain of rabies courtesy of the Americans, with his own modified version of meningitis, he had created the perfect antidote to humanity, and had inadvertently unleashed a plague destined to make his own species consume itself into oblivion.
The outbreak caused by the human testing phase of his work had at least been contained in the lab, but the protocols had sorely overlooked the unexpected side effects, and the team sent in to help those trapped inside were the ones who released the infected into the streets of south London on a Friday afternoon.
Grewal had been trapped inside a small storeroom with no water and had suffered for two days until he finally steeled himself to make a desperate bid for freedom, or at least another room that had food and water. He had found rolls of insulating wrap in that storeroom and had wound it around himself as a crude form of bite protection in readiness for his escape attempt.
Death Tide Page 26
