Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  Events above ground, as devastating as they were to the entire south east and spreading west with enough raw power to halt an armoured column heading to restore order to the capital, had actually saved him from death by dehydration or worse. When the gathering mob above ground began to move with some bizarre, unknown singular purpose and started to march together, the two lurching former colleagues who were camped outside the door to his storeroom were distracted by the sound they were all making, and stumbled their way towards the exit to join the exodus.

  Feeling desperate, he psyched himself up to fight his way out, only for that desperation to turn to foolishness as he shouted a short squawk of challenge to the empty corridor. Realising that his besiegers had gone, he forced the main door closed and locked it, returning to the carnage that used to be his state-of-the-art lab. There were parts of bodies strewn over the floors, which he tried not to look at, but the most worrying discovery was the test subjects still strapped to their gurneys.

  Some had tipped themselves over in their thrashing attempts to reach flesh with their teeth and Grewal watched in horror as they seemed to emerge from a state of dormancy when he walked in the room. Their cloudy eyes fixed on him and any noise he made fired them up until they began to shriek and hiss and snap their teeth together in his direction, as though they could bite their way to him despite being restrained.

  As traumatised as he was, he was still a scientist who felt not only personally responsible for the catastrophe but believed he could fix it.

  He first looked at the only test subjects to be still and saw a pair of surgical clamps buried through the right eye socket of one. Another appeared normal to look at, but closer inspection revealed the hilt of a scalpel protruding from the base of the skull.

  Over the next few days he took samples from them after doubling the restraints and being very careful to never make contact with them without protective gear. He collected the samples and his test results, then dispatched all of the still living men.

  Not living, living, he supposed but at least still moving.

  “Professor?” asked a voice from the phone, startling him back to the present.

  “I’m here,” he said, “who is this?”

  “Commander Briggs of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy,” came the insistent response, “Professor I can’t be certain that this form of communication will last long so I need you to answer my questions as efficiently as possible. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Grewal stammered.

  “Are you injured or infected?”

  “No.”

  “Is the lab still secure, is it accessible from the outside?”

  “Yes,” Grewal said, then thought before answering the second part, “and I’d need to open it from inside.”

  “Do you have hazardous material from the lab and is it secure?”

  “Yes, in a hard case. I have blood and tissue samples and…”

  “Please,” Briggs interrupted in an admonishing tone, “brevity and accuracy are key here, Professor. Do you have supplies to last for a month or more?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have supplies to last up to a month?”

  “No.”

  “Dammit,” Briggs said cursing him pointlessly, “can you hold out for a fortnight?”

  Grewal did the mental calculations again, having emptied every piece of edible material in the lab onto the large table in the common area.

  “Eleven days, maximum,” he said weakly, hearing breathing and a pause on the other end of the line.

  “We will attempt an extraction as soon as possible,” Briggs told him, “We will attempt to use this method of communication to warn you closer to the time, but it may not be possible. Be ready.”

  The phone clicked again, and the line went dead.

  “Please,” Grewal said in a small voice, “don’t leave me alone… talk to me, please...”

  He dropped the phone and sat with his back to the wall as the swinging handset bumped off his shoulder with a pendulum motion. Just then, whether from sadness, desperate loneliness or relief, the tears came and would not stop.

  EIGHT

  “Thank you, Private,” said Kimberley Perkins to the soldier flanking sergeant Croft with a cup of tea.

  “No, Miss,” he said looking confused, “I’m a Trooper, not a Private.”

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, as she looked up from the strong-smelling tea cupped in both hands, “sorry, I er… what’s the difference, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Trooper Cooper, as much as he had heard of the jokes about his name and rank, didn’t mind at all. He glanced at sergeant Croft, seemingly to ask for permission to engage in idle chitchat with the civilians, and he received a nod of consent. Cooper sat next to the young woman, seeing her shrink slightly away and self-consciously fuss with the hair on the left side of her face to hide the bumpy skin of the scar.

  “We are a squadron, see, made up of troops of troopers, but the infantry has regiments made up of companies of privates. There are some gunners and fusiliers and scaleys bu…” Croft cleared his throat loudly without looking up from his clipboard, and Cooper amended his explanation, “I mean signalmen,” he said sheepishly, “so it depends on where you get put in the army.”

  “Oh,” Kimberley said again as she looked up into his kind face, “so the men with the red berets and different guns are privates?”

  “No, Miss!” Cooper chuckled, “they’re all…” he paused to look at Croft’s back and evidently decided against using the nickname he had loaded ready to fire, “they are Royal Military Policemen, RMPs, and they come out of the factory as Lance-Jacks, so they can order people around, like,” he said, unaware that his explanation raised more questions than it answered.

  “Lance-Jacks?” she asked, confused.

  “Yeah, half-screws? One-stripers? Lance Corporals. ’Cept their sergeant, who is a sergeant, obviously,” he responded.

  “Lay off, Cooper,” Croft said tiredly, “can’t you see you’re confusing the lady?”

  “It’s fine, Sergeant,” Kimberley said with a smile, “bullshit does baffle brains, after all.”

  Croft gave her a warm smile, guessing incorrectly that she had heard the terminology from one the men in his squadron.

  “But I’m not bull…”

  “Thank you, Cooper,” Croft interrupted quickly, “off you go now.”

  Cooper rose, looking slightly hurt, but Kimberley treated him to a kind smile from the visible side of her face, and that pleased him. As he left, Quartermaster Sergeant Rochefort walked in and sat down with a nod to Kimberley.

  “Tea, Andy?” Croft said.

  “Yes, please, Tom,” he replied tiredly, then rubbed his face.

  Kimberley smiled again. She loved to watch people interact, especially soldiers, and saw no bigger change in them than when their subordinates left them in peace and they could revert to their peer group settings. The exception to this, she found, was the officers, who seemed to retain the same lofty sense of superiority regardless.

  Seeing the two tall, confident men relax made her feel more at ease, and she almost let out a small titter of laughter when the two men moaned and groaned at their aching joints as they sat down.

  “Miss Perkins,” Andy Rochefort said, “how are you on this fine, if not rather early morning?”

  “I’m well, thank you, Staff,” she answered, betraying that she had been doing her own research other than to ask Cooper.

  “Andy, please,” he said with a smile.

  “Very well then, but you can call me Kimberley, just not Kim,” she said in a voice than invited no disobedience or further inquiry.

  “Understood, loud and clear,” he answered, “now, I also understand there are some concerns from the people?”

  “Yes, well, not so much concerns as needs really,” she said, fidgeting with her hair again and automatically turning her face so that she spoke to them sideways, “the supplies from the shop are all gone, as you know, an
d there are people, ladies specifically, who need certain things…”

  “Ah,” Rochefort said, intuiting the subject she was trying to raise without needing her to use the words. The dead giveaway for this was the sudden absence of the men appointed to the task of ensuring effective two-way communication, “say no more. I presume you have a list available of the items?”

  Kimberley did, and she gratefully handed over the folded piece of paper from the sheaf in front of her.

  “There are other pressing matters,” she went on, “other than the island-wide shortage of toilet paper.”

  The three of them chuckled politely at the small joke, allowing other matters to be brought up. Kimberley enquired politely about the soldiers who had left that morning, asking when they might be back, just as a rushing, intense noise filled the air above the building they were in, and blasted away with a dizzying Doppler effect which was repeated seconds later.

  “That would be their taxi going to collect them now,” Croft said with a smile as Kimberley tried to figure out the logistical sense in what he said.

  The gates of the camp came into sight of Maxwell’s wagon at the head of the convoy of four. The two vulnerable trucks were in the middle, with the other tracked vehicle at the rear. They moved fast, keeping a good distance in between their vehicles, and only stopped when they reached the gates.

  More than a few Screechers had wandered out in the road after they had passed, and two had even stepped out in front of them to be crushed under the tracks of the lead wagon. Johnson, from his elevated position in the first truck offering a good view ahead, guessed that these were two of the Leader types of Screecher, the ones the marines had been calling Limas.

  Faster and more capable they might have been, but they couldn’t evade ten tonnes travelling at over fifty-five miles per hour.

  Maxwell dismounted with the other trooper from his wagon, leaving the driver in place, and pulled the gates open to allow the four vehicles inside. There was a fleeting urge in Johnson’s mind that they should cowboy it; that they should just bust through the gates like in a film. He brushed that thought away almost immediately as stupidity. He would never destroy a perfectly good barricade which could be used against the enemy.

  They closed the gates afterwards, jogged back to their mount and drove on. The camp was a big place, and when they had resided there briefly, they’d only used a portion of it and kept the fences clear. They had to push much further in to achieve their objective this time, and the mood in each vehicle felt tauter and more expectant with every inch they travelled. The enormous hangars filled with vehicles, found easily as the man driving the lead wagon had been there many times, was opened to reveal the rows of angular, brutish lumps on their four massive wheels.

  The marines had all dismounted when they stopped, pouring from the back of the trucks to the rhythmic noise of boots hitting the tarmac, to take up defensive positions, as the others sorted out the selection and starting of four Saxon armoured personnel carriers. The four men assigned to drive were all from the Yeomanry, seeing as armoured vehicles were primarily their arena, even though none of them had ever driven them. They were deep inside the complex layers of fenced sections, so highly unlikely to encounter any enemy, but that didn’t prevent the marines from demonstrating their fieldcraft, which seemed to come as naturally to them as breathing. Johnson paused a moment to take in the sight of them, either lying flat or kneeling to cover every square inch of approach through the sights of their new weapons with the alien appearance of the magazine being housed behind the trigger grip.

  The marines were very different from the men of Johnson’s squadron, and as their new trucks rolled out, they climbed aboard via the double doors at the rear. Two trucks came under the direct command of their officer, and the other two of the sergeant who had been introduced to Johnson as Bill Hampton. He was at ease with his men, never seeming to feel the need to issue orders, but simply stating what he needed them to do, and they did it. Their current drills were nothing new, as they’d become accustomed to that kind of transport in Northern Ireland, albeit in the previous generation of armoured car.

  The two men, Lieutenant Lloyd and Sergeant Hampton, nodded to one another and the sergeant climbed aboard to lead his two trucks away. This was part of the plan, sending back half of their commandos as soon as they were mobile, and the second half remained with the two tanks and Bedfords. They opened another massive building attached to the workshops and took box after box of vehicle spare parts to ensure their armour stayed mobile.

  “Right,” Johnson said happily after loading one truck, “bullets.”

  The ammo dump, stored well away from the buildings and people in either dead or living form, was a few miles from the base. It took them a long time to get through the many physical layers, then the hard work began as they carried large crates out to the one now empty big, green Bedford truck. One squad of marines knelt in cover to point their weapons towards the gate as the truck was loaded up, then yet more boxes of large bullets were carried out to the open square nearby.

  “What’s their ETA?” Maxwell asked, more out of conversation than needing the information repeated for him. In response, Johnson did that strange thing that people do when asked any question relating to time, especially when it doesn’t directly involve knowing what the precise time is, and he glanced unnecessarily at his watch.

  “Sixteen minutes,” Johnson told him, realising what the question was designed for. Maxwell was offering his opinion that they would have carried enough to fill the helicopters by the time they arrived, so long as they left the island very soon.

  “Call them in,” he told the sergeant.

  They carried the rest, fulfilling the weight quota with rapidly calculated mental arithmetic, and everyone but Johnson and a pair of Royal Marines remounted their respective vehicles in anticipation of the instruction to move.

  Johnson glanced at his watch again, seeing that the sixteen-minute window had just expired, and craned his neck to look up as he shielded his eyes from the indirect sunlight. The characteristic sound of helicopters flying, that booming chatter of rotary blades cutting the air, came to him. He turned to the vehicles, raised the thumb of his left hand, and watched as they drove away. Right on cue, the pair of helicopters dropped in, turned and flared noisily to land close to where he stood. He knelt down, screwing up his eyes to save the rotor wash from blowing too much dust into them. Ordinarily, the two Sea Kings would keep their engines turning, but they were adopting new tactics to keep their profiles low in the new war they were fighting.

  The first one was loaded, and the aircrew were strapping down the boxes before the blades had even stopped turning. The second one was similarly loaded, and Johnson allowed himself to sink into a narrow canvas chair in the first bird, feeling the ache in his hands and arms and the burn in his shoulders.

  As the engines burst back to life and whined up to screaming pitch, he leaned back and smiled at the easy success of the last six hours.

  And he prayed it would last.

  The helicopters landed first, but only by a margin of a few minutes as they had taken a route straight out to sea, heading south before looping a long westerly arc well out of sight of land, to swing back and find the island to their north. That way was intended to avoid the numerous Screechers, who would have seen and heard the aircraft, and followed them back to the island to hold some grotesque reunion of the last time.

  The first two Saxons growled their way over the bridge with their dark green and black camouflage seeming just as brutal and inappropriate to the picturesque seaside setting as the tank blocking the roadway did. They followed the new standing orders and went into the buildings to strip down and show the RMPs that they weren’t bitten. When they’d been through the initial check, they went into a quarantine building, equipped with tea, coffee and food, where they waited to prove that they weren’t running a temperature.

  Twenty-four minutes later the other Saxons came back, nest
led fore and aft of the heavily loaded Bedford trucks and a Spartan at each end of that convoy, and those men parked their wagons to go through the same process.

  Seven hours from start to finish, and they had recovered four new APCs, which would allow the marines to safely conduct their own operations, as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition for their guns. Johnson looked down the slope and smiled as the convoy snaked its way slowly through the obstruction of the tank and the sloping obstacles.

  That smile faded as he saw the man climbing out of the top hatch on the Chieftain tank, jumping up and down and waving his arms desperately.

  “Stop the convoy,” he said out loud, his voice desperate and cracking with the opening stages of panic, but there was nobody there who could turn those words into an order and pass it down to the men in the distance.

  He didn’t yet know what was wrong, but he was certain that it was nothing he wanted to see up close. He felt worse seeing it from a distance, as he was powerless to stop it.

  The man chosen to command the second of Maxwell’s wagons was Corporal Graham Ashdown. The fact that Maxwell had chosen him spoke sufficiently of his competency, and in fact his hard work saw him on a waiting list for an NCO leadership course, in preparation for him receiving another stripe on his arm.

  If anything, Ashdown was a little disappointed in the ease of their mission. Not from any immaturity or lust for violence, but from the point of view of a professional who wanted to showcase his ability to command his fighting unit. Their unhindered route to the camp showed only the rear view of a Bedford truck and the faces of the alert but inert Royal Marines inside as they scanned for threats using the minimal amount of effort in order to conserve their energy.

  That was something he found amusing; his own men were known for eating and sleeping at random times, but the marines took it to a new level entirely. If they were stood down for even five minutes, one of them would fall asleep instantly, only to come awake just as rapidly when the order to move came. It was the same with food; when the marines saw it, they devoured it as thought they were rescue dogs living in constant fear of starvation.