Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  He expected at least some employment when they arrived at the camp, but they found it devoid of life, or whatever the state of the Screechers should be called. He had heard the radio traffic about the few who had staggered into the road in answer to the noise of their four loud engines, but most of them faded away into the distance behind them, as only the quicker ones had made it out in front. He saw the evidence of those where they had been mashed into the road surface and flattened in intricate patterns by the tracks of Maxwell’s wagon and the two sets of big tyres following, so his only view of the enemy was either squashed or out of range.

  The work inside the camp was back-breaking and strenuous but it was good to feel employed, if only for a short time. The Saxons were found and started with ease, and the remaining half of the marines stayed to help load the trucks.

  As soon as the helicopters could be heard swooping in, Maxwell mounted his lead wagon and called the off, leaving Ashdown to take up his position at the rear once more as his convoy of four made their return journey in much slower time, given the tonnes of ammunition and weaponry they had recovered.

  “Contact left!” Ashdown called out over the radio, making every head in the convoy snap to their nearside as a dozen Screechers leaked from the close tree line and directly into their vehicles. No gunfire sounded as the distance was too short and the warning too late to bring their heavy machine guns to bear on the ambush, so they relied on their momentum and weight to carry them on through the attack.

  Being the last vehicle some short distance back from the others, Ashdown was the first to see it, as he had the best perspective. That said, he still didn’t have time to bring the cupola around to fire on the attack, not that he definitely would have, given that there were only a few of them.

  The first Screecher to stumble from the undergrowth was unable to gauge the speed and distance of the first light tank as it passed him by, followed by the two big, green trucks. His scarlet-red beret had long since been lost, but the camouflage smock and trousers remained intact, even if the ragged hole in his throat had soaked the uniform almost black down his front.

  The last tank, the one his head was turned away from, hit him hard with the very centre of its front edge, which threw him down hard to the concrete before rolling over his thighs with the left-side tracks. Hands reaching instinctively, the Screecher clawed at the smooth underside of the Spartan as it rolled him over and over, dislocating joints and snapping off fingers.

  The damage to the once-human body was unimaginable, but it didn’t prevent the half-ruined fingers of the left hand gaining purchase and swinging the ruined body around to drag behind the vehicle. The right-hand finger and thumb, all that remained, found a tenuous handhold on the rear and the torso raised itself an inch higher, just as the legs from just below the pelvis fell away to slip from the gory trouser legs and bounce to a gentle stop in the centre of the road.

  “Road clear,” Ashdown said, making the milky eyes of the hitchhiker snap forwards to seek the source of the sound that its brain associated with fresh meat.

  NINE

  When she came to, Ellie Finn first opened her eyes and instantly regretted it. The pain in her head was incredible in the most literal sense of the word, and it simultaneously threatened to make her vomit and fall off the hard ground she was lying on as the world spun viciously. She had been unaware of the car journey, but her brain peeked through the fog and she knew that she was in a different place from before the men had broken down the door.

  The door. The house.

  She sat up, fast and uncontrolled to be hit with another barrage of agony that shot down her spine to the tips of her big toes.

  “Amber!” she sobbed, earning another jolt of pain as the words bounced back to her ears and sounded like someone else’s. She threw up, hard and uncontrolled, to cover her left leg as she instinctively turned away. Collapsing back and banging her head again she sobbed out loud, repeating the name of her daughter, who had been left behind when the men had taken her.

  “Shhh, it’s okay,” said a voice from behind her in an attempt to soothe her pain.

  “It’s not okay,” she sobbed wretchedly, “my baby,” then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  Misunderstanding, the woman who soothed the girl shushed her again and stroked her matted blonde hair. She had lost people, too but had not been forced to suffer the death of a child, as she had none. She could only begin to imagine the pain and loss that the girl was feeling, even before the men who had ‘saved’ the crying, wounded woman had roughly dumped her unconscious into the same room as her.

  It was a cell, regardless of what they called it. Any room that someone else forced you into and locked the door on was a cell, whether it was built for that purpose or not. The younger woman had been there for a day and a night, after her own little corner of quiet safety had been invaded by the sound of a shrieking fan belt, and her front door had imploded. The men she’d met had invited her to come with them and seeing no choice but to comply or get herself hurt, she’d gone with them. She wished she’d had the strength to overpower them, but she highly doubted she could have incapacitated two of them with a swift knee to the groin before one of them had used the weapons they carried to hurt or threaten her. Meekly, she had gone with them and she’d regretted that decision every minute of every day since.

  Now, seeing a younger girl dumped roughly in the room with her, she tended to her as well as she could and waited for her to come around once again.

  She awoke an hour later much in the same way. Her hands twitched, and her body jerked as though her consciousness was trapped inside a plastic bag and she fought to punch her way out. When she did, she came awake with an exaggerated gasp and sat bolt upright, only to whine pitifully and sink back down, holding her neck with both hands at the base of her skull. She opened her eyes in response to the voice, unthreatening as it was obviously female, which was trying to calm her again. She cautiously opened one eye, hating the light streaming through the window for burning her retina with its unkind brightness, to see a woman with lighter blonde hair than her own and maybe ten years older. She smiled kindly, weakly as though she was apologising for what had happened to her.

  “Careful,” she said as Ellie tried to sit up, “go slow, you’ve got a nasty lump on your head.”

  She went slowly, raising a hand to her head and the main source of her pain to find what felt like an egg protruding from just behind her right ear. Her stomach went into spasm again, making the other woman step smartly back and snatch up a metal rubbish bin to catch the remaining bile collected in her stomach. Her brain somehow knew that she had already thrown up, but her eyes couldn’t find it.

  Perhaps she cleaned it up, Ellie thought randomly, just as the jumble of feelings and sensations bubbled to the surface and her heart broke for the third time that day.

  “My baby,” she sobbed again, screwing her face up and falling back into despair and tears to complement the agony inside her skull.

  The woman soothed her again, trying to find the words to comfort her.

  “I know, my lovely,” she said with genuine sadness for the girl’s loss, “we’ve all lost people to them but I ca…”

  “She’s not lost,” interrupted the girl with slurred words, “she’s alive. They took me away and…” she broke down again and her sobs intensified, “they left her there. She’s all alone…”

  Try as she did, Ellie couldn’t help but break down with her and the two women cried together. Resting the girl down on the bed, she stood and began to hammer on the wooden door for attention.

  “What do you want?” came an angry response from outside the closed door.

  “This woman had a baby with her,” she snapped angrily, “where is she?”

  A muttered conversation took place on the other side of the locked door, prompting Ellie to bang again.

  “She didn’t,” came the answer, “she was on her own.”

  “No, she bloody well wasn’t,” El
lie snapped back, creating more silence and insistent muttering from beyond.

  “Okay,” said a different voice tentatively, “we’ll go back.”

  The house was much the same as they had left it three hours previously, only this time it had attracted two of the slow-moving ones who were milling about aimlessly inside the low stone wall of the front garden. The crowbar put an end to one as the other was enticed towards the younger man, who had crudely taped a straight-bladed carving knife to a broom handle. The knife punctured the face dead centre, travelling slightly upwards through the sinus cavity to pierce the brain, and the thing’s lights went out.

  Both men had enjoyed the killings, but both had distinctly not enjoyed the roasting they had received from Michaels; the man who had bestowed on them the responsibility of going back to find the girl they had apparently left behind through incompetence.

  They searched the house again, finding it precisely how they had left it, with just one exception.

  The addition of another dead body laid out flat like a starfish on the kitchen floor.

  “I didn’t do that,” said Ian from behind his rough beard to the younger and far less intelligent Carl. Michaels called them Thing One and Thing Two, which Ian had explained to Carl had originated from a children’s book. But they still used their real names, despite others mimicking their frightening leader.

  “Who did then?” Carl asked, frightened.

  “Don’t bloody know, do I?” Ian snarled back at him, “But it’s a good bet whoever it was took the baby we're supposed to be looking for, so start searching, idiot.”

  Carl searched, as did Ian. They found nothing else amiss, other than the body with its punctured brain and ruined left eyeball. The back door had been ajar when they’d entered, and that was closed to keep the bad things out, but the destroyed front door would not close. Their arrival had prompted yet more interest, and they were forced to flee back to the safety of their hilltop refuge to report the news of their failure.

  Peter was forced to change his usual nocturnal routine after the interruption of the bearded man and his crowbar. The shock of finding the little girl still hadn’t faded, and their awkward flight over fields from the back of the house was far more difficult than it should have been, because the girl’s legs were much shorter than his own. If he’d been a grown up, he would have simply scooped her up in his arms and carried her. He was sure it had been Leonardo who’d scooped April up like that in a TV programme he’d very occasionally managed to see if his mother was comatose. He loved the Ninja Turtles, when he got away with watching it. The one time he tried picking this girl up like that, she’d whined and squirmed out of his grip to shoot him a look of sheer grumpiness. He got the message: don’t touch me.

  In addition to trying to get her to move more quickly without being allowed to physically help her, he also faced the frustrating limitation of only having one-way communication with her and trying to translate her suspicious looks to gauge whether his words had been understood.

  As much as this slow progress frustrated him, the very thought of leaving her to herself was an impossibility. Already in his head, he’d worked out how much extra food and water he would need to carry to keep her healthy, and that was before he even found out if she liked the same things he did; whether she would eat cold beans or rice pudding from the tin. Finally reaching the summit of a low hill behind the village, he paused at the top to assess which direction they should take. Opting for the snaking path that led into another cluster of buildings about the same size as the one they had just escaped, he turned to encourage the girl, who had taken the opportunity to sit down.

  Her legs must have been aching, he realised. As small as the hill was to him, it must have been a huge effort for such a young person. He glanced back down the hill, satisfied that nothing was following them, and sat down next to her. Digging in his back pack as she played with the floppy limbs of the cuddly lamb, Peter brought out chocolate covered biscuits taken from the house he’d been in. They’d fallen down behind some items in a cupboard, which he wouldn’t have noticed had he not been standing on a chair, and he unwrapped one to see if she noticed. He glanced at her as he chewed the first mouthful of raisins, biscuit and chocolate, to see her eyes watching the treat in his hand intently.

  Hungry or not, he doubted he would turn down the snack at any age, so he was sure he had her attention. Holding the other one out to her, he watched as hesitant fingers whipped out to take it carefully, then began to remove the purple paper sleeve and attack the foil wrapper underneath. She glanced at Peter again, just to be sure it wasn’t a trick, and bit into it. She chewed fast, not waiting to finish one mouthful before she took another bite, and she finished it before Peter had eaten the last piece of his own. She handed him back the wrapper with a small smile and looked at him expectantly.

  “You still hungry?” he asked her. Her wide eyes and blank face showed nothing, but her head nodded twice.

  “Let’s get down there and find somewhere safe first,” he told her in the slightly patronising tone of a young child talking to an even younger one, “and then we can eat, okay?”

  She seemed to think about it for a moment, her lips pursing and her fair eyebrows almost meeting in the middle, then she nodded again abruptly.

  “What’s your name?” Peter asked her, pushing the envelope of their communication to see if she would make words yet, “How old are you?”

  She ignored him, rising to her feet and walking away down the hill. Peter shrugged his way back into his back pack, hefted the pitchfork and the other bag, and followed her direction to catch up with her easily. He fell in step alongside her, keeping an easy pace due to the height difference, and told her about his life. He explained that his sister was taken away, and after that all the bad things that had happened. He skipped the details of killing his own mother after the horrendous things he had seen her do, and of the massive riot of dead things who’d walked straight through his farm and made him hide in shit until they wandered off, and about the one he had decapitated with his father’s shotgun, after he had cut off the barrels that were too long for him to manage. He kept to the facts appropriate for a child, forgetting to view himself as one, given his experiences, and the little girl listened without answering.

  That conversation, such as it was, led them to the hedge separating the rolling landscape from the village. Peter stepped in front of the girl and held a finger to his lips, then handed her the bag in his hand and pointed for her to stay where she was. She took the bag, kept her lips firmly pressed together, and nodded. Peter hefted his pitchfork and crept towards the style, where he could easily cross the wooden fence and step onto the grass verge before the road. He watched, and he listened, hearing and seeing nothing but sure of the knowledge that the absence of those things did not mean for one single second that there was nothing out there, or that they were safe.

  Keeping his eyes on the road and buildings, he reached down with his right hand and scuffed about in the earth of the hedgerow beside him, coming up with a small rock. He weighed it subconsciously in his hand, not for a precise weight but for an instinctive feel for the effort it would take to launch the missile, then heaved it up and over the hedge to make it skitter along the road where it bounced up into the side of a car with a sharp clang.

  Then he waited.

  And waited.

  To her credit, the girl stayed still ten paces behind him and didn’t make a sound. When Peter had decided that there were none of them in the immediate area, he beckoned her forwards and climbed the style to cross the fence. Turning to her, he saw that she had reached the part where she had to throw one leg over and was stuck, lacking the strength or confidence to tackle the obstacle with the bag in her had. Wordlessly, Peter reached out for the bag and took it, then froze in surprise as she held her hand out to him, even after he had taken her burden.

  He met her eyes and reached out to take her hand, feeling her warm, little fingers grip his as she climb
ed the rest of the way over. She took back the bag from his hand without being asked to and looked up at him expectantly. He nodded, then walked to the nearest house where he found both doors locked, but a small window to the kitchen open. He slipped off his bag and tried to climb up to it, but he couldn’t gain any purchase with his feet to do anything other than look inside.

  The house was empty, and more importantly it had no musty smell that the ones trapped inside made. Pulling a face of disappointment as he climbed back down, he heard a small noise. Looking at the girl, he watched as she made the noise again, a small and deliberate cough in her throat, and pointed a finger at her chest.

  The finger was then pointed at the window, and Peter finally understood. He held up a finger of his own to signal that she should wait, then used the prongs of his pitchfork to tap loudly on the window to be doubly sure that there was nothing nasty inside. Repeating the process and finding no good reason to turn down her offer of help, he slipped off his back pack and rested his pitchfork against the back door. He awkwardly held out his hands to her, silently asking for permission to pick her up, and she stepped into his hands.

  Given that there was only a relatively small age difference between them, Peter struggled to lift her, but she eventually managed to get her hands onto the open frame. Now that she held some of her own weight, he managed to push her upwards to watch as she threw one short leg into the gap and slipped inside. He watched as she climbed carefully down from the kitchen worktop and disappeared from view as she went towards the door. He waited, but the door didn’t open. Fear rising inside him, he was about to knock and shout to her or climb back to the window to see if she was still there when a noise from inside made him press his ear to the wood of the door and listen.