Palmer’s lapse into Shakespearean prose betrayed just how much time he had spent glued to the planning board and the radio. He was tired, not just physically but emotionally, and his own personal war was being swallowed by the global politics in play. Everyone around the table understood the potential severity of the response that the Soviet Union could feel forced into. Even though the Cold War was, as they all believed, in its dying stages and intelligence reported that the Union was close to collapse, none of them could even begin to predict what a desperate government would do, given the current climate, if they felt threatened. The arrival of a carrier strike group and an American nuclear attack submarine only a few hundred miles away in the English Channel ran the obvious risk of disaster.
“Why haven’t we spoken to them yet?” Lieutenant Lloyd asked the room rhetorically, “Surely they can see that what’s going on is bigger than countries fighting each other?”
“One would have hoped so, but that is somewhat beyond our control for now,” Palmer answered to move the conversation onwards, “Now, they should be here by tonight, I’m assured, rendezvous with the joint fleet in the Channel, and will send their men in tomorrow morning to us. I assume via helicopter, even though the means haven’t been confirmed to us as yet. I can only presume that we might be expecting our new commanding officer and his entourage at that time, so I would fully anticipate being evicted from here. Whatever other personnel come with them, if any, will be our responsibility to house and feed but I highly doubt they will become our men to instruct. So,” he paused, “assuming the mission will go ahead, I propose that I lead it via one of the Sultan wagons,” he said as he kept his eyes down and away from Johnson’s, “I’m sure we can all agree that taking my Chieftain would be slow going and possibly be a touch of overkill, but I want a troop of the Fox cars with me and one quarter of your marines,” he added, looking up to Lloyd and receiving a nod, “Your sergeant will suffice, and I presume we can spare a man to drive them in a Saxon?” he asked, finally making eye contact with Johnson, who was just waiting to be told he was sitting that one out. He nodded, going over the particulars, which mainly encompassed routes and alternatives, and left the actual entry, assault and clearance of the power plant as general intentions rather than specific actions, as the men coming from America knew the plant intimately and would be needed to make those calls.
“If I may, Sir?” Johnson asked politely, having calmed down from his initial annoyance of not being allowed out to play. Palmer gestured for him to speak.
“I’d suggest splitting your marines over two Saxons, with an engineer in each,” he said simply, leaving the obvious reasons out of his explanation.
“Very good, Sarn’t Major,” the captain answered with a nod as he saw the logic in the recommendation instantly, “tomorrow then, we should know more when they arrive, but I’d like men ready and briefed. Thank you.”
Johnson left, trying to decide whether to throw Sergeant Strauss back into the lion’s den or to put trust in others he wasn’t totally certain of.
FOURTEEN
Pauline finished her allocated work duty of cooking and cleaning in the hotel’s modest kitchens. There were over thirty people there now, half of whom would leave if they could guarantee success in finding somewhere safer to be. It was the lesser of two evils. When she returned, she found Ellie in the same position; sitting on the bed with her heels tight into her thighs and her forehead rested on her knees. She didn’t look up when Pauline was shown back into the room, not even when she placed a wrapped meal of fresh bread sandwiches in front of her.
Pauline went into the bathroom of their hotel room-cum-cell, and when she came back out, she saw Ellie eating the food with her cheeks puffed out and her jaw working almost desperately as she raised the fingertips of one hand to her lips.
“Sorry,” she said through her full mouth, “I just…”
“Don’t be silly, my lovely,” Pauline told her kindly as she sat down opposite her, “I brought it back for you anyway, you need to get your strength up.”
Ellie chewed and winced as she swallowed her mouthful too soon and had to force the lump down her throat.
“The bread,” she gasped before snatching another bite, “where did it come from?”
“I made it,” Pauline said simply, “the kitchens here still work fine, and all I have to do is make food. They don’t make me do anything else,” she went on, pausing hesitantly before continuing and speaking faster to change the subject, “and they keep the people out, so it’s a fair enough trade…”
Ellie looked at her seriously with dark, red-rimmed eyes.
“You think it’s fair?” she asked dangerously, “They snatch people away from their families and you think it’s fair?”
“No,” Pauline said carefully, dropping her own smile, “I don’t think what they’ve done is fair at all, but I don’t know what I’d be doing if they hadn’t come here. I’m just trying to get by, and I don’t think I can… I don’t think I can kill people.”
“Well I’m bloody ready to,” Ellie responded. Eager to change the subject, Pauline pointed at the battered paperback book on the low bedside table beside her.
“Did you read any of that?” she asked, hopeful that she had been given a lover of literature to share a room with.
“No,” Ellie answered through another mouthful of food, “I haven’t got my glasses and I can’t hold it far enough away to see it.”
Her words were full of regret and annoyance, but any response Pauline could make was stopped by the knock at the door.
The two women looked at each other before Ellie shrugged, and Pauline shouted for whoever it was to come in.
One of the first men to turn up there stood in the doorway, not stepping inside, and politely asked for Ellie to come with him.
“Why?” she shot back, full of venom.
“Because our Boss would like to talk to you,” he responded.
Pauline expected more anger, more revolt and even imagined them having to drag the woman out of the room, but Ellie simply stood, brushed off the crumbs from her dirty and stained clothes, and followed him.
Ellie walked tall, pride and anger keeping her from unravelling. She was shown to the door of the big hall in the historical building and the man who had escorted her there gestured for her to go inside. That was evidently as far as he was taking her.
She walked in, looking around at the high ceilings and decorated walls, and a voice cut through to her.
“Good afternoon,” came a man’s voice from her right. She looked to see a man of average height and build, with an unremarkable face. His voice had nothing unique about it either, but there was something intangible about the man that made him appear strong. He didn’t ooze malevolence or physically dominate her; in fact, he kept a respectful distance as he spoke.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, “but I know a simple apology won’t help you at all. Believe me when I say that I know the loss you feel right now…” He gestured to an ornate chair beside one that he took, inviting her to sit with him. She sat, her face a mask of neutrality.
“I want you to know that I sent men back to where you were and had them search until they were forced to come back, but they found no sign of her. My own daughter was lost very early on,” he said with eyes turned down, “even before most people realised what was happening. We’d been visiting family near Portsmouth and, well, I don’t need to tell you…”
“I’m very sorry,” Ellie said, seeing him look up to smile at her. That smile faded when her face contorted, and she spoke again.
“But your daughter wasn’t left for dead by thugs who knocked her mother out. Your daughter didn’t die alone and terrified. My daughter did. She’s dead because of you,” she finished, spitting the words at him with a jab of her right index finger. When she had finished, her body betrayed her and brought on angry tears caused by adrenaline, and it opened the floodgates once more.
The man sat back and just watched her
cry. He didn’t force his words on her, didn’t tell her that the men were simply being clumsy and ham-fisted about following his orders to bring back survivors to the safety of their hill. They had never encountered anyone who didn’t want to be rescued, so the thought never occurred to them that people might want to be left alone. He wanted to say that he would have done things differently, that he would have brought the girl back with them and listened to her, but felt the words were empty so he didn’t say them.
He also didn’t tell her that his men had found a dead zombie in the house, which he doubted a little girl could have achieved. He didn’t tell her that he believed someone had found her before his men had got back to them. She appeared to have decided and accepted that the girl was gone, so he saw no need to drive her insane with renewed hopes and fears, deciding that it was better to let her accept the loss and move on.
“I know there’s nothing I can say to make this better,” he told her, “but you have my word that nothing like this will happen again.”
“You’re right,” she sniffed, “nothing you can say will help.”
With that, she stood and walked from the room with steps that gathered pace until she broke into a run just before the doorway.
The man, John Michaels, leaned back in the chair and sighed. He longed for men who had the intelligence to follow orders but reminded himself that he had to adapt and work with what he had. The tale about his daughter was true, but he left out some pertinent facts.
Facts such as his daughter turning in the car as he sped home, his wife in the back seat holding her as she convulsed with the fever. He left out that the girl had opened her eyes suddenly and bitten her mother hard, tearing out a golf ball-sized chunk from her neck and sheeting the inside of the car with arterial spray from her torn blood vessels. He didn’t tell her that he had crashed the car in his sudden and terrifying blindness, and that his unrestrained daughter had flown through the windscreen on impact to roll to a bloody and broken mess thirty feet from the wreck. He didn’t tell her that when he came around from the blow to his head, that his wife was reaching for him but unable to do more than hook a single fingernail into his clothing and try to pull him towards her milky eyes and gnashing teeth. He didn’t say that he fell from his car in terror, scrambling backwards on his backside to put distance between himself and the horror. He didn’t say that the horror only grew infinitely worse when a crackling, gargling sound came from the ground behind him and he turned to see his daughter dragging her shattered and twisted frame towards him an inch at a time, as though sheer determination and hunger could force her ruined body to move.
He was ashamed of himself for what he did afterwards, and when he went back over a week later with the resolve to end their perpetual suffering, he found his daughter had moved close to a mile away from where she had last reached out to him. Her minute progress had been unceasing as she followed the direction that her last meal had gone in. He dispatched her, freed her from her useless body, with a single shot to the back of her head from the Browning semi-automatic he had removed from the armoury. He used the same method to kill his wife, shooting her in the temple through the back windscreen of the car as she turned to try and locate the source of the sound. He left their bodies where they were, no longer considering them to have been the people he loved and satisfied himself that whatever part of them that was left had been set free.
He returned to where he had parked the van he was using and drove back to the place they had fortified, having narrowly avoided being swept away by the massive horde that had inexplicably gathered and stormed across the countryside, leaving filth and destruction in their wake. He used the van because the other vehicle he had scavenged was a little too high profile for everyday use.
He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t reported to the camp, not that he had been home to receive the call anyway, and instead, he’d watched it until it was empty and sneaked in to steal weapons and the Warrior tank. He didn’t know why he felt it necessary to abandon his duties, especially seeing as the army was the only family he had left, and the men of his Sabre troop would have been his responsibility as much as his daughter had been.
He decided that he’d had enough of being part of the machine, as he illogically blamed that machine and its masters for his family dying. Instead he drank until he was sick, drank again, and dreamt up a new way of life.
FIFTEEN
The alarm went up shortly before three in the morning.
The alarm, such as it was, was the massively loud mechanical, metallic chattering of the coaxial machine gun on the turret of the Chieftain tank blocking the road. The radio sparked to life, fire support was requested, and the standby troops poured from their billets to form up at the threshold between the island and the bridge.
The direction of the enemy was given, and the two Fox cars stationed permanently on the two bluffs of higher ground erupted into life as they added their own bursts of automatic fire to the fray.
Sergeant Horton, taking his turn to sleep in the tank with all but the commander’s hatch down to preserve their heat in the dead of night, was woken by the two members of his crew who were awake and taking turns to look through their handheld optics to stare at the empty roadway. Only at that time it suddenly wasn’t empty.
The thin tripwire rigged at the far end activated the flares attached to the bridge with an echoing pop to bathe the area in a soft glow.
The reticuled display hazed into a grainy collection of shapes as a stumbling, shuffling group of zombies materialised, making the man babble a string of incoherent noises in surprise before he got his brain into gear and snatched up the controls of the weapon to stitch a burst of 7.62 into them.
The two sleeping men, one being the tank’s commander, leapt instantly to life and in seconds, the second machine gun on the tank rattled out its own shots.
Horton looked through the optics, snatched up the radio and called the two Fox cars. Within thirty seconds, their two guns added a devastating additional weight and the impetus of the advance had been halted. The optics flared brightly as the standby force behind them had set up and fired a 51mm illuminating mortar round, which sank slowly through the air behind the onslaught, showing it to number well over a hundred.
With four guns firing on them, the slow-moving infantry of the dead found their attack ‘rendered safe’ in less than a minute, but that didn’t mean the island defenders were out of the woods straightaway.
As the guns stopped when no further targets remained standing, Captain Palmer emerged wearing his camouflaged trousers and boots, with a white PT shirt under his webbing that was still unfastened. He had a Browning pistol in the holster on his belt, his Sterling sub-machine gun in his hands with the bayonet already fixed in place. The man must have woken, dressed and been ready to fight inside of thirty seconds to make it to the bridge before the firing had fully stopped. Directly behind him came Lieutenant Lloyd, similarly dressed and equally ready to bring the fight to their enemy.
“Five of yours, five of mine?” he asked Lloyd, who nodded and shouted five names into the night to have his marines come to him. Palmer turned to look at the men of the Yeomanry, picking out the first five men that he knew by name. The twelve men stepped up, fixed bayonets and readied themselves, as Palmer turned to the men of Maxwell’s assault troop who had set up their mortar.
“Hold, just stand by with an illumination round,” he told them, not waiting for a response but turning back to his assembled team, “bayonets, unless you see obvious bullet wounds to the head, then you make damn sure before you step close to them. One in the head, dump them off the road and stay close to each other.”
They waited, staring off into the dark past the tank that they trusted, to keep their night optics trained on the approach. After an hour and a half, the sun began to rise off to their right. In that time, others had come to check the situation, and everyone not directly needed was sent away. They didn’t go far, and one of the men even returned to the of
ficer’s quarters and fetched Palmer’s uniform smock for him. When the sun had risen enough, he turned to his team and addressed them.
“Ready?”
They were.
“Let’s go,” he said, calling up to the now-open hatches of the tank to give the order to cease fire. Horton confirmed the order with a thumbs-up gesture and watched as the twelve men went to work.
Palmer spread them out in a line, calling for a slow approach to the first of them which lay face down. The back of its skull was missing, indicating that the body posed no risk to them by then. It, she, was kicked off the side of the roadway to drop and splash into the water below. They moved carefully, never taking chances with the unmoving ones, and making sure with those still squirming with whatever intact body parts they still possessed. None of them was fast moving enough to make the soldiers fire a shot, and the only burst of adrenaline came from the time when a knot of them had fallen on top of a smaller one who was freed after the weight fell away.
A smaller one, that was a better way to say it.
Having rendered safe a smaller one was far easier to live with, made it slightly better when sleeping at night, instead of saying that they had killed a child. It went down to the bayonet of a marine with the slightly longer reach of his rifle and was sent over the edge with the others in uncomfortable silence.
The sun was fully up when their exhausted group filed back through the small gap made by the tank, and just then the sky above the sea filled with the sound of helicopters.
Rushing back over the bridge, the twelve men were subjected to a rapid body search to establish no wounds, then allowed to carry on into the island as per their revised standing orders.
SIXTEEN
Shortly after dawn the island, or at least those not already woken by the earlier gunfire, was woken by the shatteringly-loud noise of helicopters swooping in and hovering to land. Johnson, expecting the early morning arrivals as he was privy to the information, was alarmed as many others were from where they toiled near the bridge. He craned his neck up towards the higher ground where the only flat, open space large enough to accommodate the aircraft lay. He allowed himself a crooked smile as he watched the two recognisable silhouettes of a pair of Sea Kings dropping in. The other silhouette was unique, and made his mouth hang open slightly. The aircraft had been escorted by another helicopter that hovered high over the island in overwatch. An Apache, with its stubby wings sprouting pods of rockets, loomed almost malevolently in the air as the two transport helicopters disgorged their contents.
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