Johnson was dismissed and watched as the Colonel stepped outside and slipped on his cap to clasp his hands behind his back and enjoy a relaxing stroll back down the hill, seemingly without a care in the world. Johnson followed, stopped next to Kimberley Perkins and glared at the two orderlies, who were also smoking and standing close to the civilian woman.
“Well?” he asked them, “Off you fuck, lads.”
They scurried away after their Colonel, eager to flee the big warrant officer, even if they didn’t fall directly under his command.
He turned to face the three civilians as soon as they were alone.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said formally.
“That’s quite alright, Sergeant,” said a man who Johnson guessed was perhaps in his early fifties. He bridled at the unintentional demotion the man gave him and tried to ignore it.
“You’ll have Lieutenant Palmer back acting as a buffer between yourselves and the new Colonel,” he said, feeling as though he was betraying his beloved British Army ever so slightly, “but I rather suspect that the man wants to feel more useful…”
“We understand, Mister Johnson,” Kimberley said to mollify the conversation, “and I apologise that you were called into that, but I suspected it might have got out of control had we not sent for you,” she said as she self-consciously brushed her hair down over the left side of her face, as she did often.
It was only then that the Squadron Sergeant Major, a man who prided himself on being astute and living in the world between the lines, realised that the Colonel had not sent for him to control the unruly civilian population, but rather that the civilians had sent for him to assist them. He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant for the time being, so he squared it away until he could figure it out. He opened his mouth to say that he would provide Lieutenant Palmer with specific instructions, but his words were stopped in his throat.
“Sergeant Major,” Kimberley said as she watched him out of the right side of her face, turning the left side away self-consciously, “we are having an informal meeting tonight to discuss matters. I wonder if you would join us? The Royal Arms at five?”
Johnson was taken aback by the sudden invitation but managed to keep his face from showing it. He regained his composure and said that he would try to make it if duty allowed.
Embarrassed, he made his way to find the younger Palmer and tell him exactly what he needed to do.
EIGHTEEN
Peter and Amber woke again that morning and went through the same routine of eating breakfast and feeding the cat, who had returned undetected at some point. The house itself was comfortable and secure, and there was enough food for another two days at least, but the water situation meant that they would be forced to find somewhere new that day.
He told Amber this, and thought it was remarkable how such a young kid could take bad things happening in her stride without complaining. She didn’t cry, she didn’t complain or refuse to help, she just nodded and got on with everything.
Peter filled his water bottle before they left, using a small cup to decant the water from the toilet cistern to pour it in a bit at a time, and then he asked Amber if she needed to use the toilet one last time before they left.
She screwed up her face in thought, rolled her eyes up toward her left brow, and pursed her lips before finally nodding that she did. Peter smiled at her, finding her silent ways of communicating with him both funny and endearing, and placed a hand on her head without thinking as she walked past. She didn’t respond to the touch, and Peter didn’t even register that he had done it, such was the strength of the protective bond he felt for the girl already.
It was as though she was more than just another person who had survived, it was as though he had saved her life, which he reckoned he had because there’d been one of the things coming for the door when he’d found her, and that somehow made her his responsibility.
She was his burden, but not with any sense of regret or reluctance. Her survival had somehow become his life’s mission overnight, and the thought of abandoning her or failing in that mission was simply unthinkable to him. Amber was now his sole purpose in life, as he didn’t seem to have any other pressing engagements on his calendar.
His musings had gone on so long that she had returned downstairs from the bathroom and stood level with his stomach and smiled up at him briefly.
She was ready to go.
Peter had fed the cat, unloading two cans of food onto plates for it to give it a head start after they left. The window was left partly open, and they shut the back door after themselves when they left. The cat hadn’t come back after breakfast to say goodbye to them.
Peter had loaded up his backpack with as much of the heavier stuff as possible, leaving Amber with the shopping bag to manage. That kept his hands free to wield the pitchfork and he crouched low to stalk along the rear path and around the side of the house. They saw nothing moving in the village, but Peter thought their luck had been pushed sufficiently to warrant moving on. Plus, he couldn’t guarantee that there was any more water in the other houses. He looked up into the overgrown hedge, lifting the weapon to move a sprig of a leafy branch out of the way of the road sign.
Fingerboard, his mind told him out of nowhere when he saw it. He guessed that name, wherever he had heard it, made sense as it was like a finger telling him how far it was to the next place and in what direction.
The fingerboards gave him a choice of two places, both of which his inbuilt sense of direction said were okay, as he hadn’t been to them yet. One said four and a half miles, written in numbers and fractions, the other said two and three quarters. Looking down at Amber’s little legs, he chose the second place and pointed out their direction to her. She said nothing, not that he expected her to, and just started stepping off in that direction. He set off beside her, both of them walking in the middle of the road, Peter sweeping his eyes left and right as they went. He looked down at her out of the corner of his eye, marvelling that someone so little could walk so well, given what she had been through.
A high-pitched whine pierced the upper limits of his hearing, making his body tense in anticipation and his breathing grow rapid, ready to move if he had to. Before he had a chance to make a decision, a screaming, blurry dark monster erupted overhead and shot over them at a deceptively low altitude. He expected it to blow them violently with a downwash, but instead only the noise reached them. Both of them flinched and ducked lower, as though the flying monster was much, much lower than it was.
As quickly as it had burst into their world it was gone again, straight over their heads and out of sight in another heartbeat, leaving behind it a brief, violent memory and the fading scream of the engines. The two children straightened and looked at one other, Peter with an open mouth and wide eyes and Amber with a shrug and a look of bewildered amusement.
Unable to think of anything appropriate to say for the occasion, Peter looked around their surroundings instead, in case anything unwelcome also wanted to see where the big, fast-moving helicopter had disappeared to.
They had walked for what his blue and red watch face told him was just over thirty minutes, when they stopped and now Peter saw a footpath intersecting the route they were on. The path to their left dropped down a slight hill to where the very tops of chimneys showed. He glanced back to the road, reading from the direction of the trees ahead that the road looped to the left. At least he guessed it did. He looked at the distant building down the sloping path, back to the road and back again as he tried to figure out whether to risk the shortcut. As he was close to figuring it out, a small hand tugged at his trouser leg.
He looked down to Amber, a sinking feeling in his chest, and wondered what fresh hell was heading their way. She pointed back down the road in the direction they had come from, and he squinted to see what she had.
“What is it?” he asked her.
In response she just shook her outstretched finger in the same direction, meaning that he should look i
nstead of talking. He squinted his eyes, straining to see anything until a flash of dark movement made his breath catch in his throat.
Until he realised what it was.
“Ha!” he blurted out loudly in shocked amusement. Amber let out a small giggle as he realised what her sharp eyes had already seen.
Tail raised vertically and curled over at the very tip, the black and brown cat popped out of the long grass of the verge and trotted towards them.
It meowed when it got close, walked straight in between their legs and began snaking around Amber as it rose up off its front paws to purr loudly and rub its cheek against her hand. Amber looked up at Peter, her eyes asking the question that her lips would not. Peter shrugged, seeing no possible way he could even enforce leaving the cat behind if he wanted to, and not having the heart to say no anyway.
I guess I’m just collecting strays now, he thought to himself with mock annoyance.
“Come on, then,” he said to both of them, and climbed the wooden posts in the hedgerow break to follow the footpath down the slope. He turned and reached out for Amber to pass him her bag, sticking the pitchfork into the dirt so that it stood up vertically, then held out his other hand after she had passed over the bag to help her over. She took his hand unthinkingly, much the same way as a child would when crossing the road with a grown up, but the small gesture of trust and the warmth of her hand made him feel better somehow.
After they had climbed over, they turned to look at the cat, who just stared at them blankly from the other side. Peter spoke to it, offering encouragement like it was a younger sibling who was refusing to walk another step. Amber make a kissing noise with her lips and patted her legs. The cat stared at both of them before abruptly craning its neck over its left shoulder to lick itself.
“Come on,” Peter told the girl, “if it’s followed us this far, it’ll follow us the rest of the way.”
Amber seemed to consider this and shrugged again, picking up her bag again ready to move. When they reached the outskirts of the village after another twenty minutes of walking down the gently sloping field, they found that the path they were on emerged into a graveyard. Peter’s back crawled, threatening to make him shudder. His only experience of zombies was of them as cartoon characters, and then they were usually comedy characters with a hilariously low intelligence and easily foiled by the animated hero of the programme he was watching. They were always represented as bursting out of their graves one hand at a time and shuffling off in search of brains, which made him question the effectiveness of burial in the first place.
Weren’t people in coffins when they were buried? How did they get out and stand up under the weight of the soil? How shallow were the graves in these cartoons and why did they have green skin and crazy eyes?
Thought of the eyes sobered him. Maybe some of the cartoons had been right, only they hadn’t known or hadn’t told the truth that instead of being funny characters, they were relentless and terrifying if they gathered in more than pairs. Flashbacks came to him of the mob, the horde of things who blew through his home and devoured everything living except him, through his quick actions and dumb luck.
Maybe the cartoons should have shown the zombies as people the characters knew, maybe their best friend, and made them watch as they burned up and died and then got up and ripped the heroes apart with their hands and teeth.
Shaking those dark thoughts away, he looked for a way to skirt the graveyard and found a small stone bridge over a tiny trickle of a brook which he could easily have jumped. Amber couldn’t, he guessed, so he led her over the little bridge.
“Trip, trap, trip, trap…” she whispered from the bank behind him as he walked over the narrow stones. Peter froze, instantly recalling the tale of the three billy goats and the troll under the bridge. His feet woke up before his brain and he stepped fast over the bridge and turned to snatch Amber up but saw that she had stopped before the bridge and was pointing down.
A hand, pale and bloated with wet skin peeled away from where the blackened fingernails clawed at the bridge to haul a naked and milky-eyed monstrosity from the shallow water below.
The first thought to strike him and run through his brain almost conversationally, was about the exact circumstances that had led to a person who had turned into one of them being, at least mostly from what he could see, naked and hiding under a tiny stone bridge by a graveyard in a village with maybe twenty buildings. He wondered what possible scenario could have led to this happening, and he found himself at a total loss for a logical explanation.
As this flash of thought ran through his brain, roughly a second had passed in the real world, and in that second, the pale and bloated skin of the thing’s head rose up out of the shallow water with globules of green algae plastered to its face and partly obscuring its mouth. Then, and possibly worst of all, the thing that struck him next was the smell.
Afterwards, much afterwards in fact, he decided to re-categorise what he had experienced at that moment and classified the smell as something worse than a stench, but not quite a foul taste. It was definitely up there with the time on the farm he had to try and stay quiet with half of his mouth containing mud and slime which was mostly animal shit, and he reckoned it might have actually been worse.
Instead of wasting time considering all of these illogical and irrelevant thoughts, he decided to thrust out the pitchfork and solve the problem before it became any worse than a fright and a disgusting smell. As he lined up the weapon, the bloated mess let out a hiss that was mostly a gargle through a clogged mouth, but it was answered with another hiss of pure venom and aggression.
On the low wall next to Amber, the cat had caught up and was voicing its opinion about the situation. Peter knew that cats had a much better sense of smell than humans, so he couldn’t even begin to imagine what the cat felt about the bloated floater.
Before the situation devolved any further, the pitchfork’s prongs entered the thing’s head just before and just behind its left ear and ended the grand entrance before it had chance to get into full flow.
Peter withdrew the weapon with a grunt and a sharp pull, and the repulsive lump flopped back into the low, murky water. The cat had stopped hissing but stayed utterly motionless and kept its eyes on the thing, with only twitches of a hugely puffed-up tail betraying that it wasn’t a statue. Amber just looked blankly at him.
Then he remembered the warning she’d given him, as cryptic as it was, and he held out a hand for her to cross over to him. She didn’t hesitate and skipped across the bridge lightly to join him, then looked back at the cat who hopped down and stalked over the bridge to follow.
“How did you know?” he whispered to her as his head swivelled to locate any other unwelcome surprises, “Did you see it?” he asked, worrying that he had looked and hadn’t seen it there. She didn’t answer, so he stole a glance at her to check. She shrugged, a genuine ʿI don’t knowʾ shrug and smiled back at him.
Peter didn’t know what he expected, so he guessed the shrug was what he deserved. He pointed at her, then to his side and waited for her to nod. Stalking out into the road with her beside him, he crept along in the open so as not to be surprised by any more jack-in-the-box zombies in close quarters. He made for the largest house he could see, stopping once to listen intently as Amber stood still in total silence as though she wasn’t even breathing. The cat had disappeared again but that was hardly his priority at that point.
He saw three cars parked on the road at nearby houses which seemed to be so old in construction that they didn’t have driveways and noticed something was somehow off about them. They were at unnatural angles, because people usually parked their cars vaguely straight. Their wing mirrors were bent backwards or pushed in, depending on whether he could see the front or the back of the cars, and all of them were smeared with dried streaks of black.
Sneaking towards the house and the taller than average front door, he pointed for Amber to wait on the other side of the big car and waited u
ntil she moved. Exchanging a look, he left her there and tried the front door.
He’d once seen a television programme where the woman with big curly hair claimed that crime was up so high that people were afraid to leave their doors unlocked any more. That struck Peter as a stupid thing to say, because if locks weren’t necessary, why did every door have them? Personally, he was glad to live in the country for two reasons. One, the only city he had ever been to was London, which had burned down in riots a month ago, from what he had seen on the news, and two, around there a lot of people actually did leave their doors unlocked.
The big house was one of them. He turned the round, brass doorknob and was rewarded by protesting springs until a click denoted it was open. Pushing it gently inwards, he stood back two paces and raised the pitchfork.
“Hello?” he called into the house as loud as he dared, and hearing no reply. He looked over to Amber, seeing the top of her head from the nose up as she peered over the front of the car, and tried to figure out what to do, to try and decide whether he should take her inside on a house search and put both of them at risk if they had to run away.
Just then, he realised what the signs outside had meant, and what had happened there. It also went some way to explaining how a naked zombie found itself stuck in a low brook, and he knew in that instant that there wouldn’t be a single one of them there unless it was trapped.
That horde which had nearly consumed him in a flood, that swarm of corpses that had steamed across the countryside like a roller had been through here in some form. It had filled that road outside and swept inexorably onwards, and anything that was free to shuffle or walk or crawl would have been taken along with it. With renewed confidence in his logic, he called out louder into the house.
“Oi,” he yelled, “zombies!”
He smiled to himself as he said it, knowing that he was showing off for Amber and not caring. He smiled because it was the first time he had used the word out loud and when he did, it seemed to take some of the fear and stress out of the situation.
Death Tide Page 36
