Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “First Saxon, stop after the red doorway, red doorway,” Palmer barked into the radio, “when stationary, all wagons fire at will.”

  Maxwell saw the doorway, overshot it intentionally to allow space for five vehicles behind to pass, then called the stop and spun the cupola to engage the shambling corpses approaching from the front. He cut them down with short, controlled bursts, not aiming to render them safe but just destroy their legs so that they couldn’t get to them.

  The two armoured personnel carriers came to a squealing halt with the back doors just past the entrance to the underground lab. All around, the sounds of heavy gunfire barked and echoed to confuse the ears of all but the most experienced warriors.

  The eight men filed up the stairs two by two with their burdens being dragged with them. The last thing Mac did, at the tail of the group, was to spill the last of the inflammable liquid they had around the lab. At the top of the stairs he turned, made sure that the others were clear, pulled a grenade from his webbing and pulled the pin.

  With an accurate but gentle underhand toss, he lobbed the small bomb to bounce off the second to last step and hit the door, intentionally left open at an angle, to skitter across the tiled floor and come to a rest.

  The grenade exploded, spewing the white phosphorous filler to burn intensely and ignite the inflammable liquid and the piles of paper in a violent burst that blew hot air and scraps of debris out of the entrance and up to street level, hot on the heels of the running men. As Downes’ men split left with their heavy box, and Bufford’s turned right, the explosion erupted out of the stairwell behind them. The heavy double doors at the Saxons’ rears were opened and men piled in, their MP5s making rapid popping noises as the covering men took rapid but measured shots at the closest zombies.

  “Last man,” came the twin shouts to tell the exposed soldiers that they could get inside the safety of the armoured cars. Almost simultaneously, the doors of both wagons closed and locked, and hands thumped the walls to tell the drivers to go.

  The convoy revved their engines, gears were engaged, and the convoy started to roll forwards with their guns still spitting flame.

  Palmer and Johnson exchanged a nod, neither of them outside the safety of their vehicle, as they alone could not bring their guns to bear without opening a hatch to use their pintle-mounted weapon. Daniels looked up expectantly, and Palmer told him to call it in.

  They had their objective, and they were going home.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Yes… I understand… and that’s confirmed?” Commander Briggs said into the telephone that linked him on the bridge of the US Navy Destroyer to the Royal Navy aircraft carrier that he longed to be back aboard, “Yes… leave it with me,” he finished, replacing the handset.

  “Captain?” he said, politely getting the attention of the man in the big chair.

  “Commander?” he drawled, one side of his moustache curling up to show his amusement. He could tell that the Brit hated being on his ship, hell anyone could tell that he hated it, but he enjoyed making the unsmiling man interact as much as possible.

  “That was confirmation that the armour has the precious cargo,” he said, not wanting to tell the captain that he didn’t know precisely what that cargo was, but suspecting that the Americans knew more than he had been told about this mission, “However, they are likely to be intercepted by the second anomalous gathering heading southwest.”

  The captain knew what that meant, and Briggs was indeed correct in his assumption that information was compartmentalised and fragmented, with each person being given only the information that those above them thought they needed. He knew what the precious cargo was, as the man on board his ship who was appointed as a civilian government advisor had given him a top secret briefing on the contents of that London laboratory.

  That man may as well have worn a baseball cap emblazoned with CIA, not that Langley’s Mister Smith or Mister White, or whatever he wanted to call himself, would say as much.

  “Commander,” he said as he shifted in his chair and kept his eyes on the empty horizon, “I’m not up to speed with your British vagaries. Please define likely to.”

  Briggs swallowed down his retort that the American military personnel he was forced to work with were all blunt instruments to a man, and instead he took a deep breath and tried to keep the weary hostility from his tone.

  “Captain,” he said carefully, “the swarm will almost certainly intercept the convoy before they regain the safety of their base, and even then, their safety can’t be assured.”

  The captain stared at him for a moment before drawing in a theatrical breath through his nose as he shifted again onto the other buttock, making Briggs think that the man in charge of the vessel he had been pressed into service on was suffering with haemorrhoids. That thought made him smile, to know that the captain had a serious pain in the arse too.

  “Helmsman, take us in close enough for shore bombardment. Crewman, get me command and advise them that it is my strong tactical recommendation that they launch a helicopter rescue. And get Castlemorton on the horn,” he finished, preparing to deploy the most unlikely of weapons against the dead.

  The radio in the administrative building of Castlemorton training area rang loud and long, leaving a persistent ringing tone in the ears of the Panzersoldaten of Two Platoon and Hauptmann Hans Wolff, their captain.

  He stood, placing the perfectly moulded black beret on his head with its silver emblem of their mounts emblazoned on the badge, he stepped smartly to the telephone and picked it up.

  “Ja, Hauptmann Wolff hier,” he said, then frowned and listened, snapping his fingers and gesturing to the soldier nearest him for something to write on. The soldier scrabbled in the top pocket of his green-grey overalls and came up with a pad of paper and a stub of pencil. Wolff nodded and mm-hmm’d along to the voice on the other end of the line as he scratched numbers on the pad.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said in accented English, “of course, we will leave immediately. You too. Goodbye.”

  Hauptmann Wolff replaced the handset and breathed in deeply. He turned to his senior sergeant, Feldwebel Stefan Beck, and spoke solemnly.

  “We have orders,” he said formally in their native language, “we are now in this fight, and we leave immediately. Replace all ammunition with canister rounds, but keep a few high explosive and armour piercing just in case.”

  Beck stood and rearranged the crotch of his overalls, as uncomfortable in the clothing as they all were, and growled to clear his throat before the twenty men of their platoon. Four Leopard 2 tank crews and their four support soldiers were all that remained of their unit, who had been displaced from the training grounds in their own country by the tanks of the American and British squadrons. The huge spit of land in south Wales had reluctantly been their home, but at least it gave them the chance to hone their skills, driving and maintaining their beloved second generation Leopard tanks in that eager and perverse hope of every young soldier that they would get to see active service, and prove to everyone, but mostly to themselves, that they were a fine instrument of modern warfare.

  “Wolfsrudel,” Beck shouted, seeing all of their men smiling and bracing as he used the German for the Wolfpack, “weggetreten!”

  Wolff watched as the men did as they were told and fell out to their duties, wearing grins as wide as the tracks of their tanks, and turned to his senior NCO.

  “Beck,” he said, with a slightly admonishing tone, “do try to remember not to call them that in front of our British allies, won’t you?”

  Beck, not dissuaded in the slightest, assured his officer that he would not call their men Wolfpack again. It was a term of endearment, of pride in their commander and fostered a strong sense of belonging. The problem was that the allies would remember the Germans who roamed the Atlantic in packs of U-Boats, and those memories would still be vivid.

  “What’s the mission, Sir?” he asked the captain hopefully.

  “We head e
ast then south. There is a mass-gathering of the dead ones who are going to cut off the retreat of our allies. For whatever reason, their mission cannot fail, so we are to attack the rear of the enemy.”

  “And then?” Beck asked.

  “And then we have to kill them all, I imagine.”

  “Receiving, go ahead,” Captain Palmer said into the radio after command insisted on speaking to the officer commanding the convoy. He frowned, his eyebrows meeting at odd angles as his face gave an unfamiliar betrayal for a man who almost always maintained his professional visage.

  “Time to intercept?” he asked, flickering his eyes between his watch and the map on the wall in front of his SSM.

  “Shit,” he swore to himself, undetected by anyone inside the rolling armour, before transmitting on the radio again, “Understood. Out.”

  He switched channels, transmitting the order to press on with as much speed as possible.

  Ahead, at the tip of their column, Maxwell’s Spartan chose that exact moment to emit a loud clattering noise and judder to a tortured stop, causing the wagon behind theirs to hit them hard in the rear and concertina the entire column to a very badly timed halt.

  Peter had told Amber to hide behind the big chair, told her to stay quiet and out of sight as the noises upstairs grew louder. He ran on small, light feet to the bottom of the stairs to wait the tense moments for the sounds of a moving corpse to reach the top and begin their halting descent to where their instinctive brain heard noises. Those noises denoted food, and food drove the thing’s feet to move and propel it towards that stimulus.

  Peter hid behind the tiny protection of the interior wall to be out of sight of whatever was coming and listened intently, trying to hear over the unnaturally loud sound of his own breathing. The footsteps came steadily, rhythmically, as though the creature coming down the staircase was an actual person in full control of their body, and not the shambolic, jerky actions of a zombie. This realisation made Peter relax and straighten slightly, drawing in a breath to call out a hello. That breath caught in his throat as a new noise drifted around the lower part of the house; that of a gargling, throaty hiss.

  At once he knew he had made a mistake. A dangerous mistake, and one that he made because his focus was on the little girl and not on himself. He had never managed to corner himself in a house with one of the faster ones. In fact, he had only encountered them twice and one of those times he had been forced to use the sawn-off shotgun to decapitate the thing. His eyes flashed left to the door, then straight ahead to the chair that Amber was hiding behind, before looking back towards the door. His brain calculated the distances, the time it would take to get her and get out, and his heart dropped in his chest to know that there was no way to get out.

  Unthinkingly, he acted as instinctively as the thing coming to investigate their noise and smell.

  “Amber! Run, now! Go!” he shouted, his final word becoming drowned out by the ear-shattering screech coming from just the other side of the thin plasterboard wall.

  Amber ran, her small feet slipping on the floor and losing her a precious split-second head start. Peter watched her run, his breath held and his mouth open, then his terror doubled in intensity as he realised the one fact he hadn’t accounted for in his escape plan for her.

  She reached the door, jumped up and dragged her small fingertips off the locking latch to make it snap back loudly against its spring. The door stayed stubbornly shut and she spun to press her back hard up against the door in paralysing fear as the zombie had emerged from the staircase and locked its clouded eyeballs on her miniature frame and mirrored her wide eyes with its dead ones.

  The baggy, pinstriped trousers still had the black and white chequered shirt tucked in, the raised collar skewed and crumpled on one side where a chunk of neck was missing below the floppy mess of unnaturally blonde hair.

  Ashen grey lips peeled back from black gums to reveal the contrast of overly-white teeth, and the room filled with the musty smell of old, dry body as it coiled its muscles and bound forward.

  The smell was the last straw for Peter.

  That instant transportation back to a life which he saw as more dangerous, more claustrophobic and more terrible than the one he now lived, that smell of stale alcohol that made his mind see the woman he hated so much and had killed, but still felt cursed to his very soul for doing so. The memory of his mother made his body move before his mind even processed the emotions.

  His mouth opened to emit a strangled cry of fear and rage as his hands came up bearing the pitchfork, which he instinctively aimed at the base of the zombie’s skull. His legs propelled him towards it with a few short steps before his left foot stretched out exaggeratedly to provide the thrust with the instinctive power it needed to penetrate the flesh and sinew and save them both.

  As that foot went forward to drive his body weight into the killing blow, his toes caught on the corner of the rug and pitched him downwards instead of up.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Palmer was bombarded with information via radio, learning for the first time that the stranded convoy was directly in the path of a swarm bigger than the one that had formed in the city, and double the size of the one they had encountered a few weeks before, during the battle of the bridge. That information made the confident young officer’s face go more than a little pale and sagged his posture. Johnson watched from the corner of his eye as he pretended to study the map wall before him, noting that the captain’s right hand was trembling.

  The tremble was small, but evidently uncontrollable. Deciding not to wait for the intelligence to come to him second-hand, he switched the channel of his own headset to listen in to the conversation. Hadlington’s precise but peevish voice filled his headphones and a surreptitious glance at Daniels on the radio beside him showed that the corporal was also listening. Catching Johnson’s disapproving eye, he subtly switched back to the convoy channel and listened to the organisation of Maxwell as he cleared out the obstruction to assess the mechanical failure of his own wagon.

  “We are pending approval for helicopter rescue, and other armoured resources are on their way to you from your north west,” Hadlington reported, leaving out the somewhat salient fact that there would not be sufficient helicopters to extract the entire force, “We estimate that your time until interception is less than an hour, if you can get moving immediately.”

  Palmer’s eyes flickered again over the map, figuring out where the convoy would be at that time. He didn’t like his estimate.

  “Wait one,” he said into the radio and turned to Johnson.

  “One hour from here puts us where, SSM?”

  Johnson already knew the answer, just as Palmer did.

  “It puts us at or near the island. Too close for comfort,” he said solemnly.

  “So we risk endangering the lives of everyone there,” Palmer thought out loud.

  “ETA for aircraft extraction for precious cargo?” he asked into the radio.

  “Three-five, thirty-five minutes, over,” came the response. Captain and Squadron Sergeant Major looked at one another and exchanged a silent moment of understanding. The mission. The lives of everyone on the island. Undeniably more important to the bigger picture than their small detachment. Johnson nodded to the officer, who swallowed and transmitted again.

  “Send helicopter evac,” he said, “convoy will stay in the open so as not to bring the swarm to your location. Out.”

  The noise that four Leopard 2 tanks made, rolling over the M4 motorway bridge spanning the River Severn, was stunning. They pushed hard, demonstrating that they controlled one of the fastest main battle tanks on the planet at the time, and stopped outside Bristol to refuel from the large wagon following them. The troop had brought their entire fighting strength as well as their own replenishments, and Wolff thought it infinitely more sensible to pause and refuel before they came within sight and smell of the enemy.

  Turning south and avoiding the sprawling city entirely, they rolled onw
ards, encountering larger concentrations of shambling zombies as they progressed. These walking corpses weren’t always walking; some crawled with damaged or missing legs, others hobbled onwards with mechanical injuries which slowed them down too much to keep up with the main herd that couldn’t be seen yet. The only indication that they were ahead was the distant cloud of dust that marked the southern horizon, kicked up by so many thousand pairs of feet, all trudging onwards with some as yet unfathomed common purpose.

  Hauptmann Wolff, captain of the troop and breaking convention by commanding the leading tank, told his men to ignore the stragglers and press on through them to the main body of the enemy. Pressing on through, quite literally, the support truck following on behind the tanks drove over swathes of oily mess caused by the crushed bodies, and the men in the passenger seats of those trucks took only necessary shots from their G3 assault rifles against those zombies that posed a threat to them. The men in the tanks ahead had no space for the long rifles, so instead carried Uzi machine pistols for personal defence, should they need to dismount. Their main tool for dispatching the massed dead would be their main 120mm guns and the canister rounds they carried.

  When the stragglers became an obstacle in themselves, Wolff scanned the ground ahead for a space wide enough to spread his tanks out and bring their four guns to bear on the mass, which was already beginning to take an interest in the sound and movement behind it. Having thought ahead in his own analytical way, Wolff ordered the four tanks to halt and disperse, then load high explosive rounds into their guns. Unlike their British allies, they didn’t have to follow the projectile with a full bag charge for maximum effect and range, as they had the more advanced single-piece ammunition which made their rate of fire slightly superior. He planned to stall the massive crowd with four large explosions, and make them the centre of attention to divert their collective attention back north instead of south, where his orders had informed him they must be prevented from doing so.