Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  He saw the single bare foot, purple and bloated from the blood that had pooled there when it died, and the other foot inexplicably covered by a brown sock, and he watched as the bare foot twitched again as though electrocuted. He got to his feet and stepped carefully closer, sparing a quick glance to Amber to see that she was staring at it with her head cocked in confusion. Peter kept the spike held in both hands, levelled at the prone monstrosity as he shuffled around out of its reach to get to her, and then he saw exactly what she could see.

  The zombie was trying to claw its way towards her, using only its head and neck as its teeth sank into the heavy pile of the carpet, making the attempts to drag itself forward both fruitless and pathetic. He relaxed and stepped closer, seeing his discarded pitchfork lying beside the crippled zombie and a single, dark puncture wound at the base of its neck.

  He had no idea how it had happened, but the tip of a single prong on his pitchfork had penetrated the skin and tissue to force its way in between the sixth and seventh bones of the cervical spine and punctured the spinal cord protected inside. He had effectively, and completely accidentally, paralysed their attacker.

  The two children stared at it as it tried to reach up for them as though sheer will and determination could make the food come to its mouth. Peter spun the spike in his hand and walked around to the back of it where he was furthest away from the teeth. Deciding that he preferred to do what he had to do at a distance, he slipped the spike back into his belt, picked up his pitchfork and raised it in both hands before he looked up and saw Amber. He paused, indicating with a flick of his head that she should move and not watch. She shrugged and stepped aside to stand off to his right. With one hard thrust he ended the pitiful attempts of the paralysed zombie to drool him to death.

  Their sudden, terrifying fright forgotten, the two children searched the house together and filled the cart with everything they wanted before wheeling it back to their new home. They made two trips back to that house, finding useful items as well as food and drinks, and more ammunition for the shotgun, which Peter took even though he had only ever fired a single shot from the weapon.

  They stopped for some food before they abandoned that house as it had been picked clean before moving on to the house opposite. That house was, mercifully, free from zombies. As they were wheeling back their second haul from there, the sounds of rolling thunder began in the far distance.

  The thunder sounded in pairs, their echoing twins sounds undulating over and over until replaced by the next wave, to create a rolling wave of ever-increasing intensity until the entire sky was filled with ceaseless noise. Both of them stood still in the road and stared at the empty sky until Peter’s nerve broke first.

  “Let’s get inside,” he said softly, reaching down with one empty hand only half thinking about what he was doing.

  Just as automatically, Amber reached up and clasped his hand.

  The two of them turned and wheeled their piled-up cart back towards their new house and opened the front door. They worked in silence, stacking their haul in the kitchen as the world outside grew even louder, and after they had finished, Amber’s face grew dark and worried at the sounds outside. Peter unwrapped chocolate for her in an attempt to take her mind off the growing concern of whatever terrible thing was happening outside. She sat subdued, chewing slowly and visibly upset. Peter racked his brain for what to say to her. He picked up the cassette player and headphones, wasting a few seconds before remembering that the batteries had slowly died the last time he had given it to her. He had yet to find a new tape to go in the player but seeing as she didn’t seem to mind the same song, it hadn’t been high on his list of priorities when clearing the last few houses. He rummaged around in the kitchen drawer where he had stored the batteries from the houses in that village and found two of the right size before fitting them to the player and taking it over to where she sat quietly. He handed it to her and smiled, seeing her small look of gratitude as she placed the red foam of the flimsy headphones over her ears.

  Hearing her hum along to the chorus was the sweetest sound he had ever heard, but it didn’t drown out the sounds of what Peter suspected were bombs being dropped not far away. He went to close the small kitchen window in the hope that the sound would be muted, but as he did so the cat emerged from below with a vertical leap which made him jump backwards in fright. His heart beating in his chest, he turned to see if Amber had been frightened by it too, but he saw that she was still engrossed in the music and hadn’t turned around. The cat teetered on the threshold for a moment as it eyed him expectantly, then dropped down to meow loudly and rub against his hand, doing the dance it did when asking for food.

  Peter wasn’t fooled. He knew the cat didn’t love him but was only acting so that he worked the can opener. But in that same moment, he realised that he was fine being used by the animal just because it had decided to stay around them and because it made Amber happy.

  He fed the cat first, then made them something to eat before joining her on the comfortable chairs where she sat listening to music and playing with the small plastic figures he had found before they had met.

  High on the cliffs looking out over a misty English Channel, two men ran into the main hall of the old building, wearing looks of fear and confusion. The man in charge, who had only called himself Michaels to them, seemed unconcerned and that made them feel instantly foolish. He didn’t get up, merely lounged in a chair, smoking and looking out to sea through the big picture windows.

  “Yes?” he asked, knowing what they wanted but making them feel like scared children for asking.

  “That noise?” one of them asked timidly, hoping that the rest would be obvious.

  “What of it?”

  “What… er… what is it? Please?” said the other one as he wrung his hands and seemed unable to stand still.

  “That, gentlemen,” Michaels said as he swung his legs down and stood abruptly, “is the sound of heavy guns. Some way away, I imagine, and nothing to bother us here. Anything else?”

  There wasn’t, and he invited them kindly to fuck off and leave him be.

  In the hotel erected next to the grand building, two women sat with wide eyes as they listened to what sounded like the result of angering the weather gods raging in the skies of the south coast.

  “Automatic fire, to your front, go on,” Captain Palmer said unnecessarily, as the ragged remains of his overfilled convoy tore into the left flank of the massive horde of zombies. They were just out of sight of the island itself, but not of their effective fire, which tore great holes into the attack from their oblique angle.

  Palmer and Johnson were the only men in the convoy not closed down, as their vehicle was the only one bearing a weapon that could not be fired from inside. The Saxons were little more than armoured trucks designed to keep their occupants safe from enemy fire, and they were set back to the rear. Palmer didn’t fire the machine gun because it was at the limit of effective fire and the 30mm cannons on the Fox cars were lethal at that range, as they pumped shot after shot indiscriminately into the crowd.

  Both officer and SSM watched the fall of shot as the battle raged ahead, both noticing the regular timing between the huge splash damage of heavier munitions than they carried.

  “Your Chieftains?” Johnson asked Palmer, knowing the answer was a negative as soon as he had said it, but failing to come up with an alternative explanation.

  “No,” Palmer said, “bigger, must be the n…”

  “Shore bombardment,” Johnson exclaimed loudly over the noise of the battle raging around them as he finally understood what he was seeing.

  “Must be five- or six-inch guns,” Palmer said.

  “Nice,” Johnson said, with evil relish in response to one of those naval guns firing a round that exploded and sent body parts cartwheeling impossibly high into the air.

  “Press on?” he asked the officer, suggesting in that senior NCO manner that the officer needed a reminding nudge. Palmer picked up
the handset and keyed the radio to respond.

  “Advance one hundred.”

  The armour lurched forward, closer to the moving river of dead flesh and rendering it that much clearer to their eyes.

  “Christ on a fucking bike,” Johnson said in horror as the sheer scale of the swarm was made clear to him, then he ducked back inside and hoisted up his sub-machine gun as reassurance.

  “Indeed, Mister Johnson,” Palmer responded with his usual impeccable manners, “I just hope our chaps back at base are doing alright.”

  “They haven’t got near the bridge yet,” Johnson reassured him, pointing towards the mess of nothingness and meat ahead of them.

  With no clear commander at the bridge, the men performed their own tasks in crews or troops or sections as they saw fit. The two tanks, one blocking the road and the other firing at a gentle angle from a piece of flat ground to the side of the roadway, poured a hideously destructive amount of fire into the oncoming enemy, who seemed only able to manage progress of an inch at a time. Added to that the combined weight of every Fox car they had left, pouring 30mm rounds into the attack, and over a dozen belt-fed heavy machine guns blasting a storm of lead from their chattering barrels.

  Peculiar pops and thuds sounded occasionally as three 51mm mortars were served effectively by the one crew left behind from assault troop and two teams of Marines. Those rounds were a mixture of high explosive and smoke, not for the vision screen but for their incendiary properties of the white phosphorous fillers. Flaming zombies occasionally emerged from the smoke as is was whipped away by the strong wind for them to be blasted apart by high explosive or else cut down by varying degrees of direct fire.

  The barrels of the Chieftain tanks were fully depressed by then and unable to bring their muzzles to bear on the leading edge of the attack, instead concentrating on the lowest depression they could manage to degrade the enemy attack as best they could.

  On the slopes above them, Major Hadlington tried desperately to call in air support for the beleaguered defenders, as he saw no way to survive the unstoppable invasion, and almost lost the power of speech when he considered that the swarm had initially been almost thirty percent bigger. He had tried to order the Royal Navy helicopter to take off and repeat their trick with the music but Lieutenant Commander Barrett was adamant that everyone, and he included the surprise shore bombardment in that list, would have to stop firing for long enough for them to take off and hover in close to the swarm to lead them away like the pied piper a second time. That pause would result in the bridge being overrun.

  Command were unwavering as they denied his repeated requests for airstrikes, as he was told over and over to wait and that there were higher priorities, until eventually they stopped answering his hails.

  And then, even the shore bombardment stopped, but not before one last errant round changed their situation for the worse.

  “Understood,” the captain said to the bridge after receiving the orders to cease fire and withdraw to deeper water, “gunners, cease fire, cease fire. Helm, take us about due west.”

  The gunners fired their final shot and powered down the huge deck guns as the ship’s engines powered up to steam them out into the mouth of the Atlantic.

  Nobody asked the question about their sudden breaking off from the attack, but the captain answered the thoughts anyway.

  “Ours is not to make reply, ours is not to reason why…” he said with melodic sadness.

  The final two 127mm high-yield explosive rounds left the long barrels of the deck guns at an impossible velocity and arced their way over the grey water. They were still over the steely waves of the English Channel when they began their long descent towards the target, unseen and in the far distance from where the projectile had started its journey.

  These last, lonely rounds were fired as the ship had already begun to turn, dipping the nose of the vessel just enough to change the course of history as the effect on the shot caused them to fall low and miss the zombies.

  What they did hit, and in spectacular fashion, was the concrete support beam of the elevated section of the causeway and it caused a shudder to run through the entire length of the bridge. Huge chunks of rock and concrete spewed upwards high into the air, scattering body parts even higher and scattering them over the roadblock.

  Cracks appeared in the road, the sound of splitting concrete so loud that it was audible over the gunfire, and Horton felt his stomach lurch inside the closed-down tank weighing in at a shade under fifty-four tonnes.

  As one, the three men of the four-man crew housed inside the turret froze as their inner-ear warned them of something more terrible than the approaching horde. There was time for Horton to say one single word before the tank lurched and dropped half a foot as the first part of the degraded bridge began to give.

  “Fuck!”

  Horton and the loader below and beside him shot their hands up to reach the handles to open the hatches. Millward, Horton’s gunner sitting ahead and below him, crabbed backwards and upwards so unbelievably fast that he climbed backwards over Horton to get out of the hatch before he could, but as he hauled himself out to lead for the roadway, ten feet behind him the concrete cracked again and the tank he leapt from vanished straight downwards.

  Sinking immediately in the fifteen feet of water below, Horton lay flat on his chest and screamed “No,” at the shimmering sight of his tank under the water. Bubbles rose as the tanks moved, crabbing slightly sideways as the driver, trapped in the forward compartment and closed down, threw the beast into reverse and gunned the engine only to flood it with water after six feet of underwater travel. Horton watched, willing the man to open the forward hatch and swim to safety, but nothing happened. Standing to strip his webbing off, he was hauled to the ground by Millward, his gunner, who told him over and over again that he was gone.

  He was gone, but the forty-foot long section of the bridge that had taken him down had also prevented the swarm from getting any closer as they piled endlessly into the water to be swept away by the strong current in the direction of the wind.

  Gun and cannon fire still rained down on the swarm, but the damage had been done. Their forces were split and scattered, and events in the wider world had just taken a turn to make their small corner of Britain utterly irrelevant.

  Epilogue

  Thousands of miles west, alarms had sounded, and red lights flashed in a dozen underground control rooms all over the United States. Orders were shouted, and urgent telephone calls were made.

  One of those calls was placed directly to the White House and interrupted the President’s lunch.

  “Sir, they’ve launched,” said the voice. The president’s face dropped. He half expected, and half hoped that this time would never come. The ‘they’ part of the single sentence was as obvious as the thing that had been launched.

  Decades of conditioning, years of expecting the worst and mentally preparing for the day when the hard decision would have to be made meant that when the time actually came, he didn’t hesitate.

  “Launch counter-strikes,” he said, giving his authentication before replacing the telephone in the cradle, “and may God have mercy on our souls,” he added to nobody in particular.

  Silo doors opened, and rockets ignited, just as had happened in three locations in the Soviet Union. Their missiles, however, were aimed at levelling the remaining undead population of continental Europe to zero to prevent the endless waves of attack on their borders. Those launches had been detected in the west, and the counter-strikes had launched before their nukes had landed in Europe.

  Despite the two huge nations being on the verge of war with each other, they still enjoyed direct contact between their governments, where nobody would ever be left on hold.

  Calls were placed, desperately asking for the launches to be aborted. Arguments raged, threats were levelled, and time was wasted.

  The nukes landed in Europe, closely followed by the six tactical strikes on military and governmen
t sites all over Russia. Despite the threats, the retaliatory strikes didn’t come, and the US forces sailed away west to abandon Europe and the UK.

  The British were on their own, and the list of priorities was so long that the fates of a scattered mixed unit of military and two small orphans with their cat didn’t even feature.

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

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  Also in the series

  Toy Soldiers:

  Apocalypse

  Aftermath

  Abandoned

  Adversity

  Adaptation

  Book six yet to be named (coming 2020)