Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “Roger, Foxtrot-One-Zero, stand by to engage enemy,” Captain Palmer’s voice came back before it was interrupted by another transmission.

  “Cancel, cancel,” it said intently, “Charlie-One-One to last callsign: confirm enemy numbers and confirm negative Limas, over.”

  Charlie-One-One, Strauss guessed, was the unit callsign for the SAS team currently sitting in the dark rear of a Saxon below his elevated position. Looking back towards the shambling attack, he responded with, “Stand by, Charlie-One-One,” and double-checked his numbers and his assessment of their capabilities. Moments later he gave the report more concisely.

  “Hello, Charlie-One-One, this is Foxtrot-One-Zero. Confirmed negative for Limas, enemy at six-zero yards and closing. Count thirty-two, confirm three-two, over.”

  “Roger, all units hold fire, repeat hold fire, Charlie-One-One going foxtrot,” came the confident and slightly harsh response.

  Almost every man in their convoy had been to Northern

  Ireland and all had trained for that theatre, and all of them knew what going foxtrot meant. The four SAS men were going outside to bring the fight to the enemy on foot, and their reason for doing so was solely to keep things quiet.

  Inside the back of the Saxon, Downes replaced the phone handset with its inbuilt press-to-talk function and nodded to Trooper Williams, the Yeomanry man assigned as their driver from Maxwell’s troop. Turning to his three men, he saw them all readying themselves and their weapons. Dezzy looked momentarily forlorn as he gently set down the long machine gun and drew back the bolt on his MP5 to see the glint of brass in the dim light of the Saxon’s interior.

  Waiting until six eyes looked up at him for the order to break out, Downes nodded again once and growled the words, “Let’s do this.”

  The dull afternoon light lit up the interior as the rear doors were thrown open and the men filed out in no desperate hurry. It wasn’t as though they had to flee the truck and find hard cover to protect themselves from culvert bombs or enemy fire, but Williams marvelled at how rapidly their ingrained training had adapted to a different way of life and death.

  The last man turned back and shut the door, pausing as he was about to close it, and leaned his head back inside to fix the driver with a stern look.

  “I’ll be back! Hah!” he said, as he barked a laugh and shut the door, casting the interior back into darkness.

  Downes ignored Smiffy’s levity, knowing that trying to stop the man making jokes was as effective as trying to tie knots in snot.

  “Spread out, cover in pairs, don’t take chances,” he said unnecessarily, knowing and trusting the men to do precisely what was required and not to take stupid risks. That was often, he found at least, the biggest misconception about the men in his regiment; they weren’t unstable and insane risk-takers with no fear of death, they were just fiercely fit and committed individuals whose personal limits were higher than those of the average person. They were usually cold, methodical, tough men who lived to do their jobs, and that was why they got the best missions, the best kit, and existed outside of the stiff regime of the big green army machine.

  Instinctively breaking off into pairs as testimony to the thousands of hours spent in training, one covering and one moving, Mac dropped in behind Downes’ shoulder and they stalked forwards to close the gap between themselves and the shuffling zombies. Dez and Smiffy spread out to their left, mirroring their movements. After an advance of thirty paces to halve the gap between vehicles and zombies, their weapons began to cough the small bullets at the heads of the shambling attackers, bullets ripping into open maws to destroy brain stems and ‘render them safe’ with next to no noise.

  “Stoppage!” Downes heard to his left in the unmistakable accent of his Londoner, Smiffy. He didn’t need to look, but he knew that Dez would already be standing over him, his left lower leg pressed into Smiffy’s back as he physically let him know he was there, covering him as he knelt and cleared his weapon. If he couldn’t clear it quickly, or the enemy advanced too close, then he would call out and rise up to draw his secondary weapon and start popping heads with the Browning Hi-Power holstered on his right hip. That would be less than ideal, as only one of them had managed to find a suppressor for their sidearm and that was Downes with his Sig Sauer P228.

  “Clear!” Smiffy called. Again, Downes didn’t look, because he was still selecting targets and firing three-shot bursts into torn and rotting faces, but he knew that Dezzy would have stepped aside and removed the contact from his partner’s back, allowing him the space to stand up safely to rejoin the fight.

  Less than a minute into their encroaching action and the loose attacking formation they faced was down. In turn, each man of their respective pairs took turns to perform a tactical reload, when they clicked a fresh magazine of 9mm rounds into their guns, regardless of whether the current load was fully expended. The partially empty magazines went down the front of their dark smocks to be retrieved and refilled later.

  “One more,” Mac warned in his characteristically dour voice, made even more dolorous by the Scottish accent. All eyes shot forward, and all widened as they realised the last one approaching them wasn’t shambling or stumbling, but it seemed to be jogging in a slightly drunken fashion.

  “Fucking Lima,” Mac warned, with more intensity in his voice, then dropped to one knee and flicked the fire selector of his own weapon from semi-auto to three-shot and began squeezing off bursts to bring it down before it got to them. The others joined him, two firing bursts and two firing longer streams of automatic fire until the thing stumbled and clattered to the roadway twenty paces from them. Loud cracks echoed to their ears as the thing broke bones in the tumbling fall, for it to land, skidding on its face on the tarmac. The four men rose, never taking their eyes off their attacker and the surrounding landscape, as the thing emitted a shrieking groan and rose on its hands to try and get to its feet. One foot, the leg damaged irreparably by either the gunfire or the fall, faced backwards and as it tried to get upright, the bones crunched again, bright white shards puncturing the skin and clothing grotesquely, until it slammed back down to its face to crack its nose and leak black, thick gore from the nostrils, which dripped into an oily puddle before it. The thing began to crawl towards them on three limbs faster than it had any earthly right to do, like some reincarnation of the Exorcist.

  As one, the three men took an involuntary step backwards and raised their weapons to crouch into the short stocks and take aim. Downes lowered his MP5 and stepped out ahead of the line, making the others drop the ends of their muzzles and display their ingrained respect for the killing power of guns. Stepping forwards confidently into the path of the crawling monstrosity, he raised his primary weapon at waist height and stitched a burst of automatic fire into the skull to obliterate it.

  “Stay!” he said conversationally, as the others joined him at his side.

  “Well, would you fucking look at that,” Smiffy spoke with an incredulous tone, “that is the worst fucking outfit I have ever seen.”

  Chuckles sounded among the four men as they finally took stock of what the nearly headless Lima had been wearing before he’d died and turned.

  “I mean, come on,” Mac said, picking up the thread, ‘this wanker actually chose to wear that when he was alive.”

  The four men looked down, regarding a shiny shellsuit so offensive that none of them could make sense of the number of bright colours which adorned the body; it looked just as if he’d been wearing white, and had turned inside a paint shop and thrashed around until he was covered from head to toe.

  “Reckon the guy who owns Campari is still alive?” Dezzy asked as they turned and began to walk back, reloading their weapons.

  “If he is,” Smiffy answered, “can we just pretend he’s a zombie and slot him anyway?”

  “My thanks, gentlemen,” Palmer’s voice cut over their chatter. They looked up to see the young captain in command of the armour approaching them.

  “I did
say we would see each other soon,” Downes said, offering a hand for him to shake.

  “You did,” Palmer accepted, “but I didn’t think it would be so soon, nor under such circumstances.”

  “True, Captain,” Downes said, “very true. Have you contacted your base yet?”

  Palmer’s face dropped into annoyance and worry before he answered, nudging his head to one side and indicating that the SAS officer should follow him away for a private talk.

  “No, they aren’t responding to our calls. Do you think we can push through to retake the bridge?” he asked.

  Downes thought, casting his mind back to the rotting, rolling hills of dead and writhing bodies.

  “No, we have to find another way. I doubt your wagons would punch through and going on foot is suicide.”

  “Dammit,” Palmer cursed, then turned as his name was called urgently from the open hatch of the Sultan behind him.

  FOUR

  Long before the German tanks had been mobilised and the combined UK special forces teams had arrived at their underground objective in London, an allied team had been covertly inserted onto British soil. They did so via the side door of a twin propeller plane, and the team of four dropped out at just under ten thousand feet to freefall, before opening their canopies to arrive quietly at the twin of the nuclear power station near the south coast.

  As the three men and one woman of the Forsvarets Spesialkommando, or FSK, plummeted towards the green landscape to the north and east of London, one of them marvelled that they were being deployed at all. The Norwegian government still hadn’t officially acknowledged the existence of their elite commandos, even though they had been undergoing intensive training ready to play their part for NATO should the Cold War gather any kind of intense heat. Now, instead of deploying in secret under cover of darkness to erode the infrastructure of the Soviet Union, they were heading down to secure a location for a team of American engineers to turn down the dial on the nuclear power plant.

  The first parachute commando out of the door, eager to be the first pair of boots on the ground and prove that she was more capable than any man, levelled herself out and glanced at the altimeter on her left wrist as she reached terminal velocity. She knew the other three men of her team would be close behind her, but the low cloud cover prevented them from seeing their objective from height.

  As Astrid Larsen fell, she adjusted her attitude to allow for her right hand to reach behind and pull the cord to release her parachute above the cloud cover so as not to issue a loud crack when the chute deployed at low altitude. Taking a breath and holding it, she steadied her torso against the violent change in

  direction as the air caught the canopy to snatch her vertically. As soon as she located the steering lines she heard a whistling, flapping noise and checked up again to ensure that her rig had deployed correctly, but her vision was drawn to a man-sized missile.

  Her commander, Erik Nilson, last man out of the plane, flew past her out of control and left her with a snapshot of his hand pulling desperately on the reserve ‘chute. Within a heartbeat he was gone, swallowed by the cloud layer sitting close to the ground, and another noise pulled her eyes back up. Spiralling and yelling in fear and frustration, another of her team fell at a far faster rate than her own descent, as he twisted inexorably, agonisingly, trying to release the partially-open canopy that dragged him down at a rate he couldn’t hope to survive. He too disappeared into the clouds, and a second later she followed, pursing her lips against the sudden cool sting of the moisture.

  Emerging through the layer herself, she took in the scene below, which set her jaw tight and forced her adrenaline levels higher still.

  The compound, strongly fenced and very secure, as she would expect with anything nuclear, had somehow been infected with the disease that threatened Europe and the wider world, and this had the unfortunate side effect of containing the enemy inside a confined area. Having inexplicably lost at least fifty percent of their strength in the drop, Astrid forced herself to concentrate and find a safe place to land. Hauling on the steering lines, she aimed for a single storey building and its flat roof, flaring the canopy with all of her strength at the last moment to try and arrest as much of her momentum as possible. Losing her footing on the loose tar and shingle, she scraped herself painfully along the roof until she could unfasten the straps of her rig and shrug out of it to unstrap the weapon from her chest. Astrid, like all of her team,

  carried the same weapon as the UK special forces in the form of the MP5SD, the suppressed sub-machine gun, but unlike them, the Norwegians all carried the same HK P7 pistol with the fat cylinder protruding from the barrel, which she wore on her right thigh. Extending the parachute stock of the gun, she nestled it into her shoulder and took aim over the iron sights to the ground below.

  She saw Nilsen, at least she assumed it was him as there was no canopy around the man, partly embedded in the soft grass, with limbs sticking out at horrendously unnatural angles. There was nothing she could do for him, as landing at terminal velocity wasn’t much known for its survivability. Turning her head away from the stomach-churning sight of kneeling people tearing into her commander’s body with teeth and nails, and thankful that she was too far away to hear the ripping and crunching noises she imagined, she looked towards the sounds of distress to her right.

  Obscured by the angle of the building, she could see the upper body of another team member, the unfortunate one with the partially failed canopy deployment who’d come in too fast to control his landing. The man, Jonas, was caught up in an upright metal support by his snagged canopy. His right arm hung limply, and he cried out either in pain or fear, or both. Astrid didn’t know what was beneath him, but she saw him struggling to free his pistol with his left hand and clamp the slide under his chin to charge the weapon. He achieved this on the second attempt and began to pour shots downwards towards an enemy Astrid couldn’t see enough from her position. She stood to her full height to try and gain an advantage, but still could not sight his attackers. All too quickly, his magazine was expended, and he tucked the weapon under his arm as his rhythmic yells sounded short of breath. Performing a one-handed reload, he repeated the process to charge the weapon, but stopped to throw his head back and howl in pain. His whole body convulsed, and the firing resumed, but the yells stopped and his face flushed red. Finally locating Astrid in his vision, he shot her a look of panic, fixed her stare for a second, and turned the gun on himself.

  Astrid watched him, her face a silent rictus of horror as the top of his skull burst to fountain blood and bone directly upwards before his limp, lifeless head and body slumped down. He twitched, shaking as though someone was trying to help him down from where he hung in the tangled lines, and the realisation hit her at the same time as his body was pulled down out of sight, that he was being consumed by ravenous teeth. Scrapes to her left made her drop to her right knee and raise the gun, with her left arm resting on her left knee, providing instant stability to the weapon. As soon as she had sighted down the length of the barrel, she immediately pointed the weapon up and relaxed.

  Christian Berg, the only other surviving member of her team, had landed on his feet perfectly and jogged a handful of steps with the momentum to slow down as he stepped out of the rig he had unfastened on landing.

  Under any other circumstance, such a stylish entrance would prompt bragging and laughter, but as the last man to land, he had seen the whole grim show unfolding. Unstrapping his own gun and extending the stock, he asked Astrid in their native Norwegian what she knew.

  “The commander is dead,” she reported, by pointing at the knot of kneeling figures who feasted on him, “and Jonas just put a bullet in his own brain.”

  “Bitten?” Berg asked.

  “I didn’t see, but I have to assume so. He was hung up in his lines,” she said, pointing in the direction where his canopy flapped against the metal poles.

  “Nilsen hit his canopy in freefall,” Berg reported woodenly, “I did
n’t see it, but I heard it. Jonas must have been unable to recover.”

  Astrid pursed her lips in thought, sending up a brief prayer to the old gods for surviving what had become a catastrophic loss of life in seconds; fifty percent of their team dead from just their insertion was devastating.

  “We still have the mission,” she said, subtly reminding Berg that at less than two-thirds his size, she still outranked him. He nodded, stepping to the edge of the low building and bobbing his head fractionally as he scanned the ground, making a rough headcount of the visible zombies.

  “Do you see any of the faster ones like in the intelligence report?” she asked his broad back.

  “I can’t be certain,” he said cautiously, “but I would still prefer to stay up here until they are gone. Shall we?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “We call them over,” Berg said simply, “and shoot them.”

  Astrid shrugged, checked her watch and calculated the time left before the helicopter would be swooping in to drop off the engineers.

  “You think it will work?” she asked.

  Berg smiled, shrugging, and repeated a phrase that translated into English as, Birds fly not into our mouths ready roasted.

  Astrid understood; it was time to go to work.

  It took them close to forty minutes to attract the attention of the majority of the zombies and draw them close enough to dispatch them with bullets to their heads. Those less interested in them had to be confronted at ground level and the pair moved close to each other, at one point ending up back to back when Berg was forced to resort to his secondary weapon, as it was quicker to draw and use the pistol than to reload the MP5. The air around them stank of cordite and their barrels ran hot as they expended most of their ammunition.

  When they had finished, when no other enemies came for them and they were left dominant in the field, they finally had the time to attend to their fallen companions.