Or at least, attend to what was left of them.
Nilsen had somehow landed on his back and had been all but hollowed out. His face was gone, and his intestines had been spread over impossibly long distances as the zombies eating them had wandered towards the new sounds and dragged the glistening snakes with them. It was an ignoble and unworthy end to a respected, capable man, but the mission came first, and they managed to pick through his remains to recover the spare ammunition he carried. Both surviving members of the team were down to their last thirty rounds, as they had been forced to dispatch twice the number of enemy than would have been necessary, had they suffered no losses on the insertion. They found the body of Jonas, still partly suspended by his parachute, and tried not to look at the exposed bones of his legs where he had been chewed at like a hanging treat in a birdcage. Silently, his weapons and ammunition were taken to replenish their expended rounds, and the pair entered the building with one of the swipe cards that the whole team carried.
The engineers arrived via helicopter less than an hour after they had secured the power station. Two men, tired and both wearing a few days’ worth of stubble, followed their escort inside and went about their work in near silence, save for a few necessary words to each other. They finished quickly, far more quickly than the two surviving Norwegians had expected, and they packed up their gear to trudge exhaustedly back to the helicopter, which was sitting motionless on the hardstanding near the main entrance doors. Those doors were sealed behind them, and the helicopter’s engines sparked into life to spin up the limp blades to a screaming whine.
Over that noise, Berg shouted a warning.
It wasn’t any identifiable word, merely a panicked shout of rage and fear and alarm as he slammed his body into the path of the running shape rounding the corner of the building, like a professional sportsman checking an opponent. The combined impact of an inhumanly reckless run and the commando’s large frame sent the five of them tumbling to the ground. Astrid rolled clear of the obstruction at the front of the melee and rose to her knees as she brought up her MP5 in one smooth movement, her right thumb pushing all the way down and flicking the fire selector through to automatic.
The fat barrel of the gun spat savagely, emptying the magazine into the rising creature as it leapt into the air to tower over her countryman. The end of the barrel tracked upwards with the movement as it rose, its chest rippling with the impacts of the bullets until finally the angle of the weapon elevated enough for the thudding noise to become hollower. The splintering, cracking sounds of the creature’s skull coincided with the sudden limpness in the attack. At the peak of its ungainly leap, the wide, cloudy eyes over bared teeth went slack and it fell flat on top of Berg’s broad back to drive the air out of him and the two engineers underneath. Its head flopped, pouring a mouthful of oily drool onto the rolled-up sleeve of one of them.
Silence reigned, broken only by Astrid sucking in a breath and dropping the spent magazine from her gun to click in a fresh one as she stood and kicked out at the torn and broken body to launch it off the living ones.
“Christian! Are you okay?” she asked in Norwegian in a tone bordering on panic, “Are you hurt?” she said insistently, speaking in English this time to all of them but still mostly concerned with her team mate.
“I am fine,” Berg answered, his fingers going to the back of his head where it felt tender, to check his fingertips and find them sheened in the slightest trace of blood. He looked at the red smears on his skin, then at Astrid as they both registered a look of shock. Dropping her weapon to swing on the strap over her torso, she stepped forwards and pulled his head down to look for a wound. Berg said nothing. He wouldn’t ask questions that he didn’t want the answer to, nor would he offer empty reassurances to her.
“I can’t see any broken skin,” she said finally, feeling the relief in him as he sagged. He stood, looking at the two terrified Americans, who remained on the rough concrete bathed in the rotor wash of the helicopter spinning up above them.
“You?” he said to them, watching as they checked themselves over and offered shocked reassurances that they were fine.
“I grazed my elbow,” one of them said weakly, showing a patch of scraped and bleeding skin. He looked dismayed when the minor injury was summarily ignored, and they were bundled into the helicopter. The two Norwegians put on headsets and listened to the pilot as the helicopter’s engines dialled up their intensity, and they rose into the air to turn south and out to sea. Feeling the chill of the speed and altitude, the engineer with the fresh cut to his elbow pulled the gore-soaked sleeves of his shirt down and felt the cold of wet blood and drool on the injury, rubbing tenderly at it as he felt a sudden sting.
FIVE
“Hold the line, boys!” Lieutenant Chris Lloyd called out to his marines. “Conserve your ammunition!”
He pressed his own cheek back into the stock of his L85, the newly-issued SA80 rifle, renamed and given an innocuous codename, as was usually the way with the British Army. It was typically ironic that the SA80, as in small arms for the 1980s, only just started to come into issue when the decade began to draw to a close. Lloyd had seen how the RMPs and some troopers looked with jealousy at the Marines’ guns, when they were still being issued with equipment left over from the second world war, or the sixties and seventies.
That jealousy, as much as he understood it, given the futuristic bullpup design of the rifle, was misplaced, in his opinion. He, or at least his sergeant, the irascible Bill Hampton, ensured that the marines kept their weapons in pristine condition. It was easy, given the amount of time they were hurrying up and waiting, but it was also a sad necessity, because every speck of dust, every grain of sand and every wet leaf or glob of mud seemed magnetically attracted to the gun’s working parts. That was a constant source of annoyance, especially knowing that the word was beginning to spread that the forces would be conducting build-up training for a sandy theatre of war very soon. No major prizes were issued for guessing where that would have been, but it seemed unlikely that they would be deploying anywhere soon.
A shriek to his front focused his mind as the fence before him bent nauseatingly inwards. This prompted a sharp thrust of the attached bayonet into the open mouth of the dripping wet teenager in a navy blazer and diagonally-striped tie, the entire scene eerily lit by the flames of the burning building growing larger off to his right.
At least the bloody spike doesn’t malfunction, he thought to himself.
As another surge of bodies swept over the fallen schoolboy, Lloyd stepped back and fired a long burst of automatic 5.56 at head height and temporarily cleared a section five paces wide. Clicking on an empty chamber, he hit the release catch and missed as the empty magazine fell away, out of his fingertips. Ignoring the drop, he snatched a fresh magazine from the pouch of his webbing and slapped it home to rack the bolt and feed a fresh bullet into the chamber. Bringing the rifle back into his shoulder and nestling it in tight, he inadvertently caught the annoyingly sensitive magazine release catch again, and succeeded in firing only a single round before he clicked dry again.
“Fucking…” he swore as he turned the weapon to look for the fault. He saw it instantly as the profile of the weapon looked almost ridiculous without a magazine seated behind the trigger mechanism. He felt a thump on his shoulder and turned to see the troop medic firing his own weapon one-handed, as his left hand held out the dropped ammunition to his officer.
“Thanks,” Lloyd shouted, not that he expected Sealey to hear or answer him. The man was working, as were all of his marines as they fought incessantly to prevent the impossible tide of dead rolling out of the water like waves of animated meat.
His men were fighting shoulder to shoulder with others. There were three men wearing scarlet berets, whose long self-loading rifles (SLRs) barked loud reports of the heavier 7.62 rounds over the sharp crack of their own lighter ammunition, to over-penetrate and sometimes take more than one Screecher out, as the heavy bullets rip
ped through the meat wall ahead of them. Add to that the rattling, staccato sounds coming from the Sterling sub machine guns fired by the troopers of the dismounted armour squadron, and the shrieking moans from their enemy, the noise was confusing, terrifying and deafening.
Antiquated as they were in Lloyd’s mind, those submachine guns still killed zombies just as effectively as their new rifles.
He didn’t know what was going on in the rear, nor could he hope to know that he and his men were wasting ammunition when they should just have been getting off the island by any means necessary.
“What the hell was that?” Denise Maxwell said in response to a muted scream from outside. She and her daughter were in the front room of the empty townhouse halfway up the hill which was being shared with the injured Graham Ashdown, her husband’s second in command, and his wife and son too.
Another scream sounded, closer this time, and was deeper in tone than the first.
“Okay, something’s definitely going on,” she said as she rose to her feet, “other than whatever’s happening down there, I mean,” she explained, meaning the incessant small arms gunfire from below.
She stepped close to the door and pressed her ear to the wood, holding her breath to try and hear more of whatever was beginning to unfold on the island, while the others in the room stayed quiet. Screaming and flailing her arms, Denise flew back away from the door to land half on an armchair covered in a hideously patterned coarse brown material.
The door banged again, desperate hammering making the two young children cry and huddle away from the door. Just before one of them voiced their fears, another noise added to the banging.
“Denise, are you there?” hissed a woman’s voice, “let me in if you’re there, please!”
Flying back to her feet, Denise flicked the lock over and pulled the door wide to scan left and right in the narrow street, before grabbing the woman by her clothing and pulling her inside unceremoniously. Dishevelled, red-faced and half out of breath, Kimberley Perkins spilled inside and for once didn’t try to hide the scarring on the left side of her face.
The bumpy, mottled skin showed up a different colour from her flushed cheeks, but the situation outside was obviously more pressing than her insecurities.
“They’re here,” she said in a shaking voice through gasps of breath, “on the island. We need to go!”
The news left them shocked into silence. That silence seemed to anger Kimberley, and she turned to look for bolts on the door, only to make another desperate sound of exasperation as she found none.
Damn these country people and their unlocked doors, she cursed to herself, having to satisfy her need for security by killing the main light and flicking over the catch to make sure the feeble door was locked. In the gloom of the darkened interior she walked confidently towards Denise and grabbed her arm to shake her out of her shock.
“Denise, we have to get off the island now,” she said to her as kindly as she could, but failing to hide the intensity and fear from her voice, “Where should we go?”
Denise’s eyes met hers, but her mouth opened to emit nothing but silence. She opened and closed it twice, her look turning from dull shock to something leaning heavily towards debilitating fear, until she finally managed to speak.
“We,” she cleared her throat, “we have to get my hu-”
Her eyes grew wider as she realised that her husband, Simon Maxwell, was still out on a mission.
“There’s no time,” Kimberley snapped, “we can’t just wait to be rescued. Now, how do we get off the island?” she said, shaking Denise again.
“We need a vehicle,” Ashdown said as he struggled to stand. His neck was still bandaged, and his left arm was in a sling after the near-miss escape from when half of a former Royal Military Policeman had dragged him from his moving vehicle and tried to eat him alive.
“We load up and get to the bridge, but there’s a tank blocking it,” he finished.
“Can’t we tow it out of the way?” his wife asked as she clutched their son to her side.
“It’s a tank. It weighs more than fifty tonnes,” he said, but seeing that his words hadn’t made themselves clear, he explained it simply, “there’s no way in hell we can drag it clear.”
“So?” Kimberley snapped, eager to speed up the process.
“The helicopters,” Denise said, “Go up the hill and get on a helicopter.”
She had started grabbing up her possessions, throwing items into a fabric shopping bag with round, wooden handles that clacked together in her hand.
“And after that, I have no idea,” she finished.
“After that,” Kimberley said, “is irrelevant unless we get the hell off this bloody island.”
They moved, leaving via the back door to the house and filing along the cobbled rear path past the wall of dark brick. Kimberley walked at the front, the two women with their children in the middle and the slow-moving but armed Graham Ashdown at the rear.
Kimberley stopped at the wooden gate, secured with a twisted loop of wire hung loosely over the post which caught the gate, and it perplexed her momentarily until she saw it and pushed it upwards to free their escape route. Pausing to look back at the small flock she was leading, her eyes caught a glint of dull reflection. Turning towards it, she took in the shape of the short wooden handle and the wedge-shaped head of the small splitting axe stuck into a piece of wood. It had obviously been recently used, given the bright slices of fresh wood on the half-covered pile, and she reached out to snatch it up on impulse.
The worn curvature of the handle felt somehow reassuring in her grip, but not as reassuring as the weight of the head when it came loose from the grasp of the wet wood it was partly buried in. She hefted it once, feeling the weight and the way it moved in her hand, and she turned her eyes back to the darkening streets to lead her people uphill towards what she hoped was safety.
“Behind!” Marine Sealey screamed, repeating the warning and simultaneously turning away from the bending fences to advance three paces and drop to one knee. He pressed his eye into the scope and began squeezing off disciplined rounds in ones and twos, forcing Lieutenant Lloyd to realise the peril he and his men were in. He looked back, seeing a loose formation of uniformed men and civilians shambling towards their undefended rear.
Undefended, at least, until their medic turned to pick up the magazine for his weapon that he had dropped much in the same way as his Lieutenant had. He had recognised the jerky movement of the ex-people behind him instantly and shouted the warning as he began to pour careful fire into heads.
They were so close that the skulls filled his scope, forcing him to take his eye away after he had expended half of the magazine to locate the next closest attacker and drill a round through their head. The detail in the scope showed him flashes, almost like mental Polaroid pictures, of things he didn’t want to remember.
An eye plastered shut with thick blood pouring downwards from a deep gash to a scalp. A nose bitten clean off, exposing the two gaping holes of nostrils as though the flesh hadn’t been completed over the skull. A throat torn clean out, showing a bloody network of tubes and sinew underneath a mouth that screeched but emitted no sound.
Standing tall, leaning into his weapon and bawling for his men to turn around and fight off the rear assault, he swallowed his fear and resolved to fight harder than he had before. More weapons joined that fight and just as terrifyingly sudden as that attack had begun, it faded further away, and allowed them to take more carefully aimed shots at heads not so disturbingly close.
Renewed shouts of alarm sounded from behind them and Lieutenant Lloyd turned to see the harsh consequences of taking away half of their guns for a few precious moments. The fences and long lines of cruel barbed wire were pushed inwards and worryingly close to what must be their breaking point, where they threatened to give way at any moment under the crushing weight of Screechers crawling out of the water to flood his small force.
Lloyd faced a choice,
an imminent and desperately important choice, and he had only a few precious seconds to make it before his inaction threatened the lives of everyone. He looked once back up the hill, then back to where the sea was spewing undead horrors onto their inadequate defences, and he made his decision.
“Fall back! Fall back!” he bawled at the rag-tag collection of military police, yeomanry and marines. “On me!”
With that last command, he ran out ahead of the men and steadied his footing before thrusting the fixed bayonet into the eye of a woman he half recognised from the island. He thought nothing of that act; he couldn’t afford the time or the distraction caused by emotions or sentimentality. Without looking to see if the men behind were following him, he pressed on ahead through the streets with his rifle up in a fast-forward, reckless approximation of the FIBUA course, the fighting in built-up areas training he had led his men through before their most recent tour in Northern Ireland. Had the instructors seen his insane dash into danger, he would have instantly failed the course, but they weren’t fighting snipers and bombers now. They were fighting a new infantry that didn’t use weapons, didn’t lure them out of their protective vehicles to detonate home-made explosives packed into ice cream tubs. They merely swarmed over them in great numbers without feeling pain or holding any regard for anything but a bullet or a bayonet to the brain.
He moved fast, his nerve finally breaking and forcing him to glance behind to see a tight knot of soldiers moving in support. He saw two scarlet berets among the bare heads, and the dark green headgear of his men, and he guessed that he must have absorbed some of the others with him. The cacophony surrounding him made it difficult to discern between the different reports, but he was certain that he could hear three distinctly different weapon reports coming from the loose formation of men catching him up amidst the gunfire and the screams and the now raging crackling of the burning buildings nearer the road bridge.
Death Tide Page 45
