Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “Ah,” Johnson said conversationally as Nevin’s feet began to dance and his face turned purple, “I believe this is yours, Sergeant?”

  “It is, Sir,” Strauss said, his eyes promising punishment close to murder, “what was it doing?”

  “I believe it was raiding the supplies here instead of doing its job. See to it that it finds itself in a particularly uncomfortable and dangerous position to prove to me that it is worth keeping around?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Strauss said, stepping forward to catch the collar of Nevin’s jacket as the hand choking him opened. The loud gasp of involuntary air intake was cut short as he was hauled away backwards and dragged to the exterior perimeter to stand the rest of the night as sentry.

  Johnson, still shaking with anger and emotion, had no time to dwell on the incident as he heard the far-off rhythmic thud of rotor blades.

  Barrett, ignoring the professional pride of the flawless touchdown he normally observed, flared and dropped to the tarmac hard and powered down only just enough to keep the aircraft on the deck for as long as it took to unload their human cargo. Johnson jogged over, grabbing the loadmaster and shouting in his ear.

  “I thought this was the last load?”

  “No,” Brinklow shouted back as he shook his head emphatically, “two more. The other aircraft is on the way back there now.”

  Johnson took this in as he watched the faces getting off the helicopter, seeing that not one of them was military, which meant that either all the rest of his men were lost or, more likely, that they were still there fighting, but now with dwindling numbers. He turned to shout another name.

  “Captain Pa—”

  “Here,” Palmer shouted from directly beside him, craning up to lean his ear towards the bigger man and hear what he needed to say.

  “Still one more load on the island. I’m going back with them,” he shouted, stabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the helicopter.

  Palmer absorbed this for a few seconds, then nodded once and held up a single finger before turning away and taking off at a jog. Johnson turned to the nearest trooper, pulling two spare magazines from the man’s pouches before he hauled himself on board the aircraft, pausing as the loadmaster looked at him briefly and shrugged. Johnson turned back to see Palmer and two troopers with their arms full. Palmer passed up a dismounted GPMG, and then Johnson took the two full boxes of linked ammunition for the big gun. The last box had the lid lifted back for his inspection, and he kept his eyebrows raised as he looked back to the captain, who shot him a wink before retreating.

  The engines screamed, and the ground fell away beneath Johnson’s feet.

  THIRTEEN

  “Here they come,” Sergeant Hampton called out in warning, before leaning into his rifle and firing single shots at the heads illuminated by the fire hastily lit in a wheelbarrow further down the slope. The fire was a double-edged sword as the flickering flames no doubt attracted the zombies, but the payoff that the soldiers could see their targets was worth the disadvantage.

  All along the weak barricade, men started to fire with him, striving to bring down the fastest moving zombies who had stretched far ahead of the mass rolling relentlessly uphill towards their last stand.

  The only person not cowering in cover or firing over the barricade stood there feeling suddenly useless as she gripped the small axe in her sweaty palm. She looked around, left and right, desperately searching for anything that could be used to stem the tide of dead and help the fight. Shouts from the front sounded intermittently as men were pulled back from the centre of the line, having run out of ammunition. Each man withdrawn to stand as a second line, with bayonets ready, made Kimberley more and more fearful that they would be overrun before the helicopter returned, and she knew that she would be forced to retreat with the other civilians and abandon brave men to a fate she couldn’t bring herself to imagine.

  Before her nerve broke, the firing died off and she stepped cautiously forward to see that the advance line of zombies had been brought down.

  “Ammo count!” Lloyd shouted.

  Men fumbled in pouches, some bringing out a spare magazine and calling forward another soldier with the same kind of gun to thicken and strengthen the line, which still looked impossibly weak. She caught Lloyd’s eye and saw the resignation, the acceptance there. She also saw from the glint in his eyes that he would not stop fighting.

  “Eyes front!” Hampton shouted again, having finished dishing out the remainder of his ammunition to three marines who had joined him in the very centre of the barricade.

  All eyes turned to the front, and all hearts sank as the advancing mass was lit up by a few light sources.

  “Well, fuck my old boots,” said one man on the front line.

  “Now, now,” Lieutenant Palmer admonished haughtily in an attempt at joining in the men’s humour, “ladies present, boys. No need for barrack-room language.”

  “Sorry, Sir,” quipped the man, “but there’s a few of them.”

  A few of them was something of an understatement. Palmer and Lloyd both stared ahead before facing each other and guessing at numbers.

  “Five hundred?” Palmer asked quietly.

  “More,” Lloyd said, before realising that Kimberley Perkins was standing within earshot.

  “And how many bullets left?” she asked.

  “Not nearly enough,” Lloyd said with the same sad resignation his eyes had conveyed.

  Kimberley bit her lip, making the two officers misunderstand and try to reassure her.

  “Wait here,” she said, then disappeared into the darkness further up the hill.

  “Well, there isn’t really anywhere else to be, is there, Christopher?” Palmer said with all the poise he could muster.

  “No, Olly,” he answered, “there bloody well isn’t. Look alive, boys!” he called out, “All we have to do is hit three of them with each bullet!”

  The weak ripple of laughter died away in Kimberley’s ears as she ran up the slope, her eyes wide to try and make out the shapes of what she hoped to find. Single, loud shots sounded at regular intervals behind her, making her jump as she felt her way along in the darkness, eventually finding the slatted metal indicating what she wanted.

  “Sir?” Marine Leigh called out as he lowered the small binoculars from his face, “He did it, Sir.”

  “Did what?’ Lieutenant Lloyd asked as he stepped close.

  “Did for three of the fuckers with one bullet,” Leigh answered with a toothy grin as he nudged his head at their sniper, who rested the long barrel of his weapon over the barricade. It took a moment for Lloyd to understand that his jest had just been taken seriously, even more time to realise that it had been achieved, but he knew that if any of them could time an accurate shot to line up three of the shambling corpses for such a trick shot, then it was their implacably calm marine Enfield with his Accuracy International.

  “Double rum ration for that man!” Palmer announced gleefully, earning an almost audible groan of embarrassment from the collection of men, mostly marines, at his attempt at a joke that was only a century out of date. As their groan died down, a louder, and infinitely more menacing groan rolled upwards to their tenuous position near the top of the hill.

  Two other noises pricked the air at the same time; the unmistakable and heavenly sound of thudding helicopter blades and the unexpected sound of a big diesel engine barking into life.

  As one, the men holding the thin line turned to the loudest and nearest source of sound, and saw headlights descending the hill towards them. They shielded their eyes from the bright lights as their night vision was instantly ruined, and the vehicle came to a squeaking halt before their meagre barricade.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Palmer called over the clattering of the engine, drowning out the rippling moans from further down the hill and the incoming aircraft.

  Kimberley jumped down from the driver’s side as she left the engine running, and either hadn’t heard or had simply ignored Palm
er’s protest.

  “Clear everything out of the way!” she shouted, climbing back up into the cab without waiting for any response.

  “Surely she’s not trying to…” Palmer said, just as he saw Lloyd’s face crack into an evil grin that bordered on madness, until his own mind tipped over into understanding.

  “Clear the barricade,” they both shouted in near unison, and watched as the men shoved and pulled at the furniture and crates providing them with the thinnest of barriers between supposed safety and a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of undead. Neither officer knew if the men understood the tenacious young woman’s plan, but it only mattered that, at that very moment, they followed orders. When the roadway was sufficiently cleared, Lloyd called for them to stand clear, then held his left thumb up clearly in the light of the headlamps.

  Inside the cab, Kimberley saw the gesture and did that curious, almost automatic action with her left hand of wiggling the gearstick to ensure it was in neutral, pointlessly as she wasn’t depressing the clutch and the big, green truck was still idling and stationary. She leaned her right leg out of the open door in readiness and used both hands to depress the heavy button and release the handbrake, with her left foot wedged unnaturally on the middle pedal. The truck lurched slightly, creaking against the brakes as the pressure from her foot was less than that of the handbrake. She took two steadying breaths, her head rising up to see the oncoming horde a little over a hundred paces away, then rolled to her right and out onto the cobblestones.

  The truck moved slowly at first, despite the pull of gravity. It’s hulking green metal and canvas rolled slowly forwards as it began a journey that the laws of physics had already dictated. As certainly and as inescapably as fate, it rolled faster and faster by the second as it accelerated on a journey that would only end in devastation, but the devastation they wanted. As soon as it passed through the gap created in the barricade, orders were shouted for the hole to be sealed again and for the men to make ready. Kimberley ran to the barricade, slapping both hands onto an upturned sideboard as she watched, open-mouthed, at the rapidly retreating back end of the Bedford truck. The sheer bulk of the vehicle obscured the sight of it crashing headlong into the leading wave of the crowd.

  She didn’t see it, but she heard it. The soft, wet sounds of metal hitting flesh. The muted pops and crunches of sinew and bone giving way so terribly and inevitably under the onslaught of the tonnes of metal bearing down on them, crushing them, driving them into the roadway to be crushed and smeared as inconsequential sacks of meat, flinging them aside either whole or in parts until the resistance of so many hundreds of bodies adhered to those same inescapable laws of physics.

  The truck slowed, still rolling downwards to crush and destroy the bodies as it went, until it burst from the other side of the crowd to slam into a single-storey building and all but collapse it on impact. The remains of the roof caved inwards, cascading tile and stones to the ground, and interrupting the instincts of the zombies at the rear.

  Those mindless monsters, the ones following the others in front with no understanding of why, were drawn to the noise and diverted from the main attack to mill about the nearest source of noise. At the head of their advance, those few not crushed by the hurtling truck, stomped onwards.

  “Is it going to blow up?” a voice asked from behind the barricade as it broke the silence.

  “No, lad,” came the gruffly amused voice of Sergeant Hampton, “that’s only in the mo…”

  His retort was cut off by a double crump of explosions, making them all duck instinctively. Nervous eyes peered over the barricade to see a cloud of smoke where the blast had come from, just as the air above them tore with the ripping sounds of the helicopter passing low overhead.

  It flared, spun on its axis, and exposed the open side door where the indomitable Squadron Sergeant Major stood with his feet firmly planted and murder in his eyes.

  “Take us directly over them and go slow,” Johnson had shouted into the headset he had been given by the loadmaster. A pause told him that either the pilot was deciding whether to do as he was asked, or that he was looking for the best way to approach the horde.

  Johnson rummaged in the box held down by heavy canvas netting and came back with both hands full.

  “Hold on to me,” he shouted as he fixed Brinklow with a look and didn’t wait for an answer. The loadmaster did as he was told and took a firm grip on the belt of his webbing as the big man leaned perilously close to falling out. Barrett slowed the aircraft from the flat-out speed he had forced it to on their return journey, just as Johnson saw the most unexpected event unfold below.

  A Bedford truck, he had no idea whether it was being driven in a fruitless escape attempt or not, gathered momentum as it rolled towards the attacking horde. His mouth dropped open as it slammed into the leading edge, obliterating the first dozen ranks of undead inside of a second as it ploughed through them mercilessly. His mouth stayed open, even if it did curl slightly into the very beginnings of a horrified smile, as the vehicle carried on throwing them down and crushing them as effectively as interlocking fire from heavy machine guns. He watched as the truck emerged from the far side of the horde to splay its headlight out from the grotesque shadows that had danced through the crowd, bursting into the relatively empty street behind their combined mass, only to slam into a building to bring it down. In the poor light below, Johnson saw the faint edges of the cloud of dust and steam caused by the crash and put his hands together to hook his thumbs into the release pins and pull them simultaneously.

  Holding both hands as far out from the open fuselage door as he could, Johnson gauged the drop and distance so far as was possible in a split-second and opened both hands to drop the small bombs at what he hoped was the biggest concentration of dead left standing.

  He didn’t hear the double whump and crunch of the grenades exploding, as the hurtling aircraft was over them too fast for the sound to carry. His next glance down showed the ghostly outlines of upturned faces before the aircraft lurched and the wheels bumped to the ground to make him feel impossibly heavy on his feet. Staggering, he climbed down and reached back for the precious tools he had brought with him.

  “Sergeant Major?” a nasal voice called from behind his turned back.

  Johnson turned, hefting the long machine gun in one hand effortlessly and a box of linked ammunition in the other.

  “Lieutenant,” he acknowledged simply, no sound being heard over the engines but his mouth clearly making the word as he walked past the young officer and towards the barricade. Palmer was left standing under the wash of the spinning blades as the surge of civilians rushed towards the door. He switched on, counting them in and counting half a load. He fixed the loadmaster with a look until he was sure he had his attention, then held up a flat palm and told him to wait, mouthing the word carefully until he received a nod in reply.

  Lieutenant Palmer ran to the barricade, placing a hand on Lloyd’s shoulder to get his attention.

  “Fifteen more on this load,” he shouted, making the two officers and the SSM scan their lines. The numbers were evident. They would have to leave behind eight men.

  “The other one is on its way,” Johnson shouted, seeing instant confusion on the faces of the two men before his eyes flickered away to take in the sight of men without magazines in their guns.

  “The other Sea King,” he explained, “it’s coming back in a few minutes.”

  The officers looked at each other before Lloyd spoke first.

  “Leave me and my marines here, you get your lot gone.”

  Palmer seemed to bridle, as though the implication were that the marines were the superior soldiers and by definition braver. Then his chest deflated, and he looked expectantly, hopefully almost, up at the SSM.

  “I need your medic and a few more back at the rendezvous. Feel free to stay with me, but I need a few of the best you have with me, and I need you to go back and look after what’s left of our boys,” he said in a tone t
hat brokered no argument as he fixed the marine Lieutenant with a stare that spoke volumes.

  It said that Johnson was, in no uncertain terms, ordering the Lieutenant back to base. It said that he wouldn’t ask or even allow anyone else to stay in his place, and his firm grip on the GPMG solidified that intention. Lloyd held his eye for a moment longer and turned to speak to his sergeant. Johnson faced Palmer.

  “Get the men without ammo on board,” he instructed, “and get yourself back to the captain, Sir.”

  Palmer swallowed, nodded, and turned to do as he was told.

  FOURTEEN

  “Look alive,” Johnson roared as he opened up with the big machine gun, firing short bursts as he swung the barrel left and right to target the closest groups of zombies. The arrival of the helicopter and the brief time it was nestled near the top of the island had served to encourage them all to renew their uphill journey, because they associated the noise with potential prey.

  The harsh rattling, percussive hammering up close deafened the men, as a marine to his left focused on feeding the belt carefully into the weapon. Johnson knew they could ill afford a malfunction just then, when his unexpected arrival had quadrupled their firepower all by himself. When the first belt was about to run dry he let go of the trigger, feeling as well as hearing the sudden drop in noise, but imagining that the attack renewed in intensity as his gun went quiet. He knew that wasn’t right, he knew that only a living enemy cowered in cover when in the sights of such a weapon, and these mindless, undead Screechers held no such regard for their own lives.

  A slap on his shoulder told him that a fresh belt was seated, and he bent to the sights again and began hammering away at the remnants of the horde. When that second belt ran dry, he took his eyes away from the attack and glanced down at the box behind him, before flicking his gaze up to meet the eye of the staunch marine sergeant, to nod to him once.