That sergeant, Hampton, had stayed behind with five of his marines, all volunteers to a man, and included their sniper, who went about his own work methodically to line up two or more advancing heads, before squeezing the trigger and sending a fat, heavy round through their collective skulls.
Hampton hauled three of his men back from the barricade and began dishing out grenades like bottles of water on an aid mission. The marines, far more accustomed to the small bombs than their tank-driving counterparts, threw with ruthless efficiency to cut huge chunks out of the oncoming waves and fill the air with the crump and bang of explosions to punctuate the heavy rattle of gunfire.
The intensity of the noise was so extreme that the arrival of the second helicopter was felt before it was heard, as the rotor wash pushed them forward when it flared to land close behind them.
Johnson felt that arrival but could not afford to take his eyes from the enemy. The final belt of ammunition was slapped into his gun as he could feel the heat from the barrel radiating back to his face. Four hundred rounds had already been expended through it and his shoulder burned in pain with each squeeze of the trigger. He pulled it in tighter and carried on, deafened by his own personal destruction but yelling for the others to fall back. He felt another slap on his shoulder, this one telling him it was time to leave, and he stood a little taller to make his final stand.
The zombies were close by then, close enough to make out details of their uniforms and faces. He squeezed the trigger in one last surge as he bared his teeth and emitted a low growl of anger and frustration, firing an extended burst of fully automatic fire as he depressed and swung the long barrel left to right to left to spray the heavy bullets at the knees of the ranks of undead. His mind registered that they were thinning out, that he could not see heads of the fifth and sixth ranks of attackers, but there were still more bodies than bullets. When the gun finally ran dry he dropped it where he stood and turned to run towards the helicopter just as the barricade fell inwards under a wash of dead meat.
“There’s a fight going on down there,” Lieutenant
Commander Murray called into the headset to warn his four passengers, “I’ve got muzzle flashes and what looks like grenades.”
Wordlessly, the four rear passengers unstrapped themselves and stood, holding on to whatever they could as they readied themselves to get back in the fight. All four of them, two bearded Special Boat Service troopers and the two Norwegian commandos of the FSK, were all on the edge of their nerves but what marked them out as special was their ability to compartmentalise. To forget their emotions and to focus on the task in hand. Both teams, originally four a piece, had been halved in brutal savagery only a few hours before, but the remaining men and woman vowed to not be so easily taken.
As the helicopter slowed and turned to present the open side door, the noise of heavy gunfire pounded them over the noise of the thudding blades and screaming engines. All four hopped to the ground and fanned out, two left and two right, in pairs of mixed teams.
Astrid dropped her right lower leg to the ground and rested her suppressed weapon on her left knee as she scanned for targets. The leader of the SBS team, the man even she had found herself calling Buffs, crouched over her with his weapon scanning in opposite arcs to her own.
Uniformed men ran towards them, empty handed or with useless rifles dangling on slings, and began to throw themselves on board the aircraft. A huge, rattling burst of automatic fire from a weapon far heavier than their own sub machine guns sounded ahead from the makeshift barricade and as soon as it stopped, Astrid saw a lone figure turn and sprint for them just as a wave of undead crushed the meagre obstacle to pour over it.
She was hauled to her feet and propelled towards the open door, but she spun with the force and brought her weapon back up to face the threat. Undetected except by the ones pulling their triggers, rounds spat with snapping coughs from their fat-barrelled guns to cut down the zombies regaining their feet and cover the man who ran straight towards them. As he slowed and began waving his arms at them to retreat, the sheer presence of the last man to fall back dominated the area. He grabbed them and pushed them inside before throwing himself bodily on top of the living bodies in the open doorway.
What the fuck are these idiots doing? Johnson thought to himself, incorrectly recognising the profiles of the four shooters as the SAS team he had sent to scout potential safe sites for them.
How did they even get on the helicopter? Came his next thought, before a shriek from behind him refocused his mind and forced him further on. A whip of wind passed his face, buffeting him almost imperceptibly under the downforce of the rotor blades and the dust and debris it sent towards his squinting eyes. Another half-felt sensation behind him made him stagger slightly as a flailing hand of a now-dead Screecher hit his leg as it tumbled to the roadway with two out of three bullets fired into its skull from the burst of one of the guns ahead of him. Slowing as much as he dared and roaring at them to get on the damned aircraft, he grabbed at their equipment and sent them hurtling towards safety before diving headlong on top of them and bawling at the top of his voice.
“Go! Fucking go!” he roared, feeling his body weight instantly tripled by the forces of gravity as the helicopter launched vertically skywards.
As he rolled to get to his knees, a slap of meat on metal made his eyes fix on a bloody hand gripping the ledge. Impossibly slowly, inch by terrifying inch, the top of a head rose to meet the hand and revealed the face beneath.
Despite the gore and blood, despite the missing right cheek exposing teeth all the way back to the molars and gouged-out left eye, Johnson came face to face with his missing radio operator, Corporal Mander. The former corporal hauled himself upwards, performing a one-handed chin-up of such epically strong proportions as to betray how the mind limits the body’s ability. The ravaged mouth opened and leaned forward, making Johnson close his eyes and accept that he had nowhere to go.
A metallic clang sounded in front of his face, thudding the metal deck of the helicopter and vibrating his head painfully. He opened one eye to see the glinting head of an axe and four severed fingers. Following the head to the handle, his eyes matching the flowing contour of the wood and up the slender wrist and the forearm to see the concerned face of the young woman who had terrified him so much with her unexpected interest in him. She didn’t smile, but her look of cold steel filled him with a warmth he suspected was rather unbecoming of a man of his position.
Corporal Mander went for the radio but found his path blocked by the tall and spare Major from the intelligence corps.
“I said we are to evacuate immediately,” he hissed at him.
Mander ignored him, pushing past the man and going for the set on the desk. He had no time to explain to this man, who even though he was a reservist himself and not a full-time soldier, he saw as lower down on the food chain. Had a man like the captain given him an order, he would have followed it because he knew him to be a clever man who was tried and tested in battle; or even his Squadron Sergeant Major, who Mander saw much more of,
often being on the radio and pretending not to listen to the senior men of the squadron discussing matters.
If Mister Johnson had given the order to strip naked and do the hokey-kokey, then he would do precisely that.
But not this man. He snatched up the set and began to give a report over the channel he hoped his counterpart, Daniels, would be listening to in the Sultan out there somewhere, but after only a few words the door burst inwards.
Major Hadlington screamed foully, his high-pitched wails drowning out the entire upper spectrum of Mander’s hearing as he went down to three of them. A noise behind him made him spin, amazing even himself that he could rip his eyes away from the officer being torn apart, and he saw the female radio operator who had relieved him. She was emerging from the door of the toilet near the radio desk and their eyes met and locked for a second. Saying nothing, he shoved her hard back inside and slammed the door just as a b
ody fell on him from behind. Teeth ripped the skin from his face and lanced pain throughout his entire body as hot breath burned his eyes with the foul smell of salt water gone stagnant. His brain registered renewed screams, the same terrible high-pitched shrieking of impossible agony, and just as teeth gnawed at his right elbow and the lower part of the limb was torn sinuously away, his consciousness fled.
Minutes later, the former Corporal Mander woke, in as much as his reanimated body opened its milky eyes and pushed itself one-handedly off the blood-drenched floor. Three others were in the room with him, not that he recognised them, and the thing they fed on didn’t smell fresh to him. He heard noises from outside, from beyond the door left hanging open, and he stumbled his way through it. Outside in the cool, dark air he lifted his chin and sniffed deeply, turning his face left and up to where the sounds of gunfire echoed from past the huge crowd of the others like him.
Shortly after that, a huge green truck rocketed past him, the oversized wing mirror clipping his shoulder hard enough to break it in two places and spin him around to land hard on the cobbles. He righted himself again and re-orientated towards the renewed sounds of heavier gunfire. His long, halting stumble uphill was sparked by the thudding sounds of a huge machine which started to move as he approached. Clamping his one remaining hand onto the lip of the open door he hauled himself upwards to be rewarded instantly with the smell of fresh meat. He opened his mouth, savouring the delights to come, and was suddenly in mid-air and falling back towards the ground where he had started. The smell of meat vanished, and his remaining senses blacked out in a heartbeat as his skull burst on impact to spill his brains onto the roadway.
FIFTEEN
Barrett slammed his aircraft down to the dark ground, his entire body fatigued with the physical effort of piloting the big helicopter for over an hour of intensive short hops under immense pressure.
Real, literal, life and death pressure.
He waited until given the all-clear from his loadmaster, signifying that everyone was off, and he moved his helicopter to the flat area adjacent to their landing spot; hovering it just a few feet off the ground as the tall beast crabbed sideways.
“Julian? Julian?” a nasal voice called out, snapping Captain Palmer’s attention directly to the unnecessary source of the noise. Mixed relief and annoyance washed over him, and he stepped straight to his younger brother and hushed him, if anything for the embarrassment of the men seeing their officers engaging in such an emotional reunion.
“Lieutenant,” he snapped, sending the message loud and clear which they both heard in their late father’s voice.
Stop your caterwauling! He cried from the depths of their shared childhood, you’re neither women nor animals; show some decorum.
Second-Lieutenant Palmer stopped, wiped the look from his face and resisted the urge to hug his big brother and not let go.
“Sir,” he said formally, finally, “I’m glad you’re safe.”
“Where’s the SSM?” his older brother fired back, seemingly unaffected by the emotion of their being reunited. Palmer junior swallowed down the first four things he wanted to say, settling on a brief but thorough report.
“He stayed behind, waiting for the other aircraft and in command of the final group.”
“I see,” the captain said, dropping his eyes in thought. Without another word he thrust a pad and pencil into his younger brother’s chest and waited for him to take them.
“I’ve begun taking a record of who we have left. Unless there are any surviving members of Assault Troop left behind, I’d suggest you start with Sergeant Sinclair’s men.”
The younger Palmer, left without the emotional response to his survival that he had hoped for and, worse still, unrecognised for the fact that he had finally led fighting men in contact and done what he felt was a good job. The final nail in the coffin of his elation was seeing his brother, the man he idolised and tried to emulate all the time, physically grab hold of another officer and turn him to walk away.
“Chris,” he said, using Lieutenant Lloyd’s first name in a rare display of familiarity, “with me, if you please.”
Second Lieutenant Palmer sneered, almost crushing the pad in his hand and digging the dull point of the pencil into his flesh painfully, then stomped away to take the most uncaring and callous butcher’s report ever.
Nestling the aircraft gently back to the ground, Barrett flicked the switches to kill the big jet engines and sank into his seat in pure physical and psychological relief. Pulling off the helmet and headset, he basked in the sudden, if only relative, silence.
That silence was shattered by the shouting of a polite enquiry, even if the voice calling out was filled with tension and authority.
“I say?” the voice called again, “where are the others?”
“I’ll deal with this, Harry,” his co-pilot said as he pulled himself from his seat far faster than his slightly older comrade, “you take a moment.”
“Thank you, James,” Barrett said tiredly to Morris in an unusually intimate moment where the two men used each other’s given names, similar to the conversation that had just occurred
two dozen paces away.
“Ah, Captain,” Barrett heard Morris exclaim from behind him as he leaned back and closed his eyes briefly.
“Lieutenant,” Captain Palmer said as formally as his rushed mood allowed, “might I enquire where the rest are?”
“Yes, Captain,” Morris said with a groan as he climbed down, “the other aircraft by my reckoning should be roughly six minutes behind us, all being well.”
“All being well?” Palmer asked pointedly.
“Well, yes,” Morris replied, fighting the urge to recite no less than two film references given the evident seriousness of the question, “the Sergeant Major was rather heroically taking on an entire horde of undead when we left,” he said, hurrying to add his next sentence, given the widening eyes on the face of the army captain, “but he was far from alone; he had marines and some of your men around him and they were fighting hard.”
“And the other helicopter?” Palmer asked.
“Got released from command to return, I presume,” Morris said, leaving the explanation for Lieutenant Commander Murray’s return flight for the pilot himself, “they should have collected and been in the air by now,” he finished.
Palmer nodded, the gesture unseen in the poor light and adding a verbal acknowledgement hurriedly, and turned away to wait for the tell-tale sounds of the other helicopter coming in.
“Head count,” Johnson shouted as he shakily regained his feet. The sound of his voice was snatched away in the massive drone of the jet engines and the thudding blades. A headset appeared on his chest, held out by a lean, blonde woman he did not recognise. He knew instantly that she did not belong as part of their civilian complement, given her clothing and equipment, but similarly couldn’t place her or understand how she came to be there.
Pulling on the headphones and adjusting the boom microphone, he untangled himself from the long spiral cable snaking upwards. As he did so, his eyes took in three other forms in similar clothing and carrying weapons he hadn’t seen for real outside of anti-terrorism displays, marking out the four of them as special forces, and he half recognised the brooding, bearded man to his left as one of the SBS team who went out on that very helicopter.
“Report,” he said.
“There was an outbreak on the ship,” said the bearded man, not adding a ‘sir’ or other appropriate deference, which all but announced his specialist status, “they sank it just after we took off. The whole fleet is pulling back, and they’ve fired nukes on Russia because Russia apparently launched nukes on Europe.”
All of this information, although garnered from different sources, slotted in with what the SSM already knew. He glanced around the others in the dull, red-lit interior, seeing the filthy and exhausted faces of men, of soldiers and marines, who had fought hard right down to their last bullet. Of men who had gone toe-t
o-toe with the Screechers and taken the fight to them with the bayonet. Of men who had gone to the brink of survival and still couldn’t believe that they had got away with it. Johnson looked at those faces, counting thirteen including the four mysterious passengers already on board, and watched in sudden terror as every one of their eyes went wide.
Lieutenant Commander Murray, staying quiet and concentrating hard after the adrenaline of the rapid landing and take-off, headed inland at speed. As he levelled out the angle of attack, flattening the aircraft to cruise, his hand slipped on the throttle and slowed the aircraft. His grip on the cyclic was shaky, his palm seemingly sweaty, but the myriad smells inside the helicopter masked the metallic tang of fresh blood where the wound in his arm had opened up once more. So intense was his concentration that he missed the signs until they were too late, and as the aircraft slowed more and more, his foggy brain, left weak and confused by the blood loss, registered the warning too late.
The unbending laws of physics, that point where gravity outweighed lift, kicked in hard and the bulbous, ungainly helicopter dropped like a stone. As the momentary weightlessness made the eyes of all the passengers bulge, Johnson was pitched over to land hard, flat on his back. His eyes registered a handful of others in similar positions as another weird sense tugged his insides backwards through his spine, as the aircraft’s tail whipped around to overtake the cockpit and eject two men from the open side door and into the night air.
It was that last second spin of the fuselage, combined with the lucky position he had fallen in, that made the difference between survival and death to Johnson. As the tail of the craft hit the main part of the church, which was the only tall feature in an otherwise unremarkable countryside village, the belly of the helicopter slammed into the ground hard. So hard, in fact, that the two people who had somehow managed to stay standing were flattened into the deck on impact like meat concertinas. The severe spinal injuries alone would have killed them, but the worst were the ones who were neither lucky enough to be in positions to survive the crash, nor to be killed in an instant.
Death Tide Page 52
