“You men,” he said to the rear group, which included Nevin, “go straight for the hangar doors and wind them open. You men,” he said switching his gaze to the front of the group, “take up defensive positions at and around the entrance. You and you,” he said, picking two troopers seemingly at random, “watch the flanks of the hangar. We get the easiest available vehicles, fuel them up and drive out to the armoury. I need at least one Bedford, too,” he added for the tenth time as he recited their objectives, “for the small arms ammunition stores. Let’s go, then.”
The men nodded back at his anxious face, and he led them out.
Almost a month before Sinclair’s small detachment tiptoed
their way back into the base from the far side of its multitude of fences and walls, and shortly after they had first fled in the night, the large building they had used to house the civilians in a hurry, had been one of the last places to be evacuated. In that haste to get out, the building had not been checked, not that a sweep of that building would probably have prevented the sequence of events that had followed. One woman, in an attempt to sleep in relative peace, was tucked away in a small cupboard with a green army sleeping bag when the call to evacuate had so unexpectedly come.
As much as the army loved lists, the woman had been missed off their rota when they had ended up on the island, as there were simply too many things to do and too few people to organise them.
They had abandoned the base just in time, closing up the gates behind them in an attempt to keep it clear of infestation for as long as possible, but they had no way of knowing back then that they had only narrowly avoided total annihilation at the hands, teeth even, of a small swarm of them approaching through the shrouded woodland behind them. That swarm, driven on by the cacophony of engines and gunfire, converged on one section of perimeter fence and the combined weight of their moaning, hissing, clawing bodies collapsed it to pour them through the gap like so much water through a drain. The swarm dissipated once inside, spreading out to advance in a seemingly unending mass, all heading in the general direction of the main gate where the last stimulating noises had come from. It was as though the zombies shuffled along with some half-blind and half-remembered sense of purpose until something warm blooded presented itself.
The woman slept on, her ears stuffed with twists of toilet paper to block out the noises of so many people crammed into one place, so she had no idea that the ground outside the building was now crawling with the people the soldiers were calling Screechers.
A woman in a skirt and blouse, streaked with dried blood and filth and her high-shouldered matching jacket torn half off her, walked oddly with stiff legs as she rose and fell a few inches every time she put down her right foot. So advanced was her skill and experience at wearing the high heels, that she had miraculously retained one of them. The other foot, bare below the torn remains of her tights, scraped on the tarmac as she veered away to the building which still smelled faintly of something that her subconscious brain told her was edible. Her hair was a mess, but her face seemed strangely unblemished, with the exception of one long, thin scrape caused by a low branch of a tree as she had advanced through the woodland, not knowing why. That mostly flawless face, with its two milky-white eyes set above the scratch, locked onto the doors of the building and her body followed. Pushing into the doors and bouncing back slightly, her hands raised in another half-remembered gesture and her body went forwards again, applying enough pressure through her outstretched palms to force the aperture open. On hearing the bumps and creak of doors, two other zombies split away from the edges of the crowd and headed towards the new sounds without knowing why. They followed the woman on one high heel through the door and into a large room where the smell of living people filled their nostrils and sparked them into more animated action. They stomped through the room in ungainly, uncoordinated actions, knocking things over as they went.
Waking cramped up and in need of a thorough stretch, the woman pulled the twists of paper from her ears and worked her jaw to rid herself of the stiffness. As she did, she froze in the dark, hearing a muffled noise from outside. A noise wasn’t anything to worry about in itself, and she couldn’t place her finger on why the noise disturbed her, but her spine tingled, and her breathing doubled in speed to become shallow as her body flushed with adrenaline.
Inching the door open outwards into the corridor, her eye caught movement off to the right. As soon as she saw the woman with one high heel, she pulled back and shut the door, banging it just loud enough to know that she had been heard. Holding her breath and gripping the door handle with all her strength, the tears began to flow down her face as she heard the faint, ‘click, slap,’ of uneven footsteps coming for her. The sound stopped at its loudest, and the sudden noise of the zombie’s face banging into the door elicited a scream of such volume that it was answered threefold.
The woman screamed, drawing in breath just as the response came from the other side of the thin wood. The racking, shrieking intake of breath through a ravaged throat promised the woman such a malicious death that she cried again, sobbing as she gripped onto the door handle with all her might. Two other shrieks responded in addition to the first, signalling the anticipated feeding frenzy to come when they unearthed their trapped quarry.
Those shrieks carried outside through the doors and to the ears of other zombies. Every one of them to hear it turned and made for the doors to push their way inside and cram into the back corridor, where the shrieks were incessant outside a cupboard door. Those who didn’t hear the initial screams followed the ones closer to the building who had detected it, and they were sparked by the movement to follow and cram inside until the building could hold no more bodies.
Those who had either bypassed or been ahead of the noisy discovery simply wandered away, stimulated by an elusive bit of wildlife or by far-off noises, but those inside the building had been trapped inside by the need to pull a door to leave. They could easily have crushed their way through the doors, but the outside world offered no reason to get riled up and spark such action. Inside the besieged cupboard, the woman screamed and sobbed her way into hyperventilation and eventually unconsciousness, until the combined weight of bodies outside which could not grasp and turn the round door knob broke through the plasterboard wall instead. The renewed screams from inside were short-lived as the woman was grabbed by dirty hands and ragged nails and pulled through the gaps to be ripped apart and devoured in the narrow corridor.
Like some grim and grotesque approximation of crowd-surfing at a rock concert, the woman’s body never landed on the ground, not in any entirety at least, as she was pulled open and eaten above head height by the fifty or so pairs of hands that reached for her. She never returned, never came back as one of them, because there was nothing left of her to reanimate within seconds of being discovered. Although she suffered an unimaginable, horrendous death, at least for the woman who had tried to find some peace in quiet sleep, her nightmare was over.
There were over three hundred zombies crammed shoulder to shoulder in that building for over a month. Nothing outside had managed to stir them into action and they seemed to slow down and stand still in some form of hibernation. They simply stood, swaying in silence, waiting for something to spark them into undead life once more. That stimulus, that spark to ignite their hunger once again, came in the form of thirteen soldiers pausing just outside the back corner of the building for orders to be hissed.
“Let’s go then,” Sinclair hissed, totally unaware that he had just awoken the beast.
TWENTY
The country residence teemed with life as if it were an ant colony, only instead of the ants there were military personnel and civilians mucking in together to make the grounds as impenetrable to the undead as possible. Despite the obvious military leadership, the nearly one hundred people milling about were almost half civilian and seemed to be operating under the army control quite happily. Not all of them were able, obviously, and one large receptio
n room which Captain Palmer stated with confidence was the drawing room, had become a haven for the young and the old or incapacitated together.
Not the incapacitated soldiers, however, for even the injured men could be propped up to keep watch.
That contingent appeared to fall under the leadership of Denise Maxwell who, after being reunited with her husband, had taken to her own new and unofficial role of senior NCO with as much practicality and necessary enthusiasm as her husband had, despite the terrible circumstances leading to his elevation.
Cooper, the tall man from Admin Troop who was usually flanking the now missing and presumed dead Sergeant Croft, had been one of the only members of his sub unit to survive, and as such was now following the captain with a clipboard liberated from the kitchens. Three surviving officers, not counting the Special Air Service’s Major Downes, who was off doing who knew what, paced the ground floor with a small entourage. There was a fourth officer to have survived, but the Colonel had been in need of a lie down when he arrived at the house, so he was shown to one of the larger bedroom suites, and most likely slept through all of the hustle and bustle taking place on a floor below him.
“Mister Maxwell?” Palmer senior said, slightly louder than his conversational tone, as though stopping and turning to find the man would break the flow of productivity.
“Sir?”
“Organise a small detachment, mechanically-minded people if we have enough, and send them to the nearest farms. I want heavy machinery, diggers specifically and two of them ideally. Also, we need sufficient fuel for them, and a report on anything else useful, such as building materials and the like.”
“Ooh, ooh, hold on a second, Sir?” Cooper said as he almost dropped his clipboard, attempting to find a note on a sheet clipped towards the back.
“Aha!” he declared, finding the piece of paper he wanted and unclipping it whilst simultaneously managing to drop half of the other papers and the clipboard, to be left holding a scrap of paper and half a pencil stub. The whole procession stopped to regard him and made his embarrassment far worse, so he spoke with a quiet voice and flushed cheeks.
“The farm on this estate, Sir,” he said, “there’s a digger on there. It’s on the report from the Sass blokes.”
“Sergeant?” Palmer said as he turned towards Maxwell.
“I’ll sort two teams,” he replied, “one for here and one for other farms. I’ll ask the Major if he doesn’t mind doing one of them.”
“Good man,” Palmer said as he turned and resumed the procession, leaving Trooper Cooper to scurry and catch up after snatching the loose paper from the old, thick carpet.
“Now,” Palmer said, changing the subject as he glanced at his watch, “when are we expecting Sergeant Sinclair and his men?”
From the air, a view which only a very few of them had enjoyed, the estate they had selected looked ideal for their needs in enough ways to make them choose it as soon as it was found. Judging by the ornate building’s front and high brick wall extending around most of the grounds, the Palmer brothers employed their classical education and declared the estate to be very early Victorian, most likely planned and built almost one hundred years before. A trooper had found a plaque near the large front doors which indeed proved the officers right, detailing the years it had been commissioned and completed as 1891 and 1895 respectively.
The main house had a four-storey central square and a three-storey wing either side of that with a curious rectangular lump added on to one wing, which had housed a larger and more modern kitchen built in the fifties. There were numerous outbuildings forming part of the ready-made defences, including stables which had been converted into garaging, as well as a massive coal bunker and log store. All of these buildings had been painstakingly checked and cleared, and the entire place declared empty. Various opinions had been offered about why, but in Palmer’s view, the rich occupants were likely to have been skiing at that time of year in the Alps, or enjoying some time in their European residence, which would fashionably be on the southern coast of France near to Nice.
There were food stores, not enough to sustain them all through the next winter, obviously, but there were still untouched harvests of ripening maize to reap in nearby fields. The boxed supplies they had brought with them would sustain their people for months, but on calorific value alone and not volume.
They had to supplement, and they had to think fast about it.
The day wore on, passing the midday point and those not actively engaged in strenuous tasks began to worry about the failure of the others to arrive. People consoled themselves and offered their own silent hopes that the men were loading up as much hardware as they could find to bring back to their warm new home in the sun. Not many had the opportunity to sit and worry, as tasks were dished out to small groups of men and women alike, and those tasks ranged from creating an inventory of the food stores in the vast cellar under the kitchen, to estimating the amount of solid fuel remaining for the fires. Most people hadn’t realised yet, but without significant stores of wood and coal and oil for the heating, the coming winter was looking to become a fight for survival against more than just zombies.
The two patrols went out, the SAS men returning first with a digger to hand over their prize and report to a team of three men from One Troop, who began to use the narrower rear bucket on the machine to excavate a trench, under the orders of captain Palmer.
“Fifty yards out,” he ordered simply, “working west from the driveway. Six feet deep and six feet wide.” He received only nods of compliance and verbal affirmations of his instructions.
They went to work, creating the barrier which would slow the advance of any concentrated attack for time enough to emplace heavy guns, and also to prevent the straying of zombies in ones and twos into their safe area. There were men on patrol around the perimeter and others on standby in two Fox cars, which contained almost all of the ammunition left for the vehicles, ready to react to any concentration of enemy and cut them down. That ammunition, those 30mm rounds for the small cannons and the linked bullets for the machine guns, were a finite resource. Just as the bullets for their personal weapons were.
The only thing that wouldn’t run out of ammunition would be their bayonets, but for trained soldiers to be forced to rely on cold steel, that would sap morale faster than ice sapped body heat.
The only thing to be done was to stay busy, prepare their defences, and hope.
By mid-afternoon, Palmer had gone to find the crew of their only remaining helicopter. Lieutenant Commander Barrett and his co-pilot Lieutenant James Morris were playing cards in silence at a table made of dark wood and spindly and elaborately carved legs in one of the grand bedrooms they had adopted as their quarters, while their loadmaster snored gently on the chaise longue underneath the high window.
“Gentlemen,” Palmer said as he knocked twice on the open door, passing through it, “I was wondering if I might…” he trailed away, his nose involuntarily twitching at some newly-detected smell that broke through his normally impeccable manners to contort his face.
“I say,” he asked quietly, “what in God’s name is that odour?”
“That, Captain,” Morris said with evident amusement, “would be the boots of Chief Petty Officer Brinklow. You’re trained for biological attacks, I presume? What course of action would you suggest?”
“I’d suggest burning the man’s boots for starters,” Palmer responded before he could gather himself, “and possibly something similar for the man himself.”
Both pilots chuckled their amusement at his disgust and retort.
“Captain,” Barrett said, as he regarded his hand before selecting one card to lay down and make Morris huff a sound of annoyance, “believe me when I say you get used to it after a short time. I honestly can’t even detect it any longer.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that, I’m afraid,” Palmer said, getting back to business, “I wonder if I could impose on your time?”
; Both pilots laid down their cards and paid him their full attention to betray their professionalism. They may have appeared to have been doing nothing, but their reaction showed just how ready they were to be needed.
“I have some concerns,” Palmer began, “concerns I obviously don’t wish to share among the men and the civilians, you understand, and I would like you to conduct a reconnaissance for me.”
“The other helicopter?” Morris asked.
“Yes, primarily,” Palmer said, “and also, I’d have rather expected that the men left to gather more arms at the base would have been back by now, or at least made contact. I’ve just checked with Corporal Daniels, who is rather uncomfortably posted inside the Sultan in this heat, and he hasn’t heard from anyone.”
“Absolutely,” Barrett said, seeing Palmer deflate ever so slightly with relief, “However we don’t have sufficient fuel to do that. We’d need to refuel somewhere before any of that, and the only fuel reserves we know of are in areas that we also know to be overrun. You see the predicament?”
Palmer clearly did see the predicament. His right hand reached up and scratched the four days of stubble on his chin and cheeks, giving him the look of a much rougher man than he was. His thoughtful pause paid off, as Brinklow spoke from the gaudy one-sided couch in the room. His snoring had faded away without any of the officers noticing and he had come awake silently to listen to the conversation.
“The island is out, obviously,” he said as he swung his legs down and slipped them into his boots. Palmer felt as though the source of the smell had been plugged, or at least muted in some way when he did this, “and as far as I know, there’s none left at the base. The only other option I can think of is going back to Yeovilton.”
Death Tide Page 56
