Searching the area nearest the door for something appropriate, his eyes rested on the small, low-to-the ground profile of a Ferret. This was the kind of thing that the big bastard Johnson would normally kick around in with a radio operator and driver. The thing looked like a smaller version of their Fox cars which Nevin usually drove, only this was one of the rare enclosed versions with a turret. His teeth flashed white in the low light as a smile spread across his face, looking at the turret which housed a mounted thirty-calibre machine gun. Climbing up and flipping open the hatch, he lowered himself inside to reach for the fuel pump and ignition switches, before hitting the starter button to bark the Rolls Royce engine into life.
All around him, other engines were sparking into similar life as Nevin juddered the little scout car forward and out into the sunlight. The mission was a two-stage thing, because the vehicles on their own were only so useful without the ammunition to equip them. The obvious logic of the British Army dictated that the two elements would be stored in different places, so the requirement was to collect vehicles and then move to the ammunition dump to equip them, and Nevin didn’t want to turn his coat before he had some bullets for the heavy machine gun above him.
The raised voice of Sergeant Sinclair sparked a sequence of events that led to devastation. All of the trapped zombies inside came to life in a weirdly organic way as the few nearest the wall where the sound came from began to animate and moan as they hissed air in through their noses to try and detect the source. That excitement spread like a rumour, with zombies eight or nine bodies back from the source mimicking the animation of the others without knowing why, until within a minute, every one of the dormant monstrosities was riled up and moaning and bumping into one another. The cacophony they raised went unnoticed by the people who had awoken them as the growling engines masked the sound of impending horror.
One of the zombies, late to the party as one of the last to be infected by the unexplained excitement, sparked into animated hissing and movement until another one, far bigger, collided with her as she was off balance. It flew backwards and fell, slamming its narrow shoulders into a horizontal bar on a door, clicking open the lock and swinging the door wide. The suddenly louder sounds of engines filled the building, making the noise level roll and rise in intensity as the remnants of the swarm began to surge towards the noise and crush together to escape through the open door. The one who had freed them, albeit inadvertently, never regained her feet as the horde trampled over her. The sounds of crunching and cracking bones were nearly inaudible over the hissing and groaning, as were the sickening squelches of her body being flattened by each footfall. The first twenty bodies to step over her made it impossible for her to mobilise again and regain her feet. The next twenty flattened her entirely, leaving only her skull and snapping teeth moving as other bodies tripped over her to fall and suffer the same fate, before her lower jaw was dislocated and half removed by a heavy boot. The last thing her cloudy eye saw before she was snuffed out entirely was a single point of a high-heeled shoe descending into her eye socket to puncture the brain and stick there, tripping the wearer slightly to stagger over her skull and leave her to her final rest as a greasy smear fanning out from the open doorway.
The remnants of the swarm poured their exodus into the open with renewed animation, heading for the sounds of life.
“Everybody load up,” Sinclair said, repeating his order to his left and right as he waved his free hand towards the six fighting vehicles and small fuel tanker. The men providing cover ran to comply, dropping their lower bodies into hatches and keeping their eyes alert over the sights of their weapons. The journey to the ammunition store was a short one, and to speed their progress Sinclair ordered the gates and fences to be driven through by the lead vehicle; a replacement Spartan for Maxwell’s Assault Troop.
Nevin, again near enough in the middle of the procession to maximise his survival chances, followed the rear of the wagon in front and felt the nervous anticipation rise inside him. He would break away soon, somehow, and he would be free of them.
Maybe I’ll even go back and find better stuff, he thought to himself, imagining the spoils of scavenging when unchecked by the stifling discipline of the army, before thinking of the spoils which could be found elsewhere. All he needed was somewhere he could hide away, somewhere with plenty of food and drink – above all he craved to drink – and wait out the whole mess until rescue came and he could worm back into life as though nothing had happened.
He'd claim that he was cut off, obviously, say that he’d bravely sought the rest of his squadron but assumed them all lost. He lapsed into something resembling a daydream as he drove slowly through the camp, with his wheels intermittently rattling over a downed gate or tangled mess of fencing.
Arriving at the ammo dump, he climbed out, mindful that his was the only vehicle not to require the 7.62 or 30mm rounds, and knowing also that he couldn’t trust his ability to bully or intimidate anyone else into doing his heavy lifting this time. He found what he needed, dragging two large boxes of the heavy thirty-calibre bullets out to beside his small scout car, and prised the wooden casing open with his bayonet to rest it on the roof, before climbing back up and inside to load the first belt into the turret weapon.
Because of the sounds of engines, he didn’t hear the first shouts of alarm. He didn’t notice the running men fleeing for the safety of the building or their new vehicles. Instead, the first sign he saw of anything being wrong was when he popped his head back out of the hatch and saw a grey-skinned, mottled corpse
standing on the roof of the Spartan, holding a man up by his webbing straps. Nevin watched in terrible slow-motion as the arms contracted, muscles bunching against the weight of the struggling soldier, and the open mouth met the upcoming neck as the man pumped desperately with his bayonet to uselessly puncture the abdomen and chest of his attacker. The zombie bit down, tearing warm flesh and rupturing blood vessels as it tore a chunk away and chewed to spill hot swathes of bright, red blood over itself.
As the crowd exiting the building lost momentum due to the dilution of the noises outside, the change in pitch and tone of the engine sounds as the small convoy drove away served to focus them once more. Rounding the building into sight of where the people had been only moments before, their heads turned to stare in the direction of the fading noise. As one, with a single mind and common purpose, the horde surged in that direction as though they were a flock of birds in flight.
As was always the way, the faster ones pushed their way through the mass to lead from the front, and they pushed out ahead of the more common, slower variety. This sparked the followers to push harder to catch up with the leaders, as if they somehow knew that these special ones, these messiahs, would lead them towards food. They walked through damaged fences and ruined gateways, increasing their pace with every step towards the growing sounds, until they rounded a ninety-degree bend and saw their prize. And again, as one, they attacked.
Nevin froze, not knowing what to do for the briefest of moments. The irony of his position was totally lost on him; for a man who hated being told what to do, he didn’t realise that his brain was waiting for precisely that to happen and he lost valuable time until his brain forced a reaction. Men ran in all directions as gunfire rang out. They were disorganised, caught out in the open, and only one of them had already loaded a large enough weapon to stem the tide of incoming monsters.
Had Nevin been switched on, had he thought about anyone but himself, then he would have advanced the scout car thirty metres, climbed back and up into the turret, and degraded the attack with automatic fire from his heavy machine gun. The thirty-calibre bullets at that range would slice through so much dead flesh and kill five or six of them with each round, but he didn’t act. Didn’t do what he should to protect the lives of a dozen other men, each of whom was laying down his lives for the sake of others.
Nevin didn’t think like that. He thought for himself. He acted out of fear and self-interest
.
Instead of driving towards the danger to rescue the situation, which was not yet lost, he slammed the Ferret into reverse and blasted away in a growling roar of exhaust noise until he was far removed from the danger. He froze again, not being aware of his position in the camp relative to any known escape route, and he climbed back into the turret to better see his surroundings. His hands on the controls of the gun, he swivelled the turret to find a way out before his eyes rested on the few bodies loping towards him at something resembling a drunken jog. Unthinkingly, and ignoring all lessons of fire safety and weapon discipline he had ever received, he opened fire on them, spraying bullets in undisciplined clouds instead of concentrating them in bursts to achieve his objective. Behind the attackers, exposed in the open and almost overrun, were the rest of the men of Sinclair’s detachment. The bullets from Nevin’s wild firing did indeed cut down his attackers, even though his fire served only to disable the majority and not render them safe, but it also stitched into the only semblance of ordered defence around the vehicle Sinclair had occupied, and it had done so just as one of his men was aiming one of their Carl Gustav shoulder-mounted rockets.
The man knelt behind the tentative cover of a Fox, aiming for the main mass of the attack coming at them, and his shot would probably have scattered and ruined twenty or more of the leading ranks of enemy, to give them at least a scrap of a chance of survival. Instead, a single thirty-calibre bullet entered his body and shattered his right hip, spinning him distortedly to land on his left side with his head turned towards the open doors of the ammunition dump.
The rocket fired, showing a huge back-blast and issuing an echoing boom of a high-powered rifle which was precisely what the weapon was. The heavy round flew unseen through the doors, puncturing the thin metal skin of walls to detonate against a heavy steel locker containing the smokescreen bombs. Those smoke screens were the worst thing to have been hit, as the heat and force of the impact ignited the white phosphorous inside to raise the temperature inside the metal cabinet to an impossibly high level. The rest of the white phosphorous also caught fire, bursting thick, white smoke through the cracks in the cabinet and distorting the metal with the heat until it began to sag and melt. The ammunition stacked and stored nearby, ready to load into the vehicles, suffered from the heat and began to ‘cook off’ as the accelerant charge inside their casings heated sufficiently to fire their projectiles. Each explosion caused another, until the air was filled with the sound of a firework show from hell as rounds of all calibres blew until they combined to create a seemingly endless detonation that shook the ground and crushed Nevin’s eardrums even through the sealed armour of his wagon.
Scrambling back down to the driving seat, he threw it into gear again and drove hard away from the rolling thunder to crash through fences and bump over the uneven ground.
He laughed desperately, almost maniacally as he drove away, his laughter lapsing and devolving into bursts of sobbing and tears, before the laughter broke through again. It was the final shred of decency in his body being forced out; exorcised by his cowardice and cruel, selfish nature.
Only one other man survived the swarming zombies and savage explosions on the base. Having been on the wrong, or perhaps in hindsight right side of the building when the attack was first detected, Trooper Povey faced a choice not dissimilar to Nevin’s. Even though most of the detachment were from Sinclair’s unit and he belonged to Maxwell’s Assault Troop, the men under attack were still his, regardless of who their boss was. Povey knew that they were all one, and his true nature showed as he ran towards the fight and not away from it.
As he ran, the air from his right punched at his senses as heavy bullets pounded past. He ducked away instinctively, hitting the rough ground and rolling to retreat from the fire, which he traced from the broken bodies of a knot of Screechers back to the source. Seeing the dull green of the Ferret and wasting half a second as his brain registered the sheer rarity of finding a turreted version instead of the normal open-top variant, he looked back to his left as the huge booming sound echoed out. Seconds later came the crackling, shattering reports of ammunition cooking off, yet still Povey forced himself to his feet to run towards his men, just as the first blossoming fireballs and screaming sounds of tortured ricochets rang out. Another blast knocked him back down and focused his brain, but only sparked him into movement when a stream of zombies lined up their sights on him and began to advance.
Povey ran.
He ran out of the base and across country, fighting with uneven footing and a gathering chase every step of the way. He managed to keep ahead of the pursuit, only just, having paused twice to unload the last two magazines for his submachine gun to thin the ranks of the pack on his heels. Exhaustion, dehydration and fear boiled his senses into total panic, which served only to keep his legs moving. Every step he took threatened to be fractionally slower than the last until he knew with absolute certainty that he would eventually fall. Weird memories filed through his head in non-chronological order, having no relevance to the situation and making no sense to him, until one memory seemed more vivid than the others. It was the memory of a GPMG firing, and the feel of a helicopter’s rotor wash overhead, until the aircraft in his imagination descended before him and a man screamed at him to get down.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Nevin drove until his panic abated. He didn’t know how far or how hard he had driven, but he was certain that his inability to make choices had led him in any path other than one heading directly away from the camp.
His first realisation of this was when his foot hit the brakes in response to what his eyes were seeing, but his mind hadn’t told him he had recognised yet. He found himself on a grass hill with deep swathes of chalk-coloured rock protruding from the small tussocks where stiff, long grass sprouted up to sway in the breeze.
He sat and stared out of the driver’s small viewing window at what he realised with dawning reality was the sea. Far, far in the distance to the south, the horizon seemed to hold a dark, almost storm-like quality which would have given any person capable of rational thought a feeling of foreboding. Nevin felt no such warning, despite his knowledge of what had happened on the continent to cause such devastation as could be seen over the less than thirty-mile distance, and instead he worked the gears to reverse the scout car and drive more carefully back down the slope to find a road. Amid the bumps and squeaks inside his hot tin can, he continued to laugh to himself, only now it came as sporadic chuckles, sounding as though he had recalled something mildly amusing.
He drove through a low fence, not appearing to even notice it, and stopped at the side of the tarmac, where even after the short time since the dead had started eating people, the land had started to show the first signs of becoming overgrown. Deciding that he couldn’t see enough of the road either way to make an informed decision, he flipped open the hatch to drive with his head protruding, choosing to turn right for no good reason.
He rolled along the roads, almost forgetting the horrors he had endured over the last month and slowly allowed his senses and wits to fully return to him. One of those senses he retained was smell, and the acrid stench of the dried urine in the fabric of his uniform trousers wafted up to pass his nose and eyes as it was blasted away in the breeze.
When did I piss myself? he thought as he drove through the green lanes bathed in sunshine, until movement ahead caught his eye. He slowed instinctively, eyes narrowing as though that would help zoom his vision somehow, and he made out the shape of a person waving in a manner that screamed, ‘not dead’ at him. As he drew closer, the shape became a young woman, who stepped out into the road and continued to wave her arms frantically.
Nevin applied the brakes to come to a squeaking halt, looking down at a woman who was neither as young as he had first thought, nor as attractive as he had hoped. She was slightly thicker around the hips than he preferred, and her nose was too big for her face, but he reckoned that pickings would be slim nowadays.
&nbs
p; And hell, who doesn’t love a knight in shining armour? he told himself with a smirk he fought to keep hidden. Yanking on the handbrake, he climbed out and down to road level, leaving the submachine gun uselessly inside the Ferret.
“Oh, thank you,” the woman gasped, “thank you for stopping, you’ve saved my life…” she bent over to rest her hands on her knees and catch her breath, “are there any more with you? Any more soldiers?” she asked as her nose wrinkled up at the smell of him, “There were a few of them chasing me,” she said as she looked back over the hedge to the field on Nevin’s left.
His gaze was drawn naturally to where the woman looked, and just as his head turned, a feeling of the empty air behind him suddenly filling spun him back around to find himself facing the black figure-eight of a shotgun muzzle.
“Hands up,” growled a man with ragged facial hair, who held the gun pointed at him from a distance too close to be effective, yet close enough to be very intimidating. Nevin glanced back at the woman who was now smiling an evil sneer and holding a large hunting knife low in her right hand. Nevin smiled back at her, unsure why he felt so calm, given the situation, then back at the man pointing the shotgun at him.
And he chuckled again.
The chuckle got away from him, took on a life of its own and became a belly laugh that began to rumble and rise until he had totally lost it. Knife woman and shotgun man exchanged concerned looks and inched backwards involuntarily until they steeled themselves to challenge this laughing madman.
Death Tide Page 61
