Toy Soldiers
3: Abandoned
Devon C Ford
Dedicated to Baby J, who at the time of publishing this was trying to recreate the chest-bursting scene from Alien…
COPYRIGHT
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Any names, characters, incidents and locations portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Copyright © DHP Publishing 2018
Devon C Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive and non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen or hard copy.
No part of the text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, known or otherwise yet invented, without the express permission of Devon C Ford and DHP Publishing.
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Cover design by Claire Wood at:
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Prologue
“Unidentified vessel, this is the USS McAllister,” came a voice over the crackling radio in an accent the captain of the ship had never heard outside of a television set, “you are ordered to heave-to immediately and return to port. I repeat, heave-to immediately. We will not allow you to enter deep water.”
Captain Mike Xavier, tall and lean but more powerful than his frame suggested, turned and surveyed the people assembled on the bridge of his large transport ship, with his piercing eyes made more prominent as they sat between a thick, dark beard and an equally thick mop of unruly hair. Despite the vessel’s huge size, he had very little space for people on board, so whatever indoor areas that could be fashioned into accommodation had been hastily rigged up, and supplies had been stockpiled from wherever they could be found. They had been stolen mostly, but he believed in the needs of the many.
He had close to four hundred souls on his ship, curiously named the Aunt Margaret but known affectionately by her crew as The Maggie,
and he had been one of the few to emerge as a natural leader in the areas far from London and the initial outbreak. When the news reports went inexplicably dark and nobody knew what was happening, he and his crew had picked up their heavy engineering wrenches and crowbars, and they’d defended the docks from the looters who ran riot in the centre of Liverpool.
A week after that initial panic, new sounds rent the air over the oddly picturesque, industrial Albert Docks. Those sounds were of terror, of bloodlust and the primal fear of prey unable to escape a predator. Ahead of that wave of fear came the refugees; those human beings in possession of self-preservation instincts more attuned than others.
Xavier made an instant decision, regardless of whether it was right or wrong, but he made the decision to help by admitting
them into their safe enclave, even before he knew what they were
running from.
His men blinked, wide-eyed in disbelief at the instructions, but a growled order for them to move their arses was soon obeyed.
Over the next month they had fortified the docks, saving people whenever they could and using their tools day and night to clear the strong fences surrounding the commercial docks of the undead. Had they not heard the accounts of those desperate people running through the open gates as those inside shouted them on, they might not have believed what came from the city to gnaw at the chain link barrier in an unthinking bid to mindlessly devour the survivors. Xavier had left one of his more senior men in charge of the gate, a big French deck hand called Jean-Pierre, with arms like knotted and tarred ropes, and shiny, olive skin, and he showed his men how to lead the zombies away from the gates and put them down quietly.
Les morts, he called them. The dead. And Jean-Pierre believed that the dead should be treated with respect, even if they were trying to eat them.
“Unidentified vessel, unidentified vessel, this is the USS McAllister. We are a US Navy Frigate with a full complement of armaments. We are authorized and fully prepared to use deadly force if you do not heave-to immediately and return to port. There will be no further verbal warnings. Heave-to now.”
Xavier, the son of a French merchant sailor and a local pub landlady, a native of the city and a man who had been on those docks since he was a boy, snatched up the binoculars on the side of the instrument panel on his bridge, and scanned the horizon off to his right.
He found the vessel, tiny in comparison to his own gargantuan freighter, and watched as it continued heading west under power and most certainly not heaving-to. He didn’t hear the double crump sounds of far-off deck guns firing a single shot each into the path of the commercial boat, but he saw the huge geysers of sea water erupt skywards in answer.
“Fucking hell,” he cursed to himself, the binoculars still glued to his eyes as he saw the two plumes of white water erupt directly in the path of the vessel, “go back, for God’s sake, man,” he said in a low voice, willing the unknown boat’s captain to turn back and not risk the lives on everyone on board.
The other captain, whoever it was, tested the patience of the US Navy officer, who gave his orders and showed anyone observing that he wasn’t backing down. The warning shots were the last message, albeit not a verbal one, and Xavier had a sinking feeling about what was going to happen next.
Dropping the binoculars and putting himself back inside the confines of the bridge, he gave a simple order to his helmsman.
“All ahead stop,” he said solemnly, “bring us about.”
His helmsman responded with naval terminology betraying his roots, and the ship gave the smallest of lurches as their forward momentum was cut. The sheer size of his vessel, and the massive displacement of water it created, made it very difficult to feel the changes, but Xavier knew his Maggie well.
Even before they began their slow turn to take themselves away from the distant, loose blockade that their ship’s radar had warned them about, everyone on the bridge sitting high up at the stern of the big vessel started to watch, not needing the binoculars. They saw the explosion and its accompanying fireball as the bright orange ball spewed a great cloud of black smoke into the air.
Nothing was said after the initial shouts and screams of alarm, but the atmosphere on the ship was one of frustration and fear.
Picking the lesser of the two evils, they sailed back towards the docks and back towards the uncertain safety of north west England.
Chapter 1
Squadron Sergeant Major Dean Johnson’s detached unit of light reconnaissance tanks and armoured personnel carriers had exhausted their supply of ammunition into the left flank of the massive horde of undead heading straight for their island stronghold. That horde looked for all the world as though the entire human contents of a large city had all decided to walk in one direction at the same time and with no discernible purpose. It had, however, been degraded by over a quarter of its original number by the attack of a troop of four German main battle tanks. But the dead had piled up so high that the majority of the swarm had simply marched onwards and ignored them. That barrier of broken bodies prevented their advance and forced them to try and find another way around, but that delay had effectively removed them from the fight.
Johnson’s convoy, under the command of Captain Palmer, had been returning from London where they had rescued an eight-man special forces team and the scientist they had been sent in to extract. That extraction had fallen foul of another swarm, another inexplicable gathering of the dead that were known to form and dissipate wit
hout obvious sense or reason. And even though that swarm was only a tiny fraction of the size of the one that had cut off their retreat, it was still large enough to make the tight confines of the city streets an impassable death trap.
The armour had rolled in, snatched up their objectives, and rolled out with relative ease, but on their return journey they had been forced to stop and send their precious human cargo out by helicopter. Those objectives, the scientist and his box of virus samples, were escorted out by half of the special forces soldiers in the form of a four-man Special Boat Service (SBS) patrol. They had flown south, out over the Jurassic coast of southern England
and into the Channel where the remnants of the military and government command hierarchy remained and pulled whatever strings they had left at their disposal; which, tragically, weren’t that many.
The return of the convoy to their commandeered island base just off the coast was delayed by mechanical failures. They had to abandon the damaged tracked vehicles in order to keep moving and get into the fight, and they had arrived just in time to pour machine gun and 30mm cannon fire into the massed bodies heading for the causeway which cut them off from their people. The defenders on the island had brought tonnes of their own lead and explosives to bear on the attack from the remainder of the squadron’s guns, as well as the two stranded Chieftain tanks that brought them not only heavy cannons, but also their new commanding officer in the Captain.
The biggest weapons deployed in the fight were both unexpected and unrequested, as the American Navy destroyer had steamed towards the coast at full speed to bring both of their huge deck guns, their 127mm cannons firing high explosive rounds, to bear. However, as helpful as their unexpected assistance had been, it had also ultimately spelled disaster.
Their final salvo before the big guns ceased their bombardment had struck the bridge itself, which connected the supports of the narrow causeway, their only way on and off the raised spit of land they had called home for close to a month. The bridge had collapsed, almost costing the lives of the entire tank crew who were the armed and armoured roadblock. They survived that, but the three men who had escaped the fifty-five-tonne coffin were forced to watch as their driver failed to make it out.
Although cut off from the mainland by that final ordnance, it was actually the salvo immediately before that which caused the real problems. One explosive round, detonating deep within the attacking mass of dead, blew scattered body parts outwards in a huge half-sphere of gore and ruin. Some of that re-animated flesh landed on the island, including one shattered chunk of meat and bone that was wrapped in the remnants of grey overalls with an embroidered logo that was illegible from the black gunk that had leaked into the fabric. That fabric obscured the ragged diagonal tear across the chest, leaving one complete shoulder and arm that was oddly untouched by the destruction wrought on the rest of the body. The head, although scorched on the side where the bright white stump of an upper arm bone wiggled inside a shoulder joint exposed by the scoured flesh, remained fully animated as it thrashed around, trying to free itself from the confines of the clothing.
That in itself would not have spelled disaster, only it had been one of the faster, smarter ones. What some of the people on the island called the Leaders, what the Royal Marines called Limas, and what others had no name for because they had underestimated not only their faster movements, but also their unexplained ability to think.
Whereas every other shambolic, shuffling corpse was slow-moving and relatively simple to dispatch individually or in small groups, the faster ones displayed something resembling guile. This particular one, or at least the half a torso, head and one arm of it, freed itself from the restraint of what had been the last outfit it had ever put on, back when it had been a man and not a monster, and spun its head around, trying to get a fix on the myriad sounds echoing around the battle.
“Five left,” shouted a hoarse voice from directly ahead, making the burnt and blackened face fix on the source of the sound, and lock its milky eyeballs onto a target.
“More ammo!” cried the voice louder now, sending a man back to fetch more 51mm mortar rounds to lob high over the now severed road bridge and into the mass. They still kept coming, only to pour over the destroyed parapet and into the fast-moving current to be swept away in the same direction of the stinging smoke from their burning white phosphorous smoke bombs.
As the fourth of those five remaining bombs popped out of the tubes and shot skywards, the hand of the animated piece of burnt meat had clawed forwards using the gaps in the old stonework of the roadway to gain purchase and propel it onwards. Just as the last mortar round was dropped into the hot metal pipe to send it far away at an impossible speed, that hand reached out and locked onto the webbing belt of the soldier kneeling beside the weapon with his back to the unseen threat. He screamed, crying out involuntarily in fright, as he fell backwards with the pull and kicked out the leg of the man holding the mortar tube, sending the bomb with its armed fuse directly into a nearby building through a tall window. It exploded and poured smoke out of the shattered glass. Men screamed and shouted all around as they burned and panicked, but one scream overrode them all.
The man who had been hauled back by what transpired to be just under a quarter of a former human being felt a desperate and strong hand clamp over his face, the sharp fingernails digging in for grip and finding the soft recess of his left eye socket and the vulnerable eyeball within. As that nail punctured the skin and drove deeply inside the skull behind the eye, he bellowed a high-pitched shriek of shock and agony. That shriek was quickly stifled when cold teeth clamped down on the warm flesh of his neck and burst the blood vessels beneath, before the skin gave way and a huge chunk of flesh came sinuously free. Blood pulsed out onto the stone in massive, arterial gushes, soaking victim and attacker and painting them both the same colour.
The other man of that mortar team had fled as soon as he knew that the white phosphorous bomb would land inside their own lines, and as he didn’t like the thought of having his skin burned off his back at a temperature of five thousand degrees, he simply ran.
The battle was being fought on two fronts by then; the enemy advancing towards the thirty-foot wide gap in the roadway were still being fired on as the mass of dead were clogging up even the deep, fast moving coastal water and piling up on the nearest bit of sandy edge to the island, where their numbers would eventually break any but the stoutest of obstacles. The rest of the efforts of the living were spent in evacuating injured men from the building that was now burning violently, and they were carried and dropped some distance away as their rescuers went back to save men and equipment from the flames that by now reached high above the pitched roof.
A groan to the left of the quarter-zombie caught its attention, making it perform the same grotesque travel by clawing its own remains across the cobblestones to find the source. That source was four men, two of whom writhed and moaned; one merely emitted a series of long, intense grunts, as if he was screaming inside in a dream from which he couldn’t wake, and the closest to the zombie simply lay still.
It didn’t know how it knew, but some instinct or smell or other sense told it that this man was already dead and was simply not registering as food when there was moving prey nearby. But the body did present itself as a reliable handhold with which the crawling nightmare could haul itself over to fall on the three wounded men, who, as loud as their screams were, could not raise the alarm over the cacophony of war and flame and smoke.
By the time those three men had bled to death from the cruel bites to their throats and forearms and wrists and hands and faces, the first soldier to have fallen prey opened its milky eyes and sat up to search for fresh meat of its own.
“Attack rear! Attack rear!” came the panicked shout of one man, who fumbled with the Sterling sub machine gun in his shaking hands. But his frantic shouts went unheard as he fell victim to his friend of many years; although in that instant, that friend did not recognise him as anythin
g but food.
By the time the firing to the front had faded away and those soldiers at the front of the line, led by Lieutenant of Marines Chris Lloyd, had been reorganised and moved on to defend the beach, there were six fully-mobile zombies hunting men in the rear of their forces, thanks to the impossibly damaged remains of just one man. There were shouts and gunfire from the waterline below them, but the higher-pitched screams of women further up the island’s incline grabbed the attention of three of the zombies, who began shambling their way uphill and into the undefended streets filled with civilians.
Cut off, under attack from the water and with a growing enemy gathering strength from within their own enclave, the people left behind on the island were doomed.
Chapter 2
Peter and Amber had huddled together as an unseasonably chill wind ripped across the coastline. She had listened to the music on his cassette player until the batteries wore down, to then play the songs in slow-motion, she hugged the limp and dirty stuffed lamb up under her chin and sat in her characteristically quiet manner. It wasn’t cold inside their new home, even with having to leave a small window open so that the cat who had decided the two small humans belonged to it could come and go as it pleased. But the whistling wind made them both feel insecure and forced them upstairs, where they sat with their knees drawn up and quilts wrapped around them, just waiting for the night to end.
Part of that collective feeling of unease was the hour of booming noise in the distance that began like thunder and ended like the ceaseless banging of multiple drums, until no single sound was distinguishable from another. Those sounds had dropped suddenly in their intensity, as though the bass drum had simply stopped working, then the other sounds faded away to echoes of nothing. Still they sat quietly upstairs in the big house they had taken over and each drifted deep into their own thoughts before sleep took them.
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