Toy Soldiers 1: Apocalypse
Page 21
“The Invincible is in the channel,” said the other helicopter pilot as he glibly gave the news of an aircraft carrier floating not far away. He was the same rank as Barrett. This pilot had introduced himself as Murray but answered his fellow pilots when they called him Ruby.
He continued, “and command have doled out the birds all over the place. We have a small detachment on their way by road, carrying a tanker of fuel for our aircraft, and protected by the Marines.”
Johnson nodded at him, conveying that the necessary requirements to meet and accommodate that convoy would be made.
“Military bases are still active in Scotland,” said Barrett, but as of yet, we have no assets on the south coast except your Squadron, so here we are,” he finished with a smile.
“What about Germany?” Captain Palmer asked quietly. Johnson kicked himself mentally then, recalling that Palmer was on leave from his own squadron based near Berlin.
Barrett and Murray exchanged a look before Murray answered, “Gone. And our active units over the water,” meaning the thousands of personnel deployed to the conflict in Northern Ireland and beyond, “are reporting outbreaks of their own.”
“So,” Barrett said with a clap of his hands and forced joviality, “we are to consolidate and rescue as many of the civilian population as possible whilst Her Majesty’s government decides what to do.”
“What about the swarming behaviour of the Screechers?” Johnson asked. Smirks rippled around the pilots at his mention of the nickname, flashing anger behind the SSM’s eyes as Barrett laughed at him overtly.
“Have you been face-to-face with one yet, Sir?” he asked gently. Despite the low tone that he had been careful to sanitise for any trace of hostility, the air in the room dropped a clear five degrees.
“No, Sergeant Major,” he responded carefully, “I have not. Instead I fly the better part of ten tonnes of helicopter and am responsible for the lives of my crew and passengers. So, no, Sergeant Major, I haven’t been face-to-face with one, yet.”
Barrett’s over-reaction to the question showed his embarrassment almost instantly, and he dialled back the hostility immediately and turned to Murray. The two seemed to be deliberating using only their eyebrows until Murray shrugged and turned to the soldiers.
“They exhibit a kind of herding behaviour, and tend to amass around individual infected subjects, sorry - Screechers – in groups of roughly one hundred. Three times, that we know of, there have been mass clusterings in as many days. Two of them dissipated. The other, well,” he shrugged with a smirk, “the other ended up taking the long drop.”
“The other two swarms dissipated by themselves?” Captain Palmer asked intently.
“Indeed,” Barrett said, “it seems they are drawn by sound,” he explained, as though the soldiers hadn’t been able to figure that fact out yet, “and unless something really loud attracts their attention, the noise they make together sort of makes them lose interest and they wander off from the fringes.”
“How do you know this?” Johnson asked, seeing the familiar exchange of looks as though he was asking for the combination to a safe.
“The Americans have AWACS over us as of this morning,” he admitted reluctantly.
“So,” Palmer interjected politely, “our colonial cousins are able to spy on us from a safe thirty-thousand feet but not offer any assistance?”
“Captain,” Barrett said, “it isn’t just the Americans… It’s all of NATO, or at least those who are still intact and not fighting their own war. They suspect either a direct Russian attack or at least the threat of nuclear bombardment. Europe is falling to this disease and the Americans have to stop it spreading across the Atlantic. We would do the same.”
They would, Palmer thought as he glanced to Johnson and conveyed just how unhappy he was when politics was added to the already toxic mix they swam in.
They bloody would.
~
Peter, the sole of one shoe still flapping loudly on the roadway, slowed his run as he had not heard any of the faster ones and reckoned he had run far enough away to stop and think, without the slower ones catching him up. It had been a mistake, he knew, and not a mistake that he would make again, because he did not wait long enough to watch the houses for signs of movement.
One of the faster ones, in some bizarre approximation of corpse popularity, had gone into the bungalow opposite and the crowd with it had followed. As soon as he had made a noise breaking into the house, they had screeched and lumbered towards him. He had no idea where the faster one was, but he hoped it was stuck inside the house by its own followers being clumsy and blocking the doors.
Having annoyed himself at expending energy without finding food or a warm, dry place to spend the night, he looked around for anywhere to hole up in relative safety.
His luck, he thought with a wry smile of relief, was going to run out soon if he didn’t stop making these mistakes that offered such valuable learning opportunities.
Turning at a right angle to the direction he had come from, he took the next small road to his left and walked straight down the middle. In the old world, walking down the middle of the road was tempting fate and would likely get a young boy killed, but in this new world, walking between low walls and stationary cars where dormant corpses could spark to life and bite him was a far bigger risk than being run over by a car.
Nothing jumped out on him, even though he was ready with his pitchfork, and nothing drove down the road, which might have actually been a good thing, so long as it didn’t run him over.
He found a detached cottage on the edge of the village he had wandered into, with a neat thatch roof which hung down low over the front door. Peter watched and waited, listening and smelling the air like one of the things he was trying to avoid, and when he was sure it was safe, he waited some more. Eventually deciding to open the door and rap the handle of his pitchfork on the cobbled path, he waited, but nothing came lurching and groaning from the house straight away. Creeping inside, he repeated his process of searching the house, then locking himself in to take what he wanted.
His luck struck again, and he found the room of a boy about his own age, judging by the size of the clothes. He ate, changed and restocked his backpack before settling down to listen to the same song on the tape in his new cassette player. He didn’t know who the singer was, but he smiled at the coincidence of the song’s lyrics and the small pot of green army figures on the shelf. He took them down, looking at each one in turn as he organised them as per their poses.
The crawling rifleman.
The soldier throwing a grenade.
The kneeling man aiming his long gun.
The officer standing and pointing his pistol.
He mimed along with the words, learned as the routine had established itself in his mind to listen to the song as he settled down in a new home for the night. He lined them all up, then used his finger to poke them and make them topple.
“…like toy soldiers…” he sang softly in time with the music.
END OF BOOK 1, the adventure continues in Toy Soldiers 2: Aftermath
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