Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  Holding the big hammer in one hand and turning to the only other person in the house who was awake, he announced where they were going.

  “Doing the lap,” he said to Enfield, the oddly quiet and calm sniper filling the kettle for the first brew of the day, who simply nodded in response. Johnson paid no attention to what would have previously, in their old lives, earned the young marine an arse-chewing of epic proportions for failing to correctly acknowledge a warrant officer of his standing and position, regardless of them being from different branches of the armed forces. Johnson was never a man to enforce such displays of obedience, he had never needed to as his men respected him, and he didn’t feel the slightest need to do so now. Even less so given that the majority of their small force were either current or former royal marines. He knew that Enfield meant no disrespect by the gesture, far from it in fact, but the man wasn’t in the habit of wasting unnecessary words when a silent look or a nod would suffice.

  Doing the lap was what they called their morning routine of patrolling the perimeter of the small village which had been cleared and fortified during the weeks they had been there. Vehicles had been used to block access through their home, rolled and pushed into position before being jacked up and having their wheels removed to prevent them being pushed back out of position just as easily. In between every gap they had piled the furniture taken from the houses, leaving a single space blocked by two vehicles which could be moved should they need to drive their chosen transport out, which they hadn’t done for weeks, given the driving rain and sharp frosts in between the intermittent flurries of snow.

  On the outside of those barricades were as many sharpened fence posts and other obstacles designed to snag any unsuspecting dead to wander in their direction as could be sharpened and emplaced. The rear of the dozen houses in the village, which been cleared of anything useful, had been reinforced similarly with coils of fencing found nearby to tangle anything walking in across country. The only other building in the small village not to have been hollowed out was the small pub at the slightly higher elevated end of the tiny strip, which was really little more than a long, low room containing a bar, a fireplace and a selection of dark wood tables and chairs with a dartboard adorning one wall and innumerable stains of suspect origin. That space was left as a kind of retreat; a place where any of them could fall back to and work through their own thoughts, which they found that they needed to do with increasing frequency given their enforced lack of activity to occupy their minds.

  The resources found in the village, the canned food and dried goods looted from all of the other houses, had kept them fed for enough time to regain their strength, but occasionally they had been forced to venture out to nearby places for more until their immediate surroundings had been stripped bare.

  As Johnson and the small boy whose shoulders reached not much above the man’s waist walked the lap, checking each section for any sign of life or, more importantly, former life, he thought about the worries afflicting him.

  How long can we last, living like this? What kind of existence is it, especially for the young ones? What happens when we run out of ammo, or the baffles on the suppressed weapons finally give up, or we can no longer get a vehicle to start?

  He tried to answer his own questions, realising that he no idea how to respond to each one without raising yet more questions about the answers he’d conjured up. He knew that they needed a plan, needed so much more than they had in so many ways, but other than taking them all on the road, he had no idea what to do. They had power and heat in the form of the electrically powered fan heaters. They even had a limited supply of hot water thanks to the solar panels on the south-facing slope of the roof they lived under, which never truly got that hot given the current weather. But they were relatively safe, they weren’t suffering too badly from the elements, and they weren’t starving. Yet.

  “There’s one,” Peter said softly, snapping him out of his thoughts. Johnson looked down at the boy, followed his gaze past his outstretched finger to see an immobile body slumped over the front of a dark blue Ford saloon car.

  “What’s the difference between an Orion and an Escort from the front?” He asked himself out loud. Peter made a small noise of confusion and prompted the man to shake himself out of his distraction.

  Johnson put a large, flat palm out in front of Peter, indicating that he should stay back, but not touching him. The thing posed no risk to them as it was, not unless they were foolish enough to put themselves within biting distance and wait for it to wake up.

  That was one of the strangest things to have happened, just one development in a very extensive list, but they still found themselves shocked at new developments. The cold seemed to affect the Screechers, seemed to slow them and make them sluggish, but it also seemed to accelerate the way they rotted and fell apart. Already they had discovered a big change in the ones they unearthed from inside houses; the musty smelling ones that were more preserved than others. The unlucky ones who had found themselves outside fared much worse due to exposure to the elements; to the constant rain and freezing temperatures of the harsh early winter, which made their flesh wither and often fall way in chunks. Their skin became something in between grey and clear, hanging from them in landslides of saggy flesh, and resembled the bloated corpses one might expect to see dragged from the River Thames after being missing for three weeks. Their movements were halting and uncoordinated and often they would be inexplicably missing fingers, which he guessed had frozen solid and snapped off. This one didn’t perk up, nor did it respond to their approach as they continued to check the section of the perimeter between their position and the trapped Screecher.

  When they did approach, Johnson again gesturing for Peter to stay back, the long and knotted hair twitched as the head rose to slowly rotate on an angle until the clouded, milky orbs locked onto the SSM. He hefted his hammer, leaning over the frosty car to judge the swing required to brain it, when he lost his footing slightly. The woman, almost naked and not looking remotely good, as her withered and sagging breasts slapped softly against her emaciated ribcage, sparked up and clawed a hand at him as it animated close to the level resembling their unexcited state in warmer weather. Johnson recoiled, calling the woman a few choice names as he decided to approach the problem differently. He climbed over the next vehicle along, jumped down on the far side, having first to push out to clear the spikes so he could land unimpeded.

  As his boots hit the floor, he slipped on the icy surface, feeling the slight crunch of one ankle as he tried and failed to roll in an imitation of a parachute landing, and he sprawled out to feel his hammer slip out of his grip. He opened his eyes after he landed hard to watch it slide ahead of him and skitter to a stop just out of reach. A hoarse croak, high-pitched and hissing, sounded from behind him, as if the thing impaled against the car was trying to screech, as was their horrifying way, but had lost its voice. He turned in dread, seeing that it had pushed, pulled and fallen away from the sharpened wood it had been stuck against to land on the pitted road surface beside his boots.

  He pedalled his feet frantically, desperate for purchase to propel him away from the thing, and as his hands fumbled for the weapon trapped under his back, he heard a single word ring out.

  “Oi,” it said, the voice unbroken but as confident as any soldier he had ever served with.

  The sound that followed the voice was a metallic singing, culminating in a crunch and the solid noise of Peter’s pitchfork hitting the tarmac on the other side of the skull he had just skewered. The hissing and huffing of the thing had stopped in the same instant, and Johnson followed the line of the metal sprouting from the inanimate head, back up the worn wooden handle and past the boy’s hands to his face, which held no sign of humour or pride or expectation.

  “You alright?” he asked the SSM.

  “Yeah,” Johnson said in shock, startled and feeling cold to his core at how quickly a slight mistake could change, or end, a person’s life, “Ankle�
�s tweaked,” he said, the feeling in his body returning as the adrenaline ebbed away and the pain rushed in to replace it.

  “It’s icy,” Peter told him as he jerked the spike back out of the skull. Johnson bit back the sarcastic retort that he was well aware of that salient fact, and thank you very much for pointing it out all the same. He regained his feet as the boy was cleaning the weapon on the shredded and torn remains of the clothes his victim still wore, hissing in discomfort as he put pressure on the joint but retrieving his sledgehammer and dragging the lightweight corpse away from the road to roll it on the grass before limping slightly back to regain the safer side of their barricade. He hadn’t even seen Peter get over to save him, hadn’t heard the boy move until he had dealt the fatal blow, and he rather suspected that a platoon of Peters would be worth putting money on at decent odds.

  “Let’s keep that bit to ourselves, shall we?” he asked the boy as they walked back to complete their lap. Peter only smiled in answer.

  Chapter 3

  “Understood,” Downes said simply when Palmer told him what was on his mind.

  A man with less style, less impeccably honed manners, would have found such a conversation awkward. Julian Palmer, with his natural aristocratic charm, possessed that effortless way of making a polite suggestion in conversation, or merely presenting a problem to someone so that they volunteered to undertake the solution instead of having to give an order. In that sense he reminded himself of their former Sergeant Major, the very heart of the squadron in many ways, as he too rarely had to give an order; merely a suggestion that men jumped to carry out.

  “I’ll need a decent vehicle capable of dealing with all of this,” Downs said, waving a vague hand over the outside air to encompass the weather in general.

  “Done,” Palmer said, his mind calculating the available vehicles and fuel supplies remaining and settling on the four-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser found on the nearby farm. A good choice, given that their own military vehicles were both unfamiliar to the SAS men and notoriously unreliable, especially after the months of abuse they had suffered with little to no maintenance.

  “And it’s likely to take a couple of days,” Downes added, “I’ll have Mac draw up a comms schedule and get the boys looking at the maps again.”

  “You have my thanks, Major,” Palmer said humbly, taking his leave to return to the more mundane matters.

  On his walk back to the room he had adopted as an office, he took the long way around via the large, grassed inner courtyard to view the half-ploughed lawns where the vegetable planting had been planned but started too late in the autumn, before the ground froze hard, and which still showed no signs of thawing. They had grossly miscalculated how long their stores of food would last, burning through the ration packs at a rate not quite as desperate as their remaining ammunition, but still too fast to make surviving winter a foregone conclusion. They needed more food, they needed more fuel for fires, and they needed it now.

  He had thought ahead in the last week, diverting men from the former Headquarters Troop to join his only remaining radio operator, Corporal Daniels, in a room which had become their unofficial command. There they studied maps of the area, sadly being more topographical than detailed as to the contents of each town and village, and they scanned the lists of the local directory to find businesses that could be of help to their plight. Palmer’s own small office, what he had guessed had been the snug belonging to the former master of the house, was only a door away and he often found himself working alongside the men, instead of spiralling into depression when left alone with his thoughts.

  Hindsight, he told himself sourly, is a wonderful thing. We should have started planting food as soon as we got to this place. Should have used the remainder of the good weather to search for more. So many things we should have done.

  But they hadn’t done these things. He hadn’t. They had all rested on their small laurels and enjoyed the relative safety and relaxation, and now they had to survive somehow until the weather broke, which he knew could be half a year away. The thought of huddling in the cold and living on little to no food for all that time threatened to push him further into the depressive cycle he felt himself swirling around, and he knew that if he felt that way, then others were certain to feel the same or worse. That brought with it other concerns, and he worried that the discipline of the civilians, as well as his own adopted men, would begin to unravel.

  An early stroke of luck was finding that the nearby farm, accessible either by a cross-country walk of almost a mile or a three-mile journey by single-track roads, possessed a pair of greenhouses which had provided tomatoes and cucumbers for two weeks before they ran out. After that, they had been forced to try and remedy their sudden lack of fresh food, and plant more of it. Crops of onions and carrots had been planted, along with spring onions, broad beans and peas, but they were slow to grow in the sudden low temperatures and the yield was far too small to be worthwhile. What they did manage was large batches of stews, which were started by the volunteer contingent of civilians each morning, and which cooked throughout the day in huge metal pots on the Aga. Then when the sun began to set, everyone ate in shifts.

  Work teams toiled all day, clearing rooms and arranging things as best they could for comfort. Men and women walked over the low hill to the farm where they took everything of use, which had blessedly included some livestock that still lived. A large and docile horse had been brought inside to be stabled for winter, as had half a dozen cows, which one of the women rescued from the Island knew how to milk by hand. The farm was more of a smallholding and not a large commercial one, and the occupants had left in such a hurry that their livestock had been abandoned. There were chickens and pigs too, but the eagerness of the survivors on finding them had decimated the herds and flocks before Palmer had ordered men to guard the farm, and had spread the word to keep every animal alive. The simple logic of a daily dose of protein in the form of an egg being more important to their survival than a single roast chicken, needed explaining in detail, it seemed, which infuriated the young officer.

  The remaining chickens, safe for now from hungry mouths, laid a modest batch of eggs every day, which, just as the fresh vegetables, was nowhere near enough for all of them. He needed to supplement, to think for all of them, and he did so in every way that he could. He spread the word throughout the civilians as he did the military men, asking for experience in trapping game. Soon he had a team of three men who went out each night and each morning to set and check the snares for rabbit and hare, which were more abundant in the area than he had ever noticed before.

  Throughout the brief end of summer and early autumn, those snares had been constantly pilfered by the few Screechers roaming the countryside aimlessly, but as the temperature dropped, so too did the numbers of wandering dead they encountered. The snares provided a meagre supply of meat which found its way into the stews, every shred of flesh stripped from the bones in acceptable mimicry of their enemy.

  He hadn’t taken the time to consider this perceived disappearance of Screechers, nor did he really have that time available, but when he tried to find slumber, that was one of the innumerable questions that kept him from sleep. The reduction in numbers of flesh-eating undead human beings was a blessing, and most people considered it as simply that, but he refused to accept the assumptions that they were moving off or dying out. He kept his men alert, planned exercises with the other officers and NCOs to rouse the men and women from their sleep, as though they were under attack again. He had done this only twice since they had been attacked in force, both times feeling barely satisfied with the response times, but he’d chosen not to do so again as the backlash from the civilians was unbearable; they were unaccustomed to that kind of life, couldn’t cope emotionally or physically with being woken up in the night to react and then told to go back to sleep, because they weren’t soldiers.

  “What have we got, boys?” he announced cheerily as he walked into the room containing men be
nt over maps, wearing a smile that his eyes could not hope to match.

  “The coal place seems viable, Sir,” answered Trooper Cooper who had been made acting Sergeant Cooper as the only remaining man in the HQ Troop seeming to possess more than a few braincells, “and there’s a few supermarkets a bit further out that would be a good idea, only they’re closer to the towns,” he finished, a gentle warning in his tone.

  Palmer nodded, knowing that sending men into the larger towns near the coast could be catastrophic.

  “The Hereford lot are getting ready to go out,” he said, “get everything you can on your top three supply sites to me as soon as possible, if you please.”

  “Sir,” Cooper responded curtly, his single word conveying compliance and not annoyance. Palmer nodded to them and left, walking back out into the long, carpeted walkway where he almost collided with Maxwell.

  “Shit me! Sorry, Sir,” he said from behind two large sacks rested on his right shoulder. Maxwell had adopted the role of senior NCO, performing well in the shadow of the loss of Johnson, who was mourned and muttered about by many.

  “Not to worry, Mister Maxwell,” Palmer answered as he stepped back, using the honorary address as he would a sergeant major, despite the man still wearing the three chevrons of his actual rank, “but please do tell me what you have there.”

  “Flour, Sir,” Maxwell answered almost excitedly as he rummaged with his free hand in the pocket of his smock to produce a large, rustling plastic packet, “and yeast!”

  Palmer stared at him, his mouth slightly open, which Maxwell took to be a lack of comprehension.

  “I’m taking it to the kitchens,” he said, “I’ll ask Denise to make some fresh bread for tonight’s stew. She just needs a little salt and a bit of oil, see, and you knead it together, then rest it to let it rise, th…”