Pauline took the lighter and struck a flame with her thumb on the third attempt.
“We still need something flammable,” she said, “to make the flames nice and big.”
“You’re joking, right?” Ellie said, “with these mattresses?”
Pauline looked aghast at the implied criticism of the place she had lived and worked in for so long, but still didn’t understand Ellie’s point.
“Polyurethane foam?” Ellie asked, almost annoyed that nobody understood her point, “It’s very inflammable,” she finished.
Both Pauline and Jessica gave an, “ahh,” in unison.
“So we set fire to the bedding, toss it out of the window, wait for everyone to start running around and then what?” Jessica asked.
“Then we make a run for it,” Pauline said.
“Where?” Jessica asked.
“Anywhere,” said Ellie, sounding more reckless than she truly was, “just away from here and these pigs.”
“Out there,” Jessica asked softly, “with the monsters?”
“Yes,” she bit back, “anywhere is better than here.”
Chapter 14
“We can’t stay inside forever,” Hampton said through his gritted teeth as he flexed and bent his damaged leg.
“No,” Johnson countered, “but neither can we risk running around in sub-freezing temperatures with snow and ice everywhere.”
“We need to, Dean,” Bufford said as he placed a calming hand on the man’s shoulder, “if not for ourselves, then for the kids; they need more food than we have left and if we wait for the weather to get worse, the job will be much harder.”
Johnson couldn’t argue with the logic It wasn’t as though they needed his permission anyway, he wasn’t in charge of them, but it had evolved that decisions were made in a more democratic fashion than their former lives would have thought possible. None of them was placed above the others. Johnson was a very senior non-commissioned officer, but then Hampton and Bufford were both hugely experienced sergeants who had trained more than their fair share of young officers in nominal command of the men they served with. Astrid, the curious commando spy from Norway, was clearly no uniform-filler, and possessed a sometimes frightening intellect. Even their lowly-ranked marine, Enfield, was a specialist and a cunning man with an eye for ground like a predator.
Hell, Johnson thought, even the kids are qualified to weigh in on decisions, given how long they’ve survived on their own.
The only person not to hold rank or military experience was Kimberley, but something about the woman was so forthright that she was not the meek kind to simply obey orders she didn’t agree with or understand. Johnson had tried, very delicately given their tenuous attraction to one another, to explain to her that if the time ever came that she was told what to do in a dire situation, then she simply had to bite her tongue and trust the people she was with. She had accepted that, but something told the big man that those were the only set of circumstances under which she would submit to rule.
“Fine,” he said eventually, “what are you thinking?”
“Small recce team,” Bufford said, “not looking at shops or houses but more at commercial stuff. That means,” he said as he spread out a map, “heading back this way towards the coast.”
Johnson looked at the map but could see no reason to refuse the man.
“You’ll keep an eye out for sign of others though, correct?”
“We will. Good or bad, we’ll make damned sure first,” Enfield answered for the SBS man.
You’ve already planned who’ll be going then… Johnson told himself.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“Three-man team. Small, quiet, fast,” Astrid said in a tone of voice which brokered no argument.
Johnson looked at her, then Bufford, then Enfield in turn and saw no shame in their eyes. They weren’t trying to circumvent him, not intentionally, and he tried to find any logical reason to force one of the three elite soldiers out of their role so that he could retain a hands-on approach. It was pointless, and he knew it. Two special forces commandos and a sniper? How could he hope to replace one of those at their job? If it was co-ordinating the resupply of an armoured squadron, then Dean Johnson was your man. Laying an ambush using his faster tracked vehicles and luring enemy tanks into a killing ground he had set up to pour murderous 40mm fire into them? That was, as they said, most definitely his bag. But running around in freezing conditions, moving like a ghost and fighting like half a platoon if called upon, then no; he was no commando.
“Timescale?” he asked, changing the subject from his dark thoughts of inadequacy.
“Leave at first light tomorrow, be back by dark,” Bufford said confidently.
“Alright,” Johnson said, all fight leaving him and his belly already turning towards happier thoughts, “but you really need to bring back supplies tomorrow, because you need to eat well tonight.” The SBS sergeant and former Royal Marine smiled at the Squadron Sergeant Major, who thought that the muscular man had already visibly lost enough size to be a concern for them all. They had been living on reduced rations ever since their panicked return from the gun store, while fear of heavy machine gun fire kept their heads down for the ensuing weeks, until hunger promised a far crueller death. His beard, wild before their helicopter had crashed and stranded them in the countryside, had grown wispy and looked bedraggled until he took scissors to it and cut it shorter. Johnson himself, despite attempts to maintain standards for no reason other than that he had always done so, had succumbed and grown a tough, scratchy beard of short hair which came through with a ginger hue, despite his hair the being darkest of brown.
They were, he had to admit, in a bad way, and that would only worsen if they didn’t break out of hibernation and find more supplies.
But there were so many risks. The roads were iced over, after weeks of snow and frosts and thaws and more frosts. Packed snow had turned to mush, only to freeze solid and dry once more into slabs as hard as concrete which wouldn’t fade under an entire day of direct sunlight. They had to be almost three months shy of the break of spring, and this winter had conspired with other events to be the worst in as long as he could recall.
The only person not bothered by the temperatures was Astrid Larsen, but then again Johnson guessed that if your home country regularly experienced minus thirty degrees inland during winter, then the constant snow and sleet of a British winter, no matter how harsh, was of little concern. What was concerning, at least to Johnson, was that their country was not set up for such a bad winter, just as it couldn’t cope with a prolonged period of hot weather in the summer, and if the world hadn’t turned into a flesh-eating circus, there would have been frozen hell on earth this winter anyway.
The cold was good for one thing though; the dead were slow, lethargic, and very few in number. Those that did wander into their little fortified island posed next to no threat, unless you fell on your arse in front of them and dropped your weapon that was, and they had all expressed a hope that the bad weather would put an end to the infected population.
“Who wants to cook then?” Hampton chimed in, making it obvious that he was hungry and wasn’t going to cook.
“I’ll do it,” came a small voice from the open-plan kitchen behind their conversation in the comfortable lounge. Heads turned to take in the small frame of Peter, the sleeves of his oversized sweatshirt rolled up and slipping down constantly over his bony elbows as he hefted a large pasta pan into the sink and ran the tap to fill it. “Spaghetti and meatballs okay for everyone?”
They had kept the dozen tins of meatballs back intentionally, and the dried pasta was probably good for a lifetime if they weren’t overly fussy, which clearly none of them was.
“Need a hand?” Kimberley asked. Peter just turned and smiled at her, so she used the can opener to wind off the jagged metal discs before pouring the lumpy, sloppy contents into another pan for heating.
“Where’s Amber?” Astrid asked f
rom the other room, seeing that the two people other than herself who the little girl gravitated to were engaged in the cooking.
“She’s right here,” Peter said, “she’s helping me, isn’t that right?” he turned to pull a face at her as she was sitting up on the kitchen worktop out of sight of the lounge area. She pulled the face back playfully, but still didn’t say a word.
They ate together, testimony to the sheer size of the house as all eight of them could sit around the massive dining table set in the kitchen and still feel as though the house was empty. When they had finished, Johnson and Hampton went with the three who would be leaving in the morning, and Amber went back upstairs to watch the Care Bears movie for the third time that day. Peter, uncomplaining, took the plates and rested them in the large sink beside the pans. He shoved the sleeves of his top up his arms again, not bothering to rectify it when they slid down immediately afterwards, and he ran the tap. Kimberley got up, taking a flat sponge and holding it under the water, which had already run warm, then turned to clean down the table.
He washed, armpits resting on the sink edge and sleeves dropping into the soapy water, as she dried.
“Who taught you how to do this?” she asked, full of curiosity.
“My sister,” he told her after the briefest of pauses as though he was deciding whether to tell her or not. “She did a lot of cooking. She showed me how to cook the pasta and test it, but she didn’t let me open the tins because I could cut myself on them.” He left out that she liked to use the jagged slices of metal to score lines in her own arms.
“She showed me how to wash up as we went along, and she made my sandwiches for the next day as we did it.”
Kimberley, her heart breaking with each word he spoke, resisted the urge to patronise him. He was clearly very resilient, and to make out that his survival was extraordinary was to invite doubt into his mind.
“Were your parents working then?” she asked, seeing the boy turn and regard her quizzically.
“No,” he told her, “they watched TV and drank and smoked cigarettes. We weren’t allowed to watch the TV most of the time.” He went back to washing, his sponge making squeaking noises on the plate as he wiped circles of soap suds onto it. Kimberley didn’t know what to say, but she found herself asking the question she knew she shouldn’t.
“Peter, where is your sister now?”
He paused, thinking, then resumed the squeaking on the plate.
“She went away, to hospital, so she’s probably there now. I’ll try and find her after this has all finished.”
Before Kimberley could even start to figure out what to say to that, Peter asked his own question.
“What happened to your face?”
She froze, hearing the question asked so blatantly and innocently when people usually never had the courage to ask her.
“It was an accident,” she told him quietly, resting down one clean plate and picking up another to dry.
“Was it an accident doing a new roof?” Peter asked, “Only I saw when we had a new roof on the pig shed at home, and someone accidentally poured hot tar stuff down their hand and it looked the same.
“No, Peter, it wasn’t an accident with roofing tar, it was…” she trailed off.
“What?” he asked her, a concerned look on his face as he turned to her.
“Someone hurt me,” she told him, “someone I should have been safe with, but I wasn’t.”
“Was it your parents?” he asked, “did they hit you, too?”
“No,” she said, a tear forming in her eye, not for her own mistreatment but for the terrible reality the boy had lived before zombies roamed the country, “it was my… my husband. I got married very young, you see, and he wasn’t very nice to me.”
“Oh,” Peter said, clearly sad for her, “did you tell the police?”
“In a way,” Kimberley said, snapping out of her reverie and scrubbing the tea towel at the plate once more.
“Did someone hurt him back for you?” Peter asked as he washed up.
“I did it myself,” she blurted out before she could stop herself.
Peter stopped, thinking about it, then continued scrubbing. “That’s good. You shouldn’t let bullies keep hitting you. I did that once, hit him back, and he didn’t try it again.” Peter’s eyes went vacant for a moment as his mind followed the logic that the bully was probably no longer alive.
Kimberley said nothing, simply put the dry plate down and folded the damp tea towel before giving the boy a gentle flat palm on the head as she turned away. She didn’t trust herself to speak lest the tears come again. She hadn’t talked about what had happened for years, and moving to the country had been her way of leaving it behind her, in the past with her married name.
The planning conversation had ended during the time she had been with Peter, so when she walked into what she thought was an empty room with red, puffy eyes and her chest heaving with the effort of keeping her tears at bay, she wasn’t expecting to find the two men standing mutely staring at her.
“This one will be fine for me,” Hampton said in a stage voice as he took the closest book to him, a hardback Catherine Cookson that didn’t seem like his kind of thing at all. He made his limping escape from the room, his injured leg still rendering him less useful than he wanted to be, leaving her facing an embarrassed Dean Johnson who seemed as though he didn’t know where to look.
“Um…” he started, looking left and right for escape and finding none. He began to edge away, leaving the distressed woman to cry in peace, but she threw herself down to the sofa and let out a high-pitched growl of frustration.
“I’ll, err, just be going…”
“I’ll be okay,” she said, wiping angrily at the tears on her cheeks, “I promised myself I’d stopped crying about this years ago,” she said as she waved a hand over the scarred side of her face, “but I just got reminded of something and it caught me off guard.”
Johnson sat carefully beside her, fearful that she would be annoyed with him, and dared to reach out for her hand.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he tried tentatively. She looked at him, the mask of cool resolve falling back into place despite the puffiness of her red face.
“It seems stupid now,” she said, “like it doesn’t matter anymore. That little boy in there has been through so much and he doesn’t complain, doesn’t fall apart…”
“Don’t be silly,” he told her gently, “some injuries never heal, not properly.” She regarded him oddly then, trying to marry up the tough, bearded soldier with the kind and caring words of a therapist.
“Peter asked me about the scars,” she said after a moment. Johnson nodded, looking at her intently as she spoke, as though he could lose her if his concentration wavered and the spell broke.
“I was married when I was eighteen,” she began, “to a soldier. It was wonderful and new, but when I got pregnant my father insisted that we got married. We did, and as soon as we’d had a two-day honeymoon he started hitting me.” Her eyes locked with his, burning brightly with strength and pain in equal measures. “I lost the baby, which he blamed me for. My whole life was gone in an instant; I wasn’t allowed out, I couldn’t wear the clothes I wanted to wear, I had no friends…”
“Did he do that to you?” Johnson asked, his anger barely under control as he suspected the answer already, as his hand raised slightly towards the hair covering the puckered skin.
“Yes,” she said, “he’d been court-martialled and discharged not long after we got married. He had a tendency to drink and get into fights. That made him worse. I’d burnt his food, according to him anyway, so he grabbed my hair and pushed my head down onto the hotplate. ‘you don’t listen’ he told me.”
Johnson breathed in hard through his nose to try and tame the indignation and rage he was feeling at how this beautiful, strong and kind young woman had been so badly treated.
“So you went to the police?” he asked.
“Not directly,” she s
aid in a neutral tone, “but they were called. By the neighbours I think. I stabbed him in his sleep a week after, not that I remember doing it. He survived, unfortunately, and I spent four years in prison for it. Apparently, I was given a lenient sentence, on account of my temporary insanity. You know how many times I’d been to the local hospital in the year I lived with him?” she asked. Johnson opened and closed his mouth, unsure if the rhetoric needed a response.
“Thirteen,” she told him flatly, “thirteen times in twelve months with injuries I got from him. They asked me if I was sorry at the trial, they asked me to show remorse,” her lip curled in disgust, “I told them I wished I had never met the bastard.”
She stayed sitting there, staring off into painful memory for a while before she sniffed abruptly and stood up as though electrified.
“And there’s me feeling sorry for myself, when a nine year-old kid has survived this on his own literally, looking after a toddler. Put things into perspective, doesn’t it?”
Chapter 15
The two women and the girl tried to be as quiet as possible as they squeezed and pushed the mattress through the window of their room. When it was two thirds of the way out, hanging over the void, the lighter was clicked until the flame took hold. The foam scorched, melted, then caught in a sudden, toxic flash of flame which made them all choke and push at the burning lump with renewed energy to force it out of the window. Black smoke hung in the suddenly hot air of the small room as they all fought to crane their necks out of the opening at once to see where it landed. Their disappointment was palpable, as the burning mattress had landed fire side down and extinguished their attempts at arson.
“Grab more,” Ellie said, “rip pieces off.” They tore at the other mattresses, Jessica using the sharpened edge of her stolen teaspoon to slice at the stretched sections until they came apart in her hand. A kind of conveyor belt system established itself within seconds, with Jessica cutting pieces away using her adapted tool and Ellie passing them to Pauline, who set them on fire and dropped them one after another out of the window to the mattress below. They caught, spreading the fire until the darkness outside took on an eerie orange glow and an acrid smell sapped the oxygen from their immediate world.
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 12
