Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  “More,” Pauline hissed, “keep it coming.”

  They did, and by the time shouts were reverberating loudly around the building, they had shut the window to their room with only one mattress remaining. They had bundled up their few possessions and clothes into pillowcases and tied them together like bags, waiting for the commotion to build up. They put their coats on over their layers of clothing, holding their nerve collectively as they didn’t want to be discovered.

  Shout of ‘fire’ rang out loudly over the noise of doors opening and slamming and footsteps running fast down the corridors. They waited, breath held until some undetermined time when they should make a break for it. Their eyes met, darting between the three of them like electricity, until Ellie made the decision for them.

  “Go!”

  They went. Stepping fast along the corridor and down the stairs as doors opened and closed all around them. One man blocked their way, eyes wide and wild in the low light of the emergency bulbs, and he demanded to know what was happening.

  “Fire!” Pauline yelled, repeating the panicked call that rang through the now busy building. The word was infectious somehow, spreading the disease of fear faster than the bites of the zombies ever could. People ran and jostled, pushed and shoved on the stairways to demonstrate their primeval terror of the untameable element. Nobody noticed their subtle luggage, nobody stopped them to question why they were fully dressed and wrapped up warmly against the cold night air when others were in disarray and clutching blankets around themselves. They continued the shout, using it as a catalyst for the panic and confusion that spread faster than the fire.

  Outside, among the milling crowd of terrified people who were foolishly all looking inwards when logic should have told them that the bigger threat came from the bright flames and the noise attracting attention from elsewhere, louder shouts of authority took command. One voice stood out above all of them, barking orders to some and instructing others to get out of the way. Water buckets were found but the frozen surface of the small pond there proved yet another barrier until someone who wasn’t panicking found a large rock to drop in to break the icy surface.

  As this activity churned, three figures slipped towards the back of the group, waiting again for the unfathomable right time to act. When the double echoing boom of consecutive shotgun blasts rang out from the approach road and the answering screams of fear rose and gathered momentum, the three figures knew that the time was right.

  They didn’t run, they simply faded away from the group and turned towards the darkness.

  ~

  “What the hell is going on?” Michaels snapped at Nevin, who was still lacing his boots as he shouted orders.

  “Fire,” he said, “other side of the building on the outside. I’m having people put it out now.”

  “Fire?” Michaels asked incredulously, “How?”

  “Haven’t got that far yet, maybe we should put it out first so we don’t burn the whole place down, and then we can figure that out afterwards?”

  “It’s a solid stone building, you moron,” Michaels condescended nastily, “the worst that will happen is a few scorch marks if the fire is outside.”

  Nevin said nothing, only shot the man a murderous look that was mixed of embarrassment at not figuring that out and anger at being talked down to again.

  “It’s a diversion,” Michaels told him after a moment of thought, “get every guard on the perimet…”

  BOOM, BOOM.

  The two men’s eyes met in the poor light cast by the weak, yellowy bulbs. No words passed between them but instead a communication on a deep, almost telepathic level flashed as though they were speaking in the same high-frequency data burst transmissions as the military radio sets. They ran towards the sound of the gunfire, Michaels pausing only to grab one of his armed men and order that every one of their guards be set to the perimeter immediately.

  It was just one of them, passing by on their slow-motion travels in the freezing cold weather, and attracted by random chance to the noise and the smells and the bright orange flames licking up the side of the building. It turned towards the attractive sounds, its unthinking brain associating the disturbance with food, and it shambled uphill away from the road.

  What remained of its nose was turned up into the air to sniff, and it detected the sweet scent of fresh flesh. Before the ravaged vocal chords could issue the high-pitched screech of attack, a bright blossom of flame and noise showed ahead. It rocked backwards, the torn rags of the shirt it had been wearing so many months before being blown away along with most of its right shoulder. The right arm hung limply, the muscles and tendons severed to make the two-handed reach only fifty percent effective. The second shot, the beautiful and deadly bloom of fire and lead erupting from the end of the shotgun’s barrel took the entire left side of the face off the creature. As gruesome as the inflicted injures looked, they were far from effective at rendering the former person less dangerous. The shocked and terrified guard fumbled with cold fingers inside thick gloves that denied him the sense of touch in locating a pair of fresh cartridges to charge the double-barrelled weapon again. He was forced to look down, to locate the new ammunition with eyesight in the poor light, and when he looked back up, he let out an animalistic squeal of pure horror.

  With one useless arm hanging by gristly threads and half of what had once been a face scoured from the bone by the flensing shot, the thing bore down on him and drove him to the ground. He held the gun across his chest, screaming in short, pathetic gasps as he pushed the weapon out to keep the snapping jaws away from the exposed skin of his face. The rotting jaws opened and closed repeatedly, trying to find purchase and fulfil its sole purpose in life. It gave up trying to reach the face, instead turning and burying the broken pegs in its mouth into the thick sleeve of the waxed jacked the man wore. The bite force was unreal, sparking a howl of agony from the frozen sentry, but something inside him knew that the fight wasn’t over; knew that the teeth hadn’t broken his skin and told him that he still had a fighting chance to survive.

  He abandoned the attempts to push it directly away from him, instead allowing the arm it was biting to drop and rolled it over away from him. He flew to his feet with a speed and flexibility he didn’t know he possessed, struggling in a hideous tug of war which ended in the glittering of once-white teeth cascading through the air as the gripped sleeve was torn free. He staggered backwards a pace, righting his momentum, reversed the shotgun and brought the butt down savagely hard, twice, three times, until he stood and allowed the tears of fear and adrenaline to flow freely down his face.

  He looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps; multiple and moving faster than any undead attack would have a right to. He smiled weakly at his reinforcements, grateful of the living company to tell his ordeal to, but blanched when he saw the face of the man who looked at him. Michaels regarded him coldly, eyes darting from the ruined head of the zombie to the man clutching at the arm which was already bruised by the sheer bite force of the attack. Something flashed between their eyes, another instant of communication, but this one was wrong.

  “It didn’t bi…” the guard managed, before Michaels raised the barrel of his gun and fired a bullet into his skull from three feet away.

  Michaels and Nevin looked down on the two bodies lying at their feet, happy in their ignorance that they had contained any potential outbreak before it had started.

  “Stay here,” Michaels told Nevin, “I’ll send someone to take over.”

  He walked away, thinking that he had a bad feeling something more sinister was happening.

  ~

  “I’m stuck,” hissed Ellie after she had helped Jessica over the barbed wire strands of a fence that had been recently repaired and reinforced. Pauline turned back, trying to help free the snagged denim on her thigh as the younger woman tried not to cry out from the stabbing pain.

  “Hurry up,” Jessica warned them, watching back up the hill in the direction they had slipped away
from as louder shouts drifted down to them.

  “Got it,” Pauline told Ellie, shaking her hand to try and numb the pain of the metal stabbing into her thumb. Ellie’s other leg went over the fence just as another hiss of warning came from the girl.

  “They know,” she said, her whisper an octave above where it had been previously, “they’ve got torches.”

  They did indeed have torches, and in the frost-covered grass of the slope leading away from the hilltop prison was a thick line of disturbed ground showing darker than its surroundings. The three women moved with renewed urgency as the threat of instant pursuit spurred them on. No more gunshots had come from the hill, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any more if they were discovered.

  “Which way?” Ellie asked as they reached a thick hedgerow at road level. Pauline didn’t answer, she simply turned left and followed the line of the thick foliage for over a minute until she stopped and ushered them over a wooden style in a man-made break in the hedge. It was overgrown, but the gap was still big enough to let them through. They dropped down onto the roadway, the surface icy under the sharp crunch of old snow yet to thaw.

  “Come on,” Pauline hissed at them, taking off down the road at an uncertain pace due to the treacherous footing. They made as much ground as they could, slipping and helping one another when they lost their feet. Steam gathered around them in a haze as the moonlight illuminated them in a way that they couldn’t see under the weak lights at the hilltop. Bathed in a shiny purple ethereal glow, they moved quickly, with their ragged breath coming in gasps. They knew they had to move fast, to put distance between those chasing them and themselves, but with each step the fear grew that they would be caught.

  Jessica said nothing, but she was forced to stop when she was winded. She had no breath left and the painful stitch in her side doubled her over and made her recovery even less effective. Ellie noticed first, sensing that there was one set of footfalls too few, and turned back to her. Pauline hadn’t noticed them stop, hadn’t heard Ellie’s hiss of warning, and with each second the gap between them grew wider. Ellie didn’t dare shout, for there were still things out in the countryside that were more frightening than men with guns, but she was stuck between the two people she had fled with. She was closer to Jessica, and knew that Pauline would surely stop and wait for them when she realised she was alone. As Ellie walked to Jessica, seeing the girl grimace and stand tall to try and catch her breath, she saw a curious haze of light behind her. It took her the half a dozen steps to reach her before her brain computed what the growing glow meant, and when she reached the girl she grabbed her and dropped to the ground, rolling them both into the ditch where the trickle of ice-cold muddy water threatened to take the breath away from them both. Jessica gasped, but the sound was barely audible over the grumble of an engine moving slowly along the road, following their obvious tracks.

  The engine note waned, idled, then picked up again as the lights passed by Ellie and Jessica. Both of them squeezed their eyes shut tightly, hoping that if they couldn’t see their pursuers, then perhaps their pursuers couldn’t see them. Ellie realised as soon as the truck had passed and left them in darkness again that the tracks they’d left must have been confusing, but they hadn’t stopped so instead the truck carried on.

  Only one set of footprints left? Ellie thought. What if one person was carrying the other?

  Quite why she reasoned the logic on behalf of the people hunting her she didn’t know, but perhaps understanding your enemy was the key lesson.

  “We need to go, now,” she whispered in Jessica’s ear. The girl’s eyes shone brightly back at her as they reflected the power of the fat moon high above them. She nodded once, understanding what they now both knew.

  They couldn’t help Pauline.

  They forced their way through the hedge to emerge in the field on the far side, then set off in a straight line across the dark countryside at an oblique angle to the road.

  ~

  Pauline saw the road ahead of her grow lighter, just as the unmistakable rattle of an engine reached her ears. She slowed, then stopped, and turned to face her impending humiliation and punishment as the truck lights illuminated her with full beams and made her turn her eyes away to save being blinded.

  She had lost the other two somehow, but she had not seen or heard how or when they had disappeared. She knew it was some time ago, because all she could see as far as the distant lights were her own footprints; clear and very singular.

  The truck stopped in front of her, the sounds of doors opening and closing, and a torch was shone directly into her face.

  “How many others ran with you?” a voice demanded. Pauline said nothing, but smiled a sweet smile that had ‘fuck you’ emblazoned all over it. The man behind the torch hit her once, a brutally hard backhand that caught her between jawbone and cheek and sat her down with a sickening thump into the slushy snowmelt.

  “How many?” the voice growled again, the promise of more pain evident in the tone.

  “Five,” Pauline lied with no idea why she said what she did, “three men and three women. We all split up.”

  Silence met her lies, underpinned by the chugging rattle of the truck engine.

  “Bring her back,” the voice said, “she can be an example.”

  As she was dragged to her feet and thrown into the hard back of the pickup truck, the man climbed in behind her and rested his cold, wet boot soles on her body.

  “You cost us a guard,” the voice of that bastard Nevin said, “and Michaels won’t be pleased with you for that.”

  Chapter 16

  Dawn saw activity all over the region. The four-man SAS team deployed to seek more food and resources to both survive the winter and in preparation of making a very long and uncertain journey by road.

  The three-person team slipped from their fortified village base with no fuss and even less noise, taking their van on a long-range scavenging run in the hopes of staving off starvation.

  Nearer the coast, burnt wreckage and scorched mattresses were shoved over the cliff as the clean-up started at the hilltop. The rotten corpse of the lone attacker was discarded over the edge, along with the rest of the detritus but the dead sentry, dead at the hands of Michaels as everyone had heard, had apparently been popular. The others wanted a proper burial for him. They wanted to challenge the man over his account of their friend’s death, as not one bite mark was evident on his body.

  “You dig a bloody hole in frozen ground then,” Michaels had spat at them, “because I wouldn’t bother.”

  They did bother, despite how difficult and backbreaking it was, and questions began to be asked about the woman who had been dragged back up the hill during the night. The people wanted to know what Michaels was going to do with her, and Michaels responded by telling the people that he would do whatever he damned well felt like doing, and if they didn’t want to find themselves out on their ungrateful arses, then they would do well to stop questioning him. Those with questions faded away, and even some of those trusted with guns began to side with the majority.

  Michaels, that evil bastard who was always beside him and who seemed to share the same mutual hatred for everyone and everything, and half a dozen others all clustered closely as though they could sense the change in mood.

  The mood faded as most of those men left in vehicles to search for the missing men and women who had apparently fled in the night. Sneering down at the people who watched him leave, Michaels reached above him and pulled down the heavy hatch before the small tank he rode in drove away.

  ~

  “Contact, north west,” Mac called softly from his standing position with binoculars pressed to his eyes, “looks like multiple Screechers, standby…”

  “Talk me in,” Smiffy said, having abandoned his imitation of a television personality the instant Mac called the threat out.

  “Past the stone cottage,” Mac said, having widened his view to include the foreground briefly so that he could accurat
ely describe the location to his sniper, “hedgerow following wes…”

  “Got ‘em,” Smiffy cut him off, “just two by the look of it…” he went quiet as he watched the targets approaching them from a long way off. Downes and Dezzy were behind them somewhere, clearing out a larger building which would be useful for storing and sorting the supplies when they called the marines and the remainder of the squadron in.

  “Don’t seem that rotten,” Smiffy said sceptically, “probably hibernated inside.”

  “Drop ‘em,” Mac instructed him, demonstrating his opposing ethos to their Major when it came to the undead. Downes was of the opinion that if they weren’t close enough to threaten them, then it was a waste of a bullet, whereas Mac wanted to put down every one he ever saw, because it would need to be done eventually anyway and he wasn’t one for putting off today’s job until tomorrow. Smiffy took two longer, deeper breaths as Mac heard the click of the safety catch disengaging on the stolen Soviet rifle. He watched through the binoculars at the distant figures shambling over the field, waiting to see their fuzzy shapes drop in response to the sharp crack he expected to hear.

  “Hold up,” Smiffy said, “something ain’t right with these…”

  “What’s not right?” Major Downes asked as he emerged silently behind them onto the low rooftop they occupied.

  “Two dead bastards,” Mac said, “coming in across country.”

  “Specify, what ain’t right, trooper.”

  “Don’t look that dead, Boss. Only… only sort of half dead,” he replied, prompting silence as everyone brought out their optics to try and see what their shooter had seen.