Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  “You know what, Smiffy?” Downes asked from behind his compact binoculars, “I think you might be right. Mac, Dez; left flank along hedgerow. Smiffy; with me.”

  ~

  Jessica didn’t speak as she walked, just as Ellie behind her kept silent. Both of them were frozen to the core, filthy and soaked from the ditch water which hadn’t dried from their clothes, despite having walked all night and through the dawn. Both were exhausted to the point of collapse, but neither wanted to stop as the fear of pursuit was constant in their minds. As they crested the rise and looked down into the shallow valley towards a small collection of houses and what looked like a village hall, Ellie simply pointed the direction they should head in and both trudged onwards, shivering in silence.

  A crackle of twigs sounded ahead, making Jessica and Ellie snap their heads upwards to find themselves looking in the same direction. Both of them froze, and Ellie looked around on the ground for anything she could use as a weapon. Kicking at a lump of rock, she prised it from the stiff earth with difficulty. She hefted it in her right hand, pushing Jessica behind her, who clutched at the pathetically small sharpened teaspoon retrieved from her boot.

  Nothing moved. No more sounds came from the thick hedgerow ahead of them, and their breath began to slowly return to normal.

  “Put down your, er, rock, please,” came a cultured and strong voice from over their left shoulders. Ellie yelped and spun, trying to push Jessica behind her again and only succeeding in tripping the girl, who fell to the frozen ground behind her and was too weak to get up. Jessica yelped then, seeing two men dressed in black clothing and carrying machine guns emerge from the bushes. Behind her, Ellie found herself looking into the clear, bluey-grey eyes of a tall man with his hands held out to show open palms. A gun hung on his chest, and various other dangerous looking items adorned his torso and waist, but his eyes pierced through everything to convey a message to the young woman that she was safe now.

  Ellie dropped her rock, sinking to the hard earth beside Jessica, and both sobbed with exhaustion and relief.

  ~

  Michaels had stopped talking to Nevin, solely because the man was annoying him. He wanted to go back, wanted to show strength in front of the others back at the Hilltop and maintain their control over the people. Michaels thought the man wanted to get back behind their defences and hide in the warmth, which was no bad thing in his opinion, but Michaels desperately wanted to find the people who had escaped his rule.

  He had no idea it was just two women, or a woman and a girl, who were unaccounted for, but any loss was galling to him and he found himself pathologically unable to let it pass.

  He had forced Nevin to stop their cramped armoured scout car, the Ferret with the thirty-calibre machine gun mounted on top, and told the man to get out. The two of them walked carefully around a frozen, deserted village with their weapons held low but ready. Neither expected to be set up by any of the dead bastards out in the open, not in those temperatures, but it didn’t pay to be complacent at any time.

  That caution, that alertness, paid off when they both heard the sound of an engine at the same time. Their eyes met and, despite their almost obvious dislike for one another, both men recognised the need to work together. The Ferret was too far away, parked down a side street as it was too much of a giveaway to leave on the main road, and both men instinctively sought appropriate cover more attuned to the dangers of Northern Ireland than to a frozen southern English village amidst the undead apocalypse. The engine note grew, splitting into two distinct sounds with one lower, heavier note and another higher-pitched with a slight rattle. Michaels looked over at Nevin and caught his eye. He showed him a flat hand and waved it down in the cramped confines of the doorway he occupied. As awkward as it was, the signal for ‘take cover’ was obvious enough. Nevin nodded back, sinking out of sight into the shadows.

  They waited for almost a minute before a dusty and frost-free box van rolled through the village. Michaels saw a flash of blonde hair, long and naturally straight, in the cab. Following after that, at a distance he could only describe as tactical, was a dirty beige Montego with a single male driver. Michaels waited until they had passed into silence, then rose to see Nevin emerging on the opposite side of the road.

  “See the woman in the truck cab?” Nevin asked him. He nodded, having his guesses firmed up by Nevin’s information.

  “And what do you reckon was in the truck?”

  “Well the signage said something catering, so…”

  Michaels smiled, seeing that the two vehicles had left wide, black tracks in the freshly fallen dusting of snow that a blind child could follow.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s follow those tracks.”

  ~

  Downes and his men left Lieutenant Lloyd with the village they had cleared as they tried to keep the woman and the girl out of sight in the back of their adopted Land Cruiser. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust the marines, it was more that they saw no further need for excitement. They did consider requesting a loan of Marine Sealey, the only surviving medic from the island, but Smiffy said that he was capable of looking after them.

  “It’s just a bit of mild exposure,” he said casually, “nothing a warm-up and hot drinks won’t cure.”

  Water had been boiled on a small fire fuelled by solid white blocks that burned with a chemical intensity, and powdered hot chocolate was found in the hall. Dezzy found two mugs, added sugar liberally from the sachets he found in the kitchen area before pocketing as many as he could grab, and brought the drinks out to them, where they were safety wrapped up in blankets. Neither of them baulked or even pulled a face at the amount of sugar they were being force fed. Downes filled Lloyd in on their find, made their excuses and drove the frozen refugees back to the house. Neither spoke over the almost one hour they spent in transit, and both fell asleep leaning on one another, much to the annoyance of the two soldiers cramped in the boot space on top of their kit and radio. At least neither of them felt the urge to ask if they were nearly there yet.

  Arriving back and threading the emplaced defences which visibly marred the approach to the attractive house, Downes looked back the way they had come. Fresh snow had fallen here when none had been seen in the valley they had searched, and their tyres made wide, dirty scrapes in the earth, which was adorned with vast coils of barbed wire strung between fenceposts driven into the ground at uneven angles between the neat excavations of earth from the trenches. In the frozen snow it looked just like the pictures he had seen painted from memory by the survivors of the Great War. The thought left him under a dark cloud, as already the death tolls of the two conflicts were horribly uneven.

  “We’re here,” he announced, glancing at the woman and the girl, who had regained consciousness to blink and stare out of the windows. Neither of them answered him, not that he expected them to, given their recent ordeal, and they were ushered through the house to the warmest part, which had always been the kitchen.

  “Sergeant Major Maxwell,” Downes said comically, referring to Denise and not her husband through the intimate use of formality. The two had spoken at length on more than one occasion as they sat at the heavy butcher’s block work surface. He found her to be every bit as reliable and essential to the effective running of the house as her husband was, having been thrown into the role of the senior NCO after the tragic loss of the Squadron Sergeant Major.

  “Clive?” she answered quizzically, looking up from her task in the big, deep sink to stare at the bedraggled pair he guided into the room and steered towards the massive range, which radiated heat. “What’s all this?”

  “Found these two young ladies this morning, both rather wet and cold,” he told her.

  “Who are they?”

  Downes hesitated a fraction longer than was normal, arousing suspicion in the woman. “They haven’t spoken yet,” he answered, worried that Denise would think he was palming off a problem onto her. She shot him another look, one that bordered on disap
pointment, and turned to the shivering arrivals.

  “Hello, my loves,” she said kindly, her eyes matching the smile and the warm tone of her voice, “what have you been up to then?” The question was rhetorical, as she fussed about them getting them seated beside the warm metal and pulling levers here and there before moving a metal pot onto a hot section of the old cooker to bring it back up to temperature.

  That was the thing about the old kitchen, Downes thought to himself, it never got cold or switched off and was in a permanent state of tick-over until more was needed from it. It was like a living organism, more so than any modern, conventional kitchen would be.

  “I shall leave you to it, Sar’nt Major,” he said, ducking a small bow and retreating to shed himself of weapons and get into some drier clothing.

  “I’m Denise,” she told them as she wore the same wide smile, “we’ve been here a while now, and it’s about half and half with us normal people and the army lot.” She left out the variation of having RAF and Royal Marines there as it was only important to the people who lived by such acronyms and identities. If she wasn’t an army wife then no doubt she wouldn’t care either.

  “What are your names?” she asked as she busied herself with the hot water and cups to make a drink.

  “Ellie,” the older one said. Denise couldn’t place their relationship, as they could easily be sisters given the apparent age difference, but neither bore the slightest resemblance to the other physically. She knew that didn’t mean anything as such, but she was a woman who trusted her hunches.

  “And what about you, my sweet?” she asked, leaning down to put herself in the eye line of the younger girl.

  “Jessica,” she said, a hint of sullen anger in her voice, which was thick with cold and exhaustion.

  “Well,” Denise said as she looked up to meet the eyes of one of the other women who gravitated around the kitchens, “let’s see if we can’t find you some clean clothes to fit, eh?” she nodded to the newly arrived woman, one of her corporals she guessed, if the civilian mirroring of ranks and responsibilities was to be observed. The woman looked long and hard at the two people wrapped in blankets huddled by the warm hearth, nodded to herself and left the room clearly having taken all the measurements she needed.

  “Who is in charge here?” Ellie asked through numb lips.

  “Well,” Denise said as she sat back on the wooden stool facing them and gently slapped her hands onto her thighs, “it was all a bit up in the air when we got here, but the Captain, that’s Mr Palmer senior, is sort of in overall charge. There’s Clive, Major Downes, who you know obviously, and Mr Lloyd has his marines. I run the kitchen, I suppose, and my husband is Mr Palmer’s senior man. His little brother is here too, the other Mr Palmer, but he doesn’t mix with us much…” She trailed off as she saw the perplexed looks from Ellie and Jessica.

  “I’m waffling now,” she said, “tell me how you ended up out in the cold?”

  “We ran away from the place we were at,” Ellie said, “and we… we…” she cast her eyes down as she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “We lost the woman who came with us,” Jessica finished with an edge of flint to her words, “they caught her. The men, not the others…”

  Denise was shocked. Not being a woman usually lost for words she was speechless at the unspoken implications of what they had said.

  “Were you… prisoners?” she asked finally.

  “Yes,” Ellie said, “and it was probably worse than you think.”

  ~

  They had been warmed, cleaned, dressed and fed before they were sat in front of a large fire crackling noisily in an ornate fireplace. There were four men in the room when Denise led Ellie and Jessica in. Downes they knew or at least had met already, and the others were introduced in turn.

  “Ladies,” said Denise Maxwell, “this is Captain Palmer.” Palmer stood, offered a small bow and invited them to call him Julian if it pleased them.

  “May I introduce Lieutenant Christopher Lloyd of the Royal Marines,” he indicated a good looking young man with broad shoulders and a weathered face. “You have met Major Clive Downes of the Special Air Service,” Downes smiled a greeting at them again, “and finally Mr Maxwell, our senior non-commissioned officer who reports directly to me and, of course, Mrs Maxwell, who I appear to report directly to sometimes...” They all smiled at the weak but obvious joke and the newly arrived pair were invited to sit nearest the fire. As they did, a loud crack came from the flames and a smouldering ember spat out to land on the hearth.

  “Our apologies for the poor firewood,” Palmer said as though such things were under his direct control, “we have used up the stocks of seasoned wood and have been reduced to burning a coppice of ash we have found. It’s quite green but won’t suffocate us, I’m assured.”

  Ellie smiled to accept the unnecessary apology, feeling oddly at ease with the formality on display. He had a way, a manner, that made her feel far more elevated than her position had ever been.

  “I understand,” Palmer said gently, “that you have been residing at a place where the conditions were somewhat… unpleasant.” He left it as a statement. An invitation to explain and not a question that could be easily shut down with a simple yes or no.

  Ellie told them. She told them everything from the moment she had fled with her daughter and hidden in villages as they went house to house for food to survive off. She told them about the men who had come and dragged her away, about the man in charge who had forced those same men to go back and look for her daughter, but who had come back with only news of her disappearance. She told them about the enforced work, about the women who kept the guards ‘company’ in return for items and certain freedoms. She told them about the rumours that the man in charge, this Michaels character, was forcing survivors to give him their food under the threat of violence against them. She told them about their plan to escape, about the pursuit and getting separated from Pauline, then walking all night and all day until they stumbled on the four soldiers.

  “My sniper nearly shot you,” Downes said, suddenly looking awkward as he tried to turn it around to show how much of an ordeal they had suffered as to look as though they were undead, rotting creatures.

  “Hang on a minute,” Maxwell said, glancing at his wife who had picked up on the same critical piece of information, “you said Michaels, right?”

  “That’s right,” Ellie said, “they said he was a soldier too, just like the other one with the small tank.”

  “What other one?” Maxwell asked.

  “Nevin,” Jessica said, speaking for the first time during the meeting and curling her lip in hatred and disgust at the mere mention of the man’s name.

  Looks were exchanged through the room as almost everyone had some piece of information that others did not possess.

  “Michaels was our missing troop sergeant,” he said to the officers as an aside, “never showed up when the deployment call came in, so we chopped up his troop and shared the lads around others to fill the gaps.

  “And Nevin?” Downes asked, having felt the overt hostility in the room at the mention of his name.

  “Trooper Nevin,” Palmer said with measured tones in a display of uncharacteristic anger, “was the bane of Mr Johnson’s life. He is a lazy shirker, who is responsible for the bloodbath that led to the unfortunate…” he glanced at the young girl before choosing his next words carefully, “…passing of Sergeant Sinclair and his men. Trooper Povey attested to this, if you recall?”

  They did recall. Not only was the loss of life a crippling blow to them as they had lost close friends and almost half of the remaining squadron strength, but the devastation that it was betrayal and cowardice of one of their own stung them deeply.

  Palmer wanted to ask about Michaels, about his strengths and weaknesses as a man and a solider, but such conversations could be had with Maxwell in private.

  “Ellie,” Lloyd asked, “do you know where this Hilltop is?”

 
Chapter 17

  Mike Xavier and Jean-Pierre burst back through the gates of the docks after yelling at his men guarding them to get the damned things open. They collapsed into a heap together, having run over half a mile through the thick fog and fearing that at any second they would have the undead fall upon them and tear them apart. Cans and packets of food littered the roadway as terrified men and women dropped their precious cargo in the fearful flight.

  It was desperate, it was ill-disciplined, and it was a shambles. Xavier knew it as much as everyone else, and he felt responsible for it. He had been the one to yell at everyone to run when they had been attacked in the shop, and he knew in hindsight that he should have organised a dedicated guard and kept the others calm and orderly, instead of the mass panic they were now looking at with a destructive air of ‘every man for themselves’.

  He retained enough sense to order his men to take the food from the scavengers who flooded through the gate, each wearing similar looks of terror and relief in equal parts to be safely back inside the wire, but having seen the horrors that still existed out there. The pile of random foodstuff grew large. Large enough, he dared hope, to sustain them for a time. It would, if only he could ensure that some sort of order was maintained, because he had been horrified to see how rapidly normal people devolved to demonstrate the Darwinist theory of it being only the fittest who survived. He caught his breath, remembered what he must look like to the scared people who had been out there and deciding that he shouldn’t be just as terrified as they were, and so he stood with his feet planted widely in the open gateway with the gore-smeared axe held in two hands.

  “Put the food down there,” he called to the people who trickled back in, opening his mouth to repeat the instruction to the shapes emerging from the fog but catching them in his throat as he began to speak them. The shapes morphed into two people, one of them being half carried with a limp arm slung over the neck and shoulders of another. Xavier froze, his heartrate feeling as though it had suddenly tripled, and the axe moved with a mind of its own as he let it swing low in one hand and draw back ready to take a batter’s pose like he readied himself to play baseball.