Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  “Stop there,” he growled, “don’t come any closer.”

  At the tone of his voice, instantly conveying fear and threat, Jean-Pierre appeared at his side, having abandoned his task of ensuring that people gave up their haul as they returned. Xavier felt the man’s breath behind his neck, heard the miniscule gasp of air inwards as he saw what had prompted the challenge and recognised it immediately.

  “She’s okay,” the person carrying the other shape called out weakly, “she just hurt her ankle is all.”

  “I said stop,” Xavier warned again, real menace edging the words this time.

  “No,” pleaded the shape, coming into focus as the edges of the fog released them, “she’s just twisted her ankle…”

  At the mention of the afflicted area, Xavier and Jean-Pierre both glanced down to see the white ruffles of the woman’s leg warmers soaked in a dark red. The blood had run through to her white trainers, showing a stark contrast with the other foot, and as their eyes glanced back upwards they saw her head lolling and her eyes rolling back into her head as though she was suffering from a fever. Her face was so white she seemed almost see-through. Her mouth moved constantly, weakly, as though she was trying to speak or suckle like a baby. Xavier knew he should say something, knew he should lay down the law and protect everyone and say something about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or something like that, but the words just wouldn’t come to him. His mouth flapped uselessly, just as the woman’s did.

  “You must leave her,” Jean-Pierre snapped, “she has the sickness. She cannot come in here.”

  “But,” the man protested pathetically, “please?”

  “No,” Xavier said, finally finding his voice, “she’s infected and she will turn into one of them. She has to stay out there.”

  The look of ruined hope transformed in the man’s eyes into a sudden and foul loathing.

  “Who the fuck are you to say who comes in and who stays out?” his face contorted into a hateful rictus, and he saw the eyes of the two men barring his way turn suddenly wide and white in response. Filled with hope that he could intimidate them, he carried on.

  “She’s fine, now get out of my fucking way or else I swear to fucking God, I wi…”

  The two men facing him flinched backwards as though he was about to vomit something noxious on them. He knew then that it was something else, something awful that had scared them and nothing to do with his anger. He had that sinking feeling that he was being watched, that something was behind him as the hairs on his neck stood up at oblique angles to his skin. Lowly, inexorably, he turned his head to look behind him.

  He stopped when he had turned halfway to his right. He realised, too late, that the weight of the woman was no longer hanging on him and dragging him down. She was stood on her own, all reliance on him gone in an instant. Their eyes met, and despite the poor light and the heavy fog, the last thing he saw before the pain of teeth ripping the flesh from his neck forced his consciousness to flee was the milky white orbs or her eyes.

  Jean-Pierre and Xavier moved as one. Like a choreographed pair of dancers, they both moved forwards diagonally and crossed one another’s paths to swing their weapons in almost perfect unison into the heads of the two unfortunate scavengers standing before them. As they dropped, screams sounded nearby as others witnessed the terror of the undead, stirred from their hibernation by the desperation of living humans for sustenance, reaching their gates.

  As the captain and his first mate swung the gates closed just in time, two last healthy survivors ran in before the rotting smell hit them and the small wave of musty, hungry, zombies flowed out of the fog to reach for them.

  The last man, clutching his shoulder, fell at Xavier’s feet as Jean-Pierre locked off the gate and immediately reversed the heavy spike he carried to start puncturing skulls and crushing the cruel metal tip through eye sockets. The gate flexed worryingly, bending inwards under the weight of a concerted attack, the likes of which they hadn’t suffered before as they had always kept a low profile. Xavier stood, grabbed a handful of the man’s jacket and hauled him bodily to his feet with a strength that his thin frame didn’t imply.

  “Hey,” he said to the man as he turned to leave. The nervous eyes rounded on his, almost pleadingly, until he saw Xavier pointing to the bag of food he was carrying and directing him to leave it with the rest.

  ~

  The panic subsided after an hour. The death toll was taken, and they believed that they had lost four from the names of people who were unaccounted for. Two of those were put down directly outside the gates and were visible, but the two others seemed not to have made it back at all. The food haul, however, was hardly worth it. They could expect to survive for maybe a week on what they had brought back, and that was only if it could be rationed out and protected. Without any real weapons there was no hope of maintaining order through force, and Xavier knew it was only a matter of time before they saw a repeat of the events which had led to their poorly planned shopping run.

  He had recruited Jean-Pierre, who had agreed unquestioningly as was his way with the captain he had known and sailed with for years, and two others. One was from his crew, a squat and unsmiling engineer known amongst the crew as Jase. Xavier didn’t know if his real name was Jason or whether it was a nickname he didn’t understand, but he filed that away with the whole raft of other shit he didn’t need to know. He was completely taken aback by one of the other volunteers as one of ‘the others’ as he thought of them came up with the idea and wouldn’t take no for an answer when she demanded to come with them. Philippa McAndrew was short and small, what some men would call petite but Jean-Pierre, who preferred his women big, said that she had the body of a young boy. That put Xavier off looking at her, given the unfortunate connotations of what JP had said, but there was no denying the fire in her. She had a broad accent, which to those who had never spent much time on the far side of the Atlantic would simply fall under the category of ‘American’.

  Her idea was for a small group, say no more than four, to take one of the many smaller boats from the dock to sail up or down from the city keeping close to land and hence staying well and truly off the radar of whatever warships patrolled the stretch of water between the mainland and Ireland. A small group would also allow them to keep a low profile and not attract any of the things out there, and that way they could bring back food without causing a big commotion like they had earlier.

  Xavier tried to let the implied criticisms ride, but her words put him in a dark mood.

  “I don’t know how you do things in America,” he said, “but over here it’s not polite t…”

  “Canada,” she said flatly, cutting him off.

  “Eh?”

  “I’m from Canada, not America, but please, you were saying?”

  Xavier felt all fight evaporate from him in annoyance as he realised he had nothing to say in the first place. He diverted the conversation with practicalities.

  “You got a weapon?” he asked her.

  “I’ll find something,” she said, “when do we go?”

  Xavier looked at Jean-Pierre.

  “As soon as you’ve got a weapon,” he told her.

  ~

  The small white fishing boat chugged lazily out of the docks and turned south to skim along the dark waters of the River Mersey in search of food.

  Back at the port, in the bowels of The Maggie, where the survivors all huddled for warmth and companionship to stave off the fear and the cold, one man was absent from the group. He had taken himself away, as the noises he was making were threatening to draw attention to him He gasped and moaned as he burned up from the inside with a fever the likes of which he had never known or even thought possible. He rocked in the corner of the bathroom, hidden behind the dirty shower curtain as if believing the filthy plastic sheet could block out the world and keep him from being discovered. The only lighting there came from the weak glow of an emergency bulb, but with eyes accustomed to t
he dark it was enough to see in at least some detail. Slowly, stifling the sobs as he inched the material up his arm, he exposed the bite mark on his wrist. It was swollen, angry, and in place of what he would expect to be red flesh there was black. Or at least such a dark purple that it seemed black in the low light. He knew he had been infected, but the fear of receiving an axe to the head was somehow more terrifying to him than dying a slow and painful death through the fever which tortured his body. He was too frightened, too fevered, to know what would happen when he finally succumbed to the sickness, and he couldn’t help himself. He closed his eyes, resting the burning skin of his face against the cool tiles of the shower cubicle, and he fell asleep.

  He awoke sometime in the dead of the night, in as much as his body began to move when what had made him him had fled; chased away by the temperature soaring in his brain and killing off every conscious part of the man who had once inhabited the body. He stood, seemingly full of power and rage as pain and hunger no longer affected him as it once had. He staggered from the shower cubicle as the plastic sheet slithered over his face until gravity pulled it down behind him, then his head snapped to the right in response to a sound; a single cough, low and soft, but the unmistakable sound of something living nearby. He sniffed the air, an animalistic and predatory gesture which sparked him onwards towards the narrow cots set up all along the section of the large ship. He found the first beating heart, the first hot skin to meet his teeth, sleeping in an alcove near the toilet block. Only a choking, gurgling sound came from the person as they gasped without vocal chords or the supply of blood to the brain. The hot, sticky fluid fountained upwards so hard that the flow atomised on the metal roof above their makeshift bed, and sent a fine red mist to drift down over them. The first man chewed on the mouthful of crunchy sinew and stringy meat for a while, until something made it stop and regard its victim. The milky, blind eyes found themselves mirrored by a similar stare, and slowly the first man opened his mouth to allow the chewed flesh and pipes to drop out of his foul maw. The second man rose, walking off in a direction for no known reason and not bothering to check if the first man had followed him. He had in fact followed, solely because the movement and noise attracted it to the behaviour of its victim, which now somehow led the way for him. They killed as a pair, chewing great lumps from men and women indiscriminately until a horrified scream sounded the alarm. By the time they had been discovered there were five of them animated, all following the second one of them to have been turned, and as the main sleeping area awoke to the terror of shouts and screams, they all tried at once to get through the single door leading away from the threat.

  New sounds answered those screams, as the unholy shrieks of all but one of the newly turned beasts sounded horribly loud in the metal confines of the ship’s belly. What followed was a bloodbath, where the only escape to be had was either over the side of the ship into the icy blackness below, or else out of the docks and into the foggy city where death would just take a little longer to find them.

  Chapter 18

  Nevin drove slowly, keeping the revs of the Ferret low and thereby reducing the chances of them being detected. They didn’t need to maintain visual contact with them, as the tracks they left in the snow were like a shining beacon that just cried out to be followed. Those tracks eventually stopped at a barricade in a country road between two large properties on the edge of a small village. They left their vehicle far away from the village and went back on foot, both carrying their weapons, to spy on the barricade.

  Voices reached them, drifting back on the wind, and not raised carelessly as they would be if amateurs resided there. The height of the barricade meant that they could see nothing, and Nevin turned to Michaels and indicated with hand signals that he was going to skirt around the village. He added a gesture to tell Michaels to stay where he was, but the raised eyebrow made it clear he had overstepped the mark. Nevin said nothing more, only went and wished that he could take the keys to his Ferret, when like all military vehicles, the damned thing started on a switch and couldn’t be overridden.

  He went slowly, hugging the ground low and keeping his eyes and ears alive to the risk of discovery. He went to the left, to the lower ground, and tracked a small brook which bubbled and raged in its own tiny way, with the additional water flowing in between the rocks and chunks of ice. He stopped, finding the smallest of gaps to peer through in the prickly hedge running beside the stream, when he saw something that he didn’t expect if the people inside were tactically minded. In the gloomy air outside, the shining beacon of artificial light coming from the wide windows and double doors of the kitchen shone like a beacon, even though the sun had yet to start its decline with any purpose.

  The light didn’t surprise him, but what did take his breath away and threaten to rob him of all stealth and sense was the shape he saw in the kitchen.

  It, he, was unmistakable. The size of him. The sheer presence, despite having clearly lived in the wild for weeks or more, given the beard he now sported. The cut of his large shoulders and the disapproving, threatening cut of his brow.

  Johnson. Squadron Sergeant Major Dean Fucking Johnson.

  The man had terrorised him. Hit him, on more than one occasion, and never missed an opportunity to humiliate or punish him. He was the reason that Nevin had escaped the bounds of the army, had abandoned his mates – or at least the men who should have considered him as a mate – to death and fear when he had ensured his own safety.

  If he’s here, Nevin thought to himself, then where is the rest of the squadron?

  His logical mind told him that half, or maybe a third, of the squadron was destroyed when he had got clean away, but then he recalled that Mister Johnson had never made it back. He had been stranded on the island or, if the helicopter had even made it there to lift them out, he was lost somewhere, along with a load of the marines.

  Nevin settled in to watch. He saw the owner of the blonde hair they had both seen in the truck cab, and he smiled evilly at her uncommon looks. She was no beauty, not in his opinion anyway, but she had a look that was different. He saw another woman, one that he had recognised from the island, as well as the short sergeant of marines and another bearded man he didn’t recognise.

  That’s four, Nevin thought, and none of them is from the squadron.

  He assured himself that Johnson was stranded, cut off from the main group, if they even still lived, and had met up with others. They must have fortified their little village and thought themselves safe, but he guessed that they hadn’t counted on having to defend themselves against an enemy with heavy machine guns. He slithered back to Michaels, finding him gone from where he had left him, and so he jogged back awkwardly on the frozen ground to find him lounging on the angled hull of the Ferret with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, as he had his hands stuffed deep in his pockets and his collar turned up against the icy breeze.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t fucking believe it,” Nevin answered in an excited whisper, “It’s bloody Johnson!”

  “Who?”

  “Johnson!”

  “Hang on,” Michaels said as the penny dropped, “Johnson, Johnson? The SSM?”

  “Yeah, and it looks like there’s only a few of them there with all the food in that truck they found.”

  Evil mirrored evil as their eyes met, both of them feeling an air of excitement at taking from others, especially others who had ruled their lives with strict discipline.

  “How many is a few?” he asked.

  ~

  “Shh,” Astrid Larsen said abruptly as she held up a finger, “did you hear that? The engine sounds?”

  “I heard nothing,” Enfield said. From anyone else the speed of his answer might have sounded dismissive, but she knew him well enough to know that he was always tuned in to his senses. She relaxed, satisfied that she had imagined the sound of revs picking up before dropping into a higher gear.

  They carried on unloading the truck, carrying larg
e sacks of dried pasta, wearing smiles that only the promise of a full belly could warrant. There was rice and flour too, as well as huge catering tins of baked beans and mushy peas. It wasn’t going to be winning any awards for style and presentation, but their dinner would be packed full of much needed calories.

  They ate together, the mood high despite the bitterly low temperatures outside, and for the first time in as long as they could remember, they were full. It didn’t go to waste, as the leftovers were sealed in Tupperware tubs and placed outside on the patio. One plate with half a portion left untouched wasn’t saved, however, as the scraggy cat had leapt silently onto the worksurface to lap at the sauce until it was noticed. It froze, growling in a way that was almost funny, and shook its head rapidly to kill the pasta shell it held between its teeth.

  They went to bed, with no idea that their safe haven was firmly in the crosshairs of men who had learned to enjoy the pain of others.

  ~

  The mood at the Hilltop was sullen, awkward even, and both Michaels and Nevin received curious looks when they returned.

  “What the fuck is that all about?” Nevin moaned to Michaels, who simply huffed in response to simultaneously indicate that he neither knew nor cared. Orders were given, men and women were armed, and a scrawny goat was taken from the shed it lived in to be dragged reluctantly to the back of a truck by the rope around its neck.

  The fighting men, and a couple of women in the same bracket, left the Hilltop without reassurance or communication with anyone there. A handful of guards, now more worried about their leadership than either the zombies or the men and women under their ‘protection’, shot nervous and sullen looks as they were left alone and outnumbered by the small population who seemed ready to revolt. One guard in particular was wary, the one keeping the door firmly shut on the woman who was locked inside after her attempt at escape. The guard was finding that her evident popularity with the crowd was in directly inverse proportions to his own. The small crowd gathered, saying and doing nothing except watching him and the door he was blocking. He was so intimidated by the passive aggression of these unmoving people that he wanted back-up, and demanded that other guards join him there. Barring the way with their shotguns, almost half of the armed guards left behind ended up huddled in that doorway before long. If any more were required there, it would seriously hamper the security of the main approach as they were already spread thinly enough.