Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  If Michaels and Nevin didn’t get back soon, they thought, then they wouldn’t be coming back to the same place they left.

  The uprising was ready to start; all it needed was a spark.

  ~

  The three vehicles ‒ an estate car, a farm pickup and a Ferret scout car with a turret-mounted thirty-calibre heavy machine gun ‒ chugged at a gentle pace through the countryside. They went via a very circuitous route, stopping at every village and town to kick in doors where they could and make enough noise to invite anything preserved inside to shuffle forth into the harsh glare of a snow-covered landscape. The hibernating zombies woke. Whole families, as they once had been, staggered outside on stiff limbs in response to the sounds and smells of fresh, living meat. Each settlement they passed through prompted more followers, and the desperate bleating of the tethered goat attracted them inexorably onwards as the convoy pressed on. They had established a pattern; accelerating as they approached a village, dismount, kick doors in or open them, return to the vehicles and make noise until the leading edge of the herd following them caught up. Rinse and repeat.

  There weren’t many dead preserved inside, and some villages held none at all, but they had amassed enough of an undead infantry division that by the time the Ferret pulled ahead to lead the way to the fortified settlement they wanted to attack, there were close to fifty zombies, all dry and musty in various shapes and sizes and states of undress, following in their wake.

  The goat was never going to be a winner in this scenario, and when the three vehicles pulled off the main road ahead of the small herd and the goat was dragged, pulling and bleating loudly, from the pickup they could see the approaching micro-horde speed up as the smell and sound of the distressed animal reached their senses.

  Nevin didn’t so much volunteer for the job, but he didn’t really object either. To be the one who acted so bravely to take down Mister Bloody Johnson was an accolade he would be happy to live with, after they had broken down their defences and taken what they had.

  He moved slowly, angry at the incredible strength the wiry goat could employ, but when it smelled the rotten flesh behind it there seemed to be no more argument about which direction they should head in. Nevin stooped, scooped the animal up bodily despite the struggling, and dumped it over the vehicle barricade with difficulty. He heard a crunch as the animal landed, unseen on the far side, and instantly the bleating ramped up in volume, intensity and frequency. The thing positively screamed, and Nevin smiled sickeningly as he guessed it must have broken something as it fell to the frozen roadway on the other side.

  Happy with the results, he ducked away to double back to the safety of his armoured vehicle as the zombies shrieked and moaned to fight one another and jostle for the lead position as they zeroed in on the injured goat.

  Game on, he thought to himself.

  ~

  The sound of a baby crying made them all freeze. Wide eyes met others that mirrored their shock and disbelief, and as one they all scrambled for their coats and weapons to pour outside. The sight of a goat, one front leg held off the ground and dangling as the thing bleated constantly in high-pitched protestation at the pain, confused them all.

  “What the…” Hampton began, just as Enfield pushed past him and raised the small rifle to drill a bullet into the goat’s eye socket.

  “…hell?” he finished.

  “Noise like that will attract everything for miles,” Enfield said, “like a bleeding fish flapping in the water, the sharks’ll come.”

  The now dead goat still held everyone’s attention, as the blood poured out in pulsating gouts to soak the snow red. When the sound of the injured animal had echoed away to nothing, another sound, one far more ominous and recognisable, filled the air like a hum.

  Shrieks, far off but still too close, and the moaning, wheezing sounds of air being driven in and out of lungs which no longer seemed to need it appeared to surround them.

  “Bags,” Johnson hissed, “everyone in the catering truck just in case, now!”

  By everyone, he meant Kimberley and the children, as the others were already launching into action. Enfield threw himself up a ladder lashed to the side of a house with a small balcony that offered a commanding view of the road. He hefted the small civilian rifle he had grown so fond of, but still had his beloved Accuracy International sniper rifle on his back, despite the limited number of bullets he had left for it.

  Peter had gone back inside for Amber, smiled at her and helped her sweep up the stuffed lamb and toys into her bag before hurrying her down the stairs to slip her little feet into her wellington boots and wrap the new padded wax jacket around her. He added a scarf and a hat until only her eyes were visible, then bundled her and the bags he carried into the truck.

  She didn’t fall for the false smile and the higher-pitched voice offering her reassurance that everything was alright. She wasn’t stupid. She knew something was very, very wrong. She didn’t even flinch when the sharp snapping cracks of Enfield’s measured shots pierced the air. Peter left her there, returning shortly afterwards wearing more layers and throwing bag after bag into the back of the truck and holding his trusted spike aloft before smiling at her again and disappearing from view. Other sounds rang out, confusing her with what sounded like stones being thrown hard against metal in closely-grouped twos and threes. Amber sighed, pulling the dirty stuffed lamb from her bag and nudging down her scarf, she pressed the worn material to her lips and waited for it to end.

  “Where did this lot come from?” Hampton asked, his own rifle still unfired as he among all of them carried an unsuppressed weapon. The increase in the intensity of the attack made him rectify that as the louder noise of his weapon joined the fray.

  “Fuck knows,” Bufford answered, his voice distorted by his right cheek being pressed hard into the stock of his weapon as he moved and fired, moved and fired, picking off the skulls of the nearest Screechers to prevent them from reaching the barricade.

  A shriek tore the air behind them as a cluster of three or four emaciated monsters had worked their way inside through a weakness they hadn’t known existed. They were at the rear of the truck, reaching inside and snapping their blackened teeth at the warm flesh of the precious cargo. Johnson heard the shriek of the Screechers in attack, turning and raising his weapon just as a hatchet blade swept downwards into one skull, and a two-pronged spike burst from the back of the head of another. Three more attacked over their dying comrades, unthinking and uncaring as to their fate, and as Johnson lined up to riddle their brains with bullets, the huge booming report of a shotgun firing filled the air. One of the heads he was aiming at fell away, half severed by the scattering lead storm, then another popped open like a hard-boiled egg. Johnson bit down his revulsion and drilled a pair of bullets into the remaining zombie. He ran forward, kicking the bodies clear of the open tail section, and glanced inside to see Peter concentrating, with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he forced his shaking fingers to slot new cartridges into the sawn-off shotgun. He locked eyes with Kimberley, her own weapon dripping gore, and he jumped to drag down the roller shutter lower in readiness to leave. They were fighting all around now, and the end was inevitable.

  Johnson, unfamiliar MP5 squeezed tightly into his shoulder, pinged off rounds in ones and twos, depending on how accurate his opening shot had been. He held his head up away from the weapon to view the bigger picture, and he saw it at the same time as Bufford and Astrid. None of them had chance to call it before their sniper shouted down the warning to them from his perch.

  “Too many,” he called out, “fall back.”

  It was the worst news they could receive, and it spelled dread for them. They knew they could never have stood a chance against the kind of hordes they had experienced back when it began, but those mass gatherings, those unexplained events, those undead singularities had all but stopped as soon as the weather had begun to turn towards winter. They had dared to hope that they wouldn’t be forced to
face down another crowd, but none of them was so naïve as to think that they couldn’t one day be surprised by the Screechers. That was why their immediate plan was to bug out, to withdraw, in the opposite direction of the attack if they ever found themselves facing an onslaught like they did now.

  Despite planning for it, expecting it even, the savagery and speed of the wave of dead meat emerging from the countryside took their breath away with how fast things could go from normal to neck deep in shit.

  “Pull back,” Johnson echoed, hearing a rising flurry of muted gunshots as the defenders on the line upped their intensity at the risk of reduced accuracy. It was a vestige of training against an enemy that had a fear of incoming bullets. It was designed to make any attackers put their head down to avoid the incoming rounds and give those defenders precious moments to move. Bufford and Astrid reloaded as they ran, their movements instinctive and well-practised, and they climbed aboard one by one as Johnson started the truck. Hampton paused at the back, looking up at the only man of his unit left alive as far as he knew. Enfield wasn’t shimmying down the ladder to join him. He wasn’t even looking in the direction of the attacking wave of zombies, but instead he was staring aghast behind him and rapidly struggling to slip the strap of his larger rifle free of his shoulder to bring it to bear on the road leading away behind them.

  Hampton followed his gaze, looking up at the small rise in the road behind them questioningly with his breath held. He expected to see the heads of yet more zombies appearing at any point; expected a larger horde to attack them from the rear, but instead he saw the dull green painted metal of a British army military vehicle. His heart soared for the briefest of moments, suddenly happy that the others had found them and rescued them at the best possible moment. He turned to shout to the others that the squadron was there, that they could help them take on the horde, but just as he did the impossibly loud clattering sound of a heavy machine gun erupted from behind him. He followed the flashes of tracer ammunition, which over the short distance it fired made it appear as though laser beams were being shot from the turret of the small tank, and those beams aimed directly up at the small balcony of the house where Enfield had been.

  “Go!” Hampton roared as he hopped down painfully, pulling closed the roller shutter of the rear of the truck as he did, pushing Astrid bodily back inside as she had moved to follow him, before slapping a flat hand twice on the side of the vehicle, “get out of here!”

  In the front seat beside Johnson, Bufford looked wide eyed at the SSM and shook his head. The message was clear; no way could they get out if they stayed to mix it with whatever living enemy now attacked them.

  One word ran through Johnson’s mind: Nevin.

  It could only be him, much the same as the vehicle being used to assault them was the same Ferret they had heard in the town where Enfield had been fired upon. They were stuck. Stuck like rats in a barrel and the lid was closing fast. They had only one option to get away, and that was to force open the barricade in front of them against the tide of Screechers and drive away, leaving their two marines to an unknown fate.

  “Fucking go!” Hampton yelled again, barely audible over the big gun firing on full automatic and disintegrating the house as great chunks of tiled roof and masonry fell away.

  “We can’t leave them,” Johnson said, knowing it was foolish to hesitate or even consider staying to fight alongside them against far superior forces, even if the undead weren’t attacking them at the same time.

  “We have to,” Bufford told him, “you’d do the same.”

  He knew he would. He would sacrifice himself to give the others a chance at escape, a chance to get the kids out to safety no matter how slim their odds of survival. Johnson closed his eyes momentarily, glanced in the driver’s side mirror at the small but devastatingly impervious vehicle behind them, and he let up the clutch to jolt the truck forwards. It bumped into the barricade, into the part left on reasonably preserved rubber instead of flat metal, and he used the torque of the diesel engine to force it clear. Screechers fell under the weight of the rusting, cold metal and the way the car swung outwards cleared a path for their truck to nose its way out of the village and leave behind not only their friends, but all of the hard work and hope and stored supplies they’d been relying on.

  Chapter 19

  Enfield saw the turret swing towards him and, for the second time in this short episode in his life, he found himself the unfortunate focus of attention for the commander and gunner of the Ferret and the current subject of the thirty-cal machine gun’s attention. He hadn’t had a chance to even bring the Accuracy International up to his eye before the huge bullets tore the air towards him. He threw himself backwards, straight through the single pane window of the house with the pretty balcony set at the perfect height to look out over the fields as though there was no village there.

  The concussive ripping booms of the big projectiles hammering past him was deafening, and he could think of nothing other than trying to get clear of the onslaught. He lay on the musty carpet of the bedroom, glass and brick dust falling over him as he closed his mouth and forced his eyes shut. He crawled forwards blindly, trying to put any distance between him and the gun even if it was a few pathetically desperate feet of bedroom floor. He opened his mouth, gasping a breath in and immediately choking it out as the dust stuck to his throat. He coughed it out, sensing a break in the firing by the absence of the waves of pressure as opposed to the lack of noise. As his hearing returned to him, a more familiar sound reached up to his hiding place; the crackle of an SA80 rifle firing bursts of automatic 5.56. Enfield furrowed his dust-covered brow in thought.

  Why would Bill Hampton be firing small arms at a bloody tank? Surely he wouldn’t waste the ammo.

  Another noise pierced his consciousness, this one dialling into his sense to inspire fear at a molecular level. The shriek of the Screechers sensing fresh meat fired a round straight to his fear receptors as it sparked something so primal in him. His fuddled and assaulted brain made the tenuous connections between the gunfire belonging to his sergeant and the attention of the undead bastards drawn to the noise, and all thoughts of the scout car and its evil thirty-cal were forgotten as he forced himself back to his feet to return to the ravaged remains of the once picturesque balcony.

  Only part of the standing area survived, and great chunks of the exterior wall of the house had disappeared. Piles of rubble rested on the frozen ground below, and Enfield regained the cold, clear air of the outside world in time to see the back tyre of the Ferret bounce over a lump of stone with a swathe of off-yellow cladding still attached to it. The cladding crumbled away under the weight of the heavy wheel, but the attention of the gunner had passed him by. The turret swung to the left, the barrel depressed and a long, rippling burst of fire spewed from it as it rolled forwards. The sound of Hampton’s rifle went quiet, stopping at the same time as a yelp of pain and the crumbling rumble of a collapsing building. The Ferret went on, switching its aim to point dead ahead where it fired burst after burst of rounds dead ahead, no doubt to try and bring down the escaping box truck which symbolised the entire reason that he and Hampton had stayed behind in sacrifice; so that they could get away.

  He saw sparks ping off the left side of the scout car as it was stopped, paused in the gap in the barricade as the driver shunted it back and forth to get the correct angle to escape the village enclave. The car stopped as the turret swung to the left in search of a target. Elated that Hampton was still alive enough to shoot at them, Enfield’s sudden happiness was marred with the knowledge that his sergeant was about to be riddled with heavy calibre bullets.

  He blinked his eyes to clear the dust from his vision, shook his head to reset his senses, and pulled the heavy rifle into his shoulder to take aim at the single point of vulnerability for small arms. It was a difficult shot; difficult to the point of impossibility but he wasn’t just anyone with a gun.

  He was an expert. He was the consummate professional, an
d his chosen profession was accuracy. He could put a bullet wherever he wanted, and right then he aimed for the tiny slats of the left side viewing port where the gunner would be looking out of.

  It was desperate, but it was all he could do. He aimed, not having to correct for wind of drop of the bullet but putting the crosshair above his target as he was firing at a tenth of the range that the big rifle was sighted for, and he fired.

  ~

  “Who the fuck is doing that?” Michaels asked over the headset, not expecting Nevin to answer.

  “Doing what?”

  “Some twat’s shooting at us! Left side. Stop a minute…”

  Nevin chuckled nastily and stopped the Ferret as he kept his eyes forward in search of the truck that had disappeared. Most of the zombies they had herded were dead now; crushed by wheels or else thrown down by bullets. They had driven around to the far side of the village to barge their way through the barricade as soon as the attack came from the other side. Nevin was impatient, he wanted to press ahead and chase down the box truck to take whatever was in the back of it. The six others hiding in their cars nearby, ready to move in and take the stockpiles, would stay hunkered down until they had rolled through and dealt with every threat. As much as he wanted to chase down Johnson, who he had guessed was in the truck, he did as he was told and waited for Michaels behind him to spin the barrel of the gun and deal with the idiot who might as well have been throwing rocks at them. The man behind him manning the gun was consumed with a swift victory, distracted by the destruction of their undead conscripts, and he had broken his own cardinal rule.