Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity

by Devon C. Ford

  Plans were drawn up, supplies were sorted and stockpiled and the three vehicles they planned to use as their convoy were meticulously prepared and repaired by cannibalising whatever they had left. They were mindful not to leave those staying behind without the use of heavy guns, and to that end they left a handful of working squadron wagons arrayed where their guns could do the most damage to any assault by the dead or the living alike. The decision as to whom to send ahead in the helicopter, which they had checked and double checked could only manage one trip, was a difficult one.

  The person they should send in charge of this detachment of the civilians should be sensible and senior enough as to have their report taken seriously, but should ideally not be a man who was irreplaceable on what would very likely be an arduous and dangerous journey. Palmer had thought to send Maxwell, his interim Sergeant Major, but the man was simply too vital to the running of things to let go.

  He elected eventually to send the newly-minted Sergeant Ashdown, injured horribly so long ago by the gruesome animated remains of a Royal Military Policeman, and promoted to replace Maxwell as the nominal head of Assault Troop. He travelled with his family, all of them intertwined with Maxwell’s relations, and his presence satisfied Palmer that the word of the RAF crew would be supported by a sergeant. He sent three other soldiers on the helicopter, none of them carrying more than a small bag as the weight of luggage would put lives in danger in many ways, and those men were carrying some form of illness or injury that would hamper their performance on the hundreds of miles of unknown road they would likely be fighting along.

  The two newest arrivals, shrouded in tragedy, had both flatly refused to come. Both held on to the desperate belief that their loved ones were still alive, and both knew that they wouldn’t find their way to the Highlands of Scotland and across a stretch of sea to find safety, so they stayed.

  Arrayed the next morning before the ornate walls of the house, and seeming at odds with the building, but at home with the barbed wire and trenches, the large Bedford truck and two Fox wagons, along with the dirty Land Cruiser adopted by the SAS team, set off without fanfare or ceremony, heading north towards uncertainty. The helicopter, warmed and checked thoroughly after weeks of frozen inactivity, lifted off and thrummed sedately away into the gloomy winter sky.

  Palmer, unfamiliar with the Fox but picking up the commander’s seat and the controls with an ease which spoke highly of his intellect, paused before they rolled out. He looked down to the man who was staying, but who he had hoped would come. The man’s loyalties ran too deep for him to abandon hope of his real boss returning.

  “Corporal Daniels,” Palmer said as he waved him over, “I don’t suppose I can facilitate an eleventh-hour deal and convince you to join us?”

  “’Fraid not, Sir,” he said with a smile, “I’ll stay and mind the radio. Mister Johnson will pop up again when the weather breaks, I’m sure of it.”

  “I pray for all our sakes, Corporal, that you are right.” He leaned down, fixing the man with direct eye contact and held out a gloveless hand. Daniels climbed up on the hull of the angular wagon, removed his own woolly mitten, and took the hand in a firm grip, shaking it as the cold flesh of both men’s hands warmed slightly as though the skin liked company.

  “Drive safe, boss,” he told him.

  “You also,” Palmer replied, “I’ll make contact when I can, see if we can’t reconnect in summer.”

  Daniels nodded, sure that he wouldn’t see any of the men again but feeling that he had done the right thing by staying. Someone had to keep the pilot light on for the SSM, because Daniels knew the man well enough that even if he was dead, properly dead and not one of the Screechers, then he would have spent the last moments of his life doing something worthwhile. He knew if he was still alive then he would find him, eventually, and if he was one of those things? Well if he was, then corporal Charlie Daniels would do for him personally, then follow the boys to Scotland.

  On his own if he had to.

  Chapter 21

  Nevin came to, his head unbelievably thick and groggy as he struggled to recall how he had come to be where he was. To answer that conundrum, he thought, he had to first figure out where that was in relation to where he last remembered being, and when he followed that memory-string back to the source, he recalled with horrifying clarity what had happened. They had seized him, stripped him of his gun and dragged him to the cliffs. Without mercy, much the same way that he treated people, they had thrown him off the cliff into the evening sky where he didn’t so much fall as tumble, end over agonising end, until his broken body came to rest on a soft, mossy outcrop and his skull thumped hard into the natural green rug until the resistance of the rock underneath fought back and knocked him out cold.

  He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, much as the way these things worked when hit very hard in the head. But his clouded mind reasoned that it hadn’t grown fully dark yet, and logic dictated that given the freezing temperatures he was highly unlikely to have been unconscious all night. He reckoned he would have died of exposure if that had been the case.

  As his senses slowly returned to him, he blinked his eyes to better focus on what he could see around him. A rhythmic huffing sound came from nearby, but he didn’t understand what could make such a noise, and besides, the sight his eyes drank in shut off all concentration to anything else. He had lifted his head, propping himself up on one elbow to stare down the length of his body at where his legs had once been. He knew what he saw couldn’t be his legs because, for one, he knew that if they were, then the sickening sight of the broken bones protruding through the pale, grey flesh and the dirty material of the trousers would prompt at least some feeling of pain. He felt nothing, and tried to move the broken leg he could see. It didn’t budge, so he tried harder, grunting as he forced all of his effort into making the feet twitch, move, or do anything in response to his commands. He visually traced the feet and legs back to his own waist, patting his body as he went upwards until finally he was rewarded with the sensation of being touched at his midriff. He froze, patting downwards again and feeling nothing before moving his hands back up until he could feel his own touch. His hands moved faster, whipping up into a desperate frenzy as he sucked in a deep breath and began to scream in fear and horror and hope that the paralysis was something his brain had invented, or that he was still unconscious, but those thoughts were pushed aside as another feeling came to him.

  Nails raked down his scalp from behind, making him squeal and move awkwardly as his top half dragged the numb, dead lower half with it. He turned to see, to smell, the rotten waste of what had once been a person wriggling towards him on the same rocky outcrop above the waves below. He shrieked, the decomposed beast shrieked back, sounding a hollow hiss in place of the characteristic scream, and the two inched closer to one another as the battered, limbless, ruined corpse shuffled inexorably closer to the paralysed man who could do nothing to defend himself but scream louder. Nevin tried to escape, tried to drag his half-useless body over the rocky green of the outcrop and drag himself clear of the rotten monstrosity that was thrashing slowly with one arm and no legs from the knees down. It must have been there for a while, because it was barely identifiable as a person other than by shape.

  Nevin’s numb hands slipped on the soggy, moss-covered rock, and his face hit the ground with no body strength to support him. As he hit, the cracked stumps of blackened teeth reached forwards and connected with the skin beside his right eyebrow. It clamped down, ripping and tearing as the sudden heat of his blood threatened to cook his face in contrast to the frigid air whipping around them. He howled in pain and fear as the thing craned its neck forward to chomp on his face again. He desperately tried to claw his own way to the ledge and pour himself over to dash his own body on the rocks beneath. He failed, but he did succeed in dislodging his attacker. It fell off the ledge, coming to rest only a foot below on another rock, but that distance was an insurmountable peak to the thing
as it could barely locomote any more. Sudden heat, a burning intensity from within him, replaced the bracing cold he could feel. He knew the wind was still blowing hard against his exposed skin, but he no longer felt the temperature of it.

  He dragged himself into a position half against the rock face, looking out over the gathering gloom and dark clouds over the English Channel. Hot blood ran down his face, and he suffered in fiery agony as the infection tore through his ruined body to finish him slowly.

  As the strength fled from what was left of his body in the form of his hot blood that let off small clouds of steam as it spilled, he lapsed again into blackness as, below him, the rotten thing stopped chewing, letting the strip of flesh pulled from his face fall away, and lapsed back into its icy hibernation.

  Nevin, or at least the broken thing that used to be Nevin, remained on that cliff ledge for untold months until he eventually rotted away to nothing. The last thing to die, the infected core of his brainstem, lay dormant as the body that carried it was useless. Nevin never took another life, never had the chance to spread fear and infection as he had when he was counted among the living, and he was forced to watch the coming and going of the tide on an island he no longer had the capacity to understand.

  ~

  Above him, on the day after he had been rejected from the human race for non-compliance, a pair of eyes looked down on his immobile body from a deeply lined face. The face was lined with age, but mostly with worry and stress after a lifetime spent organising the activities of others. Those eyes had driven through appalling weather conditions, nursing the ungainly box truck at often very low speeds until they had seen the tell-tale column of smoke coming from a building high on a hilltop. They had reached it eventually, spending three long hours watching it for signs of hostility before driving up the steep approach road. When the occupants of that hilltop bastion took in their weapons and remains of uniform, they had pointed their shotguns and rifles at them.

  Johnson and Bufford, the only ones visible as the others were in the breezy back of the truck, did little to assuage their fears that they weren’t hostile, but when the two women and the two children climbed down from the back, suddenly the atmosphere changed for the better. The woman who seemed to be in charge of them bustled to the front and brought them inside to feed them, providing hot drinks almost constantly and marvelling at the bearded man’s capacity to guzzle down coffee, and she spoke to them about what had happened to bring their two groups together. It soon became clear that people from this camp had attacked them, but as three of the exhausted newcomers snatched up their weapons, seemingly expecting to fight again, she had assured them that the time of their existence when they hurt other people was well and truly over.

  “Those men are gone now,” she assured them, “one never came back and the other we dealt with ourselves.”

  That was when they had been shown the carnage of blood and gore inside the Ferret. That was when Johnson had been shown the place where the man called Nevin had been tossed off the cliff as a definitive sign that he was unwelcome.

  The woman, Pauline, was wary of scaring the two children but was very attentive to them and their needs. She asked them their names, and the young boy answered for them.

  “She doesn’t talk much,” he explained with a sad, depreciating smile, “not since her mum got taken away by bad men.”

  Something about what he said struck a chord cold in Pauline’s heart, and her gasp as her hand fluttered at her mouth made everyone sit up and take notice.

  “What is your mummy’s name?” she said in a voice affected solely for addressing a frightened young girl.

  Amber looked at her, then at Peter, then back the woman who asked the obviously silly question. She leaned in and whispered to Peter, the only way she would still communicate with anyone other than him, by using the older boy as a medium. He smiled, looked back at Pauline and answered for Amber.

  “She said she’s called ‘Mummy’…”

  Pauline smiled despite her frustration and tried another way.

  “Do people call her Ellie?”

  The mention of the name flashed across Amber’s eyes like electricity, and she began to look around as her young brain associated knowledge of her mother to the possibility of her being there. She didn’t see her, obviously, but her wide eyes turned back to Pauline and pleaded for her to tell her where her mother was. The older woman’s eyes fell, crushing her with the knowledge that she would have to be the bearer of bad news and break the girl’s heart all over again.

  “I’m really sorry… Amber,” she said warily, reaching out for the girl’s hand and trying not to take offense when she snatched it away. “She was here until two days ago, but we tried to run away from the bad people who were here before. They caught me and brought me back, but Ellie… but your mum she…” Pauline cuffed away the tears rolling down her cheeks as she looked into the bright, wide eyes of the little girl who mirrored her tears in utter silence.

  “Your mum wasn’t caught, so she must have got away with another little girl called Jessica.”

  At the mention of the other name, the little boy started. His gasp was exaggerated and drawn out, becoming a whining noise which morphed into words seamlessly as he spoke in rapid excitement.

  “Jessica? How old is she? What did she look like?”

  Pauline held up both hands to calm the innocent onslaught of his questions before she answered.

  “She’s a teenager,” she told him, “slim and quiet with long, brown hair.”

  “Has she got…” Peter hesitated, embarrassed of the facts behind what he was admitting but knowing that it would solve the confusion unquestioningly, “has she got scars on her…” his voice trailed away again but his fingers mimed slices across his wrist. Pauline’s mouth dropped open, as though the chances of finding one of the missing children she knew about was huge, but both was unbelievable. Her reaction gave flame to the kindling of Peter’s stress and fear and hope and he burst out in tears, falling down to the ground and sobbing as Amber, silent tears still streaming down her cheeks, dropped down behind him to wrap him in a hug that melted the hearts of even the toughest human beings to witness it.

  Johnson coughed, clearing his throat and turning away from the scene as Kimberley met his eyes. She cried, emotions of the past months boiling out of her at the display of innocence and humanity, and she wrapped her arms around his neck where the relief and sadness just flowed. Beside them Astrid wiped her eyes clear of tears as her own, but Bufford remained staunch and silent.

  “I’ve got to find her,” Peter cried, his own upset making Amber cry louder and harder with him. People crowded the children, eager to comfort them and mistaking them for helpless dependants instead of the tough, resourceful survivors they were.

  “We will, Peter,” Johnson told him from behind Kimberley’s embrace, “I promise we will.” He meant it, and eyed the half-covered hull of the Warrior fighting vehicle Michaels had emplaced, and knew just how useful the new technology would be to enable him to make that promise become a reality.

  Chapter 22

  Mike Xavier took over on watch, adjusting the grip on his fire axe as he switched his head from right to left. He could hear his heart beat in his ears, and each breath made him worry that the sound of his rising panic would bring down an unstoppable horde of undead to tear them apart.

  He was a calm leader. He had faced off with corrupt officials in foreign countries, had braved countless weather fronts capable of killing him and his crew, had worked in conditions so treacherous in his rise to captaincy that he would have thought himself better equipped than he was to deal with this unexpected hell. He was learning more about himself, and what he was learning wasn’t filling him with confidence about his abilities.

  He had taken over from the diminutive Canadian woman, Philippa, on guard duty as they ran short shuttle runs to bring back the stocks of food they had found a dozen miles down the river. The thickly populated areas showed few or no
lights, but Xavier’s upbringing on the banks of the Mersey had left him with an almost telepathic intuition about the area. He had directed them to hit the shoreline near to a golf course on the opposite bank and there they had pillaged the store room of an abandoned club house before loading as many crates as they could of food and bottles of drink on board the four electric golf buggies they had borrowed for the task. They drove their supplies down to the river and loaded them on board the small fishing craft before returning twice to take more. It was on that third return trip when they had just got back to the boat and he had taken over sentry duty as two others had done before him, when they came at them from the darkness.

  Emerging in a ghostly formation from the inky black beyond the reach of the weak light still glowing on the jetty they occupied, a dozen undead shuffled on damaged bodies and chilled feet towards them uncertainly. He didn’t know what it was that had attracted them.