The smell of us? Or have we made more noise than we think we have? Christ, it’s like they have a sixth bloody sense of where we are…
“Get back on the boat,” he hissed.
“Two, maybe three more trips,” Jean-Pierre told him in a voice that was a force of magnitude too loud for Xavier’s comfort. The sweat on his palms doubled before he could answer.
“Sshhh! For fuck’s sake! Get back here.”
The desperation in his tone cut through to Jean-Pierre like a blade. He froze, having the good sense not to drop his burden, but gently bend his legs and sink down to rest it on the ground silently. He paced fast to his right, taking three quiet strides until he blocked the path of their stocky mechanic and whispered in his ear. Jase dropped his burden, less quietly, and fast walked towards the boat as though not looking around would render him invisible to the things that hunted them.
“What the hell?” came a loud and annoyed Canadian voice from the darkness, “Who the heck is leaving their stuff in the dark? I could’a fallen over that, you know? Could’a hurt myself real bad.”
Three desperate voices shushed her in response. Philippa froze, hearing a guttural shriek pierce the air in the near pitch black. Other shrieks joined in, firing off in yelping barks like urban foxes heard in the dead of night, only they all knew there were no foxes there making that noise. The three of them still a way from the short jetty froze, huddling together in fear. From his position higher up, and having been in the darkness longer than the others and still in possession of his full night vision abilities, Mike Xavier watched as the loose line of zombies stopped. The one at the centre of the line, the one he thought looked like a leader as it was the first to move before the others fell in with it, barked another long shriek again and slowly turned its head in a very specific direction.
Directly towards Jason, Jean-Pierre, and Philippa McAndrew.
“Ruuuun,” he bawled, dropping down heavily onto the surface of the wooden platform before he chopped down with the blade of his axe on the mooring line to sever it instantly.
He heard the thudding of feet in the cold, still air, but what separated his own people from the undead was that one set of thumping footfalls came with the rasping of desperate and terrified breathing whereas the other did not. The living ran towards him just as fast as the dead did, and it was a straight race as to who would arrive first.
He fired up the engine, revving it into life and not caring who or what heard any more because they’d already been discovered, and were already being hunted by a pack of them.
Two thuds sounded impossibly loud on their ungainly and borderline overloaded boat, followed by a third who shouted, “Go, go!” as he sailed through the air to almost collide with Xavier at the controls.
They pushed off, accelerating to loop out away from the muddy shoreline and into the deeper water of the channel. As he pulled away, Xavier dared risk a look back as splash after splash sounded over the roar of the tiny engine and he looked to see the vague hints of human shapes dropping off the jetty towards them. The animated dead bodies sank, lacking the buoyancy and speed of movement to swim, but one remained standing resolute on the jetty. It was so calm, its gaze so intent and almost knowing, that Mike throttled back to look at it.
He knew from seeing their eyes up close that there was no way it could see him, no way those milky eyes could focus at distance in the dark and find him, yet the thing seemed to be staring directly through his soul. With a long, hissing shriek it turned away, and all of the others who hadn’t fallen into the freezing water turned to follow him a second later.
Silence hung on their small, stolen boat as none of them wanted to be the first to speak. None of them wanted to ask how the shuffling blind things had found them, how they had screamed into the air and somehow known precisely where they were. None of them wanted to ask why they had seemed to be following the orders of one of them, for fear of sounding insane, but all of them were thinking it.
On the plus side, they had recovered more food in the few hours they had been away than the entire failed foray into the city had yielded in its entirety. Mike was happy with that, as food was the great leveller when it came to dealing with hungry, scared people. So, as they settled in for their slow return journey north towards the mouth of the estuary by the docks housing their beloved Maggie, he concentrated on the rolling blackness of the water and tried to block out the thoughts that threatened to overcome him with dread and desperation.
The sun was beginning to rise as they returned, casting a ghostly ethereal glow on the far side of his ship’s huge profile. The mist hung in great swirls, occasionally obscuring the skyline of the city behind the docks. One swirl of chilly white cloud parted ahead of them, and a gasp from the bow of their small craft made Xavier throttle back to nothing to investigate. He dashed forwards to see Philippa, one hand clasped to her mouth, pointing to the water ahead.
A body, face down in the classic dead man’s float, bobbed in the swell ahead. The jacket it wore was bloated with trapped air, but the immobility and the deathly stillness of the body made it clear that it had been in the cold water for too long to waste their efforts by getting whoever it was out. They exchanged looks in the gloom of the pre-dawn, eyes like white beacons in their cold faces, and heads were shaking to indicate the sentiment of being unable to save them.
As the mist swirled and cleared on the approach to the huge vertical wall that was their floating fortress, a shriek erupted from high above them. They all froze, knowing that sound and hearing it on an almost cellular level as every inch of their bodies reacted instinctively in fear. As the adrenaline coursed through them, the sound reverberated around the abandoned docks and gave a chilling doppler effect as the person issuing the shriek plummeted overboard to fly like a house brick straight down.
The noise of the body hitting the water was like an explosion, and the icy water splashing over them took away the breath of the two who were unaccustomed to being assaulted by the cold of the sea. All around them other shrieks pierced the air, and further ahead, more splashes sounded as fountains of white water burst upwards. From those impacts in the water, nothing surfaced. No bodies broke the surface to gasp in huge lungfuls of precious, life-giving air.
Without warning or explanation Xavier gunned the engine of their small, overloaded craft and took them out to the deeper water where he turned the boat in a wide U shape. He killed the revs again, all four of them standing and holding on to look back at the docks as the sun broke rank to peer over the top of the ship.
All of them were there. Even from the distance they were at, Mike and Jean-Pierre could recognise some of their crew, their friends, from the shapes of their bodies. But not from how they moved, because their movements were jerky and spasmodic as though they were being propelled by electrical impulses controlled by unpractised hands.
“They aren’t like the ones in the city,” Jean-Pierre said slowly.
“No,” Philippa answered, surprising Xavier who hadn’t even known she had gone on the failed expedition, “these are… newer somehow.”
“They’re not frozen up yet,” Mike answered without emotion, “not like the older ones. I bet they’re still warm.”
His revelation quieted them all down to watch in near stunned silence as the people they had shared their space with for months, the people they had spoken to that same day, were gone. They weren’t themselves any more. They were dead, but still there. Present but vacant. Moving but no longer alive. They stared for a long time, even past the time when some of their deathly pale former friends had stopped making the hideous screaming noise and scanning around for them. Long past when they had not thrown themselves overboard but simply walked off the edge of the tall deck to try and get to them. They drifted away, all but two who stared directly at them with their heads cocked slightly to one side as a dog would when waiting for a tasty morsel.
“We need to go,” Philippa said, snapping them all out of their stunned reverie, “we need to find somew
here to hold up.”
“What about The Maggie?” Jean-Pierre asked Xavier, turning to speak to him alone as he stared hard into the eyes of his captain.
“She’s lost, JP,” he said flatly, “and we can’t keep her afloat with just the four of us anyways.”
Jean-Pierre accepted the sad fate and loss of his home in silence. Xavier said nothing, simply turned their nose around to face back down the river and opened the throttle enough to get them moving gently and not generate a loud noise for the dead to follow.
They headed inland, away from the dangers of the sea and the warships that lurked off shore. Away from the big container ship and everything they owned. Away towards uncertainty. Away towards risk and adversity, with only the food they had found, the clothes on their backs and the makeshift weapons they clutched in cold, tired hands.
Chapter 23
Charlie Daniels had half a dozen soldiers left with him, and although only a corporal he was the ranking man remaining at the big house. He did what he could, setting out his stall to the thirty people left there and asking them all to do their part to make it work. Large parts of the house were shut off, it being pointless to keep them open just to allow the draught to permeate the rest of the house. They contracted to the rooms nearest the kitchen, not even bothering with the second floor of the house any longer. The small amount of livestock they had left was housed in the wide inner courtyard which was destined to become a vegetable garden as soon as the weather thawed. The nearby farm still had to be visited when the fresh vegetables were needed, but essentially with fewer than a third of their number remaining, life was significantly easier, especially as their stores would stretch to fulfil their requirements for winter, and then some.
The place had taken on an almost eerie feel, like a ghost ship or a deserted town, and no sooner had the helicopter taken off in a swirling maelstrom of whipped-up snow and the others left by vehicle, than the power struggle began.
“We need one person on watch each night,” he said, “but everyone else needs to know what to do if the alarm is raised. In the daytimes we need to keep on top of the food and the firewood, but also we need to keep going out to look for other people who might have survived the wint…”
“Who died and left you in charge?” asked a whining yet deep voice. With such a small group remaining, the speaker couldn’t hide, but it was the same vocal man who had tried and failed to upstage the captain when he spoke to them. It was the same man who seemed to be at the heart of every shred of disharmony, every hint of discord, and Daniels knew that he had to be dealt with before he made a play for control that he likely couldn’t handle. He had to nip this in the bud, but without using force. He had to show that he was a better candidate for leadership than the budding communist in their midst.
“Nobody died,” Daniels answered as though the question was a genuine one, “not recently, at least. What would you suggest we do?”
All eyes turned to the man, Gordon, who for a man who liked to use his above average height to intimidate people, seemed to visibly shrink a couple of sizes. Daniels executed it perfectly, as the onus was on the man for solutions instead of problems.
He had clearly stepped outside of his comfort zone. The silence was deafening, and it seemed to oppress him as though an entire football stadium had suddenly shut up just to hear the empty words he yelled at the players.
“Well, I…” Gordon said, realising that his only skill for public oration was to point out the flaws in other people’s plans and not come up with any of his own, “I think we should… well, we should…”
“Exactly,” Daniels said cutting him off, “that’s a great idea. So,” he said addressing them all again, “as my pal here has pointed out, we need to stay warm, stay fed and stay ready to defend ourselves. Everyone okay with that?”
They were. One of the civilians who stayed behind, unsurprisingly a farmer as they existed in a huge swathe of rich farmland, had offered to take the lead with the horticultural matters. Another had offered the services of him and his wife to look after the small amount of livestock they had, and both of these offers were well received. The wives, falling into the status quo of gender stereotypes, took up residence in the kitchen where the warm hearth tended by Denise Maxwell and her followers was kept alive.
Daniels wished he had managed to keep her, along with her husband of course, but he knew that his choice to stay behind in the hope that the Squadron Sergeant Major was still out there somewhere would be a lonely one.
It really was easier with fewer people there, and if anything, the house was too big for their needs. Thoughts of moving elsewhere were abandoned as pointless, and there were so many plans to make and consider that his head was spinning. He set the guard for the night, having walked the defences out in front of the house for nothing much more than something to do, and he went to spend his evening sitting in the only environment he really felt comfortable in.
He climbed inside the Sultan, left parked in the expanse of the inner courtyard half transformed into their vegetable garden, settled into the uncomfortable canvas seat, careful not to spill the cocoa in his tin mug, and twiddled with the dials to listen in on different channels as though the repetition of old habits could bring him comfort.
~
“Charlie?” a voice shouted, startling him awake inside the chilly metal coffin. He had fallen asleep in there, kept warm by the auxiliary heater despite the uncomfortable seat, which spoke of how exhausted both physically and emotionally he was.
“In here,” he yelled, looking up at the closed hatch and mentally tutting at himself that the sound wouldn’t carry well. He stood and opened it, popping his head out and repeating his words. The chill morning air hit him hard after a night spent slightly warmer than was comfortable.
“Incoming,” the excited young trooper shouted, turning and running for the house as soon as he had passed his message. Daniels flew from the hatch of the Sultan like a grenade had just been dropped inside. So many thoughts and questions came to him – how many, what direction, how far away – but with nobody there to ask he just gripped his Sterling submachine gun and sprinted on stiff legs for the door. He burst through the house, other men throwing on heavy coats and smocks with weapons in hand ranging from their own automatic guns to shotguns used for hunting, and they jostled for position to get outside.
“Contact ahead,” shouted a trooper looking through binoculars, “on the road.”
“How many?” Daniels asked, the first question firing off from a list that had grown since he first heard the news.
“One,” came the reply, “looks like… like a bloody Montego!”
“A what?” Daniels asked, his slightly muddled brain trying to figure out how the Screechers had got their hands on the off-beige car he could now see approaching them.
“It’s weaving a bit,” the report carried on, “two inside from what I can see…”
“Stand to, stand to!” Daniels yelled, scattering the few trained men he had into defensive positions and confusing the civilians holding their shotguns until they hesitantly followed the soldiers and took up defensive positions. They waited, peering over the sights of their weapons at the car meandering its way towards them. It came on slowly, uncertainly and with a high-pitched sound of a revving engine in need of a higher gear. Daniels, amateur mechanic as everyone in the squadron had to be, guessed that it was probably a clutch synchromesh issue, and the driver had managed to get the car moving in gear and didn’t want to jeopardise their forward momentum by trying to be clever and selecting third when second kept them moving.
The car came to an abrupt stop, bumping nose first into a fence post and knocking it down before the driver overcorrected with an exaggerated snatch at the wheel to pitch them off the road into the shallower part of a ditch. Daniels stood, already running to them to offer help, as he shouted a warning to the others to keep their eyes open for bites.
When he yanked open the rear door behind the passenger, he
froze. Slumped forwards, a mess of filthy camouflage uniform and assorted weapons, were two marines bleeding from half a dozen injuries.
“Sar'nt Hampton?” Daniels asked with disbelief, “what the bloody hell have you been up to?”
“Get him out,” Bill Hampton said as he fluttered a weak hand at the unconscious passenger. His eyes were rolling back in his head, a mixture of concussion and exhaustion combining to rob him of his consciousness. Daniels went to the far side of the vehicle and pulled open the dented door to reach in and retrieve the marine sniper they had thought lost to them, along with others. As he reached in, a bolt of fur shot past so quickly that he couldn’t tell if it was brown or black or grey. Dismissing their third feline passenger for the time being and knowing that it would gnaw at him later, he dragged the bleeding Royal Marine out and yelled for others to help him. They were both carried, hands under armpits and gloves gripping trouser legs above their boots, into the house ahead of Daniels who was left to retrieve the weapons from the car. A curious noise and a sensation not felt for many months nagged at his ankles, and looking down he saw the exposed back end of a cat that had its tail held high like a vehicle antenna. It snaked between his legs, coursing between them in an endless figure of eight like the symbol for infinity, and the rattling purr drifted up to him.
“Alright,” he told it, “there’s food inside.”
As though understanding him, or at least acknowledging that he had noticed it, the cat abandoned its racetrack around the man’s ankles and trotted away after the two men being hoisted up and carried.
~
The men were uninfected, which had been the primary concern especially for the seemingly negative contingent of the civilian population, and their injuries had been treated as well as they could manage. Mostly they were suffering from exhaustion and exposure, so getting them clean and warm was the best way to deal with them. Both men slept on mattresses dragged in front of a fire kept well stocked with the split logs of the ash tree in what had been the captain’s office. They slept through the following day until Hampton woke first and sat up groggily to try and clear his head. A large, grazed lump was raised up on the back of his skull and had clearly affected his ability to balance.
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 19
