Now, seeing a younger girl dumped roughly in the room with her, she tended to her as well as she could and waited for her to come around once again.
She awoke an hour later much in the same way. Her hands twitched, and her body jerked as though her consciousness was trapped inside a plastic bag and she fought to punch her way out. When she did, she came awake with an exaggerated gasp and sat bolt upright, only to whine pitifully and sink back down, holding her neck with both hands at the base of her skull. She opened her eyes in response to the voice, unthreatening as it was obviously female, which was trying to calm her again. She cautiously opened one eye, hating the light streaming through the window for burning her retina with its unkind brightness, to see a woman with lighter blonde hair than her own and maybe ten years older. She smiled kindly, weakly as though she was apologising for what had happened to her.
“Careful,” she said as Clare tried to sit up, “go slow, you’ve got a nasty lump on your head.”
She went slowly, raising a hand to her head and the main source of her pain to find what felt like an egg protruding from just behind her right ear. Her stomach went into spasm again, making the other woman step smartly back and snatch up a metal rubbish bin to catch the remaining bile collected in her stomach. Her brain somehow knew that she had already thrown up, but her eyes couldn’t find it.
Perhaps she cleaned it up, Clare thought randomly, just as the jumble of feelings and sensations bubbled to the surface and her heart broke for the third time that day.
“My baby,” she sobbed again, screwing her face up and falling back into despair and tears to complement the agony inside her skull.
The woman soothed her again, trying to find the words to comfort her.
“I know, my lovely,” she said with genuine sadness for the girl’s loss, “we’ve all lost people to them but I ca…”
“She’s not lost,” interrupted the girl with slurred words, “she’s alive. They took me away and…” she broke down again and her sobs intensified, “they left her there. She’s all alone…”
Try as she did, Clare couldn’t help but break down with her and the two women cried together. Resting the girl down on the bed, she stood and began to hammer on the wooden door for attention.
“What do you want?” came an angry response from outside the closed door.
“This woman had a baby with her,” she snapped angrily, “where is she?”
A muttered conversation took place on the other side of the locked door, prompting Clare to bang again.
“She didn’t,” came the answer, “she was on her own.”
“No, she bloody well wasn’t,” Clare snapped back, creating more silence and insistent muttering from beyond.
“Okay,” said a different voice tentatively, “we’ll go back.”
~
The house was much the same as they had left it three hours previously, only this time it had attracted two of the slow-moving ones who were milling about aimlessly inside the low stone wall of the front garden. The crowbar put an end to one as the other was enticed towards the younger man, who had crudely taped a straight-bladed carving knife to a broom handle. The knife punctured the face dead centre, travelling slightly upwards through the sinus cavity to pierce the brain, and the thing’s lights went out.
Both men had enjoyed the killings, but both had distinctly not enjoyed the roasting they had received from Michaels; the man who had bestowed on them the responsibility of going back to find the girl they had apparently left behind through incompetence.
They searched the house again, finding it precisely how they had left it, with just one exception.
The addition of another dead body laid out flat like a starfish on the kitchen floor.
“I didn’t do that,” said Ian from behind his rough beard to the younger and far less intelligent Carl. Michaels called them Thing One and Thing Two, which Ian had explained to Carl had originated from a children’s book. But they still used their real names, despite others mimicking their frightening leader.
“Who did then?” Carl asked, frightened.
“Don’t bloody know, do I?” Ian snarled back at him, “But it’s a good bet whoever it was took the baby we're supposed to be looking for, so start searching, idiot.”
Carl searched, as did Ian. They found nothing else amiss, other than the body with its punctured brain and ruined left eyeball. The back door had been ajar when they’d entered, and that was closed to keep the bad things out, but the destroyed front door would not close. Their arrival had prompted yet more interest, and they were forced to flee back to the safety of their hilltop refuge to report the news of their failure.
~
Peter was forced to change his usual nocturnal routine after the interruption of the bearded man and his crowbar. The shock of finding the little girl still hadn’t faded, and their awkward flight over fields from the back of the house was far more difficult than it should have been, because the girl’s legs were much shorter than his own. If he’d been a grown up, he would have simply scooped her up in his arms and carried her. He was sure it had been Leonardo who’d scooped April up like that in a TV programme he’d very occasionally managed to see if his mother was comatose. He loved the Ninja Turtles, when he got away with watching it. The one time he tried picking this girl up like that, she’d whined and squirmed out of his grip to shoot him a look of sheer grumpiness. He got the message; don’t touch her.
In addition to trying to get her to move more quickly without being allowed to physically help her, he also faced the frustrating limitation of only having one-way communication with her, and trying to translate her suspicious looks to gauge whether his words had been understood.
As much as this slow progress frustrated him, the very thought of leaving her to herself was an impossibility. Already in his head, he’d worked out how much extra food and water he would need to carry to keep her healthy, and that was before he even found out if she liked the same things he did; whether she would eat cold beans or rice pudding from the tin. Finally reaching the summit of a low hill behind the village, he paused at the top to assess which direction they should take. Opting for the snaking path that led into another cluster of buildings about the same size as the one they had just escaped, he turned to encourage the girl, who had taken the opportunity to sit down.
Her legs must have been aching, he realised. As small as the hill was to even him, it must have been a huge effort for such a young person. He glanced back down the hill, satisfied that nothing was following them, and sat down next to her. Digging in his back pack as she played with the floppy limbs of the cuddly lamb, Peter brought out chocolate covered biscuits taken from the house he’d been in. They’d fallen down behind some items in a cupboard, which he wouldn’t have noticed had he not been standing on a chair, and he unwrapped one to see if she noticed. He glanced at her as he chewed the first mouthful of raisins, biscuit and chocolate, to see her eyes watching the treat in his hand intently.
Hungry or not, he doubted he would turn down the snack at any age, so he was sure he had her attention. Holding the other one out to her, he watched as hesitant fingers whipped out to take it carefully, then began to remove the purple paper sleeve and attack the foil wrapper underneath. She glanced at Peter again, just to be sure it wasn’t a trick, and bit into it. She chewed fast, not waiting to finish one mouthful before she took another bite, and she finished it before Peter had eaten the last piece of his own. She handed him back the wrapper with a small smile and looked at him expectantly.
“You still hungry?” he asked her. Her wide eyes and blank face showed nothing, but her head nodded twice.
“Let’s get down there and find somewhere safe first,” he told her in the slightly patronising tone of a young child talking to an even younger one, “and then we can eat, okay?”
She seemed to think about it for a moment, her lips pursing and her fair eyebrows almost meeting in the middle, then she nodded again abruptly.
“What’s your name?
” Peter asked her, pushing the envelope of their communication to see if she would make words yet, “How old are you?”
She ignored him, rising to her feet and walking away down the hill. Peter shrugged his way back into his back pack, hefted the pitchfork and the other bag, and followed her direction to catch up with her easily. He fell in step alongside her, keeping an easy pace due to the height difference, and told her about his life. He explained that his sister was taken away, and after that all the bad things that had happened. He skipped the details of killing his own mother after the horrendous things he had seen her do, and of the massive riot of dead things who’d walked straight through his farm and made him hide in shit until they wandered off, and about the one he had decapitated with his father’s shotgun, after he had cut off the barrels that were too long for him to manage. He kept to the facts appropriate for a child, forgetting to view himself as one, given his experiences, and the little girl listened without answering.
That conversation, such as it was, led them to the hedge separating the rolling landscape from the village. Peter stepped in front of the girl and held a finger to his lips, then handed her the bag in his hand and pointed for her to stay where she was. She took the bag, kept her lips firmly pressed together, and nodded. Peter hefted his pitchfork and crept towards the style, where he could easily cross the wooden fence and step onto the grass verge before the road. He watched, and he listened, hearing and seeing nothing but sure of the knowledge that the absence of those things did not mean for one single second that there was nothing out there, or that they were safe.
Keeping his eyes on the road and buildings he reached down with his right hand and scuffed about in the earth of the hedgerow beside him, coming up with a small rock. He weighed it subconsciously in his hand, not for a precise weight but for an instinctive feel for the effort it would take to launch the missile, then heaved it up and over the hedge to make it skitter along the road where it bounced up into the side of a car with a sharp clang.
Then he waited.
And waited.
To her credit, the girl stayed still ten paces behind him and didn’t make a sound. When Peter had decided that there were none of them in the immediate area, he beckoned her forwards and climbed the style to cross the fence. Turning to her, he saw that she had reached the part where she had to throw one leg over and was stuck, lacking the strength or confidence to tackle the obstacle with the bag in her had. Wordlessly, Peter reached out for the bag and took it, then froze in surprise as she held her hand out to him, even after he had taken her burden.
He met her eyes and reached out to take her hand, feeling her warm, little fingers grip his as she climbed the rest of the way over. She took back the bag from his hand without being asked to and looked up at him expectantly. He nodded, then walked to the nearest house where he found both doors locked, but a small window to the kitchen open. He slipped off his bag and tried to climb up to it, but he couldn’t gain any purchase with his feet to do anything other than look inside.
The house was empty, and more importantly it had no musty smell that the ones trapped inside made. Pulling a face of disappointment as he climbed back down, he heard a small noise. Looking at the girl, he watched as she made the noise again, a small and deliberate cough in her throat, and pointed a finger at her chest.
The finger was then pointed at the window, and Peter finally understood. He held up a finger of his own to signal that she should wait, then used the prongs of his pitchfork to tap loudly on the window to be doubly sure that there was nothing nasty inside. Repeating the process and finding no good reason to turn down her offer of help, he slipped off his back pack and rested his pitchfork against the back door. He awkwardly held out his hands to her, silently asking for permission to pick her up, and she stepped into his hands.
Given that there was only a relatively small age difference between them, Peter struggled to lift her, but she eventually managed to get her hands onto the open frame. Now that she held some of her own weight, he managed to push her upwards to watch as she threw one short leg into the gap and slipped inside. He watched as she climbed carefully down from the kitchen worktop and disappeared from view as she went towards the door. He waited, but the door didn’t open. Fear rising inside him he was about to knock and shout to her or climb back to the window to see if she was still there when a noise from inside made him press his ear to the wood of the door and listen.
It sounded like a creaking noise at first, then grew louder with each interval as it sounded, then paused. Just as Peter’s brain registered what it was, the door clicked and unlocked from inside, only for the door to swing open and bump into the chair she had dragged over to be able to reach the release latch.
Peter snatched up the bags and his pitchfork and slipped inside as she pulled the chair away, beaming a shy smile at her ingenuity.
“That was really clever,” Peter told her in a whisper as he closed and locked the door again, before reaching up to slip across the bolt that most houses had on their doors. She smiled again, then her face dropped back into neutral as he told her to wait in the kitchen while he searched the house.
Every step he took was mirrored. She let him get four steps ahead, then began to follow, copying his every gesture as she carried an imaginary pitchfork behind him. Peter didn’t notice, not until he had searched the lounge and turned to see her dogging his steps. He smiled, said nothing, and continued to clear the house, knowing that she was following him.
As he climbed the stairs he stepped exaggeratedly from one side to the other, bobbing his head like a disco dancer with each step. He heard the slight breath of an almost silent giggle from behind him, which made him smile. Each room they went into he closed the curtains slowly, keeping the movement gentle so as to not attract attention. By the time they had searched the second bedroom, the girl automatically went to close the other curtain to the one Peter held, and he reminded her to do it slowly and carefully. She nodded, being extra careful to do as she was told.
Peter stopped creeping, stood upright and held the pitchfork in a relaxed way to signify that the house was safe, then beckoned her to follow him downstairs to where he used a chair to stand on and assess the haul from the cupboards.
It wasn’t much, but the tap still yielded some cold water. Peter used a can opener to take the lid off a tin of beans and slid it over to the girl who sat opposite him at the table. She picked up the spoon he had laid out for her and, with occasional glances back at him, ate the entire contents.
When they had both finished, to add to the dried snot and general grime on her face, the tomato sauce had got all over her mouth and chin. Peter dabbed a tea towel in the cold water he had run into the sink and asked permission with his eyes to clean her up. She scrunched up her nose making him laugh and squirmed on instinct as he wiped away the filth on her face. When he had finished he gave her a china cup of water and sat back down with her.
“I’m called Amber,” she said in a small voice, “and I’m almost four and three-quarters.”
Chapter 10
Sergeant Horton, commander of fifty percent of the assorted group’s heavy armour, in the form of the Chieftain main battle tank employed to block the perilous road bridge onto the island, called out for his driver to roll forwards.
The defences were set so that the slab-sided rear of the tank served as a heavily armed barricade, with two machine guns and the ridiculous overkill of the 120mm cannon, pointing back towards the mainland separated only by a strip of fast-moving coastal water. Already, given their initial burst of adrenaline from the large-scale deployment to bring order back to the streets of London, they had encountered a new enemy, terrifying, if not also vulnerable in many ways. That enemy had sparked flight, then a near suicidal tactic to protect the others on the island, and now boredom.
For a month now, he had taken turns with the other men trained to fight from within the confines of one of the finest tanks in creation, and he was reduced to being a very hea
vy, very expensive, bouncer. He guarded the door, rolling their tank forwards and backwards for the faster vehicles to roll out and find gainful employment, and he was bored.
Although not yet rostered to be on duty, he had risen early due to the noise that all the men readying to depart had made, and he could not get back to sleep, so he took his turn early on the bridge. He watched the four vehicles leave, wishing that he could be a part of something useful, or at least more useful than he felt sitting still all day. He did very little all day other than watch the ground in the distance for any movement, although he was relieved for a short break around midday. Hearing via the radio that the marines were due back, he had the tank started, ready to roll it forward before the two Saxons came into view with their angular, squat faces looking intimidating as they crossed the bridge. Shortly afterwards, he repeated the orders and watched as the other two new additions, the identical armoured personnel carriers, then rolled back into place. Following that, the sight and sound of the two helicopters washed over him from high on the island behind him, where there was sufficient space near the exposed lighthouse to land the aircraft. Keeping his discipline and not watching the show in the direction of safety, he kept his eyes ahead on the direction of danger, despite his boredom.
As the final four, the original vehicles of the mission returned, he gave the orders for the last time and glanced back at the back end of the light tank squeaking past on its tracks.
His brain took a few precious seconds to fully understand what he was looking at. At first, given the acceptable colours and patterns of the thing, he assumed it was army kit slung on the outside of their wagon, as was the way of things.
But the way it hung was wrong. The way it had a head, and a face, and the way it turned that face to bear its teeth at the noisy tank as it went past, was suddenly so terrifyingly wrong.
Horton began to shout, to scream a pointless warning as the combined noise made by so many large engines drowned him out completely. He waved his arms frantically, pausing only for a second to consider opening up with the machine gun on the back of the tank, and dismissing that as the hatches were open and the head and shoulders of the commander were exposed. Just above the thing holding on, in their direct line of sight and hence the direction of any bullets they fired, were the two soft-skinned trucks that would be obliterated by their gunfire. Horton continued to scream and wave, deciding in the end to snatch up the sub-machine gun and jump down from the tank to land heavily on the roadway. Running as fast as he could with a partly numb ankle caused by the uncontrolled drop, he threw his body after the convoy and fired a short burst of automatic shots into the water beside him in desperation to attract the attention of the man with his back to the danger.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 8
