The fingerboards gave him a choice of two places, both of which his inbuilt sense of direction said were ok, as he hadn’t been to them yet. One said four and a half miles, written in numbers and fractions, the other said two and three quarters. Looking down at Amber’s little legs, he chose the second place and pointed out their direction to her. She said nothing, not that he expected her to, and just started stepping off in that direction. He set off beside her, both of them walking in the middle of the road and sweeping his eyes left and right as they went. He looked down at her out of the corner of his eye, marvelling that someone so little could walk so well, given what she had been through.
A high-pitched whine pierced the upper limits of his hearing, making his body tense in anticipation and his breathing grow rapid, ready to move if he had to. Before he had a chance to make a decision, a screaming, blurry dark monster erupted overhead and shot over them at a deceptively low altitude. He expected it to blow them violently with a downwash, but instead only the noise reached them. Both of them flinched and ducked lower, as though the flying monster was much, much lower than it was.
As quickly as it had burst into their world it was gone again, straight over their heads and out of sight in another heartbeat, leaving behind it a brief, violent memory and the fading scream of the engines. The two children straightened and looked at one other; Peter with an open mouth and wide eyes and Amber with a shrug and a look of bewildered amusement.
Unable to think of anything appropriate to say for the occasion, Peter looked around their surroundings instead, in case anything unwelcome also wanted to see where the big, fast-moving helicopter had disappeared to.
They had walked for what his blue and red watch face told him was just over thirty minutes, when they stopped and now Peter saw a footpath intersecting the route they were on. The path to their left dropped down a slight hill to where the very tops of chimneys showed. He glanced back to the road, reading from the direction of the trees ahead that the road looped to the left. At least he guessed it did. He looked at the distant building down the sloping path, back to the road and back again as he tried to figure out whether to risk the shortcut. As he was close to figuring it out, a small hand tugged at his trouser leg.
He looked down to Amber, a sinking feeling in his chest, and wondered what fresh hell was heading their way. She pointed back down the road in the direction they had come from, and he squinted to see what she had.
“What is it?” he asked her.
In response she just shook her outstretched finger in the same direction, meaning that he should look instead of talking. He squinted his eyes, straining to see anything until a flash of dark movement made his breath catch in his throat.
Until he realised what it was.
“Ha!” he blurted out loudly in shocked amusement. Amber let out a small giggle as he realised what her sharp eyes had already seen.
Tail raised vertically and curled over at the very tip, the black and brown cat popped out of the long grass of the verge and trotted towards them.
It meowed when it got close, walked straight in between their legs and began snaking around Amber as it rose up off its front paws to purr loudly and rub its cheek against her hand. Amber looked up at Peter, her eyes asking the question that her lips would not. Peter shrugged, seeing no possible way he could even enforce leaving the cat behind if he wanted to, and not having the heart to say no anyway.
I guess I’m just collecting strays now, he thought to himself with mock annoyance.
“Come on then,” he said to both of them, and climbed the wooden posts in the hedgerow break to follow the footpath down the slope. He turned and reached out for Amber to pass him her bag, sticking the pitchfork into the dirt so that it stood up vertically, then held out his other hand after she had passed over the bag to help her over. She took his hand unthinkingly, much the same way as a child would when crossing the road with a grown up, but the small gesture of trust and the warmth of her hand made him feel better somehow.
After they had climbed over, they turned to look at the cat, who just stared at them blankly from the other side. Peter spoke to it, offering encouragement like it was a younger sibling who was refusing to walk another step. Amber make a kissing noise with her lips and patted her legs. The cat stared at both of them before abruptly craning its neck over its left shoulder to lick itself.
“Come on,” Peter told the girl, “if it’s followed us this far, it’ll follow us the rest of the way.”
Amber seemed to consider this and shrugged again, picking up her bag again ready to move. When they reached the outskirts of the village after another twenty minutes of walking down the gently sloping field, they found that the path they were on emerged into a graveyard. Peter’s back crawled, threatening to make him shudder. His only experience of zombies was of them as cartoon characters, and then they were usually comedy characters with a hilariously low intelligence and easily foiled by the animated hero of the programme he was watching. They were always represented as bursting out of their graves one hand at a time and shuffling off in search of brains, which made him question the effectiveness of burial in the first place.
Weren’t people in coffins when they were buried? How did they get out and stand up under the weight of the soil? How shallow were the graves in these cartoons and why did they have green skin and crazy eyes?
Thought of the eyes sobered him. Maybe some of the cartoons had been right, only they hadn’t known or hadn’t told the truth that instead of being funny characters, they were relentless and terrifying if they gathered in more than pairs. Flashbacks of the mob, the horde of things who blew through his home and devoured everything living except him, through his quick actions and dumb luck.
Maybe the cartoons should have shown the zombies as people the characters knew, maybe their best friend, and made them watch as they burned up and died and then got up and ripped the heroes apart with their hands and teeth.
Shaking those dark thoughts away, he looked for a way to skirt the graveyard and found a small stone bridge over a tiny trickle of a brook which he could easily have jumped. Amber couldn’t, he guessed, so he led her over the little bridge.
“Trip, trap, trip, trap…” she whispered from the bank behind him as he walked over the narrow stones. Peter froze, instantly recalling the tale of the three billy goats and the troll under the bridge. His feet woke up before his brain and he stepped fast over the bridge and turned to snatch Amber up, but saw that she had stopped before the bridge and was pointing down.
A hand, pale and bloated with wet skin, peeled away from where the blackened fingernails clawed at the bridge to haul a naked and milky-eyed monstrosity from the shallow water below.
The first thought to strike him and run through his brain almost conversationally, was about the exact circumstances that had led to a person who had turned into one of them being, at least mostly from what he could see, naked and hiding under a tiny stone bridge by a graveyard in a village with maybe twenty buildings. He wondered what possible scenario could have led to this happening, and he found himself at a total loss for a logical explanation.
As this flash of thought ran through his brain, roughly a second had passed in the real world, and in that second, the pale and bloated skin of the thing’s head rose up out of the shallow water with globules of green algae plastered to its face and partly obscuring its mouth. Then, and possibly worst of all, the thing that struck him next was the smell.
Afterwards, much afterwards in fact, he decided to re-categorise what he had experienced at that moment and classified the smell as something worse than a stench, but not quite a foul taste. It was definitely up there with the time on the farm he had to try and stay quiet with half of his mouth containing mud and slime which was mostly animal shit, and he reckoned it might have actually been worse.
Instead of wasting time considering all of these illogical and irrelevant thoughts, he decided to thrust out the pitchfork and solve the problem before it bec
ame any worse than a fright and a disgusting smell. As he lined up the weapon, the bloated mess let out a hiss that was mostly a gargle through a clogged mouth, but it was answered with another hiss of pure venom and aggression.
On the low wall next to Amber, the cat had caught up and was voicing its opinion about the situation. Peter knew that cats had a much better sense of smell than humans, so he couldn’t even begin to imagine what the cat felt about the bloated floater.
Before the situation devolved any further, the pitchfork’s prongs entered the thing’s head just before and just behind its left ear and ended the grand entrance before it had chance to get into full flow.
Peter withdrew the weapon with a grunt and a sharp pull, and the repulsive lump flopped back into the low, murky water. The cat had stopped hissing but stayed utterly motionless and kept its eyes on the thing, with only twitches of a hugely puffed-up tail betraying that it wasn’t a statue. Amber just looked blankly at him.
Then he remembered the warning she’d given him, as cryptic as it was, and he held out a hand for her to cross over to him. She didn’t hesitate and skipped across the bridge lightly to join him, then looked back at the cat who hopped down and stalked over the bridge to follow.
“How did you know?” he whispered to her as his head swivelled to locate any other unwelcome surprises, “Did you see it?” he asked, worrying that he had looked and hadn’t seen it there. She didn’t answer, so he stole a glance at her to check. She shrugged, a genuine ʿI don’t knowʾ shrug and smiled back at him.
Peter didn’t know what he expected, so he guessed the shrug was what he deserved. He pointed at her, then to his side and waited for her to nod. Stalking out into the road with her beside him, he crept along in the open so as not to be surprised by any more jack-in-the-box zombies in close quarters. He made for the largest house he could see, stopping once to listen intently as Amber stood still in total silence as though she wasn’t even breathing. The cat had disappeared again but that was hardly his priority at that point.
He saw three cars parked on the road at nearby houses which seemed to be so old in construction that they didn’t have driveways, and noticed something was somehow off about them. They were at unnatural angles, because people usually parked their cars vaguely straight. Their wing mirrors were bent backwards or pushed in, depending on whether he could see the front or the back of the cars, and all of them were smeared with dried streaks of black.
Sneaking towards the house and the taller than average front door, he pointed for Amber to wait on the other side of the big car, and waited until she moved. Exchanging a look, he left her there and tried the front door.
He’d once seen a television programme where the woman with big curly hair claimed that crime was up so high that people were afraid to leave their doors unlocked any more. That struck Peter as a stupid thing to say, because if locks weren’t necessary, why did every door have them? Personally, he was glad to live in the country for two reasons. One, the only city he had ever been to was London, which had burned down in riots a month ago, from what he had seen on the news, and two, around there a lot of people actually did leave their doors unlocked.
The big house was one of them. He turned the round, brass doorknob and was rewarded by protesting springs until a click denoted it was open. Pushing it gently inwards, he stood back two paces and raised the pitchfork.
“Hello?” he called into the house as loud as he dared, hearing no reply. He looked over to Amber, seeing the top of her head from the nose up as she peered over the front of the car, and tried to figure out what to do, to try and decide whether he should take her inside on a house search and put both of them at risk if they had to run away.
Just then, he realised what the signs outside had meant, and what had happened there. It also went some way to explaining how a naked zombie found itself stuck in a low brook, and he knew in that instant that there wouldn’t be a single one of them there unless it was trapped.
That horde which had nearly consumed him in a flood, that swarm of corpses that had steamed across the countryside like a roller had been through here in some form. It had filled that road outside and swept inexorably onwards, and anything that was free to shuffle or walk or crawl would have been taken along with it. With renewed confidence in his logic, he called out louder into the house.
“Oi,” he yelled, “zombies!”
He smiled to himself as he said it, knowing that he was showing off for Amber and not caring. He smiled because it was the first time he had used the word out loud and when he did, it seemed to take some of the fear and stress out of the situation.
Nothing happened inside the house, so he waved her to him and walked inside.
It had five bedrooms, an office, wardrobes that seemed more like bedrooms in size, without windows, and a door to another room where the washing machine and a tumble drier were built into the same worktops as the kitchen had. There was a door from that room that led into the big garage where there were tools and camping things and an old car with no roof.
He checked every room, every cupboard and every possible place that a person could hide in, as though it was a high-stakes hide and seek tournament.
Loser gets eaten, he thought grimly, but he was right, and the house was empty.
As impressive as it was, as huge and luxurious as the kitchen was, which he guessed was about the same size as the entire ground floor of his old house, it yielded about a day’s worth of food for them, which meant that he would have to check the other houses in the village. He was happy to do that, hell he’d been doing it for a few weeks before he met Amber, but at least he would have somewhere for her to stay when he went. The one good thing was that the garage contained plastic bottles of water, which meant that they wouldn’t be drinking from toilet cisterns for a while.
They roamed the house looking for things and Peter checked the flow of the taps to see if they worked, purely out of interest. To his utter disbelief, and by some miracle, the tap he turned flowed strongly with water.
Water that, to his great delight, was getting hot.
Chapter 19
“Ward, where are we with comms?” Hadlington asked, with a hint of desperation in his voice.
“Still nothing, Sir,” she said coolly, but inside she was screaming for a way to warn the two teams of SAS and SBS that they were heading directly into a complete shit storm. She blamed the Americans, naturally, as they had been late in relaying the information to their own command, who had then passed it directly on to the land-based control room for that area. Had the information come only thirty minutes earlier, she could have contacted the helicopter pilot and ordered the abort, but the teams were on the ground and totally unaware what was coming for them.
“Fucking hell,” Hadlington swore under his breath, “get me command,” he told her, “and send a runner to fetch me the Colonel. I need him to sign an order for these men to drive into the lion’s den.”
~
The four men comprising Charlie-One-One had climbed in silence back aboard the helicopter that had been sent for them, and held on to the hanging straps as the bird’s nose tipped towards the east and powered away. Technically they weren’t back on board, as this helicopter, while being the same model, was a fully-fuelled one that had come via a gentler speed as their first ride was blasting back to its floating home. This one was tasked with dropping them off in south London, where they were due to rendezvous with Charlie-One-Two, who were infiltrating up the Thames, no doubt in order to provide additional options should any team have an issue getting in or out. The team and their boats would have been inserted by helicopter in the wider stretches of the river to the east for them to slip into the city quietly.
The other team had been at their own small base on the south coast when the shit hit the fan, and as they were so few in number they were forced to take to the Channel in their rigid inflatable boats to escape the enemy masses on dry land. When the navy began to congregate in the relatively narr
ow waterway between the English and French coasts, they were picked up and rapidly portioned off into individual patrols to be made available for use wherever command saw fit.
Of that four-man team, two had seen warfare in the East Falklands in 1982 and constantly reminded the others of that. All of them were formerly Royal Marines, as were all troopers of their four squadrons, but one had taken the unusual route of joining first the Royal Navy, before becoming enamoured with the elite reputation of the marines. He had quit after four years because he was told there was no possible way to transfer. His branch had been at manning balance, and not surplus, so there was no way he could transfer, he was told. So he had left, signed out and walked off base to go straight into the forces careers office to sign on as a Royal Marine recruit, then waited in cheap accommodation outside Plymouth for five weeks until the next recruitment process began. It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t pass recruitment and selection.
That confidence, which some of the training staff saw as arrogance, saw him through the Commando course and onto an accelerated path to his first promotion, due to his previous experience and capabilities. Some thought him career-driven, but those who worked with him knew him to be all work at work, and all play outside. After another four years in a new coloured beret, he again had his head turned when his unit had encountered members of the UK Special Forces in Northern Ireland.
They were kept separate in the barracks, with its anti-mortar mesh and high walls, and they were ordered not to talk to them or ask about their activities. He had disobeyed that order, finding a man who had greeted some of the older marines in his unit. Finding out that the man had previously been one of them, he asked him outright who he was with.
The Special Boat Service became his next goal, and his request for selection followed as soon as he returned to the UK. In his usual style he passed selection on his first attempt, relishing the gruelling physical and mental pressure of being tested beyond the expected limits of human performance and resolve.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 16
