They had attacked the horde, laid bloody ruin to so many thousands of them and formed a wall ten feet high and three times as deep, with more bodies than any of them could possibly imagine.
And they had still only killed less than a quarter of them.
Chapter 24
Lieutenant Commander Murray of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy shouted at his support crew to hurry because he needed to be in the air ten minutes ago.
He began his pre-flight checks, whipping through them at reckless speed, before the aircraft had even been fully refuelled. The split-second he got a raised thumb from the helmeted man on the ground, he yanked on the controls hard to force the unnatural flying machine vertically skywards, before rotating to somewhere vaguely resembling his bearing and tilting the bulbous nose down to blast away in that direction.
He had left the argument raging in the headquarters building, with that frustratingly punctilious Major wanting to know precise fuel usage and carrying weights before he would authorise any mission. Barret, the senior of the two naval pilots, opened a debate regarding seniority, if only to defer attention as Murray sprinted towards his helicopter with the coordinates scribbled hastily onto a scrap of paper. The army major brought in the army colonel, who of course wanted to know the whole story from the beginning and to congratulate people on a fine presentation, as though lives weren’t at stake. Barret fed wood into that fire as he argued with Hadlington, until everyone in the room froze at the sound of helicopter engines screaming inland over their heads.
Barret feigned a look of confusion and asked the room who the devil that could be flying over their airspace. He gave his excuses and said that he would check that none of his men knew anything about it, leaving colonel Tim Munro smiling up at Hadlington. The major didn’t know if that was out of mirth that the men of the Fleet Air Arm had blatantly disregarded his instructions, or whether in fact the old man even knew what had just happened.
“Major, allow me to tell you a brief anecdote from my school days,” he said as he leaned back and seemed to melt into nostalgia, “I was at Gordonstoun with His Royal Highness,” he said wistfully, as most of his stories began, “although he was younger than I by a few years. I recall it was a spring time affair,” he chuckled suddenly, “but then again, a Highlands spring time would freeze you southern folk to your chairs, and we were given a hearty run over the moors. We all agreed to take a shortcut and slow down our progress to give the appearance that we had run the full circuit despite the god-awful weather. When we got back, maintaining a good ruse as we staggered our returns, each boy was congratulated for their time and rewarded with hot porridge,” he finished, smiling up at Hadlington, and having that smile echoed by the young Lieutenant who followed the Colonel everywhere.
“And, Sir?” Hadlington asked impatiently, waiting with as much grace as he could before his annoyance overcame his manners.
“And, Major,” Colonel Tim said ruefully, “sometimes it’s best not to notice when folk don’t follow your orders when you realise it was unreasonable to expect that from them in the first place.”
With that he smiled, stood, replaced his uniform cap and strolled off in the direction of the bridge to inspect the men as though on garrison duty in some pleasant foreign posting.
~
Murray screamed his helicopter low and hard across the landscape. His anger at the ridiculous order came out through the controls as he did the helicopter pilot equivalent of driving angry. Even if they had half a dozen Sea Kings, they would barely be able to withdraw the men of the convoy, so the lack of their second aircraft on the rescue mission made little to no difference.
Hadlington had been waiting for permission to send the aircraft, and that permission was pending the outcome of the allied attack on the swarm of dead. No update had come, either from the tank platoon themselves or the reconnaissance planes flying high above, and so Hadlington had lacked the flexibility to pre-empt the order from command and deploy a helicopter.
As secret as the information had been, soldiers talking about a potential cure had tongues wagging all over the island.
Surely, Murray had thought to himself, any potential cure is worth investing everything we have into recovering it?
Shaking away his annoyance and incomprehension at the rigidity and stubbornly bureaucratic nature of the armed forces, he continued making his way towards the convoy, while behind him the first of the heavy shore bombardment began to land.
~
“Helicopter inbound,” Palmer said to his troopers, who had mostly dismounted to assist stripping the crippled Spartans at their front. Maxwell’s in the lead had suffered a total mechanical failure and would not engage any gear either forwards or backwards, and the one behind would need three men working with sledgehammers for an hour to straighten out the bent metal and allow the tracks to move unimpeded. Palmer had decided to forget trying to bring them home and instead ordered as much ammunition out of those wagons, and the men to squeeze in wherever they could find safe space inside the armour.
When they had stopped, the rear sections of the Saxons had swung open and the bewildered civilian in a very dirty white coat was unceremoniously bundled into the compartment, along with the box that the two special forces teams had recovered. One team sealed themselves up tightly again to protect the man and his items, and the others had spread out into the bushes on all four compass points.
The Sea King was audible long before it was visible, and Palmer ordered some of his troopers to secure the patch of flat grass fifty metres away from where their wagons were stopped. The aircraft swooped in as the four bearded men with their modern weaponry emerged out of cover again and opened the rear of the Saxon to form a bubble of eight armed soldiers around the man in their centre. He was transported as though swept along by armoured beetles, deposited into the belly of the helicopter, and then Palmer watched a very brief conversation of shouts and sign language take place between the soldiers.
“You go,” bawled Downes to Bufford, “you’re going straight out to sea anyway, and that’s your remit. Not ours.”
Buffs leaned back, regarding the SAS Major carefully before nodding once and signalling his men to climb aboard. He thought through the suggestion, weighing up the pros and cons of the concept, then decided that it was a tactical decision to send the SBS out to sea and keep the SAS on dry land, and nothing to do with organisational egotism. Bufford snatched four spare magazines for his MP5, all fully loaded. Seeing what he was doing and understanding immediately, his three men did the same and pressed the additional firepower onto the SAS men, who gave them grateful nods.
Their new rule on ammunition against this unexpected enemy was the same as their personal mantra for explosives; P for Plenty.
As the four former Royal Marines climbed up, the others ducked low to retreat from the rotor wash and just as soon as it arrived, the helicopter was gone. They jogged back to the armour without a second glance at the aircraft that could have whisked them out of the country to safety, to find Captain Palmer whipping up his men into fearsome activity.
“Come on, let’s move!” he shouted, before he saw the major and leaned over his open hatch to shout to him over the sound of engines sparking into noisy life.
“The swarm hasn’t been stopped, and they’re still heading for the island,” he said simply. Without another word the SAS men filed back into the rear of their Saxon as the other was filled with men and spare ammunition. Mac paused only briefly to pick up the dismounted GPMG from one of the Spartans, and give a nod to Dezzy to collect the link ammunition for it. Engines revved, and the reduced convoy headed towards their temporary home with the seemingly hopeless intention of preventing it being overrun.
~
The twin Mk45 127mm guns of the American Destroyer began pounding as soon as they came in range of the horde. Their heavy artillery shells soared high over the coastline to rocket inland and fall amongst the mass of bodies, startling everyone on the island. Their update via Com
mander Briggs had been that the tanks had intercepted the swarm and inflicted heavy casualties, but had floundered after they had been unable to continue their pursuit due to the piles of dead they had created. Forced to find an alternative route, their German allies were effectively out of the game.
The convoy, no longer carrying the precious cargo after a Royal Navy pilot had pulled them out of the flames, was also making its way towards the island, hoping to hit the horde of enemy in their flank.
The captain of the ship saw no other way that the day could be won, so he ordered his ship to be brought up to the shore and for their guns to be unleashed as soon as they were in range. The only thing he wouldn’t do was to use the Tomahawk cruise missiles, following the presidential decree that they should not be used without direct White House authorisation. But that didn’t stop him getting his deck guns in the fight.
Each huge round falling on the crowd did untold damage to those zombies in the immediate area of the splash and explosion, but every crater created by the big guns was instantly filled with the rolling mass of bodies, and each shot fell closer to the island as the targeting was adjusted.
Briggs initially couldn’t understand why there was a seemingly pathological need to attack the swarm instead of letting it dissipate, as most of the others had done. This especially seeing as the island was no longer tactically important to the overall parameters of success, now that the contents of the London laboratory had been recovered, and he carefully offered that opinion to the captain.
“They’ve all gotta be killed at some point, right?” he responded with detached glee, “may as well do it now when the sons-of-bitches decided to have a civil rights march!”
Briggs, as cold as he was, found the excitement for taking even formerly-human life with such reckless overkill distasteful.
And so it became a countdown.
The swarm stepped closer to the island each minute, and each minute the guns of the destroyer degraded them further, until such time as the German tanks and the Brits in their armoured cars caught up with them and added their own hail of ammunition to the party.
Which, after just under an hour, was what happened.
Just as the leading edge of the swarm came into sight, the two Chieftain tanks opened up directly into them with round after round. Every Fox car had been parked where their 30mm Rarden cannons could be brought to bear, and their speed-loaders stacked with six heavy shots ready to pour into the enemy. At the distances they could see on the island, their shot would not fall, because they were firing at less than two miles away. Every elevated section of the island that had line of sight on the single approach road rained down artillery on the smudge of approaching death, and none of them had resorted to using their machine guns yet as the distance was still too great. When their enemy grew closer to under a mile away, then the belt-fed machine guns would spark into life and provide a constant and persistent clattering din to overpower all but the biggest of the explosions.
Palmer’s convoy arrived just as the vanguard of dead began breaking away to sprint ahead for the bridge, and their mounted guns rolled lead and tracer and the promise of a second, more permanent death.
The German heavy tanks, unable to find a suitable route to catch up, despite their superior road speed for such large beasts, were twenty minutes too late to prevent disaster.
Chapter 25
Peter pitched forward in slow motion, his brain telling him the gruesome outcome before he had even hit the carpeted floor of the living room.
He knew that Amber would be bitten, her young skin would be torn and would bleed and he would hear her screams before he could get back to his feet and save her.
He had promised her only a few days before that he would protect her and wouldn’t leave her, and now his eyes pricked with tears as he fell, because he knew the last thing he would see and hear before he died was the little girl being torn apart.
That fear and desperation became resolve as he flailed about to try and recover his trip, which had only partly distracted the zombie from flying at the girl. That desperate resolve manifested itself into a blind thrust of the pitchfork in his flailing right hand which bit into the fleshy back of the creature with little force and struck bone straight away.
Peter knew even as his face hit the plush carpet that he had failed her, because hitting bone usually meant that the things just carried on as though nothing had happened to them.
Confusingly for Peter, the sound of him hitting the floor sounded much louder and later than his brain expected, and he opened his eyes to see the feet of the zombie just in front of his nose. Leaping to his feet, he threw himself backwards and scrabbled for the spike he had sheathed on his right hip, and held it out towards the twitching thing lying face down.
He saw the single bare foot, purple and bloated from the blood that had pooled there when it died, and the other foot inexplicably covered by a brown sock, and he watched as the bare foot twitched again as though electrocuted. He got to his feet and stepped carefully closer, sparing a quick glance to Amber to see that she was staring at it with her head cocked in confusion. Peter kept the spike held in both hands, levelled at the prone monstrosity as he shuffled around out of its reach to get to her, and then he saw exactly what she could see.
The zombie was trying to claw its way towards her, using only its head and neck as its teeth sank into the heavy pile of the carpet, making the attempts to drag itself forward both fruitless and pathetic. He relaxed and stepped closer, seeing his discarded pitchfork lying beside the crippled zombie and a single, dark puncture wound at the base of its neck.
He had no idea how it had happened, but the tip of a single prong on his pitchfork had penetrated the skin and tissue to force its way in between the sixth and seventh bones of the cervical spine and punctured the spinal cord protected inside. He had effectively, and completely accidentally, paralysed their attacker.
The two children stared at it as it tried to reach up for them as though sheer will and determination could make the food come to its mouth. Peter spun the spike in his hand and walked around to the back of it where he was furthest away from the teeth. Deciding that he preferred to do what he had to do at a distance, he slipped the spike back into his belt, picked up his pitchfork and raised it in both hands before he looked up and saw Amber. He paused, indicating with a flick of his head that she should move and not watch. She shrugged and stepped aside to stand off to his right. With one hard thrust he ended the pitiful attempts of the paralyzed zombie to drool him to death.
Their sudden, terrifying fright forgotten, the two children searched the house together and filled the cart with everything they wanted before wheeling it back to their new home. They made two trips back to that house, finding useful items as well as food and drinks, and more ammunition for the shotgun, which Peter took even though he had only ever fired a single shot from the weapon.
They stopped for some food before they abandoned that house as it had been picked clean before moving on to the house opposite. That house was, mercifully, free from zombies. As they were wheeling back their second haul from there, the sounds of rolling thunder began in the far distance.
The thunder sounded in pairs, their echoing twins sounds undulating over and over until replaced by the next wave, to create a rolling wave of ever-increasing intensity until the entire sky was filled with ceaseless noise. Both of them stood still in the road and stared at the empty sky until Peter’s nerve broke first.
“Let’s get inside,” he said softly, reaching down with one empty hand only half thinking about what he was doing.
Just as automatically, Amber reached up and clasped his hand.
The two of them turned and wheeled their piled-up cart back towards their new house and opened the front door. They worked in silence, stacking their haul in the kitchen as the world outside grew even louder, and after they had finished, Amber’s face grew dark and worried at the sounds outside. Peter unwrapped chocolate for her in an attempt
to take her mind off the growing concern of whatever terrible thing was happening outside. She sat subdued, chewing slowly and visibly upset. Peter racked his brain for what to say to her. He picked up the cassette player and headphones, wasting a few seconds before remembering that the batteries had slowly died the last time he had given it to her. He had yet to find a new tape to go in the player, but seeing as she didn’t seem to mind the same song, it hadn’t been high on his list of priorities when clearing the last few houses. He rummaged around in the kitchen drawer where he had stored the batteries from the houses in that village, and found two of the right size before fitting them to the player and taking it over to where she sat quietly. He handed it to her and smiled, seeing her small look of gratitude as she placed the red foam of the flimsy headphones over her ears.
Hearing her hum along to the chorus was the sweetest sound he had ever heard, but it didn’t drown out the sounds of what Peter suspected were bombs being dropped not far away. He went to close the small kitchen window in the hope that the sound would be muted, but as he did so the cat emerged from below with a vertical leap which made him jump backwards in fright. His heart beating in his chest, he turned to see if Amber had been frightened by it too, but saw that she was still engrossed in the music and hadn’t turned around. The cat teetered on the threshold for a moment as it eyed him expectantly, then dropped down to meow loudly and rub against his hand, doing the dance it did when asking for food.
Peter wasn’t fooled. He knew the cat didn’t love him but was only acting so that he worked the can opener. But in that same moment, he realised that he was fine being used by the animal just because it had decided to stay around them and because it made Amber happy.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 20
