by Luke Duffy
They tried to occupy themselves by watching the recorded movies and programmes on the TV in Amy’s classroom. The normal TV channels had stopped showing their favourite programmes; they had become a collection of doctors, policemen, soldiers and people in suits talking and arguing, and pictures and videos of people fighting all around the world. But since the power went out, they had begun to spend more time in the school library reading books to each other and playing board games.
Amy decided that they needed to help themselves to the food in the store rooms and freezers of the canteen. She felt guilty and feared that she would be called a thief, so she insisted on leaving a list of everything they had taken and a note saying that their parents would buy it all back when they came for them.
She knew deep down that they wouldn't be coming. In the past two weeks she had grown up fast, and just from watching the horizon from the classroom windows she had seen that things were bad and unlikely to get better in the near future.
The streets had become deserted. She didn't see cars and buses travelling along the roads anymore like usual. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she saw a plane in the sky. The only thing she did see was more and more of the nasty people on the street. She could tell it was them by the way they walked. They didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular and wandered aimlessly.
Amy spotted a dog at the main gate before the car park as she stood in the shadows of a classroom one day. It had been sniffing the air and began barking at the small crowd gathered by the school doors. Immediately, four of the group broke away and sprinted toward it. Luckily, the dog had time to react and ran away yelping. Amy hoped that the dog had got away safely and she regretted not being able to have found a way of letting it into the school. It would’ve made a nice pet and they could’ve looked after it while they waited.
Now, sitting in a dark classroom with her legs hanging limply over the edge of a desk, she watched the glow on the horizon fade into darkness, spelling the start of another black and cold night filled with the sounds of moans, shuffling feet, thuds and bangs from the people outside the main door, and the occasional cries of panic and pain in the distance. They had taken to sleeping in the staff room on the large leather couches with blankets they had found around the school.
Robert sat on the floor, playing with a toy car he found in one of the classrooms and Amy sat watching him, staring and with a blank mind.
“I miss Mum,” Robert said as he continued to drive his small car around at his feet.
“Me too,” she replied.
“And I miss Dad,”
“Me too again,” she knew it was going to turn into a game now.
“I miss McDonalds,”
“I miss Pizza Hut,”
“I miss SpongeBob.” He began to giggle.
“I miss iCarly,”
“Well I miss my...”
Robert suddenly stopped what he was doing and looked up. Amy hadn’t heard it, but when her eyes met her younger brother’s, her ears tuned in and she could distinctly hear the sound of an engine approaching.
She jumped down from the table and ran to the window. She saw the beam from the lights as it approached the bend in the road beyond the school grounds. It was still on the blind side and out of sight but it was getting closer, fast. She could hear its engine racing.
“Quick, pass me the light.” She held out her hand for the large heavy torch they had found in the caretaker’s room and raised it against the window, just as the car came into view in the gloom.
It took the bend at speed and Amy frantically flashed the light on and off in the hope that the driver would see them. It continued on without slowing, and was soon speeding away out of sight. Amy felt herself deflate.
“Did they see us?” Robert asked.
“No, I don’t think they did.”
She was about to turn away and head out of the room when she heard the engine again. The car was coming back. Both of them stood on chairs at the window, Amy flashing the light and Robert waving his arms, but neither of them making any noise for fear of attracting the attention of the group outside, below the window.
The car was reversing back the way it had come. It reached the area in front of the gate, and then it came to a halt and it flashed its own lights in reply to Amy’s torch.
A gasp of relief escaped her causing her breath to steam on the window. She continued to flash and wave the light but to her horror, the car slowly began to pull away. She waved faster, as though the more she waved, the more likely the car was to approach them; as if it was one of her interactive console games that she had at home where she would jump about to control the movements and speed of the characters.
She looked down and noticed that the crowd was moving away from the school and heading toward the car. When they were about twenty metres away from it, the car pulled away. Amy realised that whoever was in the car was luring them away.
She was sure they would be back.
“They're gonna come back, Robert. They just need to make sure there's none of the nasties here before they come in is all.”
Robert reached out and held her hand as he stared out the window. “I know sis. They'll be coming back.”
Within a couple of minutes, they saw the headlights of the car approaching again and before long they had pulled into the car park. Only when the lights had been switched off did Amy recognise the car. It was a police car.
A man stepped out from behind the wheel and headed for the main doors. Amy grabbed her brother by the hand and dragged him from the room.
“C’mon, Rob, we have to let him in.”
Robert was trotting along behind her as she led him to the reception doors, which they had avoided for the past two weeks.
“How do we know he's not like the others?”
“He's a policeman, and he has a car. I don’t think the nasty ones can drive, Rob.”
They reached the door and saw the beam from a torch light moving across the reception area on the other side. A man stood there in the gloom of the doorway that led outside, scanning the room before entering. He saw the children reaching up to open the bolt locks at the top of the door and moved toward them.
Amy opened the door and the man shone the light down the corridor behind them and then over their dirty, dishevelled faces before pointing it to the floor.
He crouched down as he came close and smiled warmly at the two children. “Don't be afraid, it’s okay. I'm a policeman. You're safe now, and I’ll take care of you. My name is Tony.”
17
They had thrust their way north from Baghdad, through the mayhem and hordes of infected, headed for the Turkish border.
The journey had been far from uneventful and they considered themselves to be lucky to have made it through at all.
After breaking out from the capital, with Hussein and his two remaining fighters joining the team in their bid to escape the meat grinder that was Iraq, they had passed through numerous villages and towns as they fled along the main roads and tracks that crisscrossed the country. They tried to keep clear of the populated areas as much as possible, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
In places the roads were packed with static vehicles, most of them abandoned. Many of them with their dead occupants entombed inside. Some of the stalled cars, trucks and buses were peppered with bullet holes, showing the tell-tale signs of ambush and attack. Others had burned, and whole sections of road became impassable with the charred, still smouldering skeletons of wrecked and destroyed cars.
Marcus had pushed his men hard. Angry survivors had fired at them with machineguns and rifles and even rockets on one occasion as they passed through villages and small towns. Their reaction had always been the same, to pour heavy, thunderous firepower at the firing point in reply from the machinegun turrets on the tops of the vehicles, suppressing the enemy until the team was clear of the field of fire.
Further on, American Apache gunships had buzzed them and lined up ahead, hoverin
g low above the road as though about to attack. Ian had thought quickly and pulled the American flag from his glove box and frantically waved it at them through the armoured glass of the windscreen.
Whether the pilots believed that they were on a legitimate mission or not, Marcus was unsure, but they moved off nevertheless and allowed them to continue. They could still see them in the distance to the West, paralleling them. As they travelled along the road they watched as the same two helicopters attacked a column of Iraqi tanks that were travelling at a right angle toward the team and may have been headed to cut them off.
Marcus silently thanked the pilots and watched them turn back South and disappear across a ridge line, leaving the column of destroyed and burning tanks in their wake.
As the team approached a town called Tuz, just south of Kirkuk in the northern section of the country, they had halted on a deserted stretch of road to observe the route leading up to the outskirts. They knew the town, and to sum up the general feeling, Stu, while planning a previous mission in to the area, had commented, “The hostility that the locals feel toward Western security forces is matched only by their hatred of soap.”
Marcus climbed out from his vehicle and walked to the front of their small convoy where Ian was already observing the road with his binoculars.
“How are we looking, Ian?” he asked.
Ian lowered the field glasses and handed them to Marcus without taking his eyes away from the town. “Looks deserted. I can see a few infected moving about in the main street, but other than that, nothing that looks like real trouble.”
Marcus raised the binoculars and scanned the buildings and rooftops. He hummed as he did so, acknowledging Ian’s observations. “Can’t see any signs of an ambush, but you fucking never know with this place.”
He keyed his mouthpiece and spoke to the rest of his men. “Pardon the pun guys, but the place looks dead. We’ll push on. Keep the speed up and be ready on the guns.”
Ian and Marcus moved back to their respective vehicles and up into the turrets. Stu was already manning his gun at the rear of the call sign.
“That's us mobile,” Ian sent over the air.
Within a few hundred metres, the three trucks were travelling at speed, racing toward the town and aiming for the far side.
Tuz consisted of a cluster of buildings and residential areas that straddled the main road running South to North through the centre. Most of the buildings were dilapidated single-story breeze block and wooden shacks.
Ditches lined the road and collected all the waste and trash that ran from the homes and businesses and flowed into the oily, stinking water that filtered into the outskirts, acting as a medieval-style open sewer system. Plastic bags and bottles clogged every ditch and dead animals, left to rot at the sides of the road, would be in abundance while people stepped over them and ignored the stink as they continued with their daily routines.
Before the plague, the roadsides would have been packed with trucks and cars being repaired and refuelled at the countless small mechanics garages that ran the length of the main street, with hundreds of people milling about and staring with hatred and contempt at the team as they passed through.
The checkpoint at the Southern end of the town was unmanned, another indication that the place had fallen to the dead. The stretch of road that cut through the built-up area was no more than a couple of kilometres long, and Marcus hoped to be clear to the other side of the town and back on the open highway within just a few minutes.
Midway through, Ian saw a gaggle of infected that crouched over what must have been a body in the centre of the road as they tore at the scraps of flesh, still clinging to its bones. A couple of them heard the approaching vehicles and rose to their feet. They began to stagger toward the convoy and then broke into a sprint, headed directly at the lead vehicle.
“Straight at them, Jim, don’t try to swerve at this speed, you’ll roll the vehicle.” Ian turned the turret and began to fire into their path.
Zaid, the insurgent that had been assigned to Ian’s vehicle, sat in the passenger seat. He braced himself in his seat as they closed the distance to the first of the infected.
Jim stomped his foot down on the pedal, hoping to squeeze a little more power from the engine. “C’mon you ugly fucker!” he snarled through gritted teeth as he aimed the front of his vehicle directly at the lead sprinter.
The grill of the SUV slammed into the midriff of the first body. It folded immediately with its lower limbs being dragged under the wheels and its head smashing down hard on the steel hood of the vehicle. It burst like an overripe watermelon and its brains and thick sticky blood was splattered all across the windshield.
Ian felt a slight bump as he continued to fire when the body was crushed beneath the wheels.
The second approaching infected was slightly off centre from the line of approach and it was hit with a glancing blow that sent it hurling through the air in a tangle of smashed and broken limbs. It landed ten metres away with a wet smack, sounding like a large, fresh slab of meat being dropped onto a tiled floor.
The remainder of the infected, still feasting on the carcass in the middle of the road, were completely unaware of the heavy steel monster approaching them. Only one looked up at the very last instant, as the bumper smashed into its pale, gaunt face. Ian felt more of a jolt as the vehicle ploughed over the organic speed bump.
The dead began to materialise from the houses and streets after hearing the roar of the engines and machinegun. They reached out longingly for the speeding black vehicles, as though they expected the team to stop to satisfy their ravaging needs. The loud chorus of moans as more and more of the walking corpses gathered could be heard over the engines.
Some sprinted for the roadside, but by the time they reached it the team had already passed them, and their clumsy efforts to give chase were no match for the momentum at which the SUVs charged away from them.
Marcus, Stu and Ian didn't bother to waste the ammunition from the machineguns by hosing them down. They were no real threat. Unless a crowd appeared ahead of them, speed and the heavily armoured SUVs themselves were their best weapons at that moment.
The last of the vehicles passed through the final checkpoint on the far side of the town. Like the first one, it was unmanned, except for a dead Iraqi policeman who stepped into the path of Stu’s truck and was obliterated by the heavy wheels.
“That’s us complete.” Stu informed Marcus that the entire call sign had made it through.
Marcus was about to reply when Ian’s frantic voice sounded in his ears. “IED right,” he hollered.
All three vehicles swerved to the left and over to the opposite side of the carriageway in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between the expected explosion and themselves. The people sitting in the passenger positions to the right of the drivers made themselves as small as possible in their seats. The men in the turrets ducked down and braced for the shockwave and flying shrapnel.
The team was travelling too fast to be able to stop in time. If they braked at that moment, they would have come to a halt in the centre of the killing area. Instead they had to try and push through.
A deafening roar, followed by a wave of heat and a temporary vacuum, caused every ear to pop within the team, followed by a loud ringing. Vision was distorted as the shockwave jerked the eyes in their sockets and caused the brain to rattle inside the skull, which had an effect similar to being unexpectedly punched in the jaw.
The pressure wave forced the lead truck to tilt momentarily onto its two left wheels before it rocked back over to the right, forcing it to swerve across the road as Jim fought for control.
Bangs and thuds echoed throughout the vehicles as shrapnel and debris slammed and embedded itself in the outer steel casing of the vehicles.
The three drivers, hardly able to see through the dust storm created by the blast, unable to hear due to the ringing and popping of their ears, and incapable of any other thought through the
concussion of the explosion, accelerated away from the danger area and concentrated on keeping their vehicles on an even keel.
Stu, regaining a moment of self control after being tossed about in the turret, gripped his gun and began to scan for any sign of a follow-up with small arms fire or vehicles from the surrounding area. Nothing stirred, except for a large grey and brown cloud behind them.
“Fuck me. The bastards hit us with a fucking daisy chain,” he called over the net.
Whoever had planted the row of improvised explosive devices had used a method known as a ‘daisy chain’, made up from a number of devices strung together and lining a length of road and set to go off as one, and intended to ensure maximum damage to a convoy.
The daisy chain intended for Marcus’ team had been spotted by Ian as he scanned the road to the left and right from his vantage point in the turret behind the machinegun. It had been planted too close to the roadside and they had avoided it before it caught them in the kill zone as they had roared at full speed out from the town of Tuz.
They had had time to cross to the opposite carriageway, and as a result the only damage done was that they were peppered with a few chinks of shrapnel, cracked outer layers of armoured glass, and Stu had a damaged rear wheel. The vehicles were fitted with run flat tyres and they continued for ten kilometres before they decided to stop and check over their trucks while they replaced the wheel.
They needed a break, and Marcus decided that they would pull off from the main road and travel along a dirt track to lie up in a piece of dead ground for one hour to give them the chance to get some food and recover their senses after the shock of the attack.
