The BIG Horror Pack 2

by Iain Rob Wright

  They all laughed and Cross took his turn. “I would like to find a nice fat bottle of Jack, or maybe even amaretto. Just before shit got messed up I was really into this drink called a Godfather. It was a shot of whisky with a shot of amaretto. Was a nice tipple. Would feel good to get wasted again. I think we’d all agree about that?”

  Everyone nodded and then focused their attention of Parker. It was his turn.

  He sighed. “I don’t know… I guess the thing I would like to find most is a nice, freshly made king-sized bed. One where I could just sleep for the next month. Then I would like to wake up to a nice full-English breakfast.”

  The sound of people’s mouth’s watering was almost palpable.

  “Cheater,” said Anderson, sitting down and joining them. “That was two things. I’ll let you off this time, though, just because I agree with your choices. A nice juicy sausage would be heaven right now.”

  After a brief second, they all started snickering. Anderson blushed and put her hands up. “Okay, okay, calm down. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Anyway, I said a nice juicy sausage, not a bunch of chipolatas.”

  “Ouch,” said Carp. “Way to attack a man’s pride.”

  They all continued laughing, long after the sun had disappeared to be replaced by the moon and twinkling star. It was a beautiful night there amongst the trees.

  ***

  Parker’s eyes snapped open inside the darkness of the tent. The noise that had woken him was the sound of hushed voices somewhere outside. He rolled onto his side to find that he was alone and that the shadows of his sleeping comrades were absent.

  Parker shuffled out of his sleeping bag and crept to the zipped-up entrance of the tent. Then he listened to the voices outside.

  “Should we do something?”

  “I don’t know. What if they’re hostile?”

  “We can hold our own. I say we act now while they’re not expecting us.”

  Parker unzipped the tent and pushed his way out into the chilly night. Carp and Cross were standing there.

  “What the hell is going on,” he demanded. “I’ve already said that we are not going to bother those people.”

  Carp put a finger to his lips and shushed him. Parker was about to lose his temper when his eyes caught the distant torchlights. He placed a hand over his brow and squinted to see what was going on.

  “They turned up about five minutes ago,” said Cross. “Carp was just about to relieve my post when they came flooding out from the woods.”

  Parker crouched down low in the shadows and continued to stare. “It must be the other outfit the guy at the supermarket was talking about.”

  “Should we engage?” Cross asked. “They could have Intel.”

  Parker shook his head. “No, not yet. We need to observe what they’re up to first. I got the impression that they’re hostile.”

  “Not to other military, surely?” said Carp.

  “We can’t assume anything anymore. Keep distance and recon whatever you can. I’ll wake Anderson up and dig in here; cover you both if things go bad. Go wake Schumacher up and take him with you.”

  Parker’s men nodded and crept away down the embankment. Parker snuck over to Anderson’s tent and whispered her name. Eventually she awoke, and was alert and outside her tent within two minutes. She looked weary, but capable.

  “We’ve got unidentified targets in front of the supermarket. Carp, Cross, and Schumacher are checking it out now. You and I are going to keep a cover point.

  Anderson nodded and un-shouldered her rifle. She went prone and targeted the group of strangers down her SUSAT scope. Parker went prone himself about six metres away and pulled up his binoculars to his eyes.

  The new group consisted of seven men, fully armed. They all carried the same rifles that Parker’s men carried – British Army issue. All of them had arrived by foot and they were too far away to make out their insignias, but their black berets identified them as infantry – grunts. Whether or not they were battled-hardened grunts or green recruits was unclear, but they carried themselves with confidence; shouting and laughing as they milled about the front of the supermarket. There was also one woman with them, but she wasn’t military. The woman looked to be in her thirties and was wearing a ragged and stained summer dress. It would likely provide little protection against the harsh kiss of the cold night air. The woman was being lead over to the front of the supermarket, in front of where the trucks were lined up. One of the soldiers – a large man wearing a red bandana instead of a beret or Kevlar helmet – was hollering something at the men around him.

  In the corner of his binocular’s vision, Parker caught movement on the roof. As he repositioned his focus, he saw that it was the man he had met during the day – the one with the nail gun.

  While the sound didn’t carry far enough across the tarmac to reach Parker’s ears, it was clear that a conversation was being had between the soldier on the ground and the man on the roof.What the hell is going on? Is this the outfit the guy was talking about? The ones he was wary of?

  Parker continued to watch as the scene unfolded in front of him. The woman was brought in front of the soldier with the bandana. Then something bad happened.

  A punch to the woman’s ribs dropped her to her knees. Parker heard her pained gasp as it left her anguished lungs. She was now kneeling in a position that Parker knew only too well.

  Parker had no time to do anything but watch in terror as the woman was executed – a 5.56mm NATO round through her skull the tool responsible. The sound brought back memories of Afghanistan and Iraq to Parker and, for a moment, he was glued in place, unable to move. Human life had become no more important than that of a lowly housefly. Justice and punishment had fled the world.

  Beside him, Anderson cursed. “Goddamn motherfucking barbarians. What the fuck!”

  Before Parker knew what was happening, more gunfire rang out. He realised quickly that it was Carp, Cross, and Schumacher – the men having made the autonomous decision to engage. Parker did not blame them. He pulled up his own rifle and flipped off the safety. He squeezed the trigger and caught one of the unknown soldiers in the wrist. The man leapt back behind one of the trucks and looked around in a panic as he struggled to keep a grip on his weapon. All around the car park, the hostiles were taking up cover behind abandoned vehicles. Carp and Cross were nowhere to be seen, but the sounds of their rifles could be heard off in the distant treeline of the surrounding woods.

  On the roof, the man with the nail gun was screaming and shouting, seemingly madder than he was scared. Luckily for him, the hostile gunmen in the car park were paying him no mind as they searched around frantically for Parker and his men.

  Parker lined up another shot, aiming for the soldier in the red bandana – the leader. The bullet whistled across the car park and headed straight for the man’s skull. But it missed by a fraction of an inch. The round struck the aluminium of a nearby panel van and left a ragged dent. The near miss was not lost on the soldier in the bandana and the shock was evident on his face. He shouted above the din of battle and waved an arm to his men. Within seconds, the hostile soldiers were gone, fleeing into the cover of the woods. Several moments later, Carp and Cross appeared from the adjacent treeline and scurried up to the supermarket’s blockaded entrance.

  Parker surveyed the area through his binoculars, checking that the other unit had truly fled the battlefield. It appeared they had, for now, but Parker knew they would just be regrouping. They would come back.

  “Come, on,” he said to Anderson. “We’ll rendezvous up front with Cross and the others.”

  Parker and Anderson kept low and beat a path between abandoned cars and overturned shopping trolleys until they were at the front of the Supermarket with Cross.

  “Status?” Parker asked.

  “We’re all fine,” replied Cross. “Bad news is: so are they. We only downed one of them.”

  Parker nodded. He had already noticed the dead soldier slumped up agains
t a battered Honda Civic. Its iconic lighting strip above the front bumper was smashed and smeared with blood. Then Parker turned his attention to the dead woman, still lying in the spot where she had been callously executed by the solider wearing the bandana.

  “That was Stella,” came a voice from above.

  Parker spun on his heels and brought his rifle up to his shoulder. It was the man on the roof. The man with the nail gun.

  “S’pose you’ve earned yourself an invitation,” the man said. “Hold on. I’ll come let you in.”

  Parker looked at his men and shrugged. “About time something went right for a change.”

  ***

  Two minutes later, the man with the nail gun appeared at side access fence where Parker had first met him. He quickly unlocked the thick padlock and dragged the chain-link door open. It scratched a white line into the tarmac as it slid across the ground.

  As soon as Parker and his men passed through the gate, their host relocked it again anxiously. His hands were visibly shaking.

  “You okay?” Parker asked.

  The man fiddled with his hair and sniffed his nose. “Yeah… I-I’m fine. It’s just… Well, I think I was about to pretty much give up before you guys showed up. That asshole Mack would have finally finished me off this time.”

  “Mack?” asked Parker. “The guy in the bandana? Who is he?”

  “I figured you’d know better than me. Being soldiers and all.”

  “Unfortunately, the British Army is a big group – was a big group, anyway – most soldiers don’t know each other from Adam. I’ve never met the man before.”

  The man with the nail gun unlocked a small door on the supermarket’s loading bay and allowed everyone to funnel inside. “Well,” he said, walking after them. “You can take my word for it that he is a scumbag piece of shit. I wish he’d caught a bullet when you fired on him.”

  “We’ll get the fucker next time,” said Cross.

  Parker disapproved of bad language in front of civilians, but when he saw what relief the show of bravado caused on their host’s face, he decided to let it slide.

  “You guys hungry?” the man asked them. “A lot of stuff spoiled early on, which is part of the reason why the whole place stinks so bad, but there is tons of canned food and other stuff that is just fine. Help yourself to anything you see.”

  “Hell, yes,” said Schumacher.

  Parker put a hand up to shush his men before they became uncontrollably excited. Food was the world’s only important resource nowadays and they had just stumbled upon a goldmine by the sounds of things. They were still soldiers, though, and acting giddy was inappropriate. “We won’t take food from your people,” Parker said. “We will just take whatever you can spare.”

  The man with the nail gun stopped and turned to face Parker. He looked beaten and glum. “Yeah, about that…My people consists of just me. Everyone else is dead. I lied to you before to warn you off.”

  When Parker stepped from the warehouse into the supermarket’s public area, all he could see, all he could smell, was death.”

  ***

  After almost puking at the sight of so many bodies, Parker and the others had slunk back into the warehouse and had followed their host into a comfy staffroom. It was a disconcerting contrast to the horror outside.

  “What the hell happened here, man?” Cross spoke in a tone somewhere between aggression and pleading.

  The man put down his nail gun on the table where he sat and shook his head. His body had slumped so much that he seemed inches shorter. “Lots of things happened. First man to die was a guy named Stephen. He tried to rape one of the woman we had here and…well, I guess the rest of us retaliated. Then Mandy went into a diabetic coma and died as soon as she used up all the Pharmacy’s insulin. Tom and Annie committed suicide; both their sons died of The Peeling. Talking of which, there was a second outbreak of the disease. Just when we thought everyone left alive was immune, about a dozen of us came down with it. We tried our best to nurse them, but it was useless. It took weeks for them to rot down to the bone. Then Mack came and finished off the rest of us.”

  “How many were left when Mack came,” Parker asked.

  “There were nine of us. Four woman, five men. When Mack first came, he wanted food, and we gave it to him. We were glad to see him and his men. We were naïve.”

  Parker looked around the room and saw empty wrappers and dog-eared magazines. “You’ve been holing up in this room?”

  “Yeah. I figured it would be unhealthy mixing with all the bodies out there. Plus they were my friends, you know? Besides, I’m just one man. I can’t move three dozen bodies. Got nowhere to take ‘em anyway.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Anderson. There was sympathy in her voice.

  The man looked surprised by the question. It was almost as if the notion of having a name was lost on him. Perhaps it had been a while since he had shared it with anybody. “My name is Dennis. I was a carpenter before all this happened. Hence the nail gun.” He motioned at the power tool on the table. “Gas powered. Thought about using on myself lately.”

  Anderson patted the man on the back. She smiled. “There’s no need to do that now. We can get you out of here.”

  “Screw that,” said Cross. “We should bunker down here. We got food, security-”

  “Security!” Dennis laughed. “Mack and his men have made sure that security is the last thing we have here.”

  “What happened to the nine of you that were left when Mack arrived?” Parker enquired.

  “After we fed him and his men, they came back, but this time they didn’t want food.”

  “They wanted the woman,” said Anderson, looking sick to her stomach.

  Dennis nodded and looked sick himself. “We wouldn’t give them up, of course. So Mack and his men assaulted the supermarket. We were unarmed and were going to kill us all. Once they got inside. My wife offered to go with them as long as they left the supermarket. Then the other woman showed their support and stood beside her. The women sacrificed themselves so that the men would be safe. Mack just laughed about the whole thing, like it was a game or something. He took the woman and they drove off, but, before he left, he told us to be gone by morning; that the supermarket was his.

  “But you’re still here,” said Cross.

  Dennis nodded. “When Mack left, we decided to barricade the supermarket. They had taken everything from us and we were damned if we were going to let them take this place.”

  “So what did you do?” Parker asked.

  “Got the trucks up against the entrance, used the hardware supplies in the warehouse to nail the windows and doors shut. Found the biggest padlock we could and secured the access gate. Made some firebombs from whiskey and lighter fluid. It didn’t protect us, though. Soon as we put up resistance, Mack brought out the woman. They were tied up like animals, bleeding and crying. I have nightmares about what they must have gone through. When Mack started executing them one after the other, the men I was with surrendered. They went outside to give themselves up. Mack shot them all.”

  “Why didn’t you go out there with them?” Anderson asked.

  “Because I was a coward. I was too frightened to go outside, so I locked myself in this staffroom while the other men went outside.”

  “Well, being a coward is probably the only reason you’re still alive,” Parker said.

  “When I had the guts to come out, I saw the dead woman and the dead men and I realised that there was no way out of this. Mack would kill me eventually, my wife, Stella, too. The only purpose I had left was to make it as hard on him and his barbarians as I could. I decided to keep fighting until a bullet found me. I would have finally given up today if you hadn’t been here.”

  “That woman was your wife,” Parker surmised. The woman Mack executed in front of the building was your wife.”

  Dennis nodded and a tear spilled from his eye. “I thought she was already dead. When I saw her, I thought maybe there was
a chance Mack would give her back to me if I just stopped fighting and left. But he shot her before I even had chance to say anything to her. They’ve had her for weeks. I barely recognised her. Even though she was alive, her eyes…her eyes were dead. I’m glad she passed on. I hate thinking it, but she could never have gotten through what they did to her. I just wanted to be dead too, to go wherever she was. Then you started firing on Mack’s men and here we are.”

  “Where are they based?” Parker asked. “Are they nearby?”

  Dennis shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. The nearby woods aren’t massive but I figure it a good place to set up camp. It won’t be long before they come back.”

  “You’re sure they will come back?” Cross asked.

  Dennis nodded adamantly. “Mack won’t let this go. He doesn’t accept the word, no. He’ll be irate that you took out one of his men. I guarantee you that he will be back.”

  Parker nodded and began to think. “Then, we make sure we’re ready for him.”

  ***

  Parker spent the next two hours directing Dennis and his men in various tasks designed to increase their tactical advantage should another attack occur. They stockpiled as many food and supplies from the supermarket floor back into the warehouse as they could. Then they undertook the unenviable task of stacking the heavy freezer units, shelving stacks, and till desks up against the front of the building where the plate glass windows could potentially be breached. The task was unenviable due to the rotting, foul-smelling corpses that littered the area. Some were mottled grey skeletons – victims of The Peeling, while others featured gunshot wounds no doubt delivered by Mack’s men. The odour of death was something they were all used to by now, but this amount of death so close together was still enough to turn their stomachs. Parker forced a grin onto his face; it was a proven technique to fight off the urge to retch. He just hoped Dennis did not misinterpret it as disrespect.

  The current task that occupied them all was the search for viable weaponry. Dennis had his nail gun and Parker’s men had their rifles, but their ammunition was low after the previous fire fight. They needed alternative means of arming themselves in case Mack’s resources outlasted theirs.