The existing platoons had been halved the week prior, in preparation for seeding with the new recruits. Vinh had secured a well-deserved commission, and would now lead a platoon as a Lieutenant in his own right. Steph as one of his existing Corporals, had been the logical choice to fill Vinh’s vacancy by virtue of ability alone. Now that there was no possible claim of favouritism due to the absence of a relationship, Mark had no compunction in handing her the duty. Steph’s feelings toward him might have changed, but she fought better than ever in the face of the Infected. Any soldier that could maintain cool detachment and clinical reasoning in the heat of battle was needed at the peak of the command structure. His feelings be damned, Mark was happy to have them trodden over if it meant his squad had the best leaders possible to keep them safe.
Mark picked up his other copy of the recruits coming to fill gaps created by the reshuffle. A few names stood out from the rest. Heath Tipper was joining his platoon. Ignoring his father’s wishes to remain on the farm, he’d voluntarily enlisted after recovering from his wounds. From all reports, the kid had excelled during training and would make an excellent fighter. Further down the list, his eyes stopped at another name, Chris Finart. On top of what he already knew about the man, he’d heard a number of new rumours circulating. Still angry at placing himself in a position where he could be manipulated into accepting the man under his leadership, Mark had avoided making any overt enquiries himself to date. But now he didn’t have a choice, the man would be under his command within the hour. He grunted in irritation, then got up to search for a man who might have some answers.
***
‘Hey Vinh, you got a second, mate?’
Vinh glanced up from his makeshift desk, appearing somewhat flustered as he shuffled through a bunch of paperwork. ‘Um... yeah, I guess. I didn’t realise there was so much bloody paperwork that came with the job. How the hell did you make it look so easy?’
‘Most of it’s useless shit,’ said Mark, taking a seat opposite. ‘Just find the bits of information that matter or can’t be ignored, and bin the rest. And then hand the stuff that has to be done to your Sergeant. Easy,’ he said with a wry smile as Vinh looked up at the last words.
‘You son of a bitch – I should have known!’ muttered Vinh. ‘So, what is it that can’t wait?’
‘Chris Finart. You were seconded as a training sergeant until scoring your commission - I hear he was in your squad for part of that?’
Vinh sat back in his chair, crossed his arms and nodded. ‘I was wondering how long it would take you to finally ask a question about him.’
Mark scowled. ‘Well I couldn’t leave it any longer. What’s your opinion of him after spending six weeks kicking his arse into shape? Can’t say I was a fan of the prick the last time we met, and I want to know if I was wrong. So, is he a racist little psycho like his father, or just a pathetic creep? Not that I’m happy about taking on either of those options.’
‘On the surface, he did all right. Accurate shot with a rifle, good tactical mind and appeared to remain cool enough once Carriers were added to the training scenarios.’
‘But?’
‘My gut says something’s off about the guy. Remember when we were doing the house clearances in Queenscliff and Geelong, and you’d come across the occasional Carrier that had its throat torn out and couldn’t make noise?’
Mark nodded, waiting for Vinh to continue.
‘If one was near, I’d always feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck before I’d even seen the thing, like I could sense I was about to be attacked.’ Vinh put down the papers in his hand and looked at Mark, his expression serious. ‘I’ve had the same feeling with Chris a few times, generally when I’m alone with the man. I know it sounds stupid, but hell, listening to my gut has saved my arse more than once.’
‘So, you trust him with a gun in his hands?’
‘Fuck no, but I’ve got nothing I can hang on him aside from instinct, and the last time I heard – that’s worth jack shit in a court martial. The guy’s a predator, it just waits to be seen whether or not he’s happy to channel that part of his mind against the Infected.’
Mark sighed, resigned to the situation. ‘Thanks for the heads up,’ he said, standing again.
‘I want him in my platoon, Mark. I’ll swap you one of my recruits as a replacement.’
Mark snapped a look at Vinh, caught by surprise. ‘Why the fuck would you want to do that? And besides, the deal I made back in Tasmania saw him placed under my command.’
‘No, he just had to lead by an officer who knew what the bastard had done in the past, and I fit that bill as well as you. Anyway, after kicking his arse into shape throughout recruit training, I think I have a handle on him. If he steps out of line, I’ll see that he gets fed a bullet.’
‘You sure?’
Vinh nodded. ‘Yep. Don’t worry, mate, I’ll call in the favour sometime soon,’ he said with a wry smile.
***
Chris stood in line with other recruits allocated to the platoon. His expression was calm and attentive as his new officer acknowledged their arrival, but on the inside, he seethed, furious at his allocation to Lieutenant Nguyen’s squad. Chris thought he’d escaped the man when his training had finally ended, and yet here he was again, and promoted to a commissioned officer to top it all off. Vinh had ridden him hard during the previous six weeks, wearing his act of compliance paper-thin. How many times he’d stared at the back of the man’s head, fantasizing about how it would feel to bury his knife hilt-deep into his neck. And yet somehow, he’d maintained his composure, allowing his anger to fester and wait for release at a later date.
Glancing out the corner of his eye, he observed the recruits around him. All fools. Sheep that followed orders without thought, that had fallen for the indoctrination of mateship and sacrifice without question. It made him sick how they looked at the veterans who made up the other half of the platoon, showing deference to the soldiers just because they’d survived a few run-ins with shambling corpses.
Chris’s hand dropped to his side, fingering the sheath of his new sword, the only acquisition of the day to bring him any satisfaction. Lieutenant Nguyen had adopted the peculiarity of his former boss to carry a short sword into battle. The officer had presented each recruit with their own custom-made weapon to match those worn by the other veterans, a long-bladed machete ground into a double-edged blade. It had a satisfying weight in hand, and Chris looked forward to burying it in the neck of his officer.
‘Private Finart!’
Chris was ripped from his thoughts by the sound of his name. His eyes flicked forward, body stiffening. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Do you find something funny at the prospect of fighting a city-sized swarm of Carriers?’ Vinh said, voice low, dangerous.
Chris stared straight ahead, refusing to take the bait. ‘No, Sir.’
‘Then wipe that fucking smirk off your face and listen. This isn’t your daddy’s playgroup anymore. If you want to survive the coming fight, you bloody do as I say, when I say it.’
Vinh glared at him for a moment longer before flicking his eyes away, his lip curled upward in obvious contempt. Chris tracked the Lieutenant as he walked toward a whiteboard in the room’s corner, distracting his mind with his usual game of picking out where he’d like to stab his knife in the future. Carotid artery, neck. Femoral artery, groin. Puncture an eye, just for fun.
Vinh stabbed a finger at the board. ‘This is where some of you will gain your first true exposure to the enemy. And you better believe, it’s going to be one hell of a spectacle.’
For the first time that meeting, Chris’s attention was finally secured. He looked at the whiteboard, noting a wide arc at the base to which Vinh pointed. The noise of a helicopter suddenly filled the room as one passed low overhead and landed in the adjacent field. Vinh waited for the blades to slow and noise lessen before he carried on.
‘This wall has been carefully constructed over the last six months, all to
ensure that we can fight from a position of safety. It’s thirty feet high, four metres wide at the top with a deep moat to the enemy side. In one fortnight, this will be an obstacle that the swarms of Melbourne will break upon like a king tide. All we’ll need to do is cull the bastards from our position on the wall.’
The map was drawn roughly to scale, and Chris scanned the features, seeking out any weakness that he could exploit. In three different locations, he noted tunnels through the wall and tucked the information into the back of his mind to consider later.
One of the new recruits raised an arm in question.
‘I don’t understand, Sir. I thought this battle was to clear the Infected from Melbourne. Why is the wall nowhere near the city?’
‘Ever heard the saying “choose your battles wisely”? Well in this case, the General has chosen a site that will play to the advantage of our relatively small numbers. All we have to do, is bring the enemy to our killing field to join the party.’
The same recruit began to raise his arm again before Vinh cut him off.
‘Let me guess, you want to know how that’s going to happen?’
The recruit nodded, a touch of red hitting her cheeks.
‘Over the past week, sound attractants have already massed the Infected of greater Melbourne on the northern side of the Westgate Bridge. At this time the bridge span is blocked, however come the day of battle, that will be removed, and the swarm brought to the plain.’ Vinh paused and looked out the window of the barracks to a close-cropped field of grass outside where the landed helicopter sat. It was a small two-seated craft, not something usually seen on an army base.
‘During the last weeks of training here in Geelong, you would have no doubt seen our fleet of small helicopters in action, performing drills. Well they’re our version of a cattle dog. Those little bastards will be like a floating steak in the air before the starved masses of Infected, drawing them to our field of battle.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Erin glanced down and felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She hovered not far above Southern Cross Station in Melbourne, taking part in the last sections of her helicopter training. Carriers filled the inner-city streets of Melbourne in a heaving, writhing mass of butchered flesh. Ever since the noise attractants had been dropped in sequence, starting from outer suburbs, then leading into the middle of the city, the number of Carriers had become ever more dense. Now the Infected swarmed over every free piece of ground. Bodies crawled over each other, rising in mounds past second storey windows of buildings and skyscrapers.
Directly beneath her, Carriers almost reached the heights of the train station’s roof. Hands reached up, mouths open, screeching rage and hunger at her helicopter that taunted and drove them to distraction. One face in the mob drew her attention. What was left of a woman dragged herself over the mosh pit of arms and bodies until she was near the skids of the chopper. She levered herself to standing atop the pile, one hand gripped a skull of another Carrier for balance, claw-like fingers puncturing the eyes like she was gripping a bowling ball.
Concentration disturbed, the helicopter drifted a metre to the right.
‘For fucks sake, Private,’ muttered her flight instructor. ‘If you can’t hover for at least thirty seconds, you can kiss your licence goodbye.’ The instructor took over control, raising the craft back up in the air.
Erin bit her lip in annoyance. ‘I can, I just got distracted that’s all. You’ve seen me do it before, why can’t you sign me off on the basis of that?’
‘You’re doing your tests here to replicate of the stress you’ll be under if you pass. Have a look about you, Erin. You’ll be by yourself in the future, flying over endless masses of these rabid bastards. You need to have perfect control of your bird, be able to move her like she was just another part of your body with nothing more than a thought. You need to be good enough to react to any unexpected event. If you have to ‘think’ about how to react and move your craft – you’ll end up crashing in a sea of arms.’ He reached up and rapped a glove-covered knuckle against the bubble of glass surrounding the cockpit. ‘It’d take mere seconds for those beasts to smash the glass, and then it’s lights out.’
Erin ground her teeth together. There was no way she was going to be sent back to Mark’s platoon as a failure. Not after spending the last months in study and preparation. The journey to her current position above the swarm of Melbourne had been a long time coming. Starting out in fixed wing aircraft before moving into helicopters, she’d been forced to overcome a fear of heights that she’d admitted to no one.
‘I can do this. Give me another chance and I’ll prove it.’
Erin’s instructor gave her a hard look, then nodded an acceptance. ‘OK. Your common fault is drifting to the right during a hover. Let’s provide some added motivation to correct that mistake.’
Erin raised an eyebrow in question, unsure exactly what he meant. The instructor changed course, descending toward the building on the opposite side of Spencer St. until it stood no more than ten metres to the right of the helicopter rotor blades. Carriers on the third floor of the building hammered at the windows, anger boiling at the craft that hovered within spitting distance. Glass smashed outward, shards falling in a deadly rain to the crowd below as the first Infected broke the meagre barrier. Erin tore her eyes away from the scene after watching the first Carrier leap from the window toward the helicopter in vain.
‘OK Private, take the controls.’
Erin nodded and took hold of the cyclic stick while resting both feet on the anti-torque pedals on the floor. The stick controlled the main rotor and the direction in which the craft moved, while the pedals controlled in which direction the nose of the helicopter faced. It was a balancing act that made her feel she was performing a dance, feet and hands moving independently like she was pulling the strings of a marionette to keep the craft stable. The tip of Erin’s tongue poked from one corner of her mouth as she concentrated. In her peripheral vision, she saw another Carrier fall from the building’s window, outstretched arms missing the rotor tips by a hand’s breadth. The added incentive kept her from drifting to the right, but inadvertently the helicopter started to move to the left instead.
‘Bloody hell, Private, I can’t believe you’re going to make me do this,’ muttered her instructor, taking the controls off her once again. He climbed the helicopter above the level of the buildings, his eyes searching the buildings and streets below for something. Finding what he sought, he swerved the helicopter over to a quadrangle framed by three buildings and a tree on the last side. Erin’s gut squirmed as the instructor descended into the space between the four structures.
‘This time you hold her steady. I mean it, Erin. You let her budge more than a metre in any direction and you’ll be smashing into brick or branch. Controls are yours.’
Erin’s heart raced, hammering against the inside of her ribs like it wanted to escape. She forced herself to breathe slowly and tried to ignore the insistent voice of self-doubt that told her she was going to die. A self-doubt that screamed she was about to fall from the sky in a twisted monstrosity of metal, into the arms of the swarm to be ripped apart and eaten alive. Erin focused on her controls, the feel of the metal beneath her hands and feet, and by extension of that, the rotors of the craft.
She was in control. The helicopter remained steady in the air while the down draft of the blades whipped the thin branches of the tree into a frenzy. The seconds dragged onward, each seeming an hour as she ignored the Infected reaching upward from the ground below, and those that screamed their rage at her from the surrounding buildings.
‘That’ll do,’ said her instructor, taking back over control and lifting the helicopter back above the city.
Now that she was safe again, Erin’s muscles felt like jelly. A fine tremor shook her fingers and her breath quickened with the aftermath of her adrenaline surge. Erin looked over at her instructor, still shocked at the danger in which he’d placed both o
f them for the sake of a test.
The instructor glanced at her quickly and snorted. ‘Give it a break. You were always going to do fine – you just needed a little motivation, that’s all.’
‘That’s one hell of a gamble, what if I’d stuffed up?’
‘I reckon it was a safe bet. If you couldn’t perform under pressure, you wouldn’t have survived this far against the plague. So, quit looking like you want to gut me, we’ve still got a few items to check off the list before we can head back to Geelong.’
Erin took a deep breath and let it out slowly between clenched teeth as she looked back out to the city skyline. ‘OK. Let’s get this shit over and done with.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mark gripped the edge of the parapet and stared out over the future field of battle, quietly stunned at the sheer scale of defences created. The wall was now finished, and in the last stages of stocking in preparation for the battle. On the Melbourne side, the wall soared thirty vertical feet from the base of a wide ditch. The front was panelled in hardwood timber, the joins perfectly flush to prevent any finger hold. The top of the wall was four metres wide, allowing for easy troop movement to support any areas along the front that came under heavy attack. To his right, the wall extended over the Princes Highway in an unbroken line to the edge of Port Phillip Bay, while to his left it continued in an arc for another few kilometres. If he hadn’t held a rifle in his arms, he could almost fool himself that he’d stepped back in time and taken on the role of a border soldier atop Hadrian’s Wall. Ahead, the grass plain was stripped of all habitation. Farms and trees were cleared, providing a clear line of sight as far as the eye could see. Two hundred metres out from the wall, a series of shoulder deep trenches spread across the plain in parallel lines. In other locations he could also make out constructions that he guessed held pre-prepared incendiary bombs waiting for use.
Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation Page 23
