by Wilson, Mark
Spike’s mouth breaks into a wide grin, showing those perfect teeth of his. His camera smile.
They’re rabid, wild, strong and incredibly vicious, but the infected seem incapable of strategizing or even reasoning.
Popping his head around the corner once again, Spike surveys the other infected and mouths their number to us. He guesses one hundred.
The new intel is a game-changer. I spin around and pass the word.
Split the teams.
We’d agreed on this eventuality in planning. James and the Padre lead half of the volunteers back to the door we exited from. The rest stay put with Spike and I, watching anxiously for James’ head to pop around the corner from the west wall. It’s a risk. The other side of the perimeter might well be teeming with the infected. If so, James and his team should swoop back around and we’ll reassess. If not, we’re good to go.
After three long minutes, James’ face slips around the building, followed by a thumbs up.
Instructing each of the volunteers to recheck their weapons and ready themselves, I listen as James and Stevenson use stones to coax the infected south-west of the Kirk to attack the fence. With both groups of the infected effectively herded and with their backs to us, we make our move.
Spike peels off from our group and moves silently on the balls of his feet across the grassy areas towards the infected. He moves so quickly his body appears to blur and he crosses the courtyard in moments. Running along the rear line of infected, Harry slashes at their heels, tearing the grass up with his own as he goes. A line of infected men and women with severed Achilles tendons fall backwards onto the ground.
Rushing forward with ten of my team, we deliver a head shot to each of the downed infected and pull back.
Spike hasn’t stopped moving and is continuing his run back along the fence-line, slashing the backs of knees in the next row of infected. More fall helplessly, not bothering to reach out to break their fall, and we dash back in to deliver the required blow. The whole manoeuvre takes maybe ten seconds and we kill probably twenty infected. Glancing at the faces around us, I see exhilaration and hope. They’re starting to believe that we might survive this.
Then the sound of twenty skulls being breached diverts the herd’s focus away from the battered woman who led the charge at the fence and onto us. Something else has changed: something that makes every nerve prickle.
I take a beat and realise what the sensation is. The banging and scraping on the Kirk door has stopped.
Dozens of pairs of milky eyes, damaged faces, limbs, torsos and hands rotate and reach for us at once from too many directions. Harry spins away, ducking under the outstretched hands of a small woman. He flicks a vicious back kick at her knee, changing the angle it folds at. I step over her and drive my blade into her temple, feeling her sag into true death. I risk a glance at Spike. He’s moving towards the gates and is pulling them closed, sliding the heavy latch into place. A man, stocky and with hardly any visible damage, hears the gates clatter and lumbers towards Spike who’s spotted him before I can shout a warning. Launching a powerful front-kick into the infected man’s chest, he fells his opponent, sending him down hard onto his back.
Following through, Spike lands with one of his blades driven straight through the man’s right eye. Yanking his blade free, he runs towards us.
Rejoining the team, Spike begins to pirouette, duck, slice and sprint his way through ranks of infected. He damages their hands and legs, taking away their grips and capacity for movement, and spins off, leaving the head blow a wide open goal for another in the team.
Finding myself longing for a gun, I follow along his line of wrecked bodies, delivering final blows and shielding my teammates. Jenny is at my side, clumsy at first, but improving in efficiency with every blow to a skull. She’s on a steep learning curve and rising to the challenge.
Despite the blood, the violence, the fear, horror and grim purpose, the men and women we lead are digging in, finding that part of themselves that wants to survive, the part that is a warrior, and flowing into battle. They’ll never be the same again once this is over, not one of them. But it’s the state of mind that’s essential if they’re to survive in the short term.
I lose myself to the same urge, abandoning all sense of time or morality or need for anything other than putting these people down.
Chapter 6
James cut a look at Stevenson. They’d discussed their approach but now that the infected were where they’d planned, James felt unsure about the Padre taking point.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
The big man grinned at him grimly.
“Aye. On me.”
James stood stunned for a split second as Stevenson left him standing at the wall. Tearing across the courtyard, the Padre was far less stealthy than Harry, but Christ, he was every bit as fast. What the Padre lacked in finesse, he made up for in brutal raw power and a ferocious speed and agility completely at odds with his size.
Having watched Harry and Cameron’s success with two lines of the infected, the new team of Padre Stevenson and James Kelly followed their lead. Stevenson hacking at the back of the infected knees and ankles so powerfully that his large blade practically amputated limbs, whilst James took head-blow duty, a half step behind the Padre.
Neither of the men took any pleasure from their grim task, but they did what was required.
The group at that portion of the fence were downed in less than a minute. James grinned at the Padre but the big man’s face had fallen as he looked past James to the main doors. Following the Padre’s eye-line, James whipped around in time to deliver a heavy blow from his back-up weapon, a ball-headed hammer, to the forehead of a small infected man. The blow dented his head with a crunch but didn’t dig deep enough to extinguish the vicious, determined spark of life animating the man.
James was winded as the man clattered into him and began snapping at his face with badly broken teeth. Stevenson lunged with his blade and the man became a dead weight on James, further restricting his airway.
Fighting out from underneath his would-be-killer, James rejoined the Padre, resuming the hack and slash and stab routine they’d used on the fence-line infected minutes earlier. The strategy worked though not nearly as well as it had, principally because, despite splitting themselves between James’ group and Harry’s, the infected swarmed them in much greater numbers and with an increase in speed.
A sea of grasping hands and lethal teeth flowed mercilessly to and over both groups. Screams rose from the volunteers. Some broke formation and began to run, hoping perhaps to re-enter the Kirk. The fleeing people were brought down almost immediately. Some were devoured, some bitten and left to turn, adding to the savage tide of infected.
Most of the volunteers swallowed their fear and found the kernel of courage they needed to push back against the dark desire hunting them. Metal rained down from living hand to dead head. Feet stomped. Knives slashed, stabbed and pierced. Teeth bit and hands tore at flesh. Blood ran free and warm in rivulets along the courtyard, finding the cracks between slabs and dyeing patches of frost black-red in the moonlight. Some slipped and fell on its oily slickness. More blood and gore washed over those who fell. Some rose and rejoined the fight, some became yet another victim and then another enemy.
James and Stevenson fought as a single unit, protecting their team when they could, silencing those who had been bitten and mercilessly dispatching the infected who continued to run ferociously at the living.
Ignoring the lactic acid burn of their muscles, the soldiers eliminated the infected, thinning their numbers. Chests heaving with exertion, adrenalin surge spending the last shreds of their strength, eventually the makeshift squad of soldiers and survivors rid the courtyard of those who’d threatened to overwhelm the group scant minutes before.
Limbs sagging under quivering muscles, relieved finally to be given quarter, James assessed the battleground.
Somewhere in the melee the two groups had j
oined forces, drawn together by the marauding infected. Of the fifty men and women who’d exited the Kirk, less than twenty remained.
The survivors were scattered along the steps to the Kirk. Some lay on their backs, staring up at the clear, starry night sky. Some were praying for forgiveness or in gratitude. Some vomited or wandered bewildered amongst the fleshy detritus of the infected and their fallen comrades, searching for something they recognised or for any lingering signs of life still needing extinguished.
One man sobbed and laughed loudly, sounding as though his mind had fractured and couldn’t choose which release valve to pull.
None of them had survived intact. Not in body and not in spirit. Cameron moved quietly through the survivors offering platitudes, consoling, shoring up spirits. He also checked for bites. Many were wounded but none of the remaining people, mercifully, were bitten. None awaited final silencing from one of the group.
The four soldiers stood staring out at the courtyard and at what their mission had cost. Did securing almost two hundred people justify this? Thirty dead to ensure the safety of almost seven times that many? James knew that for Cameron it was a no-brainer, and he agreed. He also knew with certainty that Harry would be broken inside because of the lives spent so cheaply.
Cameron banged heavily on the Kirk’s main entrance, startling some of the survivors in the courtyard back to their senses at least somewhat.
“All clear,” he shouted. His voice, quivering with adrenaline, was a shadow of itself.
“Leave the doors barricaded, we’ll come around back.”
James watched passively as Cameron ushered the remaining twenty men and women of the group back to the exit they’d come through ten minutes earlier with more than twice that number. Flicking some gore from the toe of his boot, James stayed in the courtyard with Harry long after the others had gone.
Standing with his face close to the gate, Harry looked through the high iron rails into the snarling faces of a swarm of the infected. James took a step nearer, concerned on some level that the damage to his friend’s soul from all the lives they’d lost tonight might compel him to do something… not good.
An image of Harry in Helmand cradling the shredded body of a twelve-year-old boy, killed by an IED, stabbed James’ heart. Harry had barely recovered from the emotional damage of that mission… and now this.
After an hour’s silence, both men stood staring into the faces of the creatures separated from them by metal and disease. Looking at his own reflection in the milky, grey eyes of an infected child wearing bright red Converse kicks, Harry finally spoke.
“They’re dead you know, James.” He gave a small almost imperceptible nod at the girl. This wasn’t a normal state of mind for Harry. The desolation poured from him with such intensity James could almost smell it.
They’d each of them been there before and they’d pulled each other back from the precipice of despair. Harry needed to work through his actions. He needed perspective on his deeds and to find the tools to justify and excuse them. He needed to put tonight’s violence in a little box and close it away forever, and he needed to do so quickly. James laid a hand lightly onto his friend’s shoulder but stayed silent.
“They don’t think, not really. They don’t breathe, had you noticed, James?”
James hadn’t noticed, but looking at the mass of creatures crushing each other against the metal, no fog of breath around them condensing on the cold Edinburgh air, he felt like slapping himself. For missing that. The revelation brought several other characteristics to the forefront of his mind. Things that his subconscious had squirreled away during the battle.
The infected didn’t blink or react to blows. They fed for only a few mouthfuls and tore themselves away to hunt their next victim. He’d relay these details to the team later.
Harry cocked his head to the side and watched his reflection in the dead girl’s eyes a little more closely.
“They’re not really people at all anymore. They move and attack and devour like predators. Like a swarm of locusts or a hungry beast, one that’s carved out the soul of the human that once resided there and taken every cell of the empty… the hollow vessel for its own dark needs.”
James felt a surge of concern for his friend and squeezed his shoulder a little for reassurance.
“They’re hollow, yes. Empty predators, devoid of any reasoning, morals, love, hate or joy and propelled by a need to devour us.”
Harry took a step towards the fence. The legion of dead behind the barrier surged a millimetre forward. Some clacked their teeth at the air. Some bit at the bars or pulled chunks of necrotic flesh from the infected in front of them. All tasted Harry’s scent or sweat on the wind and were driven ravenous by it.
James drew his blade, ready to slash out at any hands that grabbed too closely.
As was common, Harry, with his talent for reading a person’s physicality, had foreseen a subtle change and moved to take advantage. The girl he’d been looking at was almost small enough to fit through the bars… almost. And then suddenly the weight of her brethren, the crushing of her skull and pulping of her muscles, made her the perfect size to slip through.
Harry reached out and caught the dead girl before she hit the ground. He cradled her in his arm, right hand behind her blood-soaked hair. James watched as he slipped his stiletto blade around her neck and into her brain stem.
Pulling her flaccid remains a metre away from the fence, he traced his finger around an oddly familiar rash in the shape of a circle of little roses on her cheek.
Harry laid a hand on her cheek, covering her Ring o’ Roses mark.
“I’m sorry that we failed you, my dear.”
Together the lifelong friends buried the little girl in the red Cons.
Surrounded by lawn and courtyard an inch deep in human remains, the burial of this one infected and truly-dead child was an utterly futile act.
If asked why, James would have simply replied, “Because my friend needed to.”
Chapter 7
The volunteers traipse with heavy feet into the Kirk. All are silent, all are different people from the ones who had left minutes before.
The other survivors inside the Kirk look on anxiously as we file through into the main chamber. It’s clear from their expressions that they’re shocked at how few of us have returned. Some people begin to cry as it dawns on them that this is it; that there’s no more to come, aside from Spike and James. For such a large crowd of people the silence is penetrating, broken only by the shuffling of feet. Remaining volunteers move numbly towards their family or friends and accept their embraces. There’s a lot of damage been done to these people here tonight. Some of them may spend years in therapy. Few will recover.
The thought brings back the look in Spike’s eyes as I left him and James. He’d never spared a tear or even a thought for those enemies he’d dispatched in the line of duty but was always cut deeply when innocents suffered or died. Spike had fought and campaigned publicly for years, demanding that drones only be deployed when the civilian death toll could be guaranteed to be zero. Not one death of non-military personnel. That was his goal. Our superiors had yet to comply.
Tonight’s enemies, comprising what were essentially sick people, must be taking a toll on him.
It’s barely been three hours since we left Bannerman’s and dawn is crawling over from the east. We haven’t slept in two days and my brain fog is beginning to overwhelm me. I notice our phones buzzing away on the pew where we left them and scoop mine up.
Connecting the caller, I press the receiver to my ear and brace myself for a torrent of abuse from Melville. Instead of a live call, a series of messages plays through. My scrambled brain picks through the main points.
Beta Location no longer secure.
Evacuation of Beta Location commenced.
Heavy losses.
Grounds overrun.
RFMs 1 and 2 airlifted.
RFMs 3 to 5, status unknown, presumed dead or infect
ed.
Quarantine protocol initiated.
Proceed to Alpha Location.
Consider infected extremely dangerous.
Avoid contact if possible.
I hit replay and close my eyes as I listen to the messages again. Holyrood Palace is filled with the infected. The Queen and Phillip are in the air. Spike’s other family members, in the city for New Year, are presumably in the Palace. They’re most likely dead or infected. The military are setting a quarantine around the city. First stage is kill and contain. No mention of rescue missions. This tells me that they’re not confident that they can contain the infection and the violence.
If they fail to contain it, second stage is to eradicate. They haven’t given a timeline for extraction at Alpha Location, which could mean that they’re unsure of its status.
Fuck.
I slump to the floor and rest my head against the pew behind me. Running my options through, I painfully figure out how I’m going to tell Spike that almost his whole family are dead. As I decide to go with blunt honesty, Spike and James re-renter the Kirk. Both look in bad shape emotionally, but otherwise unharmed.
As soon as Spike sees me, his face falls.
“What’s happened?” he asks.
There’s no point in lying. “Holyrood Palace is down,” I say bluntly.
“Your gran and grampa are in the air. They’re safe.”
His eyes are trembling.
“What about the others?” he asks, voice trembling also.
I shake my head. “Presumed dead or infected. I’m sorry, Spike.”
