Looking around, Burke knew it would be a long time before London was once again considered the jewel of the British Empire. There was that much destruction.
And he and his team were headed into the heart of it.
Burke reached up and adjusted the gas mask slightly, trying, and failing, to make it more comfortable. The rubber mouthpiece tasted like old tires and the clips on his nose pinched uncomfortably, but he guessed he’d have to make do until Professor Graves had a chance to check the air once they arrived at their destination. For now, he’d just have to deal with it.
Captain Wattley nudged him with an elbow to get his attention and then pointed across the water. A large freighter had run aground on the other side of the river, tipping up at an angle, and even from here Burke could see the bodies of the dead lying on the deck and hanging partially off the edge of the ship. Although he couldn’t see their bodily injuries in any detail, the dark red stains covering most of their torsos didn’t require much explanation.
Wattley said something to him, but Burke didn’t hear it clearly; the sound was muffled thanks to the hoods of the gas masks each of them wore. He leaned in closer.
“What was that?”
Wattley gestured at the boat as they slipped past in the gray light of the early morning. “Why are they still dead? Why aren’t they up and walking around again?”
It took Burke a moment to understand what it was that Wattley meant.
Shambler bites were infectious and those who survived being bitten by one often suffered a hideous death shortly thereafter as the virus or whatever it was spread through their system. Inevitably, those who died ended up rising again to join those resurrected by the gas, like one big happy family of flesh-eating undead. The same might be expected here. The victims on the freighter had clearly been killed by shredders and, given that this new breed of undead were cousins to the shamblers, it made sense that their attacks might have the same effect.
Or, at least, Burke would have thought so.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Perhaps those who had survived the attack unscathed had returned to deliver the coup de grâce, a bullet through the skull, to their less fortunate comrades?
He suggested as much to Wattley.
“Come on, you can’t be serious!” the captain replied. “Look at them over there; there must be nearly four dozen or more! It would have taken forever and the noise would have brought dozens more shredders down on them in the process.”
Wattley shook his head. “Nah, I’m betting there’s more to it than that.”
But without stopping and boarding the freighter, which neither man wanted to do, there was no way of knowing for sure. As the wreck slipped into the distance behind them, Burke wondered if anyone would ever know what had happened aboard the vessel in its final hours.
Less than ten minutes later the bulk of the Westminster Bridge loomed out of the gray light of dawn ahead of them, Big Ben and the ruins of the Houses of Parliament rising behind it, and the captain began quietly passing instructions through a series of sailors stationed as relays to Lieutenant Sanders in the control room. The boat slowed as it approached the bridge and then slipped into its shadow. Burke stepped out of the way as men dashed up from below to handle the anchors and soon the vessel was at a full stop, bobbing gently in the waters beneath the bridge.
They had arrived at their destination.
Captain Wattley disappeared below to arrange for their transport ashore. Professor Graves took his place out on deck, lugging his haversack behind him. The gas mask he wore made him look particularly insectoid given his height and narrow frame, like a weirdly mechanical praying mantis, and Burke found that he had to resist the urge to laugh lest he insult the man.
Graves dug around in his haversack for a moment, removing an assortment of items.
“Here, hold this,” he said, his voice muffled from the mask. He handed Burke a small automaton that looked like a mechanical dragonfly, but with eight wings instead of four. A small glass jar hung from its belly.
“What is it?”
Graves ignored him. “Use this to wind it up, please,” he said, handing Burke a wooden hand crank.
Burke sighed, but did as he was told. He had come to know Graves a bit better over the last several weeks of working together and knew that once Graves tuned into a particular project, getting three words out of him was tantamount to getting blood from a stone.
He inserted the crank into a hold designed for it in the side of the dragonfly’s body. He held the wings flat against the dragonfly’s back with one hand while turning the crank with the other.
“Fifty times, please. No more and no less.”
Right.
While Burke was doing that, Graves pulled out several bottles filled with different colored powders or liquids and arranged them on the decking next to him. When he was satisfied with the arrangement, he took a roll of string from his pocket and tied the loose end of the string to a ring in the nose of the dragonfly.
“Now I want you to take the EDFFAMD and raise it . . .”
Burke interrupted. “The what?”
“The EDFFAMD.”
At Burke’s continued blank look, Graves said, “The electronically driven free-flying atmospheric measuring device,” and pointed at the device in Burke’s hands.
“Right. Got it.”
“Raise it over your head and loft it into the air like you would a pigeon.”
The wings lay flat and unmoving as it headed skyward and for a moment Burke thought it was going to reach the top of its arc and drop like a rock right into the waters of the Thames, but then the eight little tin plates that served as wings popped out and flapped wildly, sending the little device soaring into the air.
Graves kept control of it via the string he held in his hands, and after it had buzzed around above them for a few minutes, he quickly reeled it in. Burke could see that the collection bottle hanging beneath the automaton was filled with some of the dense smog that was drifting across the city. Graves quickly popped a cork in the bottle and slipped it free of its clamp.
Burke watched as Graves set the bottle aside and mixed some of the powders and liquids from the other jars together in a mortar and pestle. He ground them into a dark-gray-colored powder, then he turned and handed the mortar to Burke.
“When I open the collection bottle, I want you to pour that mixture inside as quickly as you can.”
Graves was hard to understand through the hood, but Burke thought he’d gotten the gist of it correct and he did as he was asked, tapping the edge of the mortar against the side of the bottle gently to get as much of the gritty-looking mixture out as he could.
When he was done Burke stepped back, expecting some strange chemical reaction to occur as Graves corked the bottle back up and gave it a good shake.
Nothing.
The mixture inside the bottle stayed exactly the same.
“Excellent!” Graves exclaimed, then reached up and removed his gas mask.
“No, Graves! What are you doing?” Burke shouted, reaching out to forcibly return the mask to the man’s face, but Graves shook him off.
“Now, now, Major. I assure you I’m just fine. The gas has dissipated and we are in no danger of it from here.”
Burke reached up to remove his own mask, and then stopped.
“You’re certain?” he asked.
Graves cast a withering look in his direction but didn’t say anything.
“Okay, okay,” Burke replied, holding up his hands in surrender. He loosened the strap on his mask and slipped it off his head. Realizing he was holding his breath, Burke relaxed and tried to breathe normally.
The air held the acrid scent of burned concrete and steel, along with the stink of bodies decaying in the wind, but that was all.
Perhaps their mission just got a l
ittle easier.
Chapter Thirteen
Beneath Westminster Bridge
London
ONCE PROFESSOR GRAVES determined that gas masks were unnecessary, communication was no longer hampered by the thick material of the mask hoods, and the squad’s efforts to get under way sped up appreciably.
A wooden-bottomed rubber raft was brought up from below and Burke’s men inflated it with the help of a pressure hose run up from the engine room below. As the squad climbed aboard, Burke ran through things one more time with Captain Wattley.
“Forty-eight hours,” he told him. “If we’re not back in that time frame, we’re probably not coming back at all. Get your men out of here and see to it that Colonel Nichols in Military Intelligence has all the details you can give him. That’s all I can ask.”
Wattley nodded grimly. “I’ll keep an eye out, Major, and I’ll be sure your man knows what happened if things go sour for you.”
The two men shook hands, and then Burke joined his men aboard the raft. Moments later they were rowing for shore, doing their best to keep the noise levels down to the barest minimum.
After anchoring the boat on some convenient rocks, the team disembarked and formed up as a unit, with Sergeant Drummond on point and with Corporal Williams watching their six. Major Burke was near the front of the column, just behind Drummond, with the others spaced out in a single-file line with about a yard between them.
Burke’s rules of engagement were simple. They were to avoid any and all contact with the shredders for as long as possible. If it looked like they were about to be attacked, they were to try and eliminate the threat without resorting to gunfire. Gunfire would be used as a last resort and then only so long as the threat remained active. By limiting the noise they were making, Burke was hoping to avoid attracting large groups of shredders to the team before they reached their destination.
The streets weren’t much better up close than they had been from the deck of the Reliant. Many of the buildings had been reduced to rubble; soot, smoke, and ash lay everywhere thanks to the fires burning out of control in other parts of the city; and they were forced to move at a slow, measured pace to limit the noise they were making so as to avoid attracting wandering shredders.
With Drummond leading the way, they managed to leave the river behind and make their way into the city without incident. They spotted more than a handful of the creatures moving through the streets, but each time they did so Drummond led the squad away from any potential confrontation, moving down an alternate route that allowed them to skirt the creatures before they were noticed.
What they couldn’t avoid, however, were the remains of the shredders’ victims. Bodies lay everywhere, the violent evidence of death that many of them sported on their bodies proof enough that it hadn’t been the German bombing run or subsequent gas attack that had done them in.
Wanting a closer look, Burke stepped over to the nearest corpse and squatted next to it.
The victim had been male, most likely in his late sixties. He was wearing the remains of a dressing gown, so had likely been chased out of bed by either the bombs or the shredders themselves after the attack. The shredders had made a mess of the man’s chest cavity, burrowing into it with all the ferocity of rabid dogs. Burke could see the shattered remains of the corpse’s ribs jutting up through the ruin of his chest and the empty space between them where his internal organs had once been.
Remembering his conversation with Captain Wattley on the deck of the Reliant, Burke checked for a coup de grâce shot but didn’t see any sign of one. He didn’t know how it was possible, but this man seemed to have died at the hands of the shredders but hadn’t gotten up to walk again in their wake, just like those on the ship they’d passed on the Thames. A quick check of some of the other bodies nearby showed him the same.
Drummond appeared at his side. “Find something, Major?” he asked in a low voice, leery, like the rest of them, of attracting the shredders unnecessarily.
Burke shook his head. “Not particularly. Just verifying a pet theory, that’s all.”
Drummond nodded, as if doing so made perfect sense while they were trying to clandestinely make their way through the city to Buckingham Palace without getting eaten by shredders. “Righto. Perhaps we can get a move on, then?”
“Of course, Sergeant.”
A scream split the morning air.
Burke leaped to his feet, turning in place as he tried to pinpoint the source of the sound. The others were doing the same, their weapons at the ready, but without a target to shoot at there was little they could do.
“Where is it?” Jones said urgently, but all Burke could do was shrug. He didn’t know.
The scream came again, and this time it was long enough for them to get a fix on it.
“This way!” Jones yelled and dashed off down a side street before Burke could say anything.
“Damn it, Jones!” Burke muttered as he set off after him.
The rest of the squad had no choice but to follow.
They left the main street and cut down an alley, following in Jones’s wake. Another cry split the air, helping them better triangulate the source of the anguish. Fear, pain, and horror were at the root of those cries, and the hair on the back of Burke’s neck stood on end to hear them. Whoever she was, she was in dire need of help.
Burke and the others skidded around a corner to find Jones staring at a maze of rubble strewn along and across the road in front of them, uncertain which way to go. Having caught up with his wayward corporal, Burke took command and led the way, making certain that Jones stayed to the middle of the pack.
They found her moments later.
The woman lay on her back in the middle of the street, her arms and legs flailing as she tried to beat off the pair of shredders who crouched over her using their nails and teeth to tear at her flesh. Blood was splashed everywhere, on her clothes, on the ground, on the faces and chests of the shredders preying upon her.
The squad was crouched along the ruined wall of a nearby building, perpendicular to where the woman lay. They had good, clean shots at both shredders. Jones took one glance and brought his rifle up, ready to take down the undead creatures in front of him with or without orders. He was lining up the shot when Sergeant Drummond snatched the weapon from his hands.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jones whispered. “Give me that gun!”
Drummond shook his head. “If you fire that thing, you’ll bring every damned shredder within half a mile down on our heads!”
Burke moved to intercept the two before things got out of hand.
Jones wasn’t one for subtleties. “Give me that fucking gun, Sergeant, or so help me God I’ll . . .”
“You’ll do nothing, Corporal,” Burke said, placing himself bodily between the two men. “And that’s an order.” He faced Jones directly, crowding into his personal space. “We’re not going to jeopardize this mission for the sake of a single shredder victim.”
Jones was shaking his head, refusing to accept that they were just going to leave the woman to her fate. “Major, that woman . . .”
“ . . . is dead,” Williams cut in from behind them.
Burke turned, saw Williams’s face, and rushed back over to the ruined wall beside him. One glance was all it took; the shredders were still feeding, but the woman lay unmoving beneath them now, her empty eyes staring skyward unseeingly.
The group slipped quietly back the way they had come, not wanting to disturb the shredders now that there was no urgent reason for doing so. Burke could tell Jones wasn’t happy, and the murderous glances he was casting Drummond when he thought no one was looking weren’t exactly reassuring either.
I’d best keep my eye on him, Burke thought, and he reminded himself to warn the sergeant when they had a private moment. For now though, they had to keep moving.
It wasn’t long after that when they reached the edge of St. James’s Park and the street that would lead them to the palace itself, Birdcage Walk.
St. James’s was the oldest of the royal parks, originally constructed by Henry VII in 1532 and greatly expanded during the reign of Charles II. Its fifty-eight acres were thick with forest and included a large lake running the length of the park.
More important from Burke’s perspective, the park ran parallel to Birdcage Walk, the road leading to the palace, and provided them with considerably more in the way of cover than the streets they left behind.
Drummond led them through the park and around the northern shore of St. James’s Park Lake. He approached the palace from the southeast and it wasn’t long before they could see a massive marble building looming ahead of them out of the trees.
Burke and company had reached Buckingham Palace.
Chapter Fourteen
Buckingham Palace
London
SERGEANT DRUMMOND POINTED to the northern section of the palace, just visible from where they crouched among the trees in the Mall. From what they could see, there wasn’t much left of that wing.
“The King and Queen’s private apartments were in that section of the palace. The bombardiers must have been aiming for them because at least half a dozen bombs came down smack in the middle of it.”
Burke shook his head, imagining what it must have been like to be inside the building at that moment. The entire wing had been pulverized; there probably wasn’t an intact wall in the whole section.
“Thankfully, the royals were in the East Gallery courtyard at the time, on the opposite side of the building, and escaped without injury. My comrades and I hustled them inside the building and to one of the hardened rooms near the Blue Drawing Room, built to act as a temporary retreat when danger threatens.”
On Her Majesty's Behalf Page 10
