Killing the Dead (Book 14): Enemies Unknown

by Murray, Richard

  “That is my failing,” Admiral Stuart said. “We had no reason to think they were intelligent enough to realise that.”

  “No one could have foreseen this,” I said. “And I’ll hear no recriminations. I just want ways we can defend ourselves.”

  There was a whiteboard over in the corner, left over from when the offices had been used as offices and not as a command and control hub for Charlie and her drones.

  “You said we had missiles, how many?”

  “We have seven Aster 15 missiles and four Aster 30’s,” Admiral Stuart said. “Both are primarily surface to air defence but we have previously used them to target groups of the undead.”

  I made a note of that on the whiteboard, hiding my frown as I turned towards the board. I’d expected more.

  “Is that just one ship or both?” Cass asked.

  “That is between them both. We used most of our munitions in the early days. I have to point out that these are not designed for ground targets. We can aim at the Reaper but there are no guarantees.”

  “What about other weapons?”

  “We have the main gun, two 30mm small calibres and two 7.62mm Miniguns. The range on them means that if we get close enough to the beach we can strafe it, but there’s no way we could actually go for headshots.”

  “So, just as likely to piss them off as kill them,” I said, chewing on my lip.

  “What you’re saying then,” Shepherd said snidely. “Is that your ships are as much use as tits on a fish!”

  “Eloquent as ever,” Admiral Stuart replied calmly. “I would recommend we save those weapons unless absolutely necessary. If this submarine is part of a larger threat, we may need them.”

  I nodded slowly, it made sense, but I still wanted a complete list of our capabilities.

  “Troops?”

  “Little more than three hundred of mixed ships crews and marines,” Admiral Stuart said scratching at his chin as he thought. “With enough small arms to outfit them all.”

  “The CDF,” Lou added slowly. “Number at close to two thousand as we speak. That’s how many were trained up and outfitted before the previous government made the decision to stop recruiting and training.”

  “That wasn’t unanimous,” Shepherd snapped.

  “No one said it was,” I said, giving her a cool look. “How many in training?”

  “Nearly six hundred but we only just have enough weapons for them. We can maybe get more people being trained but they’ll be fighting with whatever comes to hand.”

  “Samuel?” I asked.

  “Two hundred and eighty-five, at your service.”

  So, around three thousand soldiers against however many make it across the sea.”

  “Any estimates on that?” Cass asked and Charlie cleared her throat noisily.

  “I can give you one but it will be very rough.”

  “Go ahead,” I told her with a smile of encouragement.

  “Ok, well I won’t go into the math because that will put you all to sleep but near as we can figure, anything from forty to sixty per cent will make it across.”

  “So many!” Shepherd gasped.

  “Could be upwards of fifty thousand then,” I said. “A hell of a lot more of them than us.”

  There was little anyone seemed willing to say after that. The three ministers stared at each other while Samuel chewed on his lip absently as he considered those facts. The Admiral was already making plans judging by his faraway expression and Cass looked scared as she thought of her child.

  “Well, that’s pretty shitty news!” Charlie said and I shook my head as I smiled at her. “But, we aren’t dead yet so what do we do?”

  She was pretty much immune to worrying about things she couldn’t control and that was a rare trait that I envied since I worried over everything.

  “You said there were some planes at the airport.” I directed my attention to the Admiral who shook his head as he brought himself back to attention and nodded sharply.

  “Yes, ma’am, two single propeller and one twin.”

  “They work?” I asked, my idea taking shape.

  “My engineers tell me they do. Enough fuel for a half dozen trips in total.”

  “Can they be outfitted with…”

  “We couldn’t fix weapons to them, ma’am, and we haven’t any to spare anyway.”

  “No,” I said with a glare for his interrupting me. “I was about to say, can they be outfitted with something we can drop on the undead.?”

  “Molotov cocktails!” Charlie said with a wide smile. “I like your thinking, boss lady.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of napalm,” I said and her eyes widened with delight.

  “We… could, maybe, whip something up,” Admiral Stuart said, his eyes distant once more. “We have plenty of fuel and could likely make up a gelling agent. Once mixed together, that’s pretty much all napalm is.”

  He looked at me, one eyebrow raised as he asked, “How did you know about it?”

  “My boyfriend has a fascination with thinking up ways of killing the undead,” I said with a sad smile as I thought of Ryan. “There were a lot of cold nights during the winter when he’d tell me about things like that. I have a good memory.”

  “Well, it’s certainly something we can look into. Do we have an estimate on how much time we have?”

  “Days at best,” Charlie said with an apologetic shrug. “It won’t be easy for them to drag their sorry asses across the seabed but it’s not like they need to stop and rest.”

  “Not long,” I said. “I want a report as soon as possible on whether or not we can make the napalm and outfit the planes. If so, how much of it and how long to prepare.”

  I looked over at Charlie.

  “Any way of telling where they will come onto land?”

  “Some of them will be pushed off track by the current and more of them will simply get confused, but the peninsula located just past the airport is my best bet and a good ways north and south of where we are too. Mainly north though.”

  “The Airports connected to the peninsula by a fairly narrow patch of land. We can barricade it and hold off a large number with the right people.”

  “My people,” Samuel said and the admiral nodded.

  “Yes. I propose that we watch the shore and have your people waiting. As soon as they start coming ashore then you do what you can to give my pilots time to get airborne. Then, fall back towards the barricades and hold them there.”

  “As soon as enough are gathered, we drop the napalm and incinerate as many as we can.”

  “What about the other troops?”

  “Stationed to the north and south along the coast. They can engage any that come ashore and I will have avenues of retreat in place. There are some natural chokepoints on this island and we can force them into bottlenecks taking away their main advantage, their numbers.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Have something concrete by the morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What about the people?” Shepherd asked. “Do we tell them?”

  “In the morning,” I said. “We’ll let them have their fun tonight but, in the morning, we tell them. I’ll not hide the danger from them. We’ll need to have them ready to move south if things go wrong. They can be picked up there by the fleet and evacuated.”

  To where, I didn’t know.

  “Good,” Shepherd said. “I’m more and more convinced we were right to sign on with you.”

  That pleased me, I had to admit. To know that I was winning over the acerbic old woman. She had been one of the more vocal opponents of the previous government and what they were doing and I was glad that she saw that I was different.

  Mainly, because it helped me convince myself that I was doing the right thing and not just becoming like everyone else, grasping for whatever power I could get.

  “In the morning then,” I said. “We start moving everyone into place and prepare to defend ourselves.”r />
  “Something I thought we were done with,” Lou said quietly.

  “Amen to that, brother,” Charlie said with a somewhat bitter laugh.

  Chapter 15

  “You should just bloody tell them what they want to know!” Isaac said as he reached down and took a firm hold of my arms.

  He grunted as he pulled me up to my feet and helped me across to my bed, moving slowly as I limped on my bandaged foot.

  “Where would be the fun in that?”

  “You think this is fun?”

  I lowered myself slowly to the bed and lay back, resting my head on the bare mattress and smiled wryly up at my captor.

  “Not giving them what they want and seeing them become ever more frustrated? Yes, it amuses me and it’s the only power I have left, that to defy them.”

  The large man shook his head and pulled the aluminium chair out from beneath the table and dragged it across the stone floor as I winced at the scraping sound it made. He sat down in it beside my bed and shook his head before glancing up at the camera.

  “I get it, mate, I really do. Hell, I’ve been in your position before and I did everything I could to not tell them fuckers anything! But you know something?”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter! None of it does. Why the hell are you protecting a bunch of people you don’t give a damn about? I’ve read your file man and there’s no way that you give a shit about anyone but yourself.”

  He had a point and the old me would have happily given up whatever information they wanted if they had offered the right price. But since meeting Lily… well, it seemed there was no price high enough.

  Not that they hadn’t tried. After the waterboarding had come the offer of reward. Money was obviously useless but they had offered me supplies and a way out. I refused. They offered me a place amongst their soldiers, a chance to kill whomever I pleased. I said no.

  No matter what they offered, I refused, so they returned to torture. And, truth be told, I was not enjoying it at all.

  I pushed myself up, resting on one elbow, my body trembling as I looked the other man straight in the eye. I wanted him to understand what I was saying, to know I meant it and more than that, I wanted him to realise that his playing ‘good cop’ and trying to be friendly, wasn’t going to work either.

  “You can tell your masters, that there is nothing they can do that will make me tell them one thing they want to know. May as well kill me now and save yourselves the effort of torturing me.”

  “Dammit man!” Isaac cried as he surged to his feet. “I’m trying to help you here.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at that, even though it hurt to do much of anything. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a single patch of skin on my body that wasn’t discoloured by bruising and during the last beating, I’d definitely heard a rib crack.

  Sure, they had a doctor come in to fix me up after each session but even so, there was only so much you could do before the body gave out completely and I was pretty sure that I was nearing that point.

  No food and the only water to drink was when they periodically waterboarded me. Of course, when they had locked me in that tiny room, in the dark, and turned on the heat lamps, I had longed for the waterboarding.

  Despite that, my answer to their question was always the same. A simple no. I roared it at them as they sent the electrical current racing through my body and I screamed it in their faces as they pulled away the toenails of my left foot with their pliers.

  All in all, I felt they were going a little easy on me. There were a great many other ways of trying to make me talk, albeit ones that left permanent disfiguration. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were simply building up to that or had other plans for me.

  I wasn’t sure which idea bothered me more.

  “How long has it been?” I asked, not sure if he would answer.

  “A week, just about.”

  “Feels longer.”

  “Yeah, no doubt.”

  He shook his head and paced in a small circle around the room. I couldn’t tell if he was actually playing a part of genuinely interested in trying to help me. It was one of those situations where I would have asked for Lily’s advice as she could read people in a way I would never be able to.

  “How did they know that stuff about me?”

  I’d asked before and not received an answer, so was surprised when he lifted his shoulders in a shrug and actually gave one.

  “This… group, before things went to shit, they were connected. Like, really connected. Government local and national were in their pocket. They had their fingers in everything.”

  Much as I’d suspected but it was nice to hear.

  “Before they did what they did…”

  Unleashed the zombie apocalypse.

  “They began transferring information from everywhere. Libraries, research institutes, government offices. I suspect your police file was caught up in the pretty wide net they threw. A quick DNA test and the system matched you.”

  Knowing that they had the capability to do a DNA test was interesting and quite telling. I was beginning to piece together an idea of who these people were.

  “Why did they gather it?”

  “I can’t tell you that, mate, come on!”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  And I did. Kind of. Isaac and the other soldiers who guarded the base were, in the main, mercenaries. They had been hired to do a job and when things had collapsed, I suspected, sealed in the bunker with the rest of them.

  No doubt the people in charge had some means of keeping them under control and if it hadn’t been for some error in their inventory system leaving them short of co2 scrubbers, they wouldn’t have bothered heading out to find the lime as a substitute.

  Which meant they wouldn’t have bumped into my little merry band of looters and discovered we had a large number of people stashed safely on an island.

  It hadn’t taken much thinking, and I’d had little to do besides scream and think, to understand why they were so interested in our numbers. If they had, in fact, created the zombie plague then they did so for a reason.

  I wasn’t sure what that reason was, but it likely didn’t entail having so many people surviving. Judging from the little I had seen of the bunker, they were set up for a long time underground. Years, more than months.

  Which led me to believe that they had intended to hide away until the zombies had begun to die off, or died off through lack of food, before they would re-emerge into a place unspoiled by humans and have full control of the world.

  That then, meant the people back at the island were in trouble because they wouldn’t want to emerge back into a world that had a burgeoning civilization for them to deal with. No, better to deal with it early before the zombies died off.

  I shook my head to clear away those thoughts as the heavy door swung open. Isaac looked over, face registering surprise.

  “Sir!”

  The old man waved him away and walked slowly into the room. He looked around my bare quarters, a grim smile on his face as the pink haired girl walked in behind him, that damned clipboard of hers mercifully absent.

  “Good morning, Ryan. You are well?”

  “As can be expected,” I told him as I forced myself up to my feet.

  Isaac took a step forward as though fearing I would attack the man and I held up my hands and flashed him a quick and hopefully innocent smile.

  “Elspeth, my dear, would you be so kind as to bring in the meal for our guest.”

  The pink haired girl turned abruptly on her heel and left the room only to return moments later with a tray heavy with food. I was almost ashamed at the way I began to salivate and my stomach rumbled loudly. The old man merely maintained his smile and waited.

  Elspeth placed the tray carefully on the table before stepping back and to the side but not before she pulled out the other chair. The old man seated himself carefully in it, adjusting the waistcoat and then the jacket of his suit, b
efore folding his hands in his lap as he inclined his head towards the tray.

  “Please, eat.”

  Behind him, Isaac lifted his shoulders in a shrug as if to show that he had no idea what was going on and, strangely enough, I believed that he didn’t. He seemed as surprised as I was. I pulled the chair across the floor and dropped into it rather ungracefully.

  I stared down at the food. Apples, pears, apricots, sliced tomato, lettuce, beetroot, sausage, mashed potatoes and corn. Beside the plate piled high with food was a tall plastic bottle of orange juice. No cutlery though which was a wise choice.

  “It is perfectly safe,” the old man said as he lifted a piece of sliced apple and placed it between his lips.

  He bit through it and chewed slowly as I watched, not bothering to hide my suspicion. When he didn’t keel over and possibly because I was half starved and past the point of caring whether it was some trick to drug me, I began to eat.

  Slowly at first, savouring the taste and doing the best I could to not overwhelm my starving body. I had no desire to lose what little dignity I might retain by wolfing down the food and immediately vomiting it back up.

  “It would seem that we no longer need the answer to our question,” the old man said and I glanced up at him in surprise.

  “Oh? So, this is a last supper then? My final meal before you dispose of me. Seems surprising that you’d bother.”

  “No need to be snide, young man. We have a proposition for you.”

  Well, that was an interesting turn of events and I had to admire the man's gall. After all, he had just had his people torture me for a week.

  “First answer my question,” I said with a grin for the pink haired girl.

  “Ask away.”

  “Why do you no longer need to know about the people back at the island?”

  “Because they are about to all die anyway. A quite considerable number of the undead have overcome their dislike of the water and are making their way across to the island as we speak.”

  “Bloody Reaper,” I said as I shook my head. “That’s the only reason any of them would go near the water.”