Further out, in the suburbs of the city and even into the southern parts of Wales, the same activity was happening and waking up all of those trapped, dormant infected souls and driving them towards the centre of the neighbouring city by way of walking through the wide estuary.
For over a hundred miles, far further still than any of the wildest theories could have predicted, zombies were waking up and forcing their way out of their dry tombs to fulfil their desperate need to reach the source of the low frequency sound that triggered the tiny part of their brains still functioning into believing there was food on offer.
“Good God, man,” Kelly exploded as he stood from the chair he had been occupying. “We’ve still got people on the mainland. There are civilians there, have you lost your mind?”
Fisher leaned back in his chair involuntarily in response to the colonel’s anger.
“Relax, Kelly,” he said. “We have AWACS monitoring and they’ll be able to warn anyone nearby if the swarm threatens them.” Kelly didn’t sit, nor did he relax.
“You’ve just intentionally unleashed hell on those survivors all over again,” he said coldly. “And you aren’t even willing to evacuate any of them.”
“Not true, Colonel,” Fisher said as he reached for a piece of paper and waved it towards the officer. “Civilian evacuations are planned to begin at oh-nine-hundred next Wednesday. Your people will get new lives in the US of A.”
“And the military personnel?” Fisher shifted in his chair once, before fixing the hard man in front of him with a stare of pure granite.
“When our job here is done, Kelly, we’ll discuss that.”
“We’ll discuss it now,” he said firmly. “You’ve outright refused to support our efforts in recovering more survivors from the mainland which, until this moment, has been swept aside as inconsequential. I assure you, Sir, it is not. Evacuating the civilians on this island is one thing, but unless we can actively rescue more, then I fail to see the point in us being here at all.” He remained standing, chest heaving up and down as he fought to control the many words he left unsaid from tumbling out, after the unwise outburst he had already released.
Fisher stared at him for a few moments, wearing a look somewhere between mild amusement and barely veiled rage.
“Let’s get a few more things straight, shall we?” He stood suddenly and leaned over the desk with both fists pressing down hard onto the polished wood. “The United States is not here as an aid mission. The United States is occupying this part of Britain for military and scientific purposes to research, develop and hopefully deploy whatever vaccines or cures or weapons we can to ensure that the disease created here doesn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean. There are people on the other side of the globe pondering exactly the same questions to our western borders, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say they’re looking at a hundred Hiroshima-style solutions, so it doesn’t matter a good God damn whether the serum we’re developing on this island works or not; America will defend its borders at whatever cost.” He calmed, sitting back in his chair and speaking in a slightly softer tone.
“Colonel, you and your people are backed into a corner with nothing left to barter with. Your price of admission to the promised land when we’re done here is your continued service. When the work is done, we’re all going home, and you can either come with us or not. But if you don’t, then I wouldn’t be expecting foreign aid any time soon. So yes, to answer your initial question, I assure you I have most certainly not lost my mind and I will continue to order the deployment of weapons both experimental and biological on the mainland until we find a way of killing every last one of those bastards. You can go now, gentlemen.”
Kelly breathed out, never once having taken his eyes off the man sitting behind the desk holding all the power. With as much dignity and decorum as he could manage, he left the room and kept his face like stone until he was a mile away from the CIA headquarters.
“That bastard,” he erupted, making Barton flinch and torque the steering wheel alarmingly. He regained his composure before the colonel spoke again, this time in a more equable and thoughtful tone. “But at least he let slip that his show wasn’t the only one in town, and he’s under pressure to get results or his Washington DC masters will likely pull the plug on him and his little circus here.”
NINETEEN
Peter thrust out the spike, punctured a brain through a nostril made more accessible by the fact that the nose was partly torn or bitten away, and risked a glance over the ledge to watch the lifeless corpse bounce down the growing mound of bodies—animated and rendered safe alike—forming against the low building.
He had been running to and fro on the roof, in order to cover both places where his elevation was threatened. Then, behind him, on the other end of roof, the sounds of an approaching body reached his ears. Somehow, they, and he could only assume it was the smarter, faster type of biters, were managing to climb the ladder at the end where Astrid had appeared. On the side he covered now, it was a matter of sheer numbers and extremely bad luck; the misfortune being that the wall was the site where the former farmers had decided to pile enough junk that the hungry crowd below were able to use it as the start of a ramp.
His own efforts to stem the vertical flow of stinking bodies intent on eating him had, paradoxically, made it easier for more of them to climb the growing pile. Turning to his left, he drove the tip of one straight pitchfork prong into the skull of a balding man just behind his ear. The reaching arms stopped reaching for him, but the weapon held fast as the thing’s second death had caused it to flop sideways and resist his efforts to tug it back out. He cursed it and began to growl in effort through his gritted teeth, as a scraping noise behind him made him spin to see another one wearing the shredded and filthy remains of a shirt and tie get both arms and half a torso over the ledge. Yanking desperately on the pitchfork, he was forced to reach over his right shoulder to grasp at the smoothed-down handle of his father’s shotgun to use the last loaded cartridge at brutally close quarters.
The air in front of his face punched at him with a pressure wave that was confusing, before the sharp cracks he heard tied in with what his eyes were seeing. The zombie shuddered with each cracking noise until the fourth or fifth one snatched his head back and toppled it backwards to fall away and knock a half dozen more of them back to the ground. His mind caught up with his senses and he craned his neck to see Astrid crouching over one knee from a sitting position with her gun tucked into her body tightly and aimed his way. He nodded his thanks automatically, seeing her return the gesture and spin away to reload before she fired more shots over her side and turned to run back to him. Seeing his predicament, she landed one boot hard on top of the bald head and he gripped the shaft of his sticker firmly, straining to pull it free. He fell backwards as it was released from the gory grip of the skull and rolled back to his feet to begin the routine of thrust and withdraw, this time trying to improve his aim for the soft bits that didn’t threaten to steal his tools.
Astrid was firing more intensively then, pausing to fill the temporary quiet with the clicks and scrapes of well-practised hands performing another reload, and she didn’t let up until the main assault had been forced back. Peering over the edge again together, Peter saw that only the luckiest or most sure-footed of biters could make it through the mess of farmyard junk and bodies to climb for their position.
Their small breather didn’t last long, as a shriek from behind them forced the world to grind down into agonising slow-motion. The shriek, the rasping expulsion of air that conveyed nothing but hatred and malice and hunger, echoed loudly over the low rooftops of the barn louder than anything else in their immediate surroundings. They turned together in time to see the horrifying sight of a young man wearing a blue and white striped shirt marred by dark gore. The terror of being face to face with a Lima, one not horribly damaged and less dangerous, wasn’t reduced by the fact that he had either lost his trousers in the months
since the outbreak or else had turned in a state of being half dressed. The baggy boxer shorts had remained on, but the socks had worn away at the soles to leave what looked like black ankle warmers banded about his mottled grey calf muscles.
As they stared, neither yet able to bring a weapon to bear, those muscles bunched and tightened in anticipation of the leaping attack they both knew was coming. Both had seen Limas at work before—albeit at a safe distance usually—and both knew what the human body was capable of when free of the constraints binding it to normality.
It launched into the air, limbs flailing as it instinctively thrashed and whirled to correct its aerial course. Mouth open in ready anticipation, both of them could see the wide maw filled with blackened gums and the two flashes of bright metal of the man’s gold teeth as a cloud of bright, white smoke obscured their vision, billowing outwards in an expanding cone towards the flying monstrosity.
Peter’s hand had reached instinctively over his right shoulder where it landed directly on the grip of the sawn-off shotgun. The web between his finger and thumb, spread wide and taught, hit the smoothed-down wood and triggered his fingers to clamp down and seize it tightly. Pulling it in one smooth movement, he set his stance wide and forced his left palm down on top of the barrels near the breech, as his right index and middle fingers reached for the two triggers.
He couldn’t remember which trigger he had pulled when he’d fired the first shot only a minute or two before, but somehow his brain registered that pulling one of those triggers would achieve nothing but a moment of fear before the zombie cut him down in a blur of teeth and pain. Knowing this on a cellular level, even if he couldn’t explain it in triple the time it took to act automatically, both fingers squeezed the triggers at once before the gun had even finished the downward arc of his draw, to spit smoke and flame and a deafening noise out ahead of them.
It was only the fourth time he’d ever drawn the weapon to use it, and although each time he had been desperate and facing death just as he did now, he didn’t flinch from the noise and violence of the gun going off. He also hadn’t expended his supply of ammunition, which he’d tampered with just like his father had done to illegally shoot deer, and the solid ball of lead and wax barely had time to begin breaking apart when it hit the zombie in mid-air. The force of the gunshot spun Peter in spite of his attempts to stay standing, and as his right side was thrown backwards, the body of his attacker-turned-victim fell through the thin skein of gun smoke to land heavily in between Astrid and Peter. It skidded through the rough shale littering the rooftop, just as time seemed to speed up once more when Peter’s backside thumped heavily onto the deck.
Peter’s shot, fired blindly with nothing to guide it but hope and instinct, had blown away most of the right arm and shoulder to leave a broken and ruined body in which the upper and lower sections seemed unable to communicate with one another. The legs seemed to be furiously pedalling as if the doomed creature dreamed it was in the closing stages of a bicycle race. The upper body, twisted aside at an angle, tried to reach for the ankles of Astrid with each ridiculous and grotesque circuit it thrashed, teeth snapping together as it wheezed, until the Norwegian woman riddled the thing’s head with a burst of automatic fire, to leave a sudden stillness and silence to their rooftop.
That silence didn’t last long, as the renewed moaning and shrieking from below forced them both to snap back into action again.
“We cannot stay here,” she said to him, whipping her head left and right to both keep watch and look for a viable alternative to their current predicament. Peter calmly levered over the catch to break the shotgun in half and up-ended it to allow two spent cartridges to drop to the rooftop. Slipping the bag from one shoulder he thrust a hand into the pouch where he knew the full cartridges would be. He slipped the reloads into the barrels, hearing the satisfying pop each side and gripped the chopped-down stock to flick his wrist and snap the breech closed. Restoring the gun to the top of the bag and the bag over both shoulders, he stooped to pick up his pitchfork and nodded at Astrid to signify that he was ready.
As he caught her eye, he saw how hers flickered to her left—his right—and turned to see another two pairs of mottled grey hands breach the high ground.
“Silage,” Peter said as he pointed to one of the longer sides of the building. She didn’t understand the word or his meaning but followed anyway, seeing as an idea she didn’t understand was better than no idea at all. Reaching the edge of the roof with the boy at her side, she saw the twenty foot drop to the tops of low, black plastic covered mounds.
He turned to look at her face, seeing the confusion and scepticism evident.
“It’s just grass,” he explained in rapid words, “cut and piled up there with plastic over the top. It’s to feed cows,” he added as though the purpose of the practice would assist her understanding.
“And this is a safe thing to land on?” she asked him. Peter couldn’t say yes for certain, but when another shriek behind them from the direction of the ladder added to the chorus of moans from the other side, he guessed they didn’t have much in the way of options. With a shrug, he stepped off the rooftop, throwing his legs out ahead of him to fall a few seconds before landing hard on his backside.
The landing was much, much harder than he’d expected.
It had been one of the games he played on the farm where he grew up, climbing on the great mountains of cut grass as his father reversed a tractor up and down the steep slope in order to crush it down and squeeze out as much air as possible. When those great slopes of squashed grass filled the slots between the rough concrete walls, they spread huge sheets of thick, black plastic over them to seal in the grass and let it rot just enough to be exactly what the cows wanted over the winter months.
What Peter hadn’t taken into consideration was the fact that this grass had been there for months longer than usual, and the added time left to ferment provided a lot less cushioning than his childhood games told him there would be.
He landed hard, knocking the wind out of himself and shooting a pain up through his spine from his tail bone that threatened to make him vomit, on top of losing the ability to breathe temporarily. A thud beside him warned of Astrid’s arrival at almost ground level and her melodic voice hissing curses in a language he didn’t understand made it obvious that she’d also expected a softer landing.
If their impact was painful, the meeting of running zombie and rough concrete just above them was catastrophic. It had gained the rooftop just as Astrid’s blonde ponytail had disappeared from view. Breaking into a run to catch the escaping food, it sailed clear over the ledge of the roof and overtook the woman as she’d dropped vertically downwards. The momentum of the reckless run took it past the small covered mounds to slam it into the hard ground below. As it rose, broken leg bones crunching when it struggled mechanically to regain its feet, the top of its head fountained outwards as the head snapped back to start the slow, spinning descent to the ground. Peter looked to his left to see Astrid lying flat on her back with a pistol in her hand sprouting a fat pipe on the end of the barrel. She scanned that barrel left and right before dragging herself to her feet with a hiss of pain. Peter followed, not waiting for any invitation to move, and the two of them fled across the farmyard to seek higher ground.
“Why are there so many of the fast ones?” Peter gasped quietly to her in between sucking lungsful of air.
“This,” Astrid replied, also out of breath, “is what I am thinking also. There!” she said, pointing out a tall, steel structure standing forty feet off the ground. Peter saw it, recognised a grain storage silo when he saw one, and also knew that if they were seen going up there they’d never be able to come down again.
“No,” he said, tugging her sleeve back while all around them, the shrieks and moans echoed ominously. “We’ll be trapped.”
“Trust me, Peter,” she said. “We just need to stay off the ground long enough for them to come back.”
“Where th
e fucking fuck are these fuckers fucking coming from?” Johnson roared in impotent rage as he crunched the Warrior over another group staggering down the single track road.
“There’s something going on,” Bufford answered from behind him. “This ain’t right; not even for the shit-show we live in. And why are they all the fast bastards?”
They had turned around twice now, or at least they’d tried to, and the decision to save ammunition had long ago been made as they faced three or more Screechers for every bullet they carried. Using the heavier 30mm ammunition was even less sensible as they’d probably attract more than they killed with each heavy, percussive shot. Johnson idly wished they still made canister for their guns, or the more modern flechette ammunition, effectively turning their small cannon into a giant shotgun. One shot of that could clear a hundred or more of the bastards, packed tightly as they were on the road, following the noise of their engine.
“Go left here,” Buffs interrupted Johnson’s daydreaming as bodies still crunched under their tracks. The Warrior slowed and lurched slightly as the junction was taken too fast to be comfortable, not that comfort was their main concern at that point, and Johnson trusted Bufford to read the map to direct him back towards the farm, after their circuitous route to lead as many of the mob away while crushing those in the road as a bonus.
As he drove, fighting away the worry and panic and banishing it from his mind, since that would serve only to reduce his effectiveness, he allowed his mind instead to wander towards other questions that needed answering.
Why has another swarm appeared now? After a winter of seeing very little activity, he had begun to hope that they were dealing with a few stragglers and had turned his attention towards the potential of more living enemies.
And why, he asked himself, angrily echoing his question to Buffs, is almost every one of these buggers a Lima?
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 14
