“Left ahead,” Bufford said, interrupting his thoughts, “single track for three miles. Staggered crossroads; left again.”
“Roger,” Johnson acknowledged, happy that he was effectively driving a box around the area to head back for the boy and female commando he was trying not to think about, in case his guilt overcame him.
“Twenty minutes,” Buffs told him in an attempt at reassurance.
“Twenty minutes is a long time,” Johnson whispered to himself as he narrowed his eyes and focused on driving as fast as he could without crashing.
TWENTY
“There! I heard it again!” Jessica said excitedly.
“Okay,” Daniels told her, “I believe you. Just get your bloody head back inside before something takes a bite out of it.” Reluctantly, she lowered her body away from the open hatch, for the spot to be re-occupied by the tall, quiet soldier who carried his weapon like it was a prized possession. Or his first-born child.
“She’s right,” Enfield said after a few moments. “Towards our ten o’clock. That’s seven-six-two if it’s anything.” Daniels, having seen the marine for what he was, took that assessment as pure fact without question. Instructing Duncan to look for roads branching off in the direction of their ten o’clock, he fought with the map until he was looking at the right section for their general area.
There were far too many zombies around for his liking, and more than one person had voiced an opinion that something was going on, because there was no reason for every dead person in the county to suddenly up and decide to head in one direction. He didn’t know anything about that, but he did know that he was much happier heading back into a fight with the two royal marines on his side.
“Mortars?” The marine sergeant, Hampton, pondered aloud. Daniels, the sound so familiar to him as to be ingrained in his psyche, answered before Enfield’s mouth could even form a word of response. “That,” he announced confidently, “is the sound of Mrs Rarden birthing six of her most troublesome daughters...” When silence greeted his poetic musings, he sighed, “I’m wasted on this audience. That’s 30mm on full auto. One of ours. The SSM’s over there.”
It took them over half an hour to battle their half-blind way through the country lanes towards the last place they could guess the sounds were coming from. No more gunfire sounded, which made the task of hunting down the original source difficult, but eventually they rounded a bend in the lane and saw a small crowd of dead clambering over one another to form a rising mound of once-human bodies, all of them reaching upwards for what looked like two small shapes clinging onto the fragile frame of a metal silo.
“Sarge,” Enfield said urgently. He didn’t raise his voice, merely spoke with an increased intensity that cut into everyone crammed inside the small space of the armoured vehicle.
“What do you see, lad?” Hampton asked with mirrored urgency.
“Need you on that gun. Two friendlies up high, and two metric fuck-tonnes of Screechers underneath. My nine o’clock.”
Hampton didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t describe himself as a brave man; that self-awarded description was for people who craved recognition for the things they did. Bill Hampton was simply the personification of a no-bullshit attitude that allowed him to get the job done. He didn’t act how he did to get his men to like him; instead, he just did his job to the best of his ability and the men loved him for it, just as they didn’t perform to avoid his punishments, but out of a need for the sergeant to like them; to tell them they did well.
Without questioning the matter of his personal safety, he undid the hatch and squeezed his wide shoulders out of the gap to swing the big machine gun in the general direction of the things he didn’t like and started blasting away.
He fired in short, controlled bursts like he had always been taught. In fact, the only time he had ever fired one of these beasts on fully automatic for an entire belt was eight years prior when he’d lain on his back on the high ground at San Carlos bay and fired a full belt at an Argentine fighter plane wreaking havoc on the vulnerable ships at anchor. He hadn’t told anyone the story, and those who had seen him do it weren’t encouraged to repeat the tale, because it wasn’t necessarily something he was proud of.
He was proud now, he realised, but he knew that he didn’t need anyone else to be proud of him. He felt no remorse for the dead because they had no souls. They fought for no cause and had no regard for anything. Their war would rage until the end of humanity and beyond. The dead weren’t the sons and daughters of people any longer. They weren’t just like him, only on the other side of the battle lines, and he unleashed hell on them with a stony expression.
Two hundred rounds of ammunition, to the uninitiated, sounds like a lot of bullets. In truth, two hundred rounds is not nearly enough to get many jobs done. Hampton stopped to attach another box of ammunition and feed it through, before yanking back the warm metal of the charging handle to resume his one-man onslaught.
The growing mountain of dead became a sea of twice-dead, and the reaching hands stopped reaching upwards and began reaching towards him. The gunfire paused long enough for him to lean back and shout down through the gap that perhaps their driver would kindly reverse for roughly fifty paces. At least that was what Steve Duncan chose to hear and not the actual words used, which could only politely be described as ‘salty’.
The incessant, percussive rattling of the machine gun started up again until the remainder of the zombies were spread out in a reducing cone towards their vehicle.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” a voice Hampton recognised shouted at him. Looking up again and recognising the shape of Astrid Larson with her shock of bright blonde hair, he realised he was obviously just as noteworthy to her, although he imagined himself to be significantly less attractive.
“Saving your arse,” he yelled back. Enfield chose that moment to emerge from the other hatch and bring his small rifle to bear on anything in their immediate surroundings still moving. A sharp bark of laughter drifted back to him in answer.
“Where’s everyone else?” he yelled.
“How about I tell you when you get us off this thing?”
“Fair point,” Hampton grumbled to himself as he leaned inside again to give instructions. The Sultan crept forwards, crunching over the bumpy obstructions, which were mostly physically immobilised and not actually dead again. As soon as they reached the foot of the metal grain silo, the two refugees clambered down to drop onto the hull of the vehicle. Hampton’s big gun stayed silent but Enfield continued to spit small bullets into skulls whenever anything threatened their perimeter.
“We’ve got more coming,” he warned them as they obviously weren’t getting inside quickly enough for his liking.
“Are they the fast ones?” Larsen asked breathlessly.
“Don’t look like it.”
“Good. Time to get out of here.” Hampton dropped down and helped Astrid inside the Sultan, where she immediately banged her head and her elbow on exposed metal, providing enough of a distraction that the others didn’t notice the smaller of the rescued people enter. The hatch was closed, plunging them into a darker setting until Enfield closed down his hatch too, to remove the last of the daylight.
“Where are the others?” Hampton asked.
“We got separated,” Peter said. “I was… I was left behind when we were attacked. Astrid came back for me…”
“Johnson took the others to lead away the swarm,” Astrid explained, taking up the recounting. “There seems to be an unnatural number of what you call the Li—”
“Peter,” a voice said from nearer the front. The word was muffled as though the name had been uttered from behind the speaker’s hands, which they had.
“J… Jessica?” Peter asked, but he already knew it was her. He broke down and sobbed like the young boy he was deep inside, pushing his way through the press of bodies as the tears started to flow more freely than they ever had. He clawed his way the short distance to his sister a
nd threw himself against her, until she wrapped her arms around him and cried just as hard and freely as he did.
The two children, reunited against all odds, would not let one another go in the gloomy interior of an overloaded armoured vehicle, and the only other sound to fill the space was the quiet sob of another occupant.
“Where’s my Amber?”
Johnson’s concentration had never been more focused than it had been on that drive. He pushed twenty-five tonnes of armoured fighting vehicle through the overgrown lanes. At the staggered crossroads Bufford had warned him about, he had to throttle back and decide the best way to navigate the obstacle of three cars which had collided so many months ago.
From twenty feet away, he saw the dried-up remains of the driver of a Vauxhall Carlton turn to face his approach.
“Hold on,” he said unnecessarily as he ran the left side tracks over the front of the car with much less discomfort than he expected. Accelerating away, he looked out for signs of the upcoming left turn Bufford had called out to him. Overgrown road signs were barely visible but the faded white lines in the road gave subtle clues to the presence of adjoining roads, if a person knew what to look for. When the centre line turned a solid white, he slowed, looking for the tunnel created by the trees hanging down where the branches hadn’t been forced back by the passage of people in vehicles.
Those branches snapped away as the Warrior forced its way through like they were nothing. The close confines of the narrow road made the going much slower as he fought with the huge machine to keep it out of the ditches either side of them, driving their speed down even more and increasing Johnson’s stress levels. The hull scraped and banged with the noise of their aggressive progress until they emerged from the wooded tunnel into the harsh light of the full dawn. Before them, the edge of the farm opened up with the sprawl of low buildings seeming to grow outwards organically. Everywhere before them lay the crushed and broken remains of so many former people they had destroyed.
Only they weren’t. These had been cut down by gunfire moving in the other direction and couldn’t have been from their escape. Just as Johnson opened his mouth to call this information out to the others, with fears of another Nevin incident surging to the front of his mind, Bufford beat him to it.
“Armoured vehicle,” he snapped as the turret hummed to swing towards the unexpected intruder, “nine o’clock, fifty yards.” Johnson stopped the Warrior and immediately threw it into reverse out of habit. His conscious mind caught up with the subconscious in time to tell him that the likelihood of him having been drawn into an ambush was slim to non-existent. But training born of repetition took just as long to undo as it did to become second nature in the first place. He stopped, realising that he was highly unlikely to get an instant profile recognition, as the man in the turret wasn’t a cavalryman. He hesitated, experiencing a rare moment when he didn’t know the right thing to do; and then the radio came to life.
“Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha, please tell me that’s you…”
Rushed radio traffic was exchanged between the two armoured hulks and the route for extraction was agreed. The Sultan followed in the wake of the larger Warrior, which was the obvious choice to take the lead, and they all listened with wet eyes and breaking hearts to hear the shaking voice of a young woman talking through her tears incoherently to hear the sweetest of rare sounds when Amber spoke a single word into the radio in the rear section of the Warrior.
“Mummy?” she asked in a small voice before bursting out in tears for Kimberley to hug her tightly.
“We need to get clear of whatever the hell is going on here,” Johnson said to Daniels over their link.
“Agreed,” he said. “We’ve seen concentrations of Limas at the front, with a strong force of Screechers behind, then miles of stragglers lagging behind them. They’re all heading north by north-northwest, from what we can tell.”
“What’s north-northwest of here?” Johnson asked back.
“Bristol,” Bufford interjected dourly, leaving a moment of silence hanging afterwards.
“Jesus,” Johnson muttered, “I thought even the Screechers would have better taste than to go to bloody Bristol.” The joke was a weak one, but for the few people who had visited the city recently, the words held more than a little merit.
“Something’s off about it all,” Daniels offered pensively. “Can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but it’s got to have something to do with the Americans… Let me think about it and we’ll talk when we find somewhere safe to stop.”
That was their current priority—finding a place beyond the reach of the steady flow of slow-moving zombies to stop and reunite the stricken mother and daughter who were crying inside the two respective vehicles with inconsolable happiness. They headed directly east, an agreed compromise between turning directly away from the flow of dead back towards the coast, which would hinder their overall goal of heading to the far north west of Scotland, and trying to avoid said flow of dead.
“Is it me…?” Daniels asked over the radio after almost twenty miles of relatively flat A-roads.
“No,” Johnson answered, “they’re definitely thinning out.” Another ten minutes showed no signs of any Screechers on the move, so they took a turn north and stopped at the nearest patch of raised ground. Emerging carefully with weapons raised, they inspected the tracks and undersides of their vehicles to ensure they weren’t carrying any biting hitchhikers.
As soon as the all-clear was announced, a young woman with the same fair hair as little Amber dragged herself clear of the Sultan’s hatch desperately. Dropping to her knees and sobbing, she reached out to beckon her little girl to her and held her so tightly, like she’d never let go again.
“Oh my baby, my baby,” she said over and over as she showered the girl with kisses all over her head and face. “My baby. Who found you? Who looked after you?”
Wordlessly Amber leaned around her mother and smiled with her right index finger pointing at the unlikeliest of rescuers. Picking Amber up and carrying her, she threw her free arm around Peter’s neck and pulled him tight to her.
She whispered fast in his ear, and although Johnson couldn’t hear the words, he was sure it was her thanks for saving the girl. He’d done more than that, the SSM knew. He’d not only saved her life but had cared for her with a patience he was sure many adults couldn’t muster even under normal circumstances. When Ellie released the boy, he was grabbed roughly by the big man’s hands. Johnson eyed him for a second with a mixture of ingrained fear and relief, before hugging him close just as the woman had done.
“You frightened the shit out of me,” he berated the boy as his eyes lifted to take in the bedraggled appearance of Larsen and nodding his heartfelt thanks to her for risking her life. Peter stayed close to him, not quite hugging him but not withdrawing either. A girl cleared her throat to get the attention of both of them, and Peter pulled away from the hug he was returning, not able to tell Johnson just how much it meant to him.
“And who’s this?” the SSM asked.
“This is my sister,” Peter said, his words choking on the tears he was holding back, “Jessica.” Just the simple act of speaking her name triggered the pent-up emotion hidden away for so long, and Peter collapsed into Johnson, who wrapped him up tightly in an embrace that made him feel safer and more secure than he had ever felt in his entire life.
TWENTY-ONE
The testing of the device had been a success and had elevated Fisher’s standing greatly. The applications for the adapted technology were huge, and he had received the reports from their AWACS early warning aircraft that the effective radius of the device was roughly forty miles, which gave them the ability to cover about five thousand square miles with each device.
He was no fool. He knew that the plan would be to attract as many of the infected into single locations for the air force to wipe them out, and that was how they would reclaim Britain, if it was deemed viable. But now, he had given them a way to do it with minima
l expense. Already the reports had upwards of ten thousand infected gathering in the city they’d chosen far to the south of their remote, offshore location. He knew that back at Langley, their technical people would be figuring out the distances and times required, based on the information they were gathering now on how to use a ripple effect to drop the devices and pied-piper the infected all into one location, where they could be hit with napalm, or whatever, and be wiped out.
Obviously, they would still need to deploy ground troops to check every room in every house and building in the whole country, because there still had to be plenty of people who had been infected and turned after shutting themselves away at home.
He looked again at the brief report received by fax on the effects of the device. As anyone would expect, the first to reach the location of the device were the faster ones, and calculating how many of them used their superior—or at least less impaired—physical abilities to get to the city first gave an indication of how many would follow. That swarm, that migrating herd, that infected singularity merged and grew from all directions, all heading for the same spot, like iron filaments in water with the introduction of a magnet. The sheer numbers on the thin printout in his hand didn’t fully reflect the gravity of the situation; either how many had died or how many had turned and still needed to be dealt with.
What he wanted, and what he proposed in the report he was trying to formulate, was for his idea to be used as the method for purging Britain of the dangerous infected. He would sell it as the most cost effective way. Not cheaper in terms of dropping bombs, because he knew better than most people just how many his country had stockpiled ready for all-out war; but in terms of not destroying the infrastructure, buildings and resources that such a devastating bombardment would cause, and hence minimising the future rebuilding costs. His way would mean that the infected simply bled themselves to death and would be just a pile of bones and puddle to clean up by the time US forces arrived to put boots on the ground.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 15
