He considered finding a blanket to cover her as he had seen actors on television do with people who were hurt or unwell, but seeing as the heat emanating from her felt like it was growing in intensity, he stepped backwards as she dropped into a sleep-like state and burned up. Peter turned and went to shut the back door he had left open.
Hovering half out of the doorway, his gaze fell on the pile of bodies and fixed on the pitchfork buried in the skull of the man who, judging by the fresh red blood still wet on his teeth, had been the one to bite his mother.
Smiling slightly despite the fear and horror of the sudden turn of events, he closed and locked the door.
As the sun set that evening, Squadron Sergeant Major Johnson toured the camp and checked in with all five of his combined troops. Two Troop were now guarding the gate and checking in the steady stream of civilian refugees who had dutifully arrived after the cryptic phone calls from their army reservist family members.
None who arrived knew what was happening in the wider world, but one or two had seen bizarre happenings which they had sensibly stayed clear of.
“One chap smashed through the downstairs window of a house,” said a woman who had clearly dressed for the occasion with her best coat and gloves over a dress which seemed a little too summery for the chill days of early spring. “He was covered from head to toe in blood. He must have been very angry, or probably on drugs,” she opined haughtily as she stared at Johnson for an appropriate response.
“Yes, madam,” he said as he cracked a small smile which was entirely obscured by his large moustache, “now, if you wouldn’t mind signing in with the others?”
He walked away before she could protest, and he suspected that she would probably complain about the standard of accommodation on offer. Allowing himself a cruel smirk, he tried to imagine what her face would look like after she had received Sergeant Croft’s hastily organised induction lecture, which all civilian arrivals had been subjected to. It did not mince words or sugar coat anything; it told the cold, hard facts as they were known, and it served to instil in their minds their total reliance on the military personnel for their safety and protection. That way, whatever orders they were given were more likely to be followed precisely and in a timely fashion.
Welcome to the Green Machine, folks. Johnson thought to himself with glee. Hurry up and wait, stand in line, and follow the process.
Whilst his mind made jokes, a deeper, darker level of his subconscious harboured a growing sense of doom. It nurtured and fed it, as though his mind had found a dangerous animal not long after birth and was now too scared to walk into the shed where it had grown into a killer. That feeling, as much as he tried to repress it, found a sudden route for expressing itself not an hour later, just as the sun began to set.
One of the people forming the steady flow of human traffic heading for their well-guarded gate was running and out of breath, waving his arms at the soldiers and yelling from a distance where they could not hear his words. Johnson, not far from the gate and talking to one of the troop Corporals on gate sentry duty, heard the commotion; not the shouts, but orders being given calmly, and the sound of turrets traversing on two of the APCs watching the entrance to line up the devastating power of the 30mm canon and the 7.62 co-axial machine gun on the source of the disruption.
Johnson unslung the Sterling sub-machine gun from over his right shoulder and stalked towards the gate where the shouted voices began to take form in his ears.
“Behind me…” shouted the man running awkwardly towards the nearest tree cover which was still some distance away, “…tried to bite me…”
“Sergeant?” snapped Johnson at the RMP and his Corporal who had returned to the gate for a lack of anything worthwhile to do, as he pointed forwards at the man. Johnson was suddenly performing at a heightened state of attention thanks to the dump of adrenaline hitting his body. “Secure that man and lock the gates afterwards,” he added.
“Gunners,” he called in a raised voice, “track target but do not fire unless ordered.”
He didn’t wait for an acknowledgement but strode forward to watch as the hysterical man was ordered to his knees and searched before having his hands bound behind him. He said a very brief but silent prayer of thanks that the red caps were there, as prisoner handling was one of their dedicated roles which his own cavalrymen weren’t trained for. Johnson watched as the man stared down the entire length of the Military Policeman’s heavy 7.62 Self Loading Rifle, as this silenced him and seemed to focus his attention towards understanding every command he was given and following them to the letter.
Johnson scanned the ground ahead, seeing nothing. “Call out when you see something,” he shouted to the men within earshot, earning an almost immediate response as a trooper, peering out of the open hatch of one of the Fox armoured cars with binoculars to his face, shouted his rank.
“Talk to me,” Johnson responded in a loud growl.
“Two o-clock, partially obscured by low ground and tall grass, three hundred yards,” said the trooper in a young but clear voice. “One person, male, I think.”
That seemed to be the entire threat report. No mention of weapons or other people. Something the man, who now lay face down as his bound hands were lifted up for him to be searched, had said now scratched at the inside of Johnson’s skull.
“…tried to bite me,” he had said. Seconds ticked by in strained silence as the trooper called out a very slow progress report on the movement of their only contact.
“Clear this gate of non-essential personnel,” Johnson barked, sensing more than hearing the sound of boots scraping as at least two men responded to his orders. He watched intently, now able to see the outline of the approaching man, with the sun beginning to set somewhere far behind his left shoulder, and he knew instantly that something was very wrong about the slowly-encroaching threat. He had to wait a full three minutes as he endured the agonisingly slow updates from the trooper with the binoculars, until the SSM’s nerve broke and he climbed up to the front of the big armoured car and held his hand out for the instrument. Placing the glasses to his eyes, he fought to control the gasp threatening to escape his throat. Something flapped under the man’s face, as though a purse swung from his mouth and lolled grotesquely with the jerky movements of his footfalls. Twice he saw the man fall, only to slowly regain his feet and stumble onwards.
Eventually, the man progressing at an excruciatingly slow pace, Johnson no longer needed the binoculars to see him, and what was much worse was the realisation that the thing swinging from under the man’s head, was his lower jaw held tenuously on one side by flesh and sinew.
“Christ on a fucking bike,” Johnson muttered under his breath, swallowing to calm his roiling stomach.
THIRTEEN
“Hold your fire,” Johnson said in a voice that invited no disobedience. He lowered his own weapon and wandered towards the man, or the thing that had been, up until recently, a man. It stumbled headlong into the fence, rebounded, then tried again to bull its way through the seemingly invisible force field that was reinforced chain link. Johnson, feeling secure behind the fence with a two-foot buffer of space between them, stepped close enough to see and smell the man.
The smell was what caught his attention first, because it smelt like old meat and shit. The latter because the man had clearly soiled himself, but the former puzzled the soldier. When the acrid smell had pricked at his eyeballs and prompted a responding drop of water to form in both eyes, Johnson took an exaggerated step back and was startled into taking a second when the man without a full face snapped his head towards him and snarled, throwing himself against the fence once more with increased excitement.
Johnson was locked into its gaze then, his own brown eyes mirroring the milky orbs that stared back at him. The thing looked like it had cataracts and would surely be blind and unable to focus through the cloudy vision, but somehow it zeroed in on him effortlessly, and held the acquired target like a hawk looking down on prey.
The soldier slowly took a long step to his right, away from the gatehouse, and the thing followed his movement like a stumbling, rotten mirror image.
He, it, was wearing a torn shirt which had once been pale yellow, and light brown trousers. One dark tan shoe remained affixed to one foot, the other lost somewhere nobody knew. The breathing, if the noises it made could be called breathing, came in whistling hisses in and out and made different noises as it did so, like an old set of bellows.
He tilted his head, locked into its terrifying visage and unable to look away, and the thing mirrored his slow movements like some awful reflection from the other side of a horrible death.
“Sir, permission to engage?” came a shaky voice from behind his left shoulder. In response to the new sound, the thing snapped its head right and homed in on the source of the interruption as though this new thing consumed the entire attention span of the mangled man. The hissing, groaning, rattling noise that emanated from the mouth, or half of the mouth to be precise, of the thing before Johnson ramped up by a factor of five as it threw itself once more into the chain link. This time, as it tried to force its face through the too-small gaps in the metal, the side of its lower jaw that still clung on to the upper half snagged in the fence and stuck. Horrified, Johnson swallowed the spasm in his gullet that threatened to bring up the last cup of tea and biscuit he had thrown down his neck, just as the thing pulled away and he watched in gory, seemingly slow-motion detail as the remaining skin tore, and stretched to its limit, before the resistance finally became too much and the jawbone dropped to land on the soft grass with a gentle thump.
It was too much for the trooper who had approached behind his left flank, and he dropped to his knees as he vomited uncontrollably.
Something, either the sound of the retching or the smell of the regurgitated food or both, whipped the now chinless man into a desperate frenzy, and a new sound ripped from him.
“Eeeeeeeeerrrrrrrgh,” it screeched on an inward breath, making a sound that was the direct fleshy equivalent of nails being dragged down a chalkboard. It seemed to vibrate as it threw itself over and over into the chain link fence again and again, until the force of meat hitting metal rang an echoing sound along their section of the perimeter and threatened to bring yet more unwanted attention to them. Thinking, Johnson cast his eyes around the grass at his feet and located a raised tuft of thicker, more hard-wearing grass. Using the heel of his boot like a pickaxe, he swung a few times until the clump came loose, then reached down to grasp the stalks and heave the lump of turf high over the fence and away, behind the thing as though he were tossing the severed head of an enemy by its hair.
As soon as that thought came to him, before the replacement for a severed head landed, he admonished himself for having the idea and drawing the similarity.
When the grass did land, the soft thud made the screeching noise stop, and he watched in stunned silence as the thing temporarily lost all interest in the trooper, who was still throwing up the remainder of his last meal, as well as the SSM who he had been so feverishly trying to get to before the interruption. The thing staggered away in the direction of the last noise. No sooner had it stumbled five paces away than Johnson cleared his throat and made it spin its head back towards him, and it reached out in the direction of the latest sound which had caught its attention.
Not bothering to fold out the stock of the gun, he raised it and fired a short burst into the chest of the man at a range of about four paces. Convulsing like a landed fish, the man was thrown bodily backwards to hit the earth flat on his back. Johnson reapplied the safety on his gun and lowered the barrel just as he froze and dropped his jaw. The man, a handful of bullets riddling his chest, began to hiss and moan again, although in a different tone due to the holes in his lungs. Haltingly, it dragged itself upright and back to its feet to reach out towards him with both hands.
Interesting, he thought to himself, as he calmly drew the eight-inch bayonet and slowly twisted it onto the end of the lightened barrel of his sub-machine gun. He had rarely seen bayonets in his career but had long since given up wondering where Rochefort had found the random and unexpected boxes of forgotten gems.
Settling the blade into place and feeling the satisfying click as it locked in position at the diagonal angle to the magazine sticking horizontally out of the opposite side of the gun, he took two swift paces forwards and raised the gun to drive the bayonet straight through the open maw to burst the very tip of the blade out of the back of the skull. The man, the thing, became instantly lifeless, and as Johnson withdrew the blade as though demonstrating perfect form to raw recruits, he watched as his victim crumpled to the ground at his feet on the other side of the fence. He removed the blade from the weapon and wiped it delicately on the grass before restoring it to the leather sheath and turning.
“On your feet, Trooper,” he said to the shocked young man, who probably hadn’t breathed since he had finished throwing up, “and get that bloody beret off your eyes; it’s not a cap.” Then he strode purposefully towards the buildings as he fought the urge to fall to his own knees and burst into hysterical tears of crippling fear. Recalling the words that the naval air base to their north east had reported to them, his whole body went cold in shock and fear as the line returned to him once again with renewed meaning.
The dead were rising.
Miles away, sitting alone in the gathering dark and growing fear, Peter watched from the seat that his father used to occupy as his mother remained unchanged for hours.
She breathed fast, the sounds eventually transforming into shallow gasps as she snatched the oxygen from the air with ever-increasing desperation. Just after she had lost consciousness, Peter had tried the telephone and waited for painful seconds as the dial clicked all the way back from the three consecutive nines he had dialled. He didn’t understand the tone, but the line didn’t connect to anything at the other end. He tried twice more, each time failing to get through to anyone.
By the time her breathing began to slow to the sporadic gasps which rattled from her throat, Peter could feel the heat radiating away from her red-hot skin. He knew that she wasn’t going to get better, not that he could explain why or how he felt that way, just that he knew and accepted it on a level of pure belief. As that realisation settled on his soul, and he recognised that it didn’t trouble him, he rose from the seat and went to fetch himself some food from the kitchen.
Peter had no way of knowing the complex biological processes that had taken place inside his mother’s body, nor would he have fully understood them even if they were explained in a fashion more suited to the learning capacity of a nine-year-old boy.
He would not have known that her body temperature had risen to above forty-four degrees Celsius, and that the rampant fever that was destroying her from within had effectively boiled her brain and damaged it beyond all salvageable levels. She had lost all higher brain function and was left with that part of her mind which was purely instinctive and uncontrollable; the part that remembered to breathe when she was asleep, or that reminded her heart to beat without any conscious thought. That part of her, so deeply buried by years of social evolution, by generations upon generations of civilised tweaks to the genetic code of her race, that still knew how to hunt and kill for food even if she didn’t know it.
Human beings are carnivores. Their eyes are forward-facing to better locate prey and gauge distance. They have incisors and canine teeth designed for killing other animals and ripping flesh. Humans might have forgotten these facts, but their deeply suppressed brain functions had not.
Just as the fever finally killed her body, the virus that had infected her when the saliva of the man who had bitten her came into contact with her blood and torn-open flesh took over. It kept certain aspects of her body alive but retained none of what made her the person she was.
Had Peter known this, it was doubtful that he would really have cared, because he hated the person she was. He hated her on such a deep, cellular level tha
t he might as well have been infected with something just as virulent and potent as the disease which killed her, as he stood in the next room and ate a sandwich without using a plate, not caring if the crumbs falling to the floor would result in him being hit or shouted at.
Just as he finally began to accept that his life was never going to go back to normal, he heard a snarling, ripping, yelping sound from the other room.
Freezing in mid-chew, the half a sandwich still hovering near to his mouth, the sickening sounds of butchery drifted through the downstairs of the house to his ears. Unmoving for longer than he could possibly be aware of, he began to breathe again. His breath didn’t come in panicked gasps, because he too had unlocked some deep, primal ability which he didn’t know he possessed.
Peter, unknowingly, was a born survivor.
Keeping his breathing soft and quiet, he moved off the kitchen side and crept forwards in a half crouch as he placed one foot carefully after the other to cross the small yet impossibly long distance to the doorway, in his attempt to add vision to the sounds he could hear.
Rounding the doorway with just one eye and a tiny portion of his face, he couldn’t contain himself any longer and almost let out a cry of horror. On the other side of the room, down on the floor on her knees, was his mother. Her hands ripped at the blood-soaked mess of fur and meat and organs which she was pulling apart hungrily.
As disciplined as Peter was by keeping silent, he could not control what his bladder did involuntarily as it emptied to run down his right leg. Before the hot liquid had reached the rough, brown carpet, his mother froze and stopped ripping at the corpse of their dog. She lifted her head up in the air and sniffed; long, hungry pulls through her nostrils as she tried to locate the source of the acrid smell of ammonia.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 10