Half of his assault troop were in their two chosen Spartans, with another four of them designated for the front seats of the Bedford trucks that would transport the Marines. Johnson climbed aboard the front Bedford’s cabin, relegating his trooper to the breezy canvas-backed rear section, and he opened the window to rest the barrel of his Sterling sub-machine gun on the ledge. The driver, the round-faced and smiling trooper Povey, was rolling a cigarette when Johnson climbed up, and he turned to see Povey offering the little cylinder to him. Johnson didn’t smoke as a habit, but he was known to feel the urge from time to time.
“Thanks,” he said, reaching out and taking the smoke, allowing the trooper to light it before leaning back to watch him roll a replacement with deft fingers. The men knew that the time for hot drinks and cigarettes would end soon, as they would be observing ‘hard routine’, just as they would in any danger area, because they couldn’t run the risk of attracting the Screechers through something as unnecessary as tea or a smoke.
Just as the sun began to rise, Captain Palmer stepped out of the headquarters building and raised a tin mug in salute to the big man riding shotgun in the big, green truck as they set off gently down the slope.
SEVEN
The phone rang, shattering the underground silence and echoing terribly. The man in the white coat ran for it, snatching up the handset and hunching down as he cradled it with both hands for the precious promise of life that it could bring.
“Hello? Hello?” he hissed into it desperately, hoping that he hadn’t imagined it again and that there was actually someone there this time.
“Professor Grewal?” enquired an efficient and polite female voice from the other end.
“Yes,” he croaked, then cleared his throat, “yes, I’m Professor Grewal, who is calling?” he asked, wincing as he heard the mania in his voice but was powerless to prevent it escaping.
“Hold, please,” was all he heard, then a click on the line and he was certain that he’d imagined it. He flopped backwards against the wall next to the phone and slid down to sit on his heels. If he wasn’t rationing his food to the point that he was borderline hypoglycaemic constantly, he might have had the tears to spare but as it was, his body would not part with anything it could still use. He sobbed with dry eyes as he suffered another minor panic attack, reliving the terrifying events of the last three weeks spent underground.
He had been mostly underground for a few months before it all went wrong, but before his experiments for the government, the government of which country he couldn’t be entirely sure, went wrong and released hell on earth, he had at least been free to leave.
He had no clue how severe the outbreak had been, but he knew enough to realise that nobody had come to rescue him yet, so that meant things obviously weren’t going too well topside.
He was a leading expert on biological outbreaks, with a background in applied chemistry, which had allowed him to create and test the perfect pathogen to destabilise a foreign country. That knowledge sadly offered him little solace now, not knowing what was happening outside of his underground lab, which he had managed to secure by some small miracle.
By combining a particularly aggressive strain of rabies courtesy of the Americans, with his own modified version of meningitis, he had created the perfect antidote to humanity, and had inadvertently unleashed a plague destined to make his own species consume itself into oblivion.
The outbreak caused by the human testing phase of his work had at least been contained in the lab, but the protocols had sorely overlooked the unexpected side effects, and the team sent in to help those trapped inside were the ones who released the infected into the streets of south London on a Friday afternoon.
Grewal had been trapped inside a small storeroom with no water and had suffered for two days until he finally steeled himself to make a desperate bid for freedom, or at least another room that had food and water. He had found rolls of insulating wrap in that storeroom and had wound it around himself as a crude form of bite protection in readiness for his escape attempt.
Events above ground, as devastating as they were to the entire south east and spreading west with enough raw power to halt an armoured column heading to restore order to the capital, had actually saved him from death by dehydration or worse. When the gathering mob above ground began to move with some bizarre, unknown singular purpose and started to march together, the two lurching former colleagues who were camped outside the door to his storeroom were distracted by the sound they were all making, and stumbled their way towards the exit to join the exodus.
Feeling desperate, he psyched himself up to fight his way out, only for that desperation to turn to foolishness as he shouted a short squawk of challenge to the empty corridor. Realising that his besiegers had gone, he forced the main door closed and locked it, returning to the carnage that used to be his state-of-the-art lab. There were parts of bodies strewn over the floors, which he tried not to look at, but the most worrying discovery was the test subjects still strapped to their gurneys.
Some had tipped themselves over in their thrashing attempts to reach flesh with their teeth and Grewal watched in horror as they seemed to emerge from a state of dormancy when he walked in the room. Their cloudy eyes fixed on him and any noise he made fired them up until they began to shriek and hiss and snap their teeth together in his direction, as though they could bite their way to him despite being restrained.
As traumatised as he was, he was still a scientist who felt not only personally responsible for the catastrophe but believed he could fix it.
He first looked at the only test subjects to be still and saw a pair of surgical clamps buried through the right eye socket of one. Another appeared normal to look at, but closer inspection revealed the hilt of a scalpel protruding from the base of the skull.
Over the next few days he took samples from them after doubling the restraints and being very careful to never make contact with them without protective gear. He collected the samples and his test results, then dispatched all of the still living men.
Not living, living, he supposed but at least still moving.
“Professor?” asked a voice from the phone, startling him back to the present.
“I’m here,” he said, “who is this?”
“Commander Briggs of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy,” came the insistent response, “Professor I can’t be certain that this form of communication will last long so I need you to answer my questions as efficiently as possible. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Grewal stammered.
“Are you injured or infected?”
“No.”
“Is the lab still secure, is it accessible from the outside?”
“Yes,” Grewal said, then thought before answering the second part, “and I’d need to open it from inside.”
“Do you have hazardous material from the lab and is it secure?”
“Yes, in a hard case. I have blood and tissue samples and…”
“Please,” Briggs interrupted in an admonishing tone, “brevity and accuracy are key here, Professor. Do you have supplies to last for a month or more?”
“No.”
“Do you have supplies to last up to a month?”
“No.”
“Dammit,” Briggs said cursing him pointlessly, “can you hold out for a fortnight?”
Grewal did the mental calculations again, having emptied every piece of edible material in the lab onto the large table in the common area.
“Eleven days, maximum,” he said weakly, hearing breathing and a pause on the other end of the line.
“We will attempt an extraction as soon as possible,” Briggs told him, “We will attempt to use this method of communication to warn you closer to the time, but it may not be possible. Be ready.”
The phone clicked again, and the line went dead.
“Please,” Grewal said in a small voice, “don’t leave me alone… talk to me, please...”
He dropped the phone and sat with
his back to the wall as the swinging handset bumped off his shoulder with a pendulum motion. Just then, whether from sadness, desperate loneliness or relief, the tears came and would not stop.
EIGHT
“Thank you, Private,” said Kimberley Perkins to the soldier flanking sergeant Croft with a cup of tea.
“No, Miss,” he said looking confused, “I’m a Trooper, not a Private.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, as she looked up from the strong-smelling tea cupped in both hands, “sorry, I er… what’s the difference, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Trooper Cooper, as much as he had heard of the jokes about his name and rank, didn’t mind at all. He glanced at sergeant Croft, seemingly to ask for permission to engage in idle chitchat with the civilians, and he received a nod of consent. Cooper sat next to the young woman, seeing her shrink slightly away and self-consciously fuss with the hair on the left side of her face to hide the bumpy skin of the scar.
“We are a squadron, see, made up of troops of troopers, but the infantry has regiments made up of companies of privates. There are some gunners and fusiliers and scaleys bu…” Croft cleared his throat loudly without looking up from his clipboard, and Cooper amended his explanation, “I mean signalmen,” he said sheepishly, “so it depends on where you get put in the army.”
“Oh,” Kimberley said again as she looked up into his kind face, “so the men with the red berets and different guns are privates?”
“No, Miss!” Cooper chuckled, “they’re all…” he paused to look at Croft’s back and evidently decided against using the nickname he had loaded ready to fire, “they are Royal Military Policemen, RMPs, and they come out of the factory as Lance-Jacks, so they can order people around, like,” he said, unaware that his explanation raised more questions than it answered.
“Lance-Jacks?” she asked, confused.
“Yeah, half-screws? One-stripers? Lance Corporals. ’Cept their sergeant, who is a sergeant, obviously,” he responded.
“Lay off, Cooper,” Croft said tiredly, “can’t you see you’re confusing the lady?”
“It’s fine, Sergeant,” Kimberley said with a smile, “bullshit does baffle brains, after all.”
Croft gave her a warm smile, guessing incorrectly that she had heard the terminology from one the men in his squadron.
“But I’m not bull…”
“Thank you, Cooper,” Croft interrupted quickly, “off you go now.”
Cooper rose, looking slightly hurt, but Kimberley treated him to a kind smile from the visible side of her face, and that pleased him. As he left, Quartermaster Sergeant Rochefort walked in and sat down with a nod to Kimberley.
“Tea, Andy?” Croft said.
“Yes, please, Tom,” he replied tiredly, then rubbed his face.
Kimberley smiled again. She loved to watch people interact, especially soldiers, and saw no bigger change in them than when their subordinates left them in peace and they could revert to their peer group settings. The exception to this, she found, was the officers, who seemed to retain the same lofty sense of superiority regardless.
Seeing the two tall, confident men relax made her feel more at ease, and she almost let out a small titter of laughter when the two men moaned and groaned at their aching joints as they sat down.
“Miss Perkins,” Andy Rochefort said, “how are you on this fine, if not rather early morning?”
“I’m well, thank you, Staff,” she answered, betraying that she had been doing her own research other than to ask Cooper.
“Andy, please,” he said with a smile.
“Very well then, but you can call me Kimberley, just not Kim,” she said in a voice than invited no disobedience or further inquiry.
“Understood, loud and clear,” he answered, “now, I also understand there are some concerns from the people?”
“Yes, well, not so much concerns as needs really,” she said, fidgeting with her hair again and automatically turning her face so that she spoke to them sideways, “the supplies from the shop are all gone, as you know, and there are people, ladies specifically, who need certain things…”
“Ah,” Rochefort said, intuiting the subject she was trying to raise without needing her to use the words. The dead giveaway for this was the sudden absence of the men appointed to the task of ensuring effective two-way communication, “say no more. I presume you have a list available of the items?”
Kimberley did, and she gratefully handed over the folded piece of paper from the sheaf in front of her.
“There are other pressing matters,” she went on, “other than the island-wide shortage of toilet paper.”
The three of them chuckled politely at the small joke, allowing other matters to be brought up. Kimberley enquired politely about the soldiers who had left that morning, asking when they might be back, just as a rushing, intense noise filled the air above the building they were in, and blasted away with a dizzying Doppler effect which was repeated seconds later.
“That would be their taxi going to collect them now,” Croft said with a smile as Kimberley tried to figure out the logistical sense in what he said.
The gates of the camp came into sight of Maxwell’s wagon at the head of the convoy of four. The two vulnerable trucks were in the middle, with the other tracked vehicle at the rear. They moved fast, keeping a good distance in between their vehicles, and only stopped when they reached the gates.
More than a few Screechers had wandered out in the road after they had passed, and two had even stepped out in front of them to be crushed under the tracks of the lead wagon. Johnson, from his elevated position in the first truck offering a good view ahead, guessed that these were two of the Leader types of Screecher, the ones the marines had been calling Limas.
Faster and more capable they might have been, but they couldn’t evade ten tonnes travelling at over fifty-five miles per hour.
Maxwell dismounted with the other trooper from his wagon, leaving the driver in place, and pulled the gates open to allow the four vehicles inside. There was a fleeting urge in Johnson’s mind that they should cowboy it; that they should just bust through the gates like in a film. He brushed that thought away almost immediately as stupidity. He would never destroy a perfectly good barricade which could be used against the enemy.
They closed the gates afterwards, jogged back to their mount and drove on. The camp was a big place, and when they had resided there briefly, they’d only used a portion of it and kept the fences clear. They had to push much further in to achieve their objective this time, and the mood in each vehicle felt tauter and more expectant with every inch they travelled. The enormous hangars filled with vehicles, found easily as the man driving the lead wagon had been there many times, was opened to reveal the rows of angular, brutish lumps on their four massive wheels.
The marines had all dismounted when they stopped, pouring from the back of the trucks to the rhythmic noise of boots hitting the tarmac, to take up defensive positions, as the others sorted out the selection and starting of four Saxon armoured personnel carriers. The four men assigned to drive were all from the Yeomanry, seeing as armoured vehicles were primarily their arena, even though none of them had ever driven them. They were deep inside the complex layers of fenced sections, so highly unlikely to encounter any enemy, but that didn’t prevent the marines from demonstrating their fieldcraft, which seemed to come as naturally to them as breathing. Johnson paused a moment to take in the sight of them, either lying flat or kneeling to cover every square inch of approach through the sights of their new weapons with the alien appearance of the magazine being housed behind the trigger grip.
The marines were very different from the men of Johnson’s squadron, and as their new trucks rolled out, they climbed aboard via the double doors at the rear. Two trucks came under the direct command of their officer, and the other two of the sergeant who had been introduced to Johnson as Bill Hampton. He was at ease with his men, never seeming to feel the need to issue orders, but simply stating
what he needed them to do, and they did it. Their current drills were nothing new, as they’d become accustomed to that kind of transport in Northern Ireland, albeit in the previous generation of armoured car.
The two men, Lieutenant Lloyd and Sergeant Hampton, nodded to one another and the sergeant climbed aboard to lead his two trucks away. This was part of the plan, sending back half of their commandos as soon as they were mobile, and the second half remained with the two tanks and Bedfords. They opened another massive building attached to the workshops and took box after box of vehicle spare parts to ensure their armour stayed mobile.
“Right,” Johnson said happily after loading one truck, “bullets.”
The ammo dump, stored well away from the buildings and people in either dead or living form, was a few miles from the base. It took them a long time to get through the many physical layers, then the hard work began as they carried large crates out to the one now empty big, green Bedford truck. One squad of marines knelt in cover to point their weapons towards the gate as the truck was loaded up, then yet more boxes of large bullets were carried out to the open square nearby.
“What’s their ETA?” Maxwell asked, more out of conversation than needing the information repeated for him. In response, Johnson did that strange thing that people do when asked any question relating to time, especially when it doesn’t directly involve knowing what the precise time is, and he glanced unnecessarily at his watch.
“Sixteen minutes,” Johnson told him, realising what the question was designed for. Maxwell was offering his opinion that they would have carried enough to fill the helicopters by the time they arrived, so long as they left the island very soon.
“Call them in,” he told the sergeant.
They carried the rest, fulfilling the weight quota with rapidly calculated mental arithmetic, and everyone but Johnson and a pair of Royal Marines remounted their respective vehicles in anticipation of the instruction to move.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 27