“The Major will be pleased,” Lloyd opined, “I think he and his boys are suffering from a little cabin fever.”
The Major in question, Clive Downes, while clearly a more experienced and senior officer, had declined the gracious offer to lead their group, claiming that it wasn’t his area of business. Palmer, as much as he hated the responsibility on a daily basis, had to agree. Having a four-man Special Air Service patrol at his disposal was something of a luxury when it came to stepping outside the relative safety of their draughty home. On every occasion they had planned to raid an area for supplies, he had first allowed the special forces soldiers to go in quietly and return to provide an in-depth intelligence report on enemy activity and the requirements of any ensuing mission. This template had worked flawlessly until the weather had turned, but the voluntary grounding of their helicopter in order to preserve the fuel and mechanical integrity of the aircraft had greatly limited their abilities. Now, he felt, necessity would force them to brave the treacherous weather in order to survive.
“I’ll speak to him,” Palmer said, “because I doubt we have more than two or three weeks’ worth of food remaining, even on reduced rationing.”
That seemed to end their conversation on that matter, as neither wanted to face the realities of their dire situation. That situation extended solely to food, luckily, as they still had running water for reasons unknown to them. They had power still, but they knew the cause for this was as a direct result of a mission carried out by the Major and his team back when there was still hope of containing the nationwide outbreak, and they were inserted by helicopter to a nuclear power plant, where the dial was effectively cranked back down to the lowest setting. The engineers had assured them that the plant would run for many more years like that, as it only needed the constant maintenance to run at optimal levels. Given that the demand for electricity was only a fraction of what it had been before, they hadn’t experienced any loss of power. The power alone didn’t help that they were all freezing slowly to death, however.
Very uncommonly for the area, their luck ran out when they dived headlong into the worst winter any of them could recall. The marines grumbled that they preferred their arctic warfare training in the Norwegian winter to the conditions they were facing now, because at least there they were prepared and equipped appropriately. His own men had even taken to wearing their NBC, or nuclear/biological/chemical, protection suits over their clothing, in an effort to block out the worst of the cold.
Lloyd put a stop to the grumbling of his marines before it gathered momentum by assembling his men and telling them all to reach down with their right hands to check that they still had balls, which silenced any further complaints.
The worst affected areas of the vast house, which was heated by log and coal fires and the precious heating oil which fired the huge Aga in the old part of the kitchen, had been granted the use of the gas-bottle powered heaters, but as they were now a finite resource and the high ceilings made most of the heat they provided a waste, they were used sparingly. Palmer had a huge list of priorities to attend to, and heating was among those at the top of the list. He wanted a wholesale coal dealer emptied, almost salivating at the thought of sitting beside a roaring fire and being warm for the first time in weeks, but he knew that warmth would be pointless without food.
No, he told himself as he and Lloyd lapsed into a brooding silence, we need food and we need it now.
TWO
They had every intention of resting for only a day or two after finding the safety of the abandoned village, following their fluke survival of a brutal helicopter crash, but as always, best laid plans often fell at the first hurdle.
Finding the house had been total happenstance and discovering that there were two young children living there was utterly miraculous to them all. The resilience and bravery of the young boy, Peter, had emerged slowly as he relaxed more around them to speak about his experiences.
The young girl, Amber, still hadn’t spoken a word to any of the adults, although she occasionally whispered into Peter’s ear. She did show signs of warming up to one of them, however, and the way she stared at their Norwegian parachute commando bordered on the obsessive at times.
Johnson, in a rare moment of giving in to the urge to smoke, took the packet scavenged from one of the village houses and a lighter to the back garden, and leaned back to perch on the low stone wall of the raised patio. As he lit the cigarette and inhaled, the sound of the sliding doors opening and closing made him turn awkwardly to crane his neck around the bulk of his right shoulder to see who it was. Surprised to see that it was Peter, he nodded to the boy, who zipped up his oversized coat all the way to his cheeks in response to the chill in the air, and came to rest on the frosty stone near to the man three times his size. The two sat in comfortable silence for a time, both staring out over the low ground which fell away from the rear of their modest castle at the thin wisps of mist hanging near to the frozen dew on the grass.
“She likes Astrid, doesn’t she?” Johnson asked the boy, meaning to discern the reasons behind the little girl’s stares at the blonde-haired commando. Peter sighed and dropped his head.
“Her mum had hair like she does,” he answered simply. Johnson said nothing for a while, going back over the facts he had in his head about their story.
“What happened to her mother?” he asked gently, “You said you found her.”
“I did,” Peter said sadly, before pausing and explaining, “I was hiding in a house and heard people. In a car. They broke into another house and dragged her away, then they broke into the house I was hiding in, but they didn’t find me. When they left, I went to look and I found Amber.”
Johnson drew in a breath, fighting down the savage words that had loaded themselves on the tip of his tongue, ready to fire. He swallowed them down and thought before responding.
“You’re a very brave young man, Peter,” he said carefully, forcing the anger out of his voice in case the boy misunderstood and thought it was directed at him. He knew why men would drag away a woman, but he doubted that Peter would or even that he should understand that yet. “I wish I had a few dozen as brave as you in my squadron.” Instantly he regretted his words, as only one of the men who had served under him had shown anything but the utmost effort and bravery. Those men were gone now, scattered and dead to a man possibly, but he had to hope that they had stayed together and stayed alive.
“I had to kill one of the monsters, though,” Peter went on as though Johnson hadn’t spoken. “The front door was broken and it just… walked in. Probably following the noise,” he added, with a sensibility and maturity beyond his small frame and short years.
Johnson had no words this time, so he lowered his head and smoked thoughtfully. His natural manner left him lost when dealing with children; as though he didn’t know how to be around them after a lifetime of being ordered and giving orders among other rough men. Instead he chose to change the subject.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“Don’t sleep much anymore,” Peer said wistfully, his words again making him sound decades older than he was, as though the experience of the last few months had aged him beyond repair and had ended his childhood years before it should have faded into adulthood.
“Want to do the morning checks with me?” asked the Squadron Sergeant Major without a squadron or any men to command, taking a final drag and grinding out the cigarette into the frozen ground. In response, Peter stood and nodded.
Johnson put on a woolly hat and picked up his tools, taking one of the suppressed submachine guns from where the weapons rested against the wall in the lounge. Peter took his own weapon from that rack too, having taken to placing it there to mimic the adults he idolised but didn’t know how to engage with comfortably. He always carried the small spike, like a crude and homemade ice pick, and he slipped the sawn-off shotgun into his small backpack as he hefted the pitchfork and looked up to Johnson, nodding to signify that he was ready to
go.
Johnson checked that his gun was loaded, which he knew it always would be, and slung it behind him to pick up what had become his primary weapon in the form of a small sledgehammer. Most men would tire even carrying such a tool, let alone have the strength to swing it more than a few times to crush the skulls of former human beings, but Johnson managed it.
They hadn’t been forced to do much in the way of fighting since they had arrived there, especially seeing as Peter had dispatched a tenth of the undead still trapped inside the small village before their appearance, but when the injuries to Kimberley and the irascible Sergeant Hampton had taken longer than expected to heal and allow them mobility, they had decided to stay where they were until their entire contingent was fully fit. Johnson had told them about the plan to form up at the base and search for another permanent site after that, but their early foray to that base had been met with depressing evidence of carnage and destruction. Of the three sites suggested for the squadron to reform, Johnson could not recall any of the locations, so had spent days on end compiling a list of potential sites to be checked for their companions, if any yet survived. Shortly after they had found the village, a helicopter had been heard, but when they went outside into the secluded back garden to check, the aircraft had disappeared and had not been seen since. In case it came back over, Johnson had found a large tub of white gloss paint and used a broom to push the sticky white fluid around on the empty patch of road by the house. He painted four simple characters, not writing ‘help’, but instead leaving his individual calling card in his radio callsign. If whatever was flying around was military, which it almost certainly had to be, then seeing the legend of F33A emblazoned on the road below, Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha, would grab their attention instantly.
Before they knew it, however, and far sooner than they had expected, the temperatures had dropped and the first snow fell to entomb them for over a week and obscure their aerial message. After that, the priority to move and take their uncertain chances on the road fell into second place behind surviving the winter.
Holding the big hammer in one hand and turning to the only other person in the house who was awake, he announced where they were going.
“Doing the lap,” he said to Enfield, the oddly quiet and calm sniper filling the kettle for the first brew of the day, who simply nodded in response. Johnson paid no attention to what would have previously, in their old lives, earned the young marine an arse-chewing of epic proportions for failing to correctly acknowledge a warrant officer of his standing and position, regardless of them being from different branches of the armed forces. Johnson was never a man to enforce such displays of obedience, he had never needed to as his men respected him, and he didn’t feel the slightest need to do so now. Even less so given that the majority of their small force were either current or former royal marines. He knew that Enfield meant no disrespect by the gesture, far from it in fact, but the man wasn’t in the habit of wasting unnecessary words when a silent look or a nod would suffice.
Doing the lap was what they called their morning routine of patrolling the perimeter of the small village which had been cleared and fortified during the weeks they had been there. Vehicles had been used to block access through their home, rolled and pushed into position before being jacked up and having their wheels removed to prevent them being pushed back out of position just as easily. In between every gap they had piled the furniture taken from the houses, leaving a single space blocked by two vehicles which could be moved should they need to drive their chosen transport out, which they hadn’t done for weeks, given the driving rain and sharp frosts in between the intermittent flurries of snow.
On the outside of those barricades were as many sharpened fence posts and other obstacles designed to snag any unsuspecting dead to wander in their direction as could be sharpened and emplaced. The rear of the dozen houses in the village, which been cleared of anything useful, had been reinforced similarly with coils of fencing found nearby to tangle anything walking in across country. The only other building in the small village not to have been hollowed out was the small pub at the slightly higher elevated end of the tiny strip, which was really little more than a long, low room containing a bar, a fireplace and a selection of dark wood tables and chairs with a dartboard adorning one wall and innumerable stains of suspect origin. That space was left as a kind of retreat; a place where any of them could fall back to and work through their own thoughts, which they found that they needed to do with increasing frequency, given their enforced lack of activity to occupy their minds.
The resources found in the village, the canned food and dried goods looted from all the other houses, had kept them fed for enough time to regain their strength, but occasionally they had been forced to venture out to nearby places for more until their immediate surroundings had been stripped bare.
As Johnson and the small boy whose shoulders reached not much above the man’s waist walked the lap, checking each section for any sign of life or, more importantly, former life, he thought about the worries afflicting him.
How long can we last, living like this? What kind of existence is it, especially for the young ones? What happens when we run out of ammo, or the baffles on the suppressed weapons finally give up, or we can no longer get a vehicle to start?
He tried to answer his own questions, realising that he no idea how to respond to each one without raising yet more questions about the answers he’d conjured up. He knew that they needed a plan, needed so much more than they had in so many ways, but other than taking them all on the road, he had no idea what to do. They had power and heat in the form of the electrically powered fan heaters. They even had a limited supply of hot water thanks to the solar panels on the south-facing slope of the roof they lived under, which never truly got that hot given the current weather. But they were relatively safe, they weren’t suffering too badly from the elements, and they weren’t starving. Yet.
“There’s one,” Peter said softly, snapping him out of his thoughts. Johnson looked down at the boy, followed his gaze past his outstretched finger to see an immobile body slumped over the front of a dark blue Ford saloon car.
“What’s the difference between an Orion and an Escort from the front?” he asked himself out loud. Peter made a small noise of confusion and prompted the man to shake himself out of his distraction.
Johnson put a large, flat palm out in front of Peter, indicating that he should stay back, but not touching him. The thing posed no risk to them as it was, not unless they were foolish enough to put themselves within biting distance and wait for it to wake up.
That was one of the strangest things to have happened, just one development in a very extensive list, but they still found themselves shocked at new developments. The cold seemed to affect the Screechers, seemed to slow them and make them sluggish, but it also seemed to accelerate the way they rotted and fell apart. Already they had discovered a big change in the ones they unearthed from inside houses; the musty smelling ones that were more preserved than others. The unlucky ones who had found themselves outside fared much worse due to exposure to the elements; to the constant rain and freezing temperatures of the harsh early winter, which made their flesh wither and often fall way in chunks. Their skin became something in between grey and clear, hanging from them in landslides of saggy flesh, and resembled the bloated corpses one might expect to see dragged from the River Thames after being missing for three weeks. Their movements were halting and uncoordinated and often they would be inexplicably missing fingers, which he guessed had frozen solid and snapped off. This one didn’t perk up, nor did it respond to their approach as they continued to check the section of the perimeter between their position and the trapped Screecher.
When they did approach, Johnson again gesturing for Peter to stay back, the long and knotted hair twitched as the head rose to slowly rotate on an angle until the clouded, milky orbs locked onto the SSM. He hefted his hammer, leaning over the frosty car to judge the swing required t
o brain it, when he lost his footing slightly. The woman, almost naked and not looking remotely good, as her withered and sagging breasts slapped softly against her emaciated ribcage, sparked up and clawed a hand at him as it animated close to the level resembling their unexcited state in warmer weather. Johnson recoiled, calling the woman a few choice names as he decided to approach the problem differently. He climbed over the next vehicle along, jumped down on the far side, having first to push out to clear the spikes so he could land unimpeded.
As his boots hit the floor, he slipped on the icy surface, feeling the slight crunch of one ankle as he tried and failed to roll in an imitation of a parachute landing, and he sprawled out to feel his hammer slip out of his grip. He opened his eyes after he landed hard to watch it slide ahead of him and skitter to a stop just out of reach. A hoarse croak, high-pitched and hissing, sounded from behind him, as if the thing impaled against the car was trying to screech, as was their horrifying way, but had lost its voice. He turned in dread, seeing that it had pushed, pulled and fallen away from the sharpened wood it had been stuck against to land on the pitted road surface beside his boots.
He pedalled his feet frantically, desperate for purchase to propel him away from the thing, and as his hands fumbled for the weapon trapped under his back, he heard a single word ring out.
“Oi,” it said, the voice unbroken but as confident as any soldier he had ever served with.
The sound that followed the voice was a metallic singing, culminating in a crunch and the solid noise of Peter’s pitchfork hitting the tarmac on the other side of the skull he had just skewered. The hissing and huffing of the thing had stopped in the same instant, and Johnson followed the line of the metal sprouting from the inanimate head, back up the worn wooden handle and past the boy’s hands to his face, which held no sign of humour or pride or expectation.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 64