“You alright?” he asked the SSM.
“Yeah,” Johnson said in shock, startled and feeling cold to his core at how quickly a slight mistake could change, or end, a person’s life, “Ankle’s tweaked,” he said, the feeling in his body returning as the adrenaline ebbed away and the pain rushed in to replace it.
“It’s icy,” Peter told him as he jerked the spike back out of the skull. Johnson bit back the sarcastic retort that he was well aware of that salient fact and thank you very much for pointing it out all the same. He regained his feet as the boy was cleaning the weapon on the shredded and torn remains of the clothes his victim still wore, hissing in discomfort as he put pressure on the joint but retrieving his sledgehammer and dragging the lightweight corpse away from the road to roll it on the grass before limping slightly back to regain the safer side of their barricade. He hadn’t even seen Peter get over to save him, hadn’t heard the boy move until he had dealt the fatal blow, and he rather suspected that a platoon of Peters would be worth putting money on at decent odds.
“Let’s keep that bit to ourselves, shall we?” he asked the boy as they walked back to complete their lap. Peter only smiled in answer.
THREE
“Understood,” Downes said simply when Palmer told him what was on his mind.
A man with less style, less impeccably honed manners, would have found such a conversation awkward. Julian Palmer, with his natural aristocratic charm, possessed that effortless way of making a polite suggestion in conversation, or merely presenting a problem to someone so that they volunteered to undertake the solution, instead of having to give an order. In that sense he reminded himself of their former Sergeant Major, the very heart of the squadron in many ways, as he too rarely had to give an order; merely a suggestion that men jumped to carry out.
“I’ll need a decent vehicle capable of dealing with all of this,” Downs said, waving a vague hand over the outside air to encompass the weather in general.
“Done,” Palmer said, his mind calculating the available vehicles and fuel supplies remaining and settling on the four-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser found on the nearby farm. A good choice, given that their own military vehicles were both unfamiliar to the SAS men and notoriously unreliable, especially after the months of abuse they had suffered with little to no maintenance.
“And it’s likely to take a couple of days,” Downes added, “I’ll have Mac draw up a comms schedule and get the boys looking at the maps again.”
“You have my thanks, Major,” Palmer said humbly, taking his leave to return to the more mundane matters.
On his walk back to the room he had adopted as an office, he took the long way around via the large, grassed inner courtyard to view the half-ploughed lawns where the vegetable planting had been planned but started too late in the autumn, before the ground froze hard, and which still showed no signs of thawing. They had grossly miscalculated how long their stores of food would last, burning through the ration packs at a rate not quite as desperate as their remaining ammunition, but still too fast to make surviving winter a foregone conclusion. They needed more food, they needed more fuel for fires, and they needed it now.
He had thought ahead in the last week, diverting men from the former Headquarters Troop to join his only remaining radio operator, Corporal Daniels, in a room which had become their unofficial command. There they studied maps of the area, sadly being more topographical than detailed as to the contents of each town and village, and they scanned the lists of the local directory to find businesses that could be of help to their plight. Palmer’s own small office, what he had guessed had been the snug belonging to the former master of the house, was only a door away and he often found himself working alongside the men, instead of spiralling into depression when left alone with his thoughts.
Hindsight, he told himself sourly, is a wonderful thing. We should have started planting food as soon as we got to this place. Should have used the remainder of the good weather to search for more. So many things we should have done.
But they hadn’t done these things. He hadn’t. They had all rested on their small laurels and enjoyed the relative safety and relaxation, and now they had to survive somehow until the weather broke, which he knew could be half a year away. The thought of huddling in the cold and living on little to no food for all that time threatened to push him further into the depressive cycle he felt himself swirling around, and he knew that if he felt that way, then others were certain to feel the same or worse. That brought with it other concerns, and he worried that the discipline of the civilians, as well as his own adopted men, would begin to unravel.
An early stroke of luck was finding that the nearby farm, accessible either by a cross-country walk of almost a mile or a three-mile journey by single-track roads, possessed a pair of greenhouses which had provided tomatoes and cucumbers for two weeks before they ran out. After that, they had been forced to try and remedy their sudden lack of fresh food, and plant more of it. Crops of onions and carrots had been planted, along with spring onions, broad beans and peas, but they were slow to grow in the sudden low temperatures and the yield was far too small to be worthwhile. What they did manage was large batches of stews, which were started by the volunteer contingent of civilians each morning, and which cooked throughout the day in huge metal pots on the Aga. Then when the sun began to set, everyone ate in shifts.
Work teams toiled all day, clearing rooms and arranging things as best they could for comfort. Men and women walked over the low hill to the farm where they took everything of use, which had blessedly included some livestock that still lived. A large and docile horse had been brought inside to be stabled for winter, as had half a dozen cows, which one of the women rescued from the Island knew how to milk by hand. The farm was more of a smallholding and not a large commercial one, and the occupants had left in such a hurry that their livestock had been abandoned. There were chickens and pigs too, but the eagerness of the survivors on finding them had decimated the herds and flocks before Palmer had ordered men to guard the farm, and had spread the word to keep every animal alive. The simple logic of a daily dose of protein in the form of an egg being more important to their survival than a single roast chicken, needed explaining in detail, it seemed, which infuriated the young officer.
The remaining chickens, safe for now from hungry mouths, laid a modest batch of eggs every day, which, just as the fresh vegetables, was nowhere near enough for all of them. He needed to supplement, to think for all of them, and he did so in every way that he could. He spread the word throughout the civilians as he did the military men, asking for experience in trapping game. Soon he had a team of three men who went out each night and each morning to set and check the snares for rabbit and hare, which were more abundant in the area than he had ever noticed before.
Throughout the brief end of summer and early autumn, those snares had been constantly pilfered by the few Screechers roaming the countryside aimlessly, but as the temperature dropped, so too did the numbers of wandering dead they encountered. The snares provided a meagre supply of meat which found its way into the stews, every shred of flesh stripped from the bones in acceptable mimicry of their enemy.
He hadn’t taken the time to consider this perceived disappearance of Screechers, nor did he really have that time available, but when he tried to find slumber, that was one of the innumerable questions that kept him from sleep. The reduction in numbers of flesh-eating undead human beings was a blessing, and most people considered it as simply that, but he refused to accept the assumptions that they were moving off or dying out. He kept his men alert, planned exercises with the other officers and NCOs to rouse the men and women from their sleep, as though they were under attack again. He had done this only twice since they had been attacked in force, both times feeling barely satisfied with the response times, but he’d chosen not to do so again as the backlash from the civilians was unbearable; they were unaccustomed to that kind of life, couldn’t cope emotionally or physical
ly with being woken up in the night to react and then told to go back to sleep, because they weren’t soldiers.
“What have we got, boys?” he announced cheerily as he walked into the room containing men bent over maps, wearing a smile that his eyes could not hope to match.
“The coal place seems viable, Sir,” answered Trooper Cooper who had been made acting Sergeant Cooper as the only remaining man in the HQ Troop seeming to possess more than a few braincells, “and there’s a few supermarkets a bit further out that would be a good idea, only they’re closer to the towns,” he finished, a gentle warning in his tone.
Palmer nodded, knowing that sending men into the larger towns near the coast could be catastrophic.
“The Hereford lot are getting ready to go out,” he said, “get everything you can on your top three supply sites to me as soon as possible, if you please.”
“Sir,” Cooper responded curtly, his single word conveying compliance and not annoyance. Palmer nodded to them and left, walking back out into the long, carpeted walkway where he almost collided with Maxwell.
“Shit me! Sorry, Sir,” he said from behind two large sacks rested on his right shoulder. Maxwell had adopted the role of senior NCO, performing well in the shadow of the loss of Johnson, who was mourned and muttered about by many.
“Not to worry, Mister Maxwell,” Palmer answered as he stepped back, using the honorary address as he would a sergeant major, despite the man still wearing the three chevrons of his actual rank, “but please do tell me what you have there.”
“Flour, Sir,” Maxwell answered almost excitedly as he rummaged with his free hand in the pocket of his smock to produce a large, rustling plastic packet, “and yeast!”
Palmer stared at him, his mouth slightly open, which Maxwell took to be a lack of comprehension.
“I’m taking it to the kitchens,” he said, “I’ll ask Denise to make some fresh bread for tonight’s stew. She just needs a little salt and a bit of oil, see, and you knead it together, then rest it to let it rise, th…”
“I’m aware of the process, Maxwell,” Palmer interrupted him, unsure how he even knew, given that his family home was graced with a cook and staff, “I was more concerned with where you found it.”
“Farmhouse, Sir, tucked away in a shed,” he replied, falling back on the senior NCO style of giving loud, crisp and punctilious answers when dealing with officers. Palmer knew and recognised the routine immediately, abandoning any further line of questioning as pointless.
“Well, my compliments to Mrs Maxwell,” he said formally, “and I’ll expect a nice, fresh crust with the evening meal.”
“Very good, Sir,” Maxwell answered, resuming his burdened march towards the kitchen. Palmer watched him go, thoughts bouncing around his head until his gurgling stomach changed the subject for him. Clasping an involuntary hand to his thinning midsection, he lost his train of thought for a moment and returned to the office where the planning had happened.
“Village bakeries,” he announced gleefully to the room, earning uncomprehending stares from four sets of eyes.
“Sir?” Cooper asked, his face asking the question far more than the inflection did.
“Tactically, it’s wiser to avoid the more built-up areas, correct?” he asked rhetorically, but seeing that Cooper opened his mouth to respond, he continued quickly, “but the smaller villages are all but abandoned, or at least the Screechers there are contained,” he paused, waiting to see if any of them had cottoned on to his idea yet. They hadn’t.
“We go into the small bakers’ and grocers’” he went on enthusiastically, “and take their flour and yeast and salt… they will have all the ingredients to bake bread, surely, so we bring that back and add fresh bread to the menu. I can’t believe…”
His stomach growled audibly again, silencing his enthusiastic speech and raising the eyebrows of the other men in the room.
“Here you go, Sir,” Daniels said in an almost embarrassed tone, reaching into a pouch and coming out with the remnant of a shiny green wrapper, “have a dead fly biscuit before you drop.”
Palmer smiled, gratefully accepting the gesture and the hard biscuit laced with dried fruit, as he knew the men well enough to not feel embarrassed by breaking down the divide between officer and troopers a level. As he chewed, his stomach protested again as it eagerly accepted the food, but Daniels wasn’t finished.
“Oi, Coops, give the Captain one of them Rolos you’re hiding.”
Cooper looked shocked, maybe even a little hurt, and his mouth hung open to begin a feeble protest before the corporal cut him off.
“Don’t pretend you ain’t got any,” Daniels said with a rueful smile, “we’ve all seen you. Peel a bloody orange in his pocket, that bugger would, Sir.”
Cooper deflated before he spoke.
“It’s my last one though,” he admitted feebly, sparking laughter among the others.
“Aw, Coops,” Daniels chuckled, “don’t you love the Captain enough to give him your last Rolo?”
Amidst the laughter at his expense, Cooper reached into his clothing and brought out a tangle of paper and foil wrapping which contained a solitary, lonely, chocolate-covered treat.
“It’s quite alright, Sergeant,” Palmer said, playing along, “I wouldn’t want you to display such affection in front of your peers and cause unnecessary embarrassment.” He let the laughter die down, chewing the hard biscuit and feeling better for it, before reiterating his orders.
“All of the local bakeries, if you would?” he said, his slightly full mouth betraying how much his hunger overrode his breeding, “and I’ll speak to Lieutenant Lloyd to request a detachment of his men to get straight on it. The other task still stands.”
He kicked himself for not thinking of this before, only forming the idea when he saw Maxwell carrying the sack of flour. He had so many demands on his time and energies that he was missing the answers directly in front of his face, and those demands seemed to grow every day. That list of problems requiring solutions and action grew, boiled over, and almost caused a fire in an instant, with the outbreak of pure pandemonium from down the hallway outside his office.
FOUR
“Jesus, it’s cold,” Nevin complained as he blew on his hands and rubbed them, before holding them over the fire he was crouching in front of.
“It’s winter,” Michaels answered with an undisguised lack of interest, “it happens.”
Nevin ignored the sarcastic retort as he stared into the flames, his face contorting into a rictus of distaste for the man he had been forced to bow and scrape to over the weeks since he had joined the group on the Hilltop. At first the grass had been very green, with stockpiles of looted beer and spirits and good cigarettes, which were a luxury to him. Once that initial hangover had passed, made worse by that bastard Johnson limiting them to a single pint a day for his own amusement, he had realised that the utopia he had imagined wasn’t a reality.
It could be, he told himself in quiet moments, but not with Michaels at the helm.
The surprise of finding their squadron’s missing troop sergeant had stayed with him for over a week, until he realised that the man he had known before wasn’t the man he spoke with now. Sergeant Michaels had been a quiet man, fastidious in some respects, and hard on his men, but ultimately committed to them and rewarding when the appropriate time came. The man sitting in the ornate chair behind him in the grand parlour was still quiet, but there seemed to be an element to him now that was either lacking something he had possessed before, or else there was an edge he had gained since. Nevin mused that it could be both; that the loss of family and the addition of lawlessness had changed the man, much as it had changed him.
On balance, he much preferred the Hilltop way of life, in that he was never roused from an uncomfortable sleep to sit and keep watch with the promise of punishment if he didn’t perform his duties under the malevolent watch of senior men. Senior in their eyes, at least, but not in Nevin’s. He had shed the uniform as
soon as he’d arrived, and bundled the dirty clothing stained with sweat, blood and the acrid stench of dried urine, handing them to a cowed woman to be washed and ironed. He had wanted to burn the uniform, but Michaels had insisted that he keep it ready. The rationale for that insistence, as much as Nevin didn’t understand it at first, became evident when they had visited a group of nearby settlers who had found themselves in a similarly protected position as the Hilltop.
The rolling higher ground near the seaside cliffs formed a natural barrier against the legions of undead who roamed across the countryside in the late summer, making those on the lower ground inland vulnerable. The unmistakable sounds of battle in the previous months had tugged at Michaels’ thoughts until Nevin had been thoroughly questioned about the two actions to defend the island, and those facts had further solidified his gut feelings about the lower ground.
That geography, nature’s defences, had protected dozens of small pockets of humanity along the coast, and the arrival of Nevin provided Michaels with the additional tool he required to make further acquisitions.
Dressed in his uniform, Nevin was inspected by the former sergeant who wore nothing to indicate the life he had abandoned, other than the webbing and weapons taken from the camp. Michaels instructed Nevin very precisely in what to say and do, and after sunrise he rolled out at the head of a small convoy in the Ferret car he had taken from the camp before he had abandoned the rest of his squadron to die by flame, explosion or the teeth and nails of the dead. The other vehicles, a collection of civilian cars and vans driven by the cruel followers of Michaels and his litter of lawlessness, dropped back to wait out of sight of the big farm, as Nevin powered up the chalk stone track to the fenced enclave, where he was met by three men holding shotguns unthreateningly.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 65