Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  I know, she told it in her mind, we need to get out of here.

  She had been moved, had her clothes taken off her, and her wounded wrists dressed again with fresh bandages. She’d felt a sensation in those cuts when they were roughly wiped clean, and her brain told her that it registered that sensation as a stinging feeling, but somehow the connections to the part of her brain that felt pain were severed or blocked.

  She had been dressed in a simple gown which was left open at the back when she was transferred onto a bed in a plain room, where every fixture was immovable and built into the walls. Eventually she managed to sit up, still feeling as though she was inside that same bubble, but as if the walls were growing thinner, allowing more of the terrible outside world to penetrate and send her confusing messages. Her mouth was dry, a sudden return of a normal feeling to her, and as though the room knew what she needed, her eyes found a plastic jug half-filled with water and a paper cup beside it. She poured herself some, getting nearly half of what she spilled over the lip of the jug into the cup, and drained it.

  It seemed to her as if the water wasn’t water at all, even though it tasted just like water, but was instead some elixir which woke her up and returned her full array of senses to her. With that return, after her fourth cup was raised to her mouth by her shaking hands, her memory returned with all the rage and hate and terror that she had missed out on when she had been in the bubble. She stopped drinking, turned her head slowly towards the thick off-white interior of the door without a handle, and threw the plastic jug at it with a high-pitched scream of rage.

  The jug clattered off the door to clatter noisily on the floor in three bounces before it came to a spinning stop. As that sound disappeared, it was replaced by another, building in volume as it became multiple pairs of shoes moving with ominous purpose towards her door.

  The shutter snapped open, revealing a pair of eyes on the other side of the thick Perspex viewing port, then it snapped closed again. She heard a chuckle from the corridor, followed by the sound of the shoes squeaking away in diminishing volume, until she was left alone with only the sound of her breath coming fast.

  She ran at the door, bouncing off it as she screamed in rage and frustration, tears streaming down her face from the anger she was feeling, more than from any shred of weakness. The sounds of shoes returned with more purpose, menacingly stamping and squeaking along the corridor until the view port again revealed eyes, only this time narrowed in anger instead of wide with amusement. The shutter snapped across again, and a heavy clunk of a disengaging door lock echoed dully inside her empty cell.

  The door spilled inwards, three grown men filling the gap in an instant as she was snatched up and off her feet to be piled back down onto the bed. She fought and screamed as they forced her wrists and ankles into the leather restraints, arching her back as she tried to bite them and use the only weapon available to her that they hadn’t taken away.

  They stepped back, out of breath and chuckling at the defenceless girl who was half the size of any one of them, so no match at all for all three. They left her alone, now unable even to reach her face to remove the sweat-sticky strands of hair out of her eyes. She stuck out her lower jaw and blew upwards, attempting to dislodge the annoyance that way, but gave up after a handful of attempts and lay back in angry exhaustion.

  She had no idea how long she had been there, but the light from the single, high window grew dull. After her breathing had returned to normal, she felt cold, shivering as the cool air dried the sweat from her body and seemed to leave her permanently deprived of the body heat she had lost.

  She lay there into the night, her cell lit only by the wan shaft of dull yellow from an external light outside the window, and she must have drifted in and out of consciousness because she had wet herself at some point. She’d heard footsteps a few times. Had heard the shutter squeak quietly open, as though whoever was peering in wanted to keep the animal in the cage undisturbed as much as possible, and in the depths of the night she heard another sound from the corridor which chilled her more than the low temperature could ever have done.

  The outbreak had spread quickly from the separate section of the hospital, as the main building had been one of the epicentres of the local infection. Being a rural area, naturally the distance between hospitals capable of providing trauma care was often vast. Those attacked and bitten ahead of the main waves of dead flowing outwards from London were rushed to hospital, and in such confined areas where the sick and injured languished in beds, it made the rapid spread a forgone conclusion as the first of many critically ill patients died and then rose in a new form, in which their milky blind eyes zeroed in on the nearest victims.

  One of the nurses from the Accident and Emergency department had been smoking outside a fire escape door when the screams and shouts of alarm first came from inside. She dropped her cigarette, grinding it out with her shoe by automatic reflex, looked inside and saw the man who had been brought in with the animal bite to his arm stomping almost drunkenly across the corridor with both arms raised towards an unseen target.

  That makes sense, she thought, drunk most probably. The bloke’s burning a fever and blathering on about it being a man who’s bitten him, when there’s no way that’s been caused by a person.

  Then the blood fountained past her view, making her hesitate and take an automatic step backwards away from the inexplicable horror she could see inside. The blood was followed by the drunken man on his hands and knees, snuffling at the hot, sticky liquid on the shiny floor. He froze, his head snapping up to lock his gaze directly onto her face as he sniffed the air with exaggerated animal-like movements.

  She saw the eyes; milky and clouded as though he had been blinded by cataracts. The head tilted slowly to one side as the muscles of his body tensed before he flew at her.

  He’s not drunk, she decided, that’s not natural. Nobody should move like that.

  She stood transfixed by his approach as he slipped and slid on the spilled blood, until her senses regained control of her terrified body and she reached out to slam the heavy door hard into his face. The door bounced back, revealing a writhing body crumpled in the doorway where the thick wood had impacted and rearranged his facial features hideously. He climbed back to his feet as she stood dumbstruck at what she was seeing and hearing from inside, and then she ran.

  She ran faster than she had ever run before and wouldn’t have thought herself capable of such a feat. She was not a small woman, nor would she ever class herself as athletic by any stretch of the imagination, but she propelled herself with an inhuman speed blindly across the road towards the nearest building set on higher ground.

  Snuffling and grunting came from behind her until a hideous, terrifying noise ripped the air as though a set of bagpipes was being tortured on an inward breath. The guttural, primal scream the man emitted spurred her faster until she dared risk a glance behind her to see the man stumbling stiff-limbed closer to her.

  The ambulance came from nowhere. Later she realised that her terror and focus had been so consumed by her attacker, by the predator hunting her down, that her brain must have filtered out the sound of the approaching engine and the screech of locked tyres and the sirens. It hit the man square, thumping him bodily through the air with a vile crunch of metal and bone to send him twenty paces down the road away from her. She froze again, unaware of how much her chest was heaving with the rapid breathing, and her instincts took over to send her two steps towards the sight of the injured man, despite the unnaturally violent behaviour he had exhibited. When she saw his broken and shattered limbs begin to move, saw him start to right himself with his ruined body and swivel his crooked neck back around to face her, all sense of helping the man vanished as quickly as it had first appeared, all duty of care evaporated in a heartbeat, and she turned and ran again as other afflicted men and women spilled from the main building.

  Going via the rear entrance to the other building, if only to seek sanctuary inside away from
the monsters she feared were chasing her, she ran inside and turned to bolt the doors behind her. She ran through the corridors, finding some doors locked and others open to her.

  Too late, she found the suddenly familiar sounds of screams and screeches from ahead, and faltered, turning back to bump chest first into a white-uniformed orderly running towards the sounds.

  “No,” she pleaded, “don’t go that way.”

  “I’ve got to…” he started to say before she slapped him to focus his attention.

  “No! You’ve got to get us out of here. Right now. People have gone mad,” she told him, “they’re… killing each other.”

  He hesitated for a second, seeing nothing but the maniacally desperate look in her eyes, then led her away from the terrible sounds. He hesitated again, his hands fluttering at the keys clipped on his waist as he slowed and turned to her.

  “I’ve got to help them,” he said as he thrust the keys at her, “get as many people out as you can, just don’t open any of the doors with a red card by them.”

  She swallowed, nodded, and watched the man jog away as his shoes squeaked on the floor. Left in silence, she turned and walked to the nearest door to peer through the thick glass of the observation window. She glanced away, checking the details of the name and the colour-coded card beside the door. She saw that it bore a piece of red card underneath the legend of a name, surname first, and she looked back inside just as something hit the glass with a wet thud.

  She recoiled, stepping back as the fresh shit smeared slowly down with gravity and the cackling laugh bounced around the concrete walls within.

  That one can stay there, she told herself, moving down the corridor until she found a door without a coloured card. She looked through, her breath catching as she saw a young girl strapped to the bed looking small and helpless in the leather restraints. She paused, glancing hesitantly at the lack of colour-coordinated risk assessment, and she made a judgement call in the desperate hope that she was right. Fumbling with the keys, she unlocked the door.

  Jessica thought back to that day often. Now, as she hauled frozen bags of potatoes and vegetables onto shelves in the huge freezer, she wondered where her younger brother was, and if he had survived, too.

  EIGHT

  echo-one-one, charlie-one-one. sitrep: no losses to c-1-1. consolidated position at 50.8734n, 2.8915w with mixed civilian and other arms personnel. supplies low but sustainable at present. survivors in excess of 100 require extraction. confirm viability of secure location.

  The message on the small screen was short and to the point, and it also had to be sent when the four-man SAS team were safely away from prying eyes at the big house. Privacy was not something many people could enjoy on any military base, and Major Downes had yet to bring Captain Palmer up to speed on the other deployments of special forces troops. That would have been so far beyond his original pay grade that his need to know had gone from night to day.

  “Keep it on, Smiffy,” he said, meaning for his trooper to preserve the integrity of the complex snaking antenna cables used to send the burst data transmission on one of the set frequencies programmed into their man-portable radio, “we’ll give them an hour and pack it up.”

  “No need, Boss,” Smiffy said, “getting one back now.”

  Downes damn near bowled the man out of the way as he pushed his face up to the small readout to take in the answering message.

  charlie-one-one, echo-one-one. no losses to echo teams. our location is viable and defended. supplies adequate. unable to send evac by air. recommend journey by vehicle or boat via shallow coastal waters only. repeat, vehicle or shallow coastal waters only.

  “Well, bugger me…” Downes said to himself.

  “Rather not, Boss,” Mac intoned from behind him, “I’m more of the blonde hair, big boobs and daddy issues type.” Downes ignored the levity and explained.

  “Major Kelly has four bricks under his command,” he said, using the slang term for the four-man teams they usually operated in at the coalface level, “and they were in London as soon as that lab went dark. They were sent for a selection of VIPs and evac’ed by helicopter to a place designated ‘Echo’.”

  The three other men of his tightly-bound team exchanged looks. Only Mac’s face remained impassive, as the other two were learning about this for the first time.

  “We’ve still got a government?” Dez asked.

  “Of a sort,” Downes answered, “but I rather suspect they’re being kept safe for whatever comes after. They are set up for this, the quarantine I mean, and something tells me they aren’t scratching around for flour and yeast like we are.”

  Smiffy read over the response again, asking why the need to emphasise the shallow water approach.

  “Because whatever is left of NATO’s naval forces will probably sink anything seen leaving the British or Irish mainland, I imagine,” Downes answered. “Send an acknowledgement,” he instructed his trooper.

  Smiffy pressed the buttons on the backpack-sized device attached to the lengths of wires, then began collapsing the equipment and packing it back down to be stowed in the rear of their Land Cruiser taken for the reconnaissance mission at the request of Palmer.

  “You wait,” Smiffy said as he hauled the ungainly radio up and into the tailgate, “one day we’ll be able to do this from our personal mobile telephones.”

  “Dream on, laddy,” Mac drawled, “you just focus on the job we’re doing before you get all that Star Trek nonsense in your head. What are you after? A phone call from your watch?”

  Smiffy shrugged. His job was to get the job done, whatever it might be. Unlike the rest of the army, where a man or woman would have one main job and maybe learn how to undertake the roles of the others around them until their experience grew sufficiently that they understood the bigger picture, he had lots of jobs. He was a sniper and a signalman, being well-versed in long-range communications as well as long-range killing. He was part engineer, part infantryman, part paratrooper, as well as being a half-decent medic, as they all were. That was what marked them out as different; not their size or natural ability, but their attitude and their resource for learning.

  “So, what’s the deal with this secure site, Boss?” Dezzy asked gently, not wanting to get shut down for raising the subject. Downes stopped folding the map he had been looking at back to its original dimensions, pausing as though he was giving serious thought as to whether he should share the information in full. He resumed his folding with a sharp intake of breath, as though the moment of introspection had robbed him of the ability to inhale, and he stuffed the map into his bag.

  “Scotland. Inner Hebrides to be more exact,” he explained, “isolated and well stocked, and hopefully they should be able to see out the infection, or whatever it is, and return to re-establish order. I thought it was a badly kept secret, but obviously not. They’ve been planning this as a fall-back space for years in case of bio or nuclear attack; they’ve built bunkers and stockpiled God knows what. There can’t be too many of us left, probably even fewer after this bloody winter ends, and there will be a lot of rebuilding to do.”

  “How does that affect us?” Smiffy asked as he leaned on the side of the truck.

  “How do you think?” Mac butted in and answered for the Major, “Every house, every shop, every factory and every farm in the whole bloody UK needs clearing.” His words left them all quiet as the prospect of surviving brought with it even more challenges.

  “I mean, come on,” Mac went on, “we’ve seen how they freeze up in this weather, and my guess is that they’ll degrade somehow when the weather warms again, but that doesn’t stop the faster ones much now, does it?”

  Nobody answered his rhetorical question.

  “Mac’s right,” Downes said, “we know they go into a kind of hibernation, and any that have followed any Limas inside buildings and gone into winter mode will still be dangerous when they,” he waved his hand vaguely to try and demonstrate the word he was looking for in vai
n, “when they… snap out of it or whatever. Fuck me, lads, even one of them left could end the world all over again. That’s how it started this time.”

  Dezzy looked at him, taking in his words and not wanting to lose any more time, or focus on the future of what ifs. He glanced at Smiffy, the two men feeling ever responsible for one another, and both shot the other a look that said it didn’t matter much to them anyway. They’d just do their jobs.

  An hour passed, which had been spent in near silence as they systematically cleared a small village door-to-door, just as they had discussed doing all over their afflicted country in order to get life back to normal. Towards the end of the main road which passed as the High Street, their tactics evolved, as there could be only a few of the enemy remaining in the village, even if they were alerted to their presence, and the team began to make more noise.