Hot chocolate. With a sigh of satisfaction, he gingerly touched his lips to the drink, only to recoil as the liquid was hotter than lava.
“What you up to?” the girl asked.
“Just waiting for my friend to call up on the radio,” he told her, forgetting his very recent injury and foolishly trying the drink again to see if it had cooled down in the last second.
“Can I help?”
Daniels opened his mouth to answer, recognising that he would actually be glad o the company of someone interested in his secondary profession. But a nagging doubt plucked at the back of his mind.
“Do you want to bring someone else to keep you company?” he asked her awkwardly.
“Like who?”
“Like, err, like that woman you turned up with?” he tried, listing the only person he knew that she knew, bar the now-absent SAS patrol who had found them. Their arrival had sparked another, more concerning fear about their security, causing them to face the prospect of risk coming from other people for the first time since the virus had swept over the country.
“She’s been in bed for over a week,” the girl answered, reaching up to grasp the cold metal and placing a boot on it, ready to haul herself up.
“Hold on,” Daniels said, suddenly seeming worried that the girl was coming aboard regardless of the need for a chaperone.
“What?” she said, ceasing her climb as she saw no way to scale the high side.
“It’s…”
“You’re worried what people will think if you hang around with a girl my age?” Daniels looked shocked but swallowed and nodded.
“Don’t be so silly,” she told him dismissively and resumed her climbing.
“Go ‘round the front,” he told her, “you’ll never get up this way.” He waited as she dropped back down, heard her boots shuffling towards the lower section at the nose of the vehicle until she reappeared on the hull.
“Move over.”
He did, ducking back inside and moving away from the hatch as she lowered herself inside, flailing for purchase with her feet. Eventually spilling into the Sultan’s interior, she straightened her clothing and grinned at Daniels.
“Easy,” she said, her smile wavering as her teeth chattered.
Daniels frowned, glancing around and resting his eyes on a tattered, green army smock that he snatched up and went to drape around her shoulders. He froze, leaving the jacket resting over her slim frame as he backed off.
“Relax,” the girl said, “I know you don’t have any funny ideas.” Daniels relaxed but couldn’t help maintaining the frown.
“How do you know? I mean,” he added hurriedly, “I don’t, but still… how do you know?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t really,” she admitted, reaching down to slip a sharpened slither of metal from her right boot and twirl it before her face to catch the dull light from the open hatch. “But if you did have, you’d only have them once, know what I mean?”
Daniels knew precisely what she meant.
“So, who’s your friend and where is he?” the girl asked. Daniels slid back into the seat in front of the radio as his fingers went to work on the switches and dials.
“He’s my boss, actually, and he’s on his way here.”
“He’s in the army too?”
“Yeah. He’s my Squadron Sergeant Major,” he said, investing the title with all the grandeur he felt for it.
“So?”
“Sooo… so he’s my SSM.” He shrugged as if to indicate that the matter was dealt with. “That’s it. We got separated after the island—that was the last place we were before here—and everyone thought he was gone, but I wouldn’t take those odds…” he glanced at her to see her confusion and rephrased. “He never made it out on a helicopter when some of the boys and the civvies were knee-deep in a hell of a fight. Well, he did make it out, only the helicopter went down, which we’d never have known about if they hadn’t survived the crash and the winter.” The girl looked at him with a curious eyebrow raised.
“You’re really confusing,” she said. “You know that?”
“Sorry,” Daniels said, sipping the drink again and wincing as it was still unnaturally close to boiling. “My boss was missing in action, and everyone thought he was a goner. I stayed behind in case he popped back up, still believed you see, and he did. Not long after everyone went, as it happened…”
“Went where?” she asked, picking up a new avenue of questioning but intending to circle back around to her original lines of enquiry.
“Scotland. Or at least a big island just off the coast of Scotland.”
“And what are they doing there?”
Daniels shrugged, not entirely sure how to answer the question with anything meaningful.
“Not worrying about zombies. I thought you knew all of this. Didn’t you get the option to go with them?”
“They said something about going,” she answered with a shrug of disinterest. “My brother’s still here, so I’ll stay.” Daniels’ face dropped. He stopped tweaking the dials on the radio and sucked in a breath ready to be the voice of reason. Turning to face her, he started to speak as gently as he could.
“Liste—”
“Don’t,” she snapped at him. “I’m sick of people telling me that he probably didn’t make it or that he probably got evacuated or anything else like that. Unless you’ve seen Peter walking around as one of those… things, then you can save your breath.”
Daniels shut his mouth and turned back to the radio. The two sat in silence for a long time before she broke the spell, and it started with a conversation about music. She couldn’t understand that for a car, as that was essentially how she saw the tracked command vehicle, it didn’t have a radio or cassette player. When Daniels pointed out the radio, she laughed at him and explained it as though the corporal was a little slow.
Her laugh wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t unkind or hurtful but more that her default setting was one of defensive aggression; as though she was a much older woman who had been bitten hard by life and chose to get her digs in first.
The two unlikely companions talked for a while as they grew more comfortable around one another, never straying far from the safe topics of conversation so as not to scratch any surface too deeply and risk unveiling their darker thoughts beneath.
“I heard you mention…” Daniels began, shaking his head slightly as he decided to just come straight out with what he meant. “Someone said you had a brother.” She glared at him, her nostrils flaring once and her eyes glazing over with a coldness that spoke volumes about how fast the girl could erect a defensive wall. Daniels saw that and spoke more quickly to prevent her closing down completely. With his eyes cast down to stare through the thick metal beneath his boots, he muttered the words through a tightening throat.
“I had a brother,” he told her. “My twin brother, actually. He was six minutes older than me, which he loved telling people…” Daniels sucked in a sudden breath through his nose and sat upright, delivering the next sentence as though reporting on the weather. “He moved away a few years back, chasing some promotion. The town where he lived is gone now. One of the swarms—did you ever see one of those?”
She shook her head.
“Those swarms were something else. Not just thousands of people in a crowd, but moving like they all became one and poured over things like water.” His face contorted slightly out of anger or repulsion before he mastered his emotions and physically shook the feelings away. “Well, one of those swarms went through where he lived, according to the reports. I have to accept that he’s either one of them, in which case he probably went down in the fight at the island, or he never came back as one of them and is just… dead.”
He gave another simple shrug, as if to indicate that it was just one of those things. It was what it was and shit happens and c’est la vie and any other worthless platitude he could think of to try and feel less wretched about everything. Finally sniffing and looking up through wet eyes at
her, he saw his gaze mirrored almost identically.
She gave him a small, sad smile.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” she told him softly. “But mine isn’t dead and he isn’t one of them. I know it.” Daniels gave her the same pitying smile and opened his mouth to respond before the radio headset crackled in time to stop him. He snatched it up and turned up the volume.
“Zero-Bravo, Zero-Bravo, this is Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha.”
“Three-Three-Alpha, Zero-Bravo,” Daniels answered almost breathlessly, agonising his way through the pause that followed.
“Charlie, we’re on our way to you now. Get the kettle on, lad. Out.”
Daniels smiled broadly, a warming feeling of happiness and satisfaction radiating through his body as he turned to regard the girl again. He realised in that moment, even though common sense had told him that his brother was almost certainly gone, his faith that Johnson was still out there had paid off, so her faith that her brother was still out there couldn’t be dismissed just yet.
FOUR
“A few shufflers starting to head our way,” Mac reported to Downes and Lieutenant Lloyd, who were organising the loading of the second ferry.
“Any Limas?” Lloyd asked. The dour-faced Scot shook his head slowly, but the negative reply didn’t offer any hint of optimism.
“Not yet,” he intoned ominously.
It had been that way ever since the cold weather had shown the first signs of moving on. Throughout the coldest time, they had seen far fewer of the Screechers, the shuffling corpses slowed by the unspeakable damage wrought upon their bodies by the elements and other factors. They held no regard for one another, and many were found dragging themselves along roads on worn stubs of fingers, their legs having been crushed into ruin by the trampling feet of their undead comrades.
Since the days became less bitterly freezing cold, the shuffling type of zombie had begun to re-emerge, or at least had started to move enough to catch up with them wherever they were and stagger into sight, like the most catastrophically hungover people; their clothes rotting and falling off them in strips to expose the pale, dead, emaciated flesh underneath.
“How far out?” Downes asked, his undivided attention on his sergeant.
“Few hundred yards and closing. All coming straight up the road.”
“Tell Smiffy he has the green light to start popping them,” Downes instructed, “but nobody else is to fire unless they get in close.” Mac nodded his understanding of the simple orders and turned away to see them fulfilled without another word. Smiffy, the SAS patrol’s Londoner, was still in possession of the suppressed stolen Soviet VAL sniper rifle and had proved his ability to hit undead heads from distance with very little noise, in comparison to the loud reports of other weapons.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Lloyd warned the SAS major, meaning that the one kind of enemy invariably led to the other making an appearance. The addition of a few Limas would complicate their evacuation no end, not to mention run the risk of losing men and bringing the contagion to the safety of the island stronghold.
“Isn’t it always?”
Lloyd smiled back at the taller man, silently acknowledging his point that they were only ever moments away from total disaster.
As the second ferry, loaded with a mixture of bedraggled squadron men and royal marines, chugged slowly backwards to boil a wash of white water against the sloping dock, a raised voice from behind turned Downes’ attention. Eyes darting left and right, he saw in an instant what was happening.
“Limas!” cried Dezzy, left hand cupping his mouth as his right gripped the stock of the dismounted machine gun which he had a worryingly intimate relationship with. His suppressed MP5 bounced against his waist as he jogged back, abandoning the frontal position to move and cover their left flank, where a more pressing danger had presented itself.
Downes glanced over his shoulder, seeing that their ride off the mainland was still blocked from docking by the slow moving second vessel. Gunfire broke out; not the subtle, focused coughs of his team’s weapons as they lined up careful head shots, but the heavy clattering bursts of the MG3 machine guns mounted on the German tanks. The very fact that they were forced to use them conveyed enough of a threat to cause Downes significant concern, and his orders reflected that.
“Recall everyone on foot,” he bawled, “to my position NOW.”
His orders were relayed, only half heard by some in between the chattering bursts of heavy gunfire. Mac reached him first with Smiffy close behind, the long barrel of his sniper rifle jutting over one shoulder as the automatic shotgun appeared in his hands. Downes saw it and followed suit without hesitation, dropping his MP5 on its sling to retrieve Dezzy’s shotgun, which he still carried after their demolitions man refused to part company with his acquired GPMG.
No sense in wasting 9-mil bullets and blowing out the baffles on the MP5s, his mind reasoned. Plus, 12-bore cartridges are a lot easier to come by than bullets.
His uncharacteristic loss of concentration was shattered by Dezzy stitching three short bursts from his belt-fed gun at a shape appearing between two buildings.
“Rückzug! Alle Mann zu mir!” Wolff bawled to his men, who responded immediately by stopping their onslaught with the mounted guns and closing hatches to drop to the ground and run towards the dock.
Lighter gunfire, rapid and staccato, added to the din as the dismounted troopers added fire to the approaching mob with their Uzi submachine guns. A knot of men formed, all facing outwards and cutting down anyone, anything, appearing between the vehicles and around nearby buildings. They weren’t in any immediate danger of being overrun, but their position was undefendable in the long term and they all knew it.
“Fast fucker!” Mac yelled. “Eyes left!”
Downes turned, his eyes passing over the prone form of Dezzy, who was working his machine gun alone like a stone-cold professional, searching for the subject of Mac’s warning.
Then he saw it. Jumping, no, flying through the air like no human body had the right to do. It must have flanked their position, creeping close before leaping from the roof of an abandoned car to attack Dezzy from outside his field of fire. The implications for what Downes saw didn’t even register as he brought up the barrel of the wicked shotgun and fully depressed the trigger, while holding on as tightly as possible with his left hand. The gun bucked, shaking his entire body violently as it spat the contents of half a dozen heavy cartridges in the direction of Dezzy’s impending death.
He fired on instinct, not properly aiming the gun or even holding it, so that it couldn’t do him damage, but every shot seemed to spit from the barrel in a gout of flame so slowly that he began to fear he would fail his man.
The fourth shot blew away the lower part of the creature’s extended left arm, the inertia of the lead spinning the body slightly as physics did what it did best. The fifth shot seemed to hit nothing, but the sixth caught the Lima’s spinning skull to blast away the top of the dome like a boiled egg being expertly opened.
Time seemed to return to normal speed as the ruined attacker slammed onto Dezzy’s back and forced the air from his lungs with a pained oompff.
“Dez!” Smiffy screamed, running towards the intertwined bodies and lining up a kick to the jaw of the zombie. Downes saw that his shot hadn’t killed it at all, merely stunned it, and watched in utter horror as he tried to raise his gun again, only to realise that any shot would invariably pepper the SAS.
Smiffy’s kick connected directly under the jaw, which was already beginning to open in anticipation of a bite of warm flesh. The open maw snapped shut with a sound louder than a pistol shot as Downes saw two small, white projectiles fly out of the thing’s mouth in opposing directions. The force of the kick was so great that it took Smiffy off his feet to land on Dez’s back and force another grunt of breathless pain from him. Downes looked at what was half of his patrol vulnerable on the ground, taking the initiative and raising the brutal shotgun as the filt
hy creature was just clear of them.
But he didn’t fire. Seeing the Lima rocked back on its knees, upper body arched backwards at a grotesquely unnatural angle, Downes lowered the shotgun and fought against the spasms in his stomach as he took in the sight.
With his last shot, which had opened up the top of the skull, combined with the savage force of the kick, the thing’s brain had leapt up and out to hang in gory ruin over the right side of its face. Milky eyes fluttered as the damage wasn’t quite enough to end the creature, and the sight of that fluttering involuntarily tightened Downes’ finger around the trigger for him to destroy the pulpy mess.
“Fuck’s sake!” Dezzy groaned as he rolled out from under Smiffy, who was cursing and clutching his right ankle.
“We must be leaving, Major!” Wolff shouted, tugging at his shoulder. He nodded, helping Mac drag the other two troopers to their feet to half carry them to the last ferry, which was finally approaching the dock. Downes looked around, seeing a few zombies but marking all of them as the faster type from their easily recognisable movements. Gunfire continued all around him, but without him and his team adding to it, the encroaching enemy were making concerning progress.
“Into the water,” he shouted, repeating himself louder until Wolf shouted the translation in German. Louder cracks of gunfire sounded then, making the major look up to search for the source as his legs felt the savage cold of the water he’d stepped into. The second ferry, stopped just out of the way of their own, sprouted all of their marines pouring volleys of shots into the approaching enemy to buy them the time they needed to escape.
The water went suddenly deep, submerging many of them as they paddled desperately towards the low hull of the ferry and the safety it promised. Hands reached down to grasp at Downes’ soaked jacket and haul him aboard, in turn dragging Dezzy with him, as he wouldn’t release the winded soldier.
The two men were dumped on the deck unceremoniously and lay on their backs side by side.
“Did you see that?” Dezzy asked through gasps. “The fucking thing… flanked me…”
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 84