“And your intel package is complete and up to date?” Miller went on.
“Count on it.”
“And how do you propose we go about securing said infected assholes?”
Fisher leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was the smile of a man who knew he had already won, because unless the SEAL wanted to commit mutiny and refuse to carry out his orders, he was stuck with them.
“Master Chief,” he said smoothly. “I’ll leave the finer details of that matter to you entirely. Just get it done.” Miller banged his clenched fist hard on the top of the oak desk, knocking down a framed picture of a square-jawed man in an officer’s uniform shaking hands with a man who looked remarkably like Reagan, and he snarled at the CIA agent.
“Easy for you to say, four thousand miles away in your office.” Fisher’s smile evaporated and he leaned forwards to look directly into the eyes of the soldier.
“I’ll be there with you, Miller,” he said quietly. “And just because I wear a suit now, don’t think I didn’t get my hands dirty. I’ve seen shit all over South America and the Persian Gulf, and that’s got me where I am. You don’t like your orders? Tough shit. I’d prefer you to be a willing participant in this, but I asked the president for a team of elite operators and he sent me you. If you’re not up to the job, I can request the US Army or the Marine Cor—”
“We’ll do it,” Miller interrupted before Fisher went on to commit further blasphemy. “Just don’t think we agree on everything.” He stood and replaced his headgear before fixing Fisher with a hard look. “You got that?”
“Got it!” Miller’s man, Hernandez, called from behind him after Miller had pointed out the low section of rocky beach he wanted to land at. The six SEALs had enough time to stow their gear and tool up for the immediate mission, as Miller reminded them that the sooner they got it out of the way, the sooner they could rest up in safety.
They had met as a team and thrown ideas out together after reading the briefing dossier on their newest enemy. It was simpler than understanding the fighting capabilities of a foreign power, because these things only had one tactic, and that tactic would be the same the world over.
They swarmed en masse, and they tried to eat you.
Miller had told them, over and over, that they would only engage small groups and lure them in ones and twos into their cargo net trap. Then, with their ‘volunteers’ snagged in the nets, they would drag them directly back to the facility on the island just off the mainland, without coming into contact with them and risking any of them catching a bite. Sure enough, those ‘volunteers’ would be wet through from being dragged along a small stretch of icy water, but he passed that off as a tactical choice, given that the reports from the British claimed that low temperatures slowed their movements.
What bothered him most of all was the reports of some of the infected displaying increased physical and mental abilities over the horde. As much as Grewal and Chambers wanted one of those, Miller was reluctant to make it his priority until he’d had his own boots on the ground and seen how badly the shit had really hit the fan.
Hernandez cut the engine before they neared the shore, floating in as silently as possible to bump and scrape the boat onto the rocks in the shallows before the others jumped out to drag it ashore. The bundled cargo net was carried out from the prow of their small, black inflatable and they patrolled fast up the shore to get away from their infiltration method just like they had drilled to do.
The fact that they were fighting a new kind of enemy didn’t register, but Miller wasn’t completely ignorant of having to adapt their tactics, which is why he assessed the narrow street of what appeared to have been a small coastal village and formulated the execution of his plan.
“Shepherd, Coleman,” he hissed in a low voice designed to carry only as far as it needed to. “Take the north and south rooftops over that chokepoint.” He indicated the empty street ahead with a bladed hand. “Hernandez, ready on the boat. Jackson, on me with the cargo net.”
“Where do you need me?” the youngest and newest member of their elite team asked. Miller smiled at the kid in the dark, not that he saw it.
“You’re the bait, Willy.”
“I’d like to formally lodge my complaint about this mission, Master Chief,” Walt Wilson complained quietly as he stood alone in the street. He didn’t mind being called Kid or Willy, hell he enjoyed the hazing as it meant the SEALs must have liked him to some degree, even if they hadn’t gone to war as a team until then. But what he didn’t like was being bait.
“Shut up,” one of the two Daves hissed from the low rooftop to his left. Miller and Jackson were out of sight too, keeping watch over their area of operations, leaving only Hernandez a few paces out to sea with the boat’s engine ticking over, ready to open the throttle wide.
“You’re doing fine,” Miller’s voice sounded low and reassuring, before he raised it slightly to encompass the whole team within earshot. “Flare out.”
A pop and a whooshing, hissing noise seared along the street, bathing the quaint abandoned houses in a fiery red glow. They stayed at high alert, every sense dialled way up in anticipation of their first encounter with the enemy. The flare burned fiercely ahead of their position, giving off more noise than they’d expected, but the sheer emptiness of the world, devoid of any trace of life, seemed to amplify any disruption to the silent dark.
As the glow began to fade and the noise abated, Miller’s nerves began to increase as he considered their next move.
Should he fire another flare and double-down on a tactic that might not work? Should he relocate his team and try the same thing further inland?
As he was weighing up the options, a voice cut through to focus him completely.
“Contacts. Three, approaching from the east.” Miller slowly inched his head around the side of the rough surface of the bricks to see three dark shapes silhouetted against the fading red light.
“Hold position,” he told his men. “Kid? Make a noise.”
“Make a…?” Wilson started to say before trailing off. He drew himself up, feeling alien as he stood tall out of cover, and cleared his throat.
“Yo!” he yelled, leaving the single syllable to echo down the artificial canyon of the terraced buildings.
“Yo?” Miller asked, chuckling. “First contact with the enemy and you decide to lead with ‘yo’?”
“Well,” Wilson shrugged, “you kinda put me on the spot… I didn’t know wh—”
“Look alive!” Coleman snapped from above them. They all snapped their focus back to their front, where the shouted word had sparked a slow, cumbersome approach to their position.
“I, er,” Wilson said. “I don’t like this…”
Miller ignored him. He carefully watched the three figures shambling closer through the red, smoky haze of the dying backlight. He was certain that none of them was the reported faster type, the ones who had been seen running and jumping instead of walking like drunks, but he also knew that they didn’t exactly have a mastery of their chosen battlefield.
“Master Chi—” Wilson began, before the words were drowned out by a tortured, ripping, gasping shriek in stereo from the advancing pair.
Gloved hands instinctively gripped weapons tighter as brains fought against the body’s natural urge to defend itself; to kill the Screechers before they got close.
Wilson’s nerve threatened to break first as he raised the butt of the sub machine gun into his shoulder and took a bead on the closest zombie. Before Miller could stop him from pulling the trigger, he abruptly lowered the weapon a fraction and stood a little straighter but remained ready to drill rounds into it.
“Back up now,” Miller told him, his breath catching in his throat as the kid stumbled on the heavy knotted rope of the cargo net when his boot heel caught it. He righted himself, stumbling backwards a little faster until he was clear of their rudimentary trap.
Nobody spoke. Nobody opened fire. The only sounds were the rippin
g, gasping shrieks of the monsters and the dying fizzle of the flare as it sputtered and flashed darkness over the red-bathed street. Just as the leading zombie stepped a halting, bare foot onto the edge of the cargo net, the flare died completely and plunged them all into darkness.
The absence of the flare’s light wasn’t a true darkness; even with the total absence of any light pollution, the night sky held a few twinkling stars and a dull wash of moonlight. Red light didn’t obliterate a person’s night vision like the white beam of a light bulb would, but still the panic of losing their sight was enough to trigger fear to rule over their bodies.
Wilson turned and ran, adding a, “Fuck, fuck, fuuuck,” to keep the undead attackers zeroed in on their meal. Miller held his nerve, closed his eyes to imagine how the scene was playing out without the distractions his eyes would give him, and gauged how fast they were moving.
“Hernandez!” He bawled, “Now!” Sparking multiple things to happen at once.
Hernandez, out of sight but connected to them by a long, heavy rope, gunned the throttle of the inflatable boat to snap that line taught and snag the two creatures in the net as it folded up around them to drag them towards the stony beach.
Miller and his team abandoned their positions to retreat, now that their mission objectives were bagged, and he jogged forwards to make out the shape of their youngest team member scrambling backwards on the ground to get his legs away from the writhing, shrieking mess tangled inside the heavy net.
“On your feet, kid,” he snapped, keeping his own very wary eyes on the dangerous cargo. “Everyone onboard and let’s get the hell off this island.”
EIGHT
“Be advised,” the tinny-sounding, far away American voice said, “significant infected event travelling south to north close to your bearing. Expect contact to the east as early as seventeen-hundred, over.”
“Acknowledged,” Daniels said into the radio with a resigned tone laced with fear. “Thanks for the heads-up. Out.”
“What is it?” the girl, Jessica, asked from the front of the cramped Sultan as she mimed the actions of driving the tracked vehicle, complete with engine noises. Daniels swallowed, not sure how to answer the question. He was accustomed to living his life surrounded by other hardened men and not a young girl with a blunt and forthright manner. He paused, long enough for her to turn around and give him a stern look, before deciding to just tell her.
“AWACS reporting another swarm,” he said, opening his mouth again to explain his use of military jargon.
“The Americans are still flying over us then?” she asked, betraying the fact that she listened a lot more than she spoke. “They haven’t entirely abandoned us?”
“Who knows what they’re doing up there… spying on something, no doubt,” Daniels answered, leaning back in the narrow seat and laying out his small pouch of dry tobacco scraps to try and force enough together with his fingertips to be worth the effort. Jessica abandoned her pretend driving position, stepping towards him and noticing his shaking fingers were making a mess of the task requiring fine motor skills. Wordlessly, she took the thin strip of paper from his sweaty fingers and gently sprinkled the tobacco evenly along the crease down its centre. Her own small fingers deftly rolled it into a smooth tube better than Daniels’ usual efforts, before she licked the gummed edge and passed it to him. He thanked her with a mumble and lit it, sucking hard to get a lungful of stale smoke, before letting it out with his eyes closed.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked, eyes open again as he regarded the well-rolled cigarette.
“Swarm warning?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“Yeah,” Daniels answered, pausing to draw on the rolled smoke again before his eyes went wide. “Shit, we need to warn the SSM!” He snatched up the radio set and turned dials before calling out a repeated phrase over and over, with no reply.
“Is it close?” she asked quietly in a lull between his hails.
“Yes,” he said, not turning to look at her. “It’s coming from the island—the place we were before here. They must’ve got off at low tide somehow and back on the mainland.”
“Is it heading here?”
“They’re not sure. Last reported direction of travel was just ‘north’, which puts them heading right to left off to our east going past.” She frowned, evidently thinking the problem through geographically.
“So they’ll miss us?”
“Foxtrot-three-three-Alpha, Foxtrot-three-three-Alpha this is Zero-Bravo, come in, over…” he said into the radio, ignoring her question.
“Oi,” she said, jabbing him in the upper arm with an extended index finger. “They’ll miss us, right, Charlie?” He dropped his head, mouth open ready to try and call his SSM again.
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “But the others are heading this way right into their path.”
“Getting something garbled over the radio,” Bufford said to Johnson over their link inside the Warrior. They’d driven hard for ten miles before they were forced to stop and deal with the scraping noise directly above the driver’s hatch. With that lucky hitchhiker removed and half decapitated by Bufford’s shiny pioneer’s axe, they had resumed their journey, heading north and west over the low, rolling countryside, which was beginning to show the earliest hints of spring.
“What is it?” Johnson asked, his eyes narrowed as he focused forward on the small slice of road he could see through his viewing slit.
“Well, if I knew that…”
“I think they’re saying ‘Foxtrot’,” Peter said confidently. “That’s you, isn’t it?” Johnson opened his mouth to reply with the long version, stopping before he wasted his breath.
“It might be,” he answered. “Keep listening. It’s probably just Daniels seeing where we’ve got to.”
Forty minutes of steady driving later, Johnson stopped the Warrior abruptly. Noises of complaint came through his headphones as the uncomfortably seasick passengers in the rear section would have been banged around with the suddenness of their halt. Johnson ignored those complaints and stared ahead.
“What do you make of that?” he asked, prompting silence in his ears. The question was intended for Bufford, who remained quiet as he stared through the optics to their front.
“Nothing good,” he finally answered.
“What is going on?” Astrid’s voice sounded in their ears.
“How far does it extend?” Johnson asked.
“Left to right… as far as I can see with the topography. No way around.”
“What is happening, Johnson?” Larsen demanded in a tone that betrayed her former seniority among the Special Forces of her native country. A pause hung heavy on their communication channel before Johnson broke it with the sobering news.
“There’s a smear on the horizon to our front,” he said in a flat, almost emotionless voice. “Buffs, the toggle on the fire controls, zoom in.” Bufford found the controls and used the magnification to full effect before a hiss of breath filled their ears.
“Shhhhit…”
“Be specific, Sergeant,” Larsen admonished from the back, where she couldn’t see what they were talking about.
“It’s a swarm,” he said, mirroring the same toneless vocal attitude of their driver, “and it’s directly in our way.”
“Zero-Bravo,” Daniels said with evident relief in his voice. “Be advised there’s a reported swarm in the area.”
“We know, lad,” Johnson said, no longer concerned with correct radio protocol. “We were driving straight towards it until we saw it.”
“Send grid-reference and bearing,” Daniels instructed. Johnson, anticipating the request, gave the grid from the local map and a compass bearing as best they could ascertain. Silence followed after the brief, “Wait one,” reply as Johnson imagined his corporal checking the location and direction against his own position.
Knowing the man was competent at reading a map, Johnson grew annoyed and then concerned as the silence stretched long
er than expected.
“Daniels,” he called into the radio, “bearing isn’t towards your location. They’ll bypass and head north.” The logic was sound, as the things rarely deviated from an easy route when they gathered in numbers, unless something grabbed the attention of the Limas.
“Negative,” Daniels’ voice came back in a hoarse whisper. “Bridge on that road is out. Collapsed last summer. They’ll be forced down the lower ground directly to our location.”
The transmission had been cut shortly after that, when Johnson’s questions had been answered and he was unnervingly in agreement with the corporal’s assessment. He prayed he was wrong, prayed that the swarm—even if it was miniscule compared to the ones they’d encountered before—would ignore their comfortable country residence and carry on up the country.
They were stuck, with no way to cross through the flowing river of dead meat and reach the others, and knowing now that the bridge north of them was destroyed, they had no way to get ahead of the shambling procession in time. As the light began to fade, Johnson reluctantly turned their big tracked vehicle around to find somewhere safe to spend the night.
Peter’s heart raced as he peeked out of the open hatch to see a large farm building ahead of him. Memories of his previous life came back in an unbidden rush that made his body react to the influx of adrenaline he experienced. Calming his breath as he focused hard on climbing out without falling, he forced away the images that came to his mind.
The poor cows, unable to outpace their hungry attackers, being pulled down and devoured.
His father’s dog opened up like it had exploded, to soak the rough carpet, a white shard of rib bone protruding at an odd angle as hands clawed at the insides.
His mother, smeared with gore, trying to bite him through the dirty glass of the patio doors.
Hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of feet passing by only inches from his face as he tried to stay still and not breathe in case the horde detected him.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 87