EIGHTEEN
Strictly speaking, Barton wasn’t entirely telling tales about there being a military matter requiring Kelly’s attention. The colonel sat in the passenger seat of their vehicle and endured the rough, bumpy roads being negotiated too fast by the captain instead of one of the men under their command.
“I think this will be far enough, Barton,” he said, having banged his head once too often on the door frame, forcing him to hang heavily from the handle above the window.
“Not quite, Sir,” the captain replied, raising his voice over the noise of the engine and howling wind. “Something has actually cropped up. It seems our colonial cousins have been playing with their toys and have caused something of a stir on the mainland.”
Kelly growled low in his throat before asking for an explanation.
“Can’t say I’m one hundred percent up to speed on the subject matter, Sir,” he said apologetically. “Perhaps we should get it straight from the horse’s mouth?”
The horse in question was pacing back and forth as far as the stretched cord of the satellite phone would allow. He was evidently excited as words tumbled from his mouth, barely taking the time to look up and acknowledge the two men as they walked in, other than to raise his eyebrows and smile briefly.
“Yessir,” he said into the phone, “yessir, that’s right. Uh-huh. Coverage like we never expected… No, Sir drives them crazy. Yessir, I will. Thank you.” He replaced the handset into the cradle of the black briefcase and turned to clap his hands together.
“What the bloody hell has you so excited, Fisher?” Kelly demanded.
“Pull up a pew, Colonel, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
The engineer couldn’t get away from the place they called ‘the facility’ quickly enough. Some facility it was, given that it was a farm shed with some hastily welded cages thrown together. What was inside those cages brutalised his senses and would probably stop him sleeping for the rest of the month. Or the rest of his life, he wasn’t sure yet.
With that lasting memory fresh in his thoughts, he rushed back to the small hangar he’d been camping out in to be close to his work and began the modifications to prepare the three devices brought from America.
With the precise frequency, courtesy of the radio he’d been told a soldier was trying to tune when the phenomenon was stumbled upon, he was familiar enough with the device to make short work of reprogramming the interior workings. As soon as the first one was ready, he took a break, waving over the single guard sent from the US Air Force to keep watch over the merchandise. Pulling his last pack of Newports from his pocket, he tapped the base twice to shoot two filters free and offered one to the young man, who slung his rifle over his shoulder and smiled as he took it. Producing a lighter, the engineer lit his own and offered the dancing flame over as he sucked in a long pull and closed his eyes to stretch his back. He glanced down at the cigarettes, seeing that the carton was only half full and regretting giving one away, because he was down to his last pack. He’d been around enough military personnel in his time to know that a whole carton of smokes was easier to come by than most things when enough servicemen gathered in one place, but he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to switch to an inferior brand before he got home. Perhaps a carton of Lucky Strikes would see him back, he mused.
“Go tell your bosses the first one’s ready,” he said as he exhaled. “I’ll prep the other two and then I can get the heck out of here.” He frowned as he took another pull on the cigarette. “Where in the hell are we, anyways?”
“Scotland,” the kid replied, as though the vague geographical information made any difference to either of them. The engineer shrugged, taking back his lighter and feeling the unseasonal breeze tighten his skin as he vowed to finish the work as soon as possible so he could go home.
The helicopter crew for the CH-46 Sea Hawk arrived within the hour in a wash of noise and increased wind. They paid the engineer no attention, seeing just a man in coveralls stooped over what looked like a medium sized aircraft munition in the middle of a hangar, and loaded the device they had been sent for.
The pilot spoke in that relaxed tone they always used which, to the uninitiated, sounded like it must have been part of their basic training.
“Roger, proceeding on bearing one-five-one degrees for four-two-zero miles,” he reported, signing off as he turned the nose of the noisy helicopter just left of south to drop the device in a large city far away from their safe place off the coast.
Those instructions had come via radio, and the crew had no idea they originated from a house only a few miles away and came from the Central Intelligence Agency. If they had known, they probably wouldn’t have cared because, just like the engineer, they were eager to get their job done and be back where they were more comfortable. In their case, it was the massive aircraft carrier sitting ten miles off the western edge of the Irish coast as part of the blockade to ensure none of the escaping survivors carried the disease to their home.
Their sedate cruising speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour saw them passing over the centre of what their map told them was a place called Bristol, when the pilot slowed and turned a few long, lazy circles to lower their altitude.
“In position,” he announced over their link, “drop when ready.” In answer, the rear ramp of the helicopter lowered with a mechanical whine to admit a rush of chill air from the abandoned land below them. Unlike a conventional bomb, this one merely had to be ejected into mid-air at a height exceeding one thousand feet for the device to activate on landing. That was as much as they knew—as much as they needed to know—and when the seemingly innocuous missile had been shoved clear over the edge of the ramp, they closed it up and began the three-hour flight back.
“Be advised,” the pilot reported to their command structure, “package is delivered. RTB.”
Bristol, a sprawling city on the banks of the busy River Severn, had been devoid of life for some time. Not all life, just human life. Or more specifically, it was utterly devoid of all living human life.
Trapped inside so many buildings, the thousands of undead woke from their state of hibernation to be whipped into such a frenzy of excitement that many broke free of their prison premises by barging their way through glass windows, and even in some cases breaking down doors in their frenzy to get to the source of whatever it was driving them so animalistically wild with hungry excitement.
Further out, in the suburbs of the city and even into the southern parts of Wales, the same activity was happening and waking up all of those trapped, dormant infected souls and driving them towards the centre of the neighbouring city by way of walking through the wide estuary.
For over a hundred miles, far further still than any of the wildest theories could have predicted, zombies were waking up and forcing their way out of their dry tombs to fulfil their desperate need to reach the source of the low frequency sound that triggered the tiny part of their brains still functioning into believing there was food on offer.
“Good God, man,” Kelly exploded as he stood from the chair he had been occupying. “We’ve still got people on the mainland. There are civilians there, have you lost your mind?”
Fisher leaned back in his chair involuntarily in response to the colonel’s anger.
“Relax, Kelly,” he said. “We have AWACS monitoring and they’ll be able to warn anyone nearby if the swarm threatens them.” Kelly didn’t sit, nor did he relax.
“You’ve just intentionally unleashed hell on those survivors all over again,” he said coldly. “And you aren’t even willing to evacuate any of them.”
“Not true, Colonel,” Fisher said as he reached for a piece of paper and waved it towards the officer. “Civilian evacuations are planned to begin at oh-nine-hundred next Wednesday. Your people will get new lives in the US of A.”
“And the military personnel?” Fisher shifted in his chair once, before fixing the hard man in front of him with a stare of pure granite.
“W
hen our job here is done, Kelly, we’ll discuss that.”
“We’ll discuss it now,” he said firmly. “You’ve outright refused to support our efforts in recovering more survivors from the mainland which, until this moment, has been swept aside as inconsequential. I assure you, Sir, it is not. Evacuating the civilians on this island is one thing, but unless we can actively rescue more, then I fail to see the point in us being here at all.” He remained standing, chest heaving up and down as he fought to control the many words he left unsaid from tumbling out, after the unwise outburst he had already released.
Fisher stared at him for a few moments, wearing a look somewhere between mild amusement and barely veiled rage.
“Let’s get a few more things straight, shall we?” He stood suddenly and leaned over the desk with both fists pressing down hard onto the polished wood. “The United States is not here as an aid mission. The United States is occupying this part of Britain for military and scientific purposes to research, develop and hopefully deploy whatever vaccines or cures or weapons we can to ensure that the disease created here doesn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean. There are people on the other side of the globe pondering exactly the same questions to our western borders, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say they’re looking at a hundred Hiroshima-style solutions, so it doesn’t matter a good God damn whether the serum we’re developing on this island works or not; America will defend its borders at whatever cost.” He calmed, sitting back in his chair and speaking in a slightly softer tone.
“Colonel, you and your people are backed into a corner with nothing left to barter with. Your price of admission to the promised land when we’re done here is your continued service. When the work is done, we’re all going home, and you can either come with us or not. But if you don’t, then I wouldn’t be expecting foreign aid any time soon. So yes, to answer your initial question, I assure you I have most certainly not lost my mind and I will continue to order the deployment of weapons both experimental and biological on the mainland until we find a way of killing every last one of those bastards. You can go now, gentlemen.”
Kelly breathed out, never once having taken his eyes off the man sitting behind the desk holding all the power. With as much dignity and decorum as he could manage, he left the room and kept his face like stone until he was a mile away from the CIA headquarters.
“That bastard,” he erupted, making Barton flinch and torque the steering wheel alarmingly. He regained his composure before the colonel spoke again, this time in a more equable and thoughtful tone. “But at least he let slip that his show wasn’t the only one in town, and he’s under pressure to get results or his Washington DC masters will likely pull the plug on him and his little circus here.”
NINETEEN
Peter thrust out the spike, punctured a brain through a nostril made more accessible by the fact that the nose was partly torn or bitten away, and risked a glance over the ledge to watch the lifeless corpse bounce down the growing mound of bodies—animated and rendered safe alike—forming against the low building.
He had been running to and fro on the roof, in order to cover both places where his elevation was threatened. Then, behind him, on the other end of roof, the sounds of an approaching body reached his ears. Somehow, they, and he could only assume it was the smarter, faster type of biters, were managing to climb the ladder at the end where Astrid had appeared. On the side he covered now, it was a matter of sheer numbers and extremely bad luck; the misfortune being that the wall was the site where the former farmers had decided to pile enough junk that the hungry crowd below were able to use it as the start of a ramp.
His own efforts to stem the vertical flow of stinking bodies intent on eating him had, paradoxically, made it easier for more of them to climb the growing pile. Turning to his left, he drove the tip of one straight pitchfork prong into the skull of a balding man just behind his ear. The reaching arms stopped reaching for him, but the weapon held fast as the thing’s second death had caused it to flop sideways and resist his efforts to tug it back out. He cursed it and began to growl in effort through his gritted teeth, as a scraping noise behind him made him spin to see another one wearing the shredded and filthy remains of a shirt and tie get both arms and half a torso over the ledge. Yanking desperately on the pitchfork, he was forced to reach over his right shoulder to grasp at the smoothed-down handle of his father’s shotgun to use the last loaded cartridge at brutally close quarters.
The air in front of his face punched at him with a pressure wave that was confusing, before the sharp cracks he heard tied in with what his eyes were seeing. The zombie shuddered with each cracking noise until the fourth or fifth one snatched his head back and toppled it backwards to fall away and knock a half dozen more of them back to the ground. His mind caught up with his senses and he craned his neck to see Astrid crouching over one knee from a sitting position with her gun tucked into her body tightly and aimed his way. He nodded his thanks automatically, seeing her return the gesture and spin away to reload before she fired more shots over her side and turned to run back to him. Seeing his predicament, she landed one boot hard on top of the bald head and he gripped the shaft of his sticker firmly, straining to pull it free. He fell backwards as it was released from the gory grip of the skull and rolled back to his feet to begin the routine of thrust and withdraw, this time trying to improve his aim for the soft bits that didn’t threaten to steal his tools.
Astrid was firing more intensively then, pausing to fill the temporary quiet with the clicks and scrapes of well-practised hands performing another reload, and she didn’t let up until the main assault had been forced back. Peering over the edge again together, Peter saw that only the luckiest or most sure-footed of biters could make it through the mess of farmyard junk and bodies to climb for their position.
Their small breather didn’t last long, as a shriek from behind them forced the world to grind down into agonising slow-motion. The shriek, the rasping expulsion of air that conveyed nothing but hatred and malice and hunger, echoed loudly over the low rooftops of the barn louder than anything else in their immediate surroundings. They turned together in time to see the horrifying sight of a young man wearing a blue and white striped shirt marred by dark gore. The terror of being face to face with a Lima, one not horribly damaged and less dangerous, wasn’t reduced by the fact that he had either lost his trousers in the months since the outbreak or else had turned in a state of being half dressed. The baggy boxer shorts had remained on, but the socks had worn away at the soles to leave what looked like black ankle warmers banded about his mottled grey calf muscles.
As they stared, neither yet able to bring a weapon to bear, those muscles bunched and tightened in anticipation of the leaping attack they both knew was coming. Both had seen Limas at work before—albeit at a safe distance usually—and both knew what the human body was capable of when free of the constraints binding it to normality.
It launched into the air, limbs flailing as it instinctively thrashed and whirled to correct its aerial course. Mouth open in ready anticipation, both of them could see the wide maw filled with blackened gums and the two flashes of bright metal of the man’s gold teeth as a cloud of bright, white smoke obscured their vision, billowing outwards in an expanding cone towards the flying monstrosity.
Peter’s hand had reached instinctively over his right shoulder where it landed directly on the grip of the sawn-off shotgun. The web between his finger and thumb, spread wide and taught, hit the smoothed-down wood and triggered his fingers to clamp down and seize it tightly. Pulling it in one smooth movement, he set his stance wide and forced his left palm down on top of the barrels near the breech, as his right index and middle fingers reached for the two triggers.
He couldn’t remember which trigger he had pulled when he’d fired the first shot only a minute or two before, but somehow his brain registered that pulling one of those triggers would achieve nothing but a moment of fear before the zombie cut him do
wn in a blur of teeth and pain. Knowing this on a cellular level, even if he couldn’t explain it in triple the time it took to act automatically, both fingers squeezed the triggers at once before the gun had even finished the downward arc of his draw, to spit smoke and flame and a deafening noise out ahead of them.
It was only the fourth time he’d ever drawn the weapon to use it, and although each time he had been desperate and facing death just as he did now, he didn’t flinch from the noise and violence of the gun going off. He also hadn’t expended his supply of ammunition, which he’d tampered with just like his father had done to illegally shoot deer, and the solid ball of lead and wax barely had time to begin breaking apart when it hit the zombie in mid-air. The force of the gunshot spun Peter in spite of his attempts to stay standing, and as his right side was thrown backwards, the body of his attacker-turned-victim fell through the thin skein of gun smoke to land heavily in between Astrid and Peter. It skidded through the rough shale littering the rooftop, just as time seemed to speed up once more when Peter’s backside thumped heavily onto the deck.
Peter’s shot, fired blindly with nothing to guide it but hope and instinct, had blown away most of the right arm and shoulder to leave a broken and ruined body in which the upper and lower sections seemed unable to communicate with one another. The legs seemed to be furiously pedalling as if the doomed creature dreamed it was in the closing stages of a bicycle race. The upper body, twisted aside at an angle, tried to reach for the ankles of Astrid with each ridiculous and grotesque circuit it thrashed, teeth snapping together as it wheezed, until the Norwegian woman riddled the thing’s head with a burst of automatic fire, to leave a sudden stillness and silence to their rooftop.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 95