Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  To his left and right, he heard the rattle of near-continuous gunfire interspersed with his team calling out their magazine changes. Cycling his own weapon like he’d fired a hundred thousand rounds through one—which he guessed he probably had—he removed the pressure from the trigger as another shriek sounded close to the leading edge of the advance. It burst through the front rank and stopped, bone-thin arms held low and away from its skeletal body with fingers splayed out like claws, staring directly at him.

  In the half-second it did that—the half second that felt like an excruciating minute to Miller—he stole a fleeting glance down at the case at his feet. He didn’t have time to marvel at how effective the device was, and yet it was its very success that had contracted his life and the lives of his men into that tiny warzone on the edge of the icy cold water off the western coast of Scotland.

  “Get rea—” he began saying, just as it crouched down and burst towards him, lumbering fast like an animal charging him head-on.

  “Break, break, break!” Jackson yelled, telling all of them to get clear of the net. “Hernandez, now!”

  The SEALs scattered, running and rolling and yelling as the sound of the outboard motor of their boat gunned it to maximum with no preamble. Miller moved, feeling that familiar bullet-time phenomenon as his mind and senses operated at a level that cycled information faster that the rest of him. His legs seemed to take an age to respond. When they did, his boots moved so slowly over the sandy shale of the beach that he might just as well have been in the water up to his waist. Slowly, desperately, he ran to his left as the rope connecting the left side of the net to the boat accelerating away to sea began to go taut and lift from the wet ground so fast that it left the water soaked into its fibres behind. He threw himself over it, sailing through the dark, cold air at waist height just as the shriek off to his right sounded both impossibly close and impossibly loud.

  He hit the wet sand with a thud and spun to bring his weapon up. All around him, the gunfire had started again as he stared at the living, shrieking whirlwind of limbs that was the faster one fighting against the heavy, wet fibres of the net trapping it.

  “We need to get the fuck outta here, Miller!” Jackson barked at him as he stopped firing long enough to click in a replacement magazine and charge the weapon. “Last mag!” he added.

  Miller snapped out of it, jumping up and raising his weapon once more to empty the magazine in bursts aimed at head height into the ranks of the infected backlit by the red flare, still advancing on them. They retreated back towards the water before Miller spun and jogged back towards the thrashing net, calling for the others to cover him. Reaching down for the handle of the case that was just a little too effective at riling up the infected, a bony hand with broken and ragged fingernails shot out of a gap in the net to claw at his left calf muscle. Even through the thick trouser leg, he felt the sharpness of the attempt to drag him into the snapping teeth he could hear but not see. He tugged his leg away hard, hearing a snap that could easily have been bone, and reached down again for the case.

  The thing trapped inside reared up on its knees and lunged. Miller reacted on instinct, applying force with the nearest weapon on his body to the closest target on his enemy.

  His right knee crunched cruelly into the face of his attacker in the dying light and freed him to scramble away. The team, still firing and moving, splashed into the black water where Hernandez had brought their small boat back in to collect them, before opening up the throttle again and dragging the writhing bundle out to sea.

  Professor Grewal waited eagerly, fighting the urge to administer doses of serum to the remaining three test subjects to satisfy his anxiety that it would randomly be ineffective against them.

  Every test conducted so far, through every means of exposure, had resulted in the catastrophic haemorrhaging of the infected subject and resulted in death. Or at least permanent death.

  He paced, unable to stay still with nervous anticipation of what the unsmiling, bearded soldiers were bringing back. They had been deployed specifically to bring back one of the faster ones, and only one of the faster ones. They seemed pleased to be given the green light to start executing the infected people, and the report via radio that they had succeeded caused the makeshift lab to erupt in fist-clenching, high-fiving celebration.

  The wait for them to return had been agonising, and more than a few false starts had deflated the excitement when people claimed to have heard a boat engine. The last false alarm had been a female lab technician who pointed inland with her claim, and her beratement was still ongoing when a voice called out from the seaward entrance to the large outbuilding.

  “Here’s your goddamned fast one, asshole,” Miller snarled, dropping the rope he was holding, with the rest of his team following suit to leave a soaked, writhing, shrieking bundle. Grewal had no time to respond to their arrival or the insult as Yates barked orders at his team to suit up and secure the subject.

  Subject, Grewal scoffed to himself internally. It’s much easier to call them that than acknowledge what they really are.

  This one had been a young woman. Tall and probably thin to begin with, given that the remnants of clothing she wore didn’t seem baggy on her. It was obvious to anyone who had observed the behaviour of the infected for any amount of time that she was different; her movements were faster, sharper, and her blind eyes above a viciously broken nose that still oozed dark gore zeroed in with a terrifying speed and accuracy on anyone who spoke.

  In spite of Yates’ strict instructions, his team struggled to loop the thick wires on poles over the matted strands of lank hair and had hit her in the skull hard enough to knock off chunks of grey skin and expose the bone beneath.

  “Be careful of the head, we need her alive!” Chambers shouted at them, earning a salvo of savage looks which all spoke of an invitation to pick up a pole and show them all how it was done. He got the message loud and clear but still flinched every time the skull was impacted. Grewal ignored the ‘alive’ part of his warning and prepared a dose of serum in the same aerosol dispenser he’d used the first time.

  A shout of alarm behind him made him spin. No words reached his ears; only the guttural yell of primal fear as though a Neanderthal was being attacked by a predator.

  Grewal decided that what he could see actually matched that description perfectly, as the subject had thrown off one of her captors and grabbed the heavy pole attached to her neck to swing it around savagely. Yates was standing directly in front of her—it—and ducked to save himself but ultimately doomed the soldier on the other side, who took the full ballistic force of the swinging pole in the side of the head to be knocked out.

  Untethered on both flanks, the thing snapped its gaze to lock onto Yates and advanced on him, forcing him backwards. It writhed and thrashed as it moved, like a feral cat wearing a collar, until the force of its efforts dislodged the coil of wire from around its neck.

  Grewal, standing fifteen feet away from the unshackled monstrosity, froze and let out the slightest involuntary whimper of terror.

  Yates, however, didn’t freeze. He let the pole drop in his left hand as his right instinctively reached for the heavy forty-five, realising with crippling panic that in his haste to get a suit on, he’d left the weapon holstered under the thick, baggy rubber suit where it was useless to him. Looking back up to his attacker in time to see her mouth open wide enough to rend a fresh tear in the mottled grey skin of her cheek and fighting down the urge to coat the inside of his protective visor with the MRE he’d recently consumed cold, he did the only thing he could and brought the pole up desperately to defend himself.

  The thing bit down at him, teeth breaking on the rough surface of the pole’s grip as the full bite force was deployed without the breaker fuse of pain feedback. Yates was treated to an up-close, an extremely up-close, view of two teeth being forced out of the dark flesh of a gum and drop onto his visor. He screamed. Bellowing incoherent rage and fear, the sound formed an ulul
ating, keening war cry as he pushed back on the pole with every ounce of strength he possessed.

  A crack sounded. Not a clear, sharp snap like the clean breaking of a bone, but the sinewy crunch of something being forced out of joint.

  None of them knew that Miller’s knee had come close to breaking the neck cleanly and had driven shards of shattered nose into the brain. It had done damage that would have been irreversible, had she still been fully alive. The pain such an injury would have caused would have been crippling and debilitating, but without that circuit feeding back to the brain to cease all activity, the ruined body carried on attacking until the force exerted on the spinal injury was too much and the joint gave way.

  The broken neck alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill the creature, not fully, but the movement shifted those shards of bone to puncture that part of the brain that drove the infected to keep fighting. With a last limp expulsion of dark gore from the mouth, she slid off Yates to land face down amid shouts of alarm. Two men of the SEAL team burst back in, weapons up and eyes scanning until they took in the scene and advanced on the still body of the thing they had gone through so much to capture. Yates was hauled to his feet and had multiple weapons trained on him. He was so dazed that he didn’t even spit back an insult when ordered to strip off the suit and prove he wasn’t bitten. When they were satisfied he wasn’t infected, the atmosphere in the room turned from fear and shock to anger.

  Arguments raged around Yates as he sat with his face in his hands and took a series of long, deep breaths. The SEALs were unhappy that they would have to go back out, an understatement to end all understatements.

  The scientists were unhappy in their turn that Yates had killed the one test subject they needed to give the green light to the operation. Yates reached a shaking hand down to his right hip to run his fingers over the wood inlay of the gun’s grip, reassuring himself that it was still there and telling himself that he would never be out of reach of it until they were off that cursed island.

  Loitering in the shadows, a man in a heavy black coat sighed and slipped away. Successful confirmation test or not, Fisher would damn well give that green light to start deploying the serum, because the timeframe he had been granted had almost expired. He didn’t see their delays as relevant or in any way likely to affect the overall mission.

  Fisher smiled to himself in reassurance as he climbed back inside the vehicle to be driven back to the CIA base of operations, telling himself that he’d soon be settling into his new office as a section chief, if it all went as well as he hoped it would.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Fisher was once again picked up by helicopter and ferried back to the floating fortress out in the eastern edge of the Atlantic. It was a great expense to go to, only to have a single spectator involved, but he hoped it was an indication of how his stock was rising.

  In truth, Jacobs wanted him there ready to be sent back to the US, should anything go wrong. If it did then Fisher, as the sacrificial lamb, wouldn’t be afforded time to find a replacement for his own neck on the chopping block.

  Fisher strode in, confidence exuding from his body like a scent, nodded greetings to the faces he recognised and shook hands briefly with Jacobs.

  “Time on target?” he asked the senior man.

  “A little under twenty mikes,” Jacobs told him, gesturing behind them at the coffee pot and paper cups. Fisher didn’t want a coffee but poured himself one anyway, in case a refusal would be seen as nervousness. Twenty minutes was a long time to wait when your career aspirations were riding on the outcome of what was about to happen.

  “Sir,” a uniformed technician called out. Fisher stood upright from where he had been leaning against a wall, incorrectly thinking that he was being called over, but hesitated when Jacobs answered and stepped up to the console. “Gunship approaching target area.”

  “Put the channel on,” Jacobs instructed, leaning back and producing a packet of cigarettes to add to the already thick, smoky atmosphere in the darkened room. Fisher stepped forward, listening intently to the sounds coming from the speaker beside the radio and fighting to make out the words over the continuous droning hum and whine of the engines.

  “Affirmative, Zeus-one-one. Conduct reconnaissance circuit and report,” the speaker announced.

  “Acknowledged,” came the reply from the pilot as the background noise shifted almost imperceptibly. Hundreds of miles away, in the dark skies over a city teeming with inexplicably agitated undead, a large cargo plane similar to the one which had brought Fisher to Scotland banked forty degrees to its left and began flying a long, seemingly lazy loop of the area.

  Their infrared detection package, state of the art in any of the world’s former militaries, was rendered useless as the massed bodies gave off no heat to identify them as bright white outlines in a sea of abandoned black and grey. They adjusted the contrast of their imaging displays, until the black outlines of human figures could be made out at the edges of the densely packed crowd.

  “Jesus ‘aitch…” one of the crew muttered as he finally understood what the enormous mound was in an open area adjacent to the wide river. The writhing pyramid of dead meat rose from ground level like a molehill, only instead of fresh earth, it was the animated bodies of the former inhabitants of the UK.

  “Zeus-one-one. Confirm concentration of infected, Control. Advise are we cleared to engage, over?”

  “Zeus-one-one, Control,” came back the clipped tones of the operator in the control room on board the carrier. “Confirm you are cleared to engage. Repeat, clear to engage.”

  The crew of the AC-130 went to work. The pilot kept the steady banking manoeuvre at the same angle to maintain the even platform for the gunners to do their gruesome work.

  Their commands were short and clipped, their drills slick and well-practised as they poured round after 40mm round screaming down through the night sky, to detonate in violent air bursts and fill the air with the weaponised aerosol serum.

  Almost immediately, the mound of infected piled high over the device, which was humming and radiating its almost-silent rallying call out for miles in every direction, began to fall away. A minute after their brutal aerial bombardment began, a hundred and twenty small bombs had exploded just above ground level. The infected—the zombies—fell in uncomprehending physical failure, as their sallow skin blackened from every cell in the remains of their broken bodies, as the minute tissue walls degraded, the fluids left inside their bodies haemorrhaged with catastrophic results.

  As the serum spread through the massed crowd, they began to fall and lie on the ground to twitch and leak black gore into the concrete, moving for the last time. When the treated ammunition was spent, the crew switched to their standard load and began destroying everything outside the test zone, paying careful attention to and recording the most effective means of destruction.

  The armed cargo plane stayed on station for almost an hour, pouring every piece of serum-treated and standard munition they carried into anything moving. With a brief radio report, the pilot levelled out the long wings of the aircraft and headed south to rendezvous with their mid-air refuelling appointment and back to Aeroporto de Gran Canaria.

  “Rewind the tapes,” the crew chief said into their intercom. “There’ll be a jet standing by to take it off our hands.”

  Before they had landed, another aircraft had taken off to head over Britain at high altitude. The crew had flown that same route so often that it was second nature to them. But this time, their brief sent in the night gave them specific co-ordinates to concentrate on, instead of a general patrol searching for infected activity.

  Their last mission had sent them to the same area, and their discussions went on, back and forth for hours as they flew, debating why they had been sent to that specific location again. The only person on board not to involve himself in the speculation was the overall mission commander, a lieutenant colonel. The idle chatter died down and the crew lapsed into relative silence, until the
pilot’s voice broke the stillness in their earphones.

  “Approaching target co-ordinates,” he said, receiving no reply but knowing that the crew would be readying to carry out their individual tasks.

  “Confirmed infected singularity still occupying the city,” one of the men with his eyes pressed into the viewfinder reported. “Estimate numbers to be… hold the phone… hold the goddamned phone!”

  “What is it?” another muffled voice asked over the intercom.

  “That answers the question,” the man staring down through the strong magnification told them. “Something… something killed all of them.”

  “Repeat that,” growled the voice of the mission commander.

  “Confirm no movement, repeat no movement in any of the infected,” the operator, a lieutenant, replied. “They appear…”

  “Take your time,” the mission commander said slowly, though not to be misinterpreted as kindly, “and give me a report.”

  “Sir, they appear to have… melted, or something.”

  The mission commander closed his eyes and relaxed. He knew without looking through the scope or viewing the footage from far below them that the serum had been deployed and the results had been everything they had hoped for.

  “Confirm no movement of infected?” he asked, waiting a handful of seconds for a response.

  “Sir, I’m getting some residual movement but… but nothing I can see for certain. I see none of them still alive. Or whatever it is they are.”

  The mission commander switched his headset over to a radio channel only he was tuned to, hailing the same small command and information centre in the bowels of a US navy aircraft carrier. He hailed them with their callsign and waited for the response.

  “Confirm mission successful,” he said clearly. “I repeat, mission was successful. Some residual movement at ground level but confirmed deaths of infected are believed to be as close to one hundred percent as possible.”