“Ahem,” said a voice in mimicry of clearing the throat. Grewal turned to see Staff Sergeant Yates stepping towards them. “I think you’re kinda missing the point; these faster ones aren’t just a bit quicker on their feet than your average schmuck. They think. They actually hunt us, like we’re prey. That updated threat assessment better be accurate if you don’t want more lives at risk.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Grewal interrupted before Fisher could respond. “It’ll take weeks for them to corral the remaining infected into one place and deploy the serum again. I imagine it’ll also take a while to manufacture the sonic devices and create more of the serum.”
All eyes turned to Fisher, who had the decency to look embarrassed.
“Yeah, that’s, uh… that’s not exactly accurate.”
“What are you saying?” Yates asked.
“I’m saying the planes are already flying the devices in and the serum’s loaded into munitions. They’re ready to rock.”
“Unless we can tell them otherwise,” Chambers said, trying to get the conversation back on track.
“Sure,” Fisher agreed, silently telling himself that there was no way he would put his neck on the line to pull the plug on a billion-dollar operation, based on a few infected with the magical ability to jog and open a door surviving the fire. Surely the military would be capable of mopping up a few grasshoppers when they got there?
“Good,” Chambers said, raising his voice to encompass the whole makeshift lab and get everyone back to work. “In the meantime, we’ll prep for the arrival of the anomalous infected.”
“Assuming we do get one and it survives long enough to be injected with serum,” Grewal added with a fleeting, sideways glance at the staff sergeant.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Two agonising hours later, a wet and angry SEAL team returned. They dragged behind them the same cargo net with a thrashing, shrieking detainee trapped inside and Miller’s words to them before the net was unfurled made it clear that triggers would be pulled if they screwed up a second time. He glowered at everyone in the room before spinning on his wet boot heel and ordering his men back to secure the boat.
Yates took control, instructing everyone to either suit up and get a pole or else get the hell off his lab floor. The once-living occupant of the sea-soaked net was dragged into the mouth of the nearest open cage door and locked inside, for the net to be teased off the subject with difficulty until a bony limb broke free and everyone jumped backwards with shouts of fear and alarm.
It thrashed its way out of the bonds, wailing and shrieking as though made even angrier by the kidnapping and the warm bodies so close to it, yet at the same time finding the way to them blocked by steel mesh. It rammed itself into the metal barrier over and over again, gouging chunks of flesh from its body and losing a front tooth with a snap as it tried to bite its way through.
“We need tissue samples,” Chambers said loudly, looking around and waiting for a volunteer to present themselves. Normally this would be a simple thing; approach the cage door and allow the subject to reach out with a hand through the gap, then grab the limb and cut away some cold flesh. Yates turned his head in an exaggerated move left and right to see that none of them—neither the scientists nor his own people—had the balls to get the job done.
He stepped up, no doubt uttering choice opinions inside his protective visor, and waited for the arm to come out of the aperture towards him. It did, striking like a viper as he grabbed the wrist hard. Just as he was about to shout for someone to take the sample, he found himself dragged clean off his feet to impact the cage, the unbelievable strength of the disgusting creature taking him by surprise.
It was superhuman. Incomprehensible how someone not overtly muscled like a prize-winning bodybuilder could exert such brute force, and for the second time in his life, Staff Sergeant Yates came face to face with one of the faster ones, with nothing but desperation and crippling fear driving him to escape.
Hands pulled at him, making him become the rope in a panicked game of tug of war, as the savage, snarling creature threatened to drag him back towards it and pull his whole body through the small hole if it could. Yates roared incoherently with rage as his gloved right hand found the grip of his pistol.
He ignored the screams of protest, of fear that he would kill another precious test subject and send them all back to square one, because he knew what he planned wouldn’t leave the thing double-dead, but would free him and obtain the tissue samples in one unorthodox move.
He pressed the barrel of the forty-five-calibre pistol against the slender forearm of the thing, angling it upwards as he braced his body with every ounce of remaining strength and leaned away before pulling the trigger three times.
The sound of the gun going off in close quarters amid the pack of bodies was deafening; not just the sound of the three small explosions but the concussive wave of pressure that accompanied each pull of the trigger.
The flesh burned where the muzzle flashes had scorched it, but the fat bullets punched their way through flesh, bone and sinew to make the grip fail. Yates fell away, conscious to keep a firm grip on the wrist of the hand still digging its nails into the thick rubber of his suit. He tried to ignore the image of the grey skin stretching before it tore away to leave him lying on his back, holding the violently severed hand.
“Stand back,” Grewal shouted, his command muffled by the protective suit. “Back!” They moved aside as he stepped close, an aerosol machine held in both hands, looking like an oversized vintage perfume dispenser.
He pumped it, covering the grotesque face of the creature with a fine mist that it aspirated simply through the effort of shrieking and trying to get to so many fresh victims. It gave no reaction at first, but that was to be expected as the other, non-anomalous infected didn’t exactly fall down choking and clutching their throats like comedy villains on the big screen.
It faltered, staggering slightly as though drunk, and blinked its milky eyes at them.
“Here’s your goddamned tissue sample,” Yates gasped as he stood, holding out the dead hand for Chambers to take, before walking off unsteadily.
The anomalous infected, the thing they had heard being called a Leader or Lima in the intelligence reports, blinked its eyelids again and slumped back in the cage to land heavily against the cargo net, where it raised the ruined, ragged stump of its left forearm to inspect it.
A low hiss sounded; not like the hiss they emitted before they shrieked the air back out so hideously, but a noise that sounded far more pensive than they had ever heard one of them make.
Chambers crouched down to meet the creature’s eye level, pulling off the large hood of his suit, despite the warnings from others.
“Look at the eyes,” he said, lifting a tentative finger towards the sitting subject. They did. The eyes, the milky orbs from their infected dreams that they’d expected to see, were fading, allowing a dark iris colour to return and lend the hideous beast an air of humanity.
Before any elation could spread, it exhibited a kind of seizure and shuddered as if in agony or racked by a sudden bout of epilepsy. It stopped, going still as they all stood and stared, before it relaxed finally to be at peace. Chambers stayed crouched down, still staring at the face, which had regained a hint of emotion before it went slack.
“Dick?” Grewal said gently from beside and above him. Chambers looked up at him, seeing him offer a sterile steel tray to take the severed hand he was still clutching like a prized possession. Chambers held it out for him, dropping the hand just as the tray fell away to clatter onto the hard ground. Time moved slowly for him, while the others in the room seemed to move fast to throw their bodies away from him. Then he turned his head back to face the cage.
Those eyes, no longer milky but bloodshot white with a jet black iris, were wide open and fixed on him. The creature flew forwards, its remaining hand shooting out of the gap with perfect accuracy to grab him by the sleeve, hauling him forwards. Chambers
screamed. He screamed with the terror of what was happening, even if he didn’t fully understand it, and he screamed with the pain of his index finger being bitten clean off between the first and second knuckles with a bite force the rational part of his brain couldn’t believe belonged to a human body.
A gunshot erupted again, loud and close, and Chambers scrambled away from the cage, clamping his left hand hard around his right wrist, with speckles of dark gore patterned over his face. He blinked it away but felt the sting of the sticky fluid on his eyeball as strong hands hauled him upwards.
A tourniquet was lashed around his right forearm and twisted to be painfully tight as voices fought for space in his brain. One shushed him, telling him in an American accent that everything was going to be okay. Another screamed repeatedly in a deep voice, which only paused briefly for the man making the awful sound to refill his lungs and start again.
“Too late,” a gruff voice said over him. “It’s all over his face. Can’t guarantee there’s no infection.” He recognised the army sergeant’s harsh tone and connected it with the sound of a gun’s hammer being cocked.
“No,” another voice—Grewal’s voice—snapped. “Wait, please.”
Grewal ran to the sample fridge, knocking aside a panicked lab assistant in his desperate haste to fetch a fresh vial of serum. Opting for the direct application method, he stabbed a syringe into the rubber section in the lid and tipped it up to draw out an unmeasured amount of the clear fluid before squeezing the plunger to force the air from it. Not bothering to find a vein, he jabbed it hard into Chambers’ shoulder and depressed the plunger to fill the muscle with the cold liquid.
“It’s his only chance,” Grewal’s voice drifted to him as the fever began to burn him up faster than he expected.
Professor Richard Chambers had precisely zero percent chance of surviving from the moment the infected thing bit into his flesh. The metaphysical changes alone that the subject had undergone in a matter of seconds were unprecedented, and now with its head blown half off, it would never reveal the secrets of what made it especially lethal to living humans.
Chambers, by the cruellest twist of fate, was also one of those few people, one of the tiny percentage of human beings that possessed a certain genetic trait which combined with the virus in a way that left them just as violent and ravenous, but still in possession of enough cognitive ability as to be truly, horrifyingly dangerous.
The addition of the serum to his body before he died simply accelerated the process and bonded with the original virus to create the freshest version of hell mankind could conjure.
All over the south west region of central England, there were almost five thousand like him, all spreading out with murderous intent and a newly unlocked ability to stalk and hunt their prey—living people—with renewed energy and lethality.
Chambers sat upright, tensed the muscles of his right forearm and snapped the tourniquet off his limb. Pulling at the heavy, cumbersome protective suit, he tore it away from himself with startling ease and turned his head to face professor Grewal.
Grewal had seen that look in his eye once before—had seen it just before the scientist had punched him in the face—only now the eyes weren’t light blue and on the verge of tears but jet black amid a sea of red lightning bolts running through the white sclera. It drove a cold dagger of terror into Grewal’s chest.
Before Grewal could move, Chambers’ hand shot out impossibly fast and gripped his neck so hard that his hands and arms went painfully numb instantly. He tried to speak, at least his mind formed the words but his mouth couldn’t respond, due to the pressure around his neck.
Chambers leaned forwards, sniffed him once as he growled low in his chest, then bit him on the cheek hard enough to scrape his front teeth down Grewal’s cheekbone before the burn of the fever started to take him.
Chambers dropped the other scientist, the two of them finding themselves once more on the same side, regardless of how they’d felt about one another. He set about hunting down the other living people. Impacts hit his body, but as none of them blew apart his skull, they barely slowed him as he leapt and climbed and tore at them; never stopping to eat but just dealing debilitating blows before his attention was caught by another living enemy.
“Okay, that was definitely a forty-five,” Dave Shepherd said to the other SEALs, who had all stopped their work to stare back up the hill at the building they had just come from. The answer to the statement came in the form of an explosive rattle of automatic fire which had to be from a squad gun. If that was being used inside a building, then the day had almost certainly gone to shit, Miller knew.
They began to ready their weapons again, stacking up and waiting for the word to advance back up the hill just as screams filled the black sky.
“No,” Miller said. “It’s loose, and that means an outbreak. You know our orders.”
They did.
Wordlessly, they climbed into the boat and pushed off, taking a compass bearing to direct them out to sea where they would find the naval flotilla and hope to be done with the scourge.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The men of the British Special Forces elite took their role seriously.
Acting as the cut-off between what was obviously some kind of viral testing facility hastily thrown together by the Americans in a secluded farm on the west coast of the island, and the rest of the population to their backs in the east. They had never officially been told that there were scientists there testing the sickness that caused the dead to become ambulatory and tear the flesh from others unthinkingly. However, their strict orders to destroy anything coming from that direction that didn’t give the correct codeword response to their challenge—with a heavy inference to shoot first if they weren’t speaking at all—made it clear that they were facing the potential of infected people seeking a way through them.
They had made a small town of tents in the lee of a raised hillock which sheltered them just a little from the harsh weather the island experienced. But since they’d all successfully completed SAS selection and training, and had all spent time living in harsh environments where the power of the elements alone might kill them, this hardship barely even registered as one.
They rotated their turns on the road barricade, just as they took turns sleeping and patrolling the impassable ground either side of the only stretch of flat ground which the road ran through. That road was covered by two interlocking firing arcs of belt-fed general purpose machine guns capable of destroying any vehicle moving towards the farm.
“I still don’t like it, Tip,” a trooper complained to the man beside him as he lit his cigarette and tucked both hands back under his armpits to leave the smoke dangling from between his lips as he spoke. “There was more bloody gunfire earlier, so the boys said.”
The man he spoke to sighed, as though bored of hearing the same arguments come from him. “There’s always gunfire from there. It’s the easiest way to kill one of them.”
“Well, I still don’t like it.”
“What don’t you like, Ed?” corporal Tipuric asked trooper Jenkins.
“Well,” the man said, voice still muffled by the cigarette and his Welsh accent, “they could be doing all sorts of things down there, and we don’t know anything about it.”
“What are you worried about?” Tipuric snapped, the cold taking the edge off his usually long patience. “Expecting a BTR-Eighty to come plodding up the hill? Howay, man. Bloody cold’s got to your brain.”
“Well, if one does come up, it can bloody well have one of these bastards,” the reply came as one hand was taken from the warm armpit it resided in and tapped a dull, green tube standing vertically.
“Take more than one,” Tipuric answered absent-mindedly, annoyed with himself for even being drawn into the idle conversation. He was saved any further retort by a sharp sound from the darkness ahead of their position. Both men froze, hearing the sudden absence of low chatter from either side of their roadblock. For ten long second
s nobody said a word, waiting to see if the noise repeated itself. Tipuric didn’t move, other than to tighten his grip on the Colt rifle he cradled and run his thumb up towards the safety catch.
“Fox,” he said confidently. Before anyone could disagree, the sound came again, only much further to the left of where it had originally sounded, to give the impression that there were more than one of the animals out there. That sharp cry was answered by a low chorus of hisses in various tones.
Tipuric stood, flicking off the safety catch and pointing his rifle front as he shouted.
“Stand to! Stand to! Attack front!”
Muzzle flashes from the medium machine guns lit up the dark night, showing hideous snapshots of men and women wearing a mixture of camouflage uniforms and white coats, all smeared with dark patches of blood, approaching at a run up the slope towards them.
Behind them, a mortar was sent up to pop high over their heads where a small parachute deployed to gently lower the fired projectile back to earth as it burned brightly and provided illumination to the battlefield.
That illumination did not make them happy. Tipuric’s mind counted just over twenty, which wasn’t an insurmountable number by any stretch of the imagination for such well-trained and well-armed men, but something nagged at the back of his mind as he lined up heads between the iron sights of the rifle and clattered off bursts of fire.
He should have listened to that nagging doubt. If he had, they might have won. Might have survived. As it happened, the noises they had ignored had originated with two former people—one in a pale shirt with a missing finger and another wearing the uniform and insignia of a US army staff sergeant—who had flanked the roadblock from the impassable high ground to each side and fallen upon the men firing the GPMGs.
As the guns went silent in unison, Tipuric instinctively turned to his left and began triggering shots off at the shape of a crouching man in a once light blue shirt with the collar undone and the sleeves rolled up as though he was still working after a long day. The shape crouched further, like it was powering up, then leapt clear of the aim of his rifle like a human-sized grasshopper, which left the SAS man momentarily stunned. Spinning and searching for a target, he looked back at the trooper who had been beside him, in time to see the man’s boots fly through the air as his rifle flashed with automatic fire when his trigger finger spasmed. As trooper Jenkins sailed backwards out of their defensive position, one of the bullets he inadvertently and negligently fired ricocheted from something and thumped into Tipuric’s side with just enough force to punch its way an inch into his flesh. Immediately, the wound welled with hot blood and took his breath away, but he was instinctively certain nothing vital was hit. Staggering back to his feet, he hefted the rifle with the heavy attachment under the barrel for firing small grenades, only to find the space before him empty.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 101