Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  Later, after she had gorged herself, Sally wandered back down the stairs with the front of her pretty dress sheeted in blood. She walked aimlessly out of the front door, pausing only briefly to look at the thing struggling weakly in the driver’s seat of a Volvo, and walked off, dismissing it as inedible.

  “Just hurry up so we can get back,” trooper Harris said to Nevin, who was dragging out the task so as to avoid any form of hardship. Nevin chuckled from behind the tree he was using as cover for his squat and made intentionally foul noises with his mouth to annoy Harris.

  It worked, as Harris tutted and walked a few paces further away from him.

  In the small patch of woodland behind the builders’ yard, a woman in a dirty floral dress with one shoulder pad torn and hanging down her right arm, turned her head slowly towards the sounds. The blood that had covered her front had been washed away by rain, and further degraded by her walking around for three weeks to provide the result of the dress being torn in places that could excite a soldier.

  That was, if she didn’t have the clouded-over eyes and pale, mottled grey complexion of a Screecher.

  Turning her body to point in the same direction as her face, she emitted a low, gargling hiss and set off towards the source of the noise. When she reached them, she heard two people talking. She didn’t know they were people and her destroyed brain had no way of interpreting the noises as defined speech, without the higher functions she had once possessed. She had no cognitive ability, but she was attracted to the sound and the closer she got to the sound the more she could detect movement. With that movement came the smell of the living, and with that smell came an apparent aggression and lust for warm flesh that spurred her instinctively onwards.

  “Oh-Jesus-fuck!” Nevin blurted out as he almost fell backwards with unfastened trousers in a desperate bid to locate his personal weapon.

  “Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot, Nevin,” Harris snapped at him, finally breaking and deciding to let the troublesome soldier have both barrels. “You just can’t help yourself being a twat, can you? Every fucking time there’s work to do, you find some excuse to piss about and… aargh! You wanker!”

  Nevin made desperate noises and pointed behind Harris, who was so annoyed with the man’s stupidity that he ran out of words, dismissed him with a wave of his hand and a noise of disgust and turned away.

  Directly into the path of what used to be Sally Crawford.

  “Last one?” asked the tall man, who had evidently worked at the yard, as he indicated that the room in the truck was all but taken up. Strauss nodded in agreement, then froze as the scream of a grown man in agony ripped the air in two.

  The two marines had already set off for the rear of the building at a dead run, followed by Strauss and three others.

  Rounding the edge of the building, he swore loudly as he heard the sound of automatic gunfire erupt.

  “Hold! Hold!” he screamed, both in frustration at the person firing and at the marines ahead of him, as he had seen the rounds hitting the damp earth ahead of them. The marines had seen it too and threw themselves against the corner of the brick building.

  “Hold your fire,” Strauss bellowed, hoping for a response from the person behind the weapon. From the noise, he knew it to be the same Sterling as the one in his hand, but then again, both men he had sent back there were similarly armed. The firing stopped, although more likely caused by an empty magazine than by common sense regaining control, and Strauss took his chance to break cover as he told the others to stay where they were.

  He rounded the corner just in time to see Nevin slotting a fresh magazine into the side of his weapon, complete the reload and raise it to his shoulder. Ignoring the risk of a ricochet hitting him, Strauss ran hard at an angle for the rest of the scene to emerge.

  He saw Nevin leaning into his weapon as he fired more careful, measured shots. He saw Harris, at least he assumed it was Harris, lying flat on his back and twitching his right boot like a tap dancer. He saw a woman, her modesty unpreserved thanks to the holes torn in her dress and saw fresh blood on her as well as the stains of old blood. He had seen enough people like that over the last month; normal people lifted from their everyday lives and cursed to wander the earth in a ceaseless search for food. This woman had been pretty. Had obviously cared about her body and her appearance. Now she was riddled with bullets, staggering back upright to her feet and tearing the air in between the gunshots with that awful screeching noise.

  Nevin, a third of the way into his second magazine, had still not brought her down. Strauss knew the man, knew that he scored acceptable scores on the range days to qualify on the weapon in his hands, but could only attribute the appalling inaccuracy to fear and panic.

  Fear and panic were the weapons of their enemy, and his trooper was more danger to himself and his own side than to the lone, unarmed female Screecher in front of them.

  “Cease fire!” he bawled angrily, not caring about the noise, seeing as the automatic fire had likely already attracted every Screecher in the area to their location. Nevin stopped, shaking and wide-eyed as he spun towards Strauss and forgetting the basics of weapon discipline. Inadvertently pointing the barrel of a live weapon at his sergeant’s chest, Nevin watched as the gun was slapped away from his grip.

  “Safety that weapon, Trooper,” Strauss spat at him, then took two swift steps forward to spear Sally Crawford upwards through her open mouth and stop her shrieking for good. He didn’t spare her a glance as she fell to slump down, because he was already turning to the reliable man from another crew in his troop.

  “Harris? Harris?” he said insistently, “can you hear me?”

  The moaning and twitching man moved his hand away from his face reluctantly before clapping it back to the wound and keening more loudly, hearing the sergeant’s response.

  “Oh fuck,” Strauss said, before turning and shouting for a med kit. The marine spotter arrived first, slapping a heavy gauze pad onto the ragged patch where Harris’ right cheek used to be.

  “You’ll be alright, son,” he said to the stricken man as the rest of the troopers picked him up bodily to take him back to the vehicles. Strauss picked up Harris’ gun, checked to find that it had not been fired, and looked at the Screecher for the first time since he had rendered her safe. He slowly broke his gaze away and looked at Nevin, then back at the woman. Turning back to Nevin again, he inclined his head to indicate for him to move ahead of him. That look alone promised that the matter was far from over.

  FOUR

  “Sir, patrol reporting that they are on the way back,” Daniels told Johnson, wearing a look that indicated clearly there was still bad news to come.

  “And?” the SSM asked.

  “And they are reporting a casualty. One of our troopers has been…”

  “Bitten?” Johnson asked in a quiet voice to break the painful silence.

  “Yes.”

  Johnson took a sharp breath in through his nose before blowing it steadily out of his nose. He asked for an estimated time of their arrival and left.

  Finding his only superior, ignoring the junior officer who was, in his opinion, a very well-polished turd in a tailored uniform, he cleared his throat to interrupt the conversation Captain Palmer was having with Lieutenant Lloyd of the marines.

  “SSM,” he acknowledged, reading his facial expression perfectly, ‘do we need to speak privately?”

  “In front of Mister Lloyd is fine by me, Sir,” he said with a nod to the Lieutenant. Johnson liked marine officers, as they endured the same hardships as their men and as such, formed a tighter bond with them, he felt. Army officers were sent to what he considered to be the most expensive boarding school going, only to learn to act as though the men under their command were the scum of the earth. No matter how badly they treated the scum, they still fought like the devils and drilled like guardsmen in the desperate attempt to gain their superiors’ acceptance.

  “One Troop is inbound, but they have a casualty,” he told
them. Palmer’s face screwed up in sympathy briefly, and he asked who it was in a concerned voice.

  “One of the troopers, Sir,” Johnson told him, suspecting that he might have seen a small drop in the man’s shoulder signifying relief. If he had read that right, he could only assume that it was relief that the injury wasn’t to a civilian.

  “It’s the nature of the injury that’s the cause of concern,” Johnson explained, “it’s a bite.”

  The two officers looked instantly drawn.

  “Is he running a fever yet?” asked Lieutenant Lloyd.

  “No details as yet,” Johnson answered, “but they will be here in minutes.”

  “The man needs to be quarantined, Sergeant Major,” Lloyd insisted, “One of our chaps was bitten at Heron,” he explained, using the Navy’s own name for their air squadron at Yeovilton, “and he ran a fever until he died, then he…” Lloyd paused, then seemed to decide that he had no better way of explaining it, “then he came back and turned on his mates.”

  “Timeframe?” Palmer asked.

  “From bite to turning? Within the hour,” was all that Lloyd could say.

  “If you’ll allow me?” Johnson asked politely, meaning that he wanted the captain’s leave to issue orders ready for the arrival of the returning troop. Palmer nodded and followed him.

  “Daniels? Get the tank moved and rouse the standby troop. I want them at the foot of the bridge now.”

  Daniels nodded and began to give orders into the array of radio sets in front of him, not that Johnson saw, as he was already heading down the slope at a jog to be at the roadway before the others.

  The standby troop the forces kept at the ready to respond to anything, was Sergeant Maxwell’s assault troop. He gave Maxwell a short version of events and explained what he needed from him, then turned away as Maxwell gave his own order for two men at each end of his long line spread out across the road, who promptly disappeared to bring what they were ordered to. The noise of engines grew until the returning troop rolled in, stopping when instructed before reaching the island itself.

  The hatch of the lead vehicle, Strauss’, was up and he held a hand to his ear to hear the questions shouted by the SSM.

  “In the Bedford,” he yelled back, pointing behind him unnecessarily.

  The armoured cars were waved through and instructed to park. Only Strauss was permitted to leave his wagon, and the others were ordered to shut down their engines but stay where they were.

  The terrified civilians were first off the truck, their eyes wide and their breathing fast. They were the ones who had been on the island when it had all started, so they hadn’t experienced the fear of coming close to the Screechers before. Johnson climbed up to see a trooper he couldn’t recognise due to the blood and heavy dressing on his face. The man was strapped down, and it took him a moment to recognise that he was secured around the torso, his arms pinned to his sides, with heavy-duty grey tape.

  Johnson looked to Strauss, who seemed to understand the question.

  “Couldn’t run the risk of him turning and being able to move,” he explained simply. Johnson looked at the man’s feet, seeing that his knees and ankles were similarly bound.

  “Trooper?” he asked, giving the man a fairly robust poke in the shoulder.

  “It’s John Harris,” Strauss said, earning a grunt from the SSM.

  “What happened?”

  “Two of the lads were out back behind the target building, a Screecher attacked and bit Harris,” he reported bluntly. What he didn’t say gave more indications to Johnson that what he did.

  “And our other man?”

  “Nevin,” Strauss answered simply, making Johnson suppress a growl.

  “Get him inside,” the SSM ordered, then stepped back to allow the flurry of movement his instructions had sparked. He saw the two marines, the sniper and his spotter, talking quietly to their Lieutenant, who looked up to meet Johnson’s eyes before an apologetic look washed over him. Johnson decided to ask the direct question and walked towards them.

  The marines stepped politely aside, allowing the SSM room.

  “Anything I haven’t been told yet?” he asked curtly.

  The Lieutenant looked to his sniper, then back at Johnson before instructing them.

  “Tell him.”

  “Sarn’t Major,” the sniper said politely, “not my place to say, but your man, Nevin?”

  “What of him?” Johnson asked, barely keeping the contempt at even hearing the man’s name from his words.

  “He froze. Emptied an entire magazine at the thing and failed to bring it down. He was fucking about, begging your pardon, before that and was trying to shirk the hard graft,” the marine said without emotion.

  Johnson couldn’t be sure what annoyed the marine most, the unprofessionalism of the man or the unforgivable inaccuracy of his shooting. Johnson himself could forgive neither.

  “Thank you,” he said, “I trust you’ll keep this to yourself?”

  The three marines nodded, and Johnson glanced to the Lieutenant to be sure he got the message.

  “Get yourselves squared away then,” he instructed his two men, leaving him alone with the SSM.

  “This is an isolated matter, Sir,” Johnson told him formally, “one bad apple in my whole squadron, and he won’t be an issue again.”

  “I understand, Sarn’t Major,” Lieutenant Lloyd said in an equally formal tone, “but I’m sure you will also understand that I may be forced to insist on my marines being present for future missions. We are, after all, the specialist infantry.”

  Johnson had to agree that the man had a point. As proud of his soldiers as he was, the majority at least, they were still reservist cavalrymen and could not expect to measure up under intense pressure against the Royal Marines Commandos.

  “Lieutenant,” he said seriously, “I may just insist on that myself, so long as we can get your boys appropriate mounts in the morning.”

  “Make way,” Johnson boomed as he scattered the rubber-necking troopers out of the way, “anyone not directly needed here is to piss off to your duty stations. Now!” he added unnecessarily, as the soldiers had already begun to crowd at the door like rats escaping when the barn lights came on.

  He found Harris in a bad way, with the marine’s own medic attending to him, seemingly voluntarily.

  “Fever’s already got him, Sir,” the marine said, his Midlands accent alien to the south coast, and his eyes conveying more than the words meant.

  “Get him comfortable, if you can,” he said, then watched as the man administered two syrettes of morphine directly into Harris’ thigh. The breathing rate stayed high, but the rasping sounds that came from the unconscious man’s throat lessened. They watched as the breathing continued to grow steadily slower, then Harris’ open eyes widened with each gasped breath inwards. As the breathing stopped, the tension in his body lessened and the heat seemed to bleed away from him.

  Johnson placed a hand to Harris’ face, reaching out to close his eyes when the marine snapped a warning.

  “Don’t!” he said as he got to his feet and stepped away. “Help me,” he said, then he pulled a strip of the same tape used to secure the body and began to strap his chest down to the table Harris lay on. Passing it under the table as they wrapped it round, ducking and rising with each turn, they both leapt back in unison as the last time they stood, they were being watched. Harris’ eyes, turning in an instant from the dead eyes of a human to the milky orbs of a Screecher, were fixed on Johnson. The trooper drew breath in to prepare a shriek of excitement and frustration at being denied his meal but stopped short as the marine swore loudly. Harris snapped his head towards the man, fixing him like a computer-aided targeting system, and drew breath in again.

  He didn’t get chance to issue the shrieking noise, as Johnson’s bayonet punched through his right temple and into his brain. Having to use his left hand to hold the flopping skull still the SSM withdrew the blade with great difficulty.

  T
raining note, he told himself, aim for the eye socket unless you want to lose your bayonet.

  Silence hung heavy in the room as both living soldiers looked at the twice-dead corpse in disbelief.

  “That was fast,” Johnson said, seeing the man opposite him nodding but keeping his eyes on the body, “Was it that fast with your man?”

  “What?” the marine said in confusion, “Oh, not sure. It wasn’t our man, it was on the other side of the airbase.”

  “So…” Johnson said, trying to frame the question correctly to get the information, “were you told that your marine turned that quickly?” he asked, wincing at the terminology he had just used.

  “They didn’t say,” he mumbled, “but did you see how quickly he changed?”

  “I did,” Johnson said, then turned to leave the room, “can you please put my trooper in a bag and we can organise a proper burial?”

  “Good God, man. You’re proposing that we order our men to kill one another at the first sign of injury?” Captain Palmer asked incredulously. The man was so well-bred, so exquisitely mannered that for him to show such emotion betrayed how truly shocked he was at the suggestion.

  “If it’s from a bite, Sir, then yes, but only a bite,” Johnson responded flatly. He stood stock still, semi-rigid as though prepared to stand to attention if not most of the way there already. He fixed his eyes on the corner of the ugly picture frame on the wall behind the captain and stared straight through it.

  “I can’t issue that order, SSM,” he replied, “it’s barbaric. It’s inhumane, it’s…” he paused, unable to locate the words he wanted to best describe how he felt about the suggestion, “… it’s just not the way we do things, man!”

  “I appreciate that, Sir,” Johnson said patiently, “but the fact remains that we are outside the normal parameters of war. This isn’t the fight we’ve been trained for.”

  Palmer sat down in a chair and crossed one leg over the other. In other men the gesture would appear almost feminine, but something about the way he did it made it stylish. Johnson sat down next to him, explaining again how rapidly Harris turned. He described the burning hot fever, how he had been incapacitated almost as soon as the bite occurred, and how once his breathing had stopped, he was ready to tear chunks out of him inside of a minute.