Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  “Sir, if we allow injured men back inside the wire, we will be done for,” he said calmly, “I started a procedure today that we need to stick to whenever anyone goes off the island. The returning men have to strip down and be inspected to be sure that nobody is hiding a bite and thinking that they’ll get better. They have to have their temperature taken for signs of fever and anyone displaying signs we aren’t happy with goes into a holding area. That’s the only way we can be sure not to bring back the disease, and yes, it may be barbaric but by God it is necessary, Sir.”

  “Quite right, Sarn’t Major,” he said, using the enlisted men’s vernacular for his rank, as he often did without making it sound unnatural, coming from him, “I trust you’ll make the necessary arrangements whilst I pass this on to our naval colleagues?”

  “Consider it done, Sir,” Johnson replied, because him asking permission from the captain was a formality.

  He had given the orders twenty minutes prior to the meeting.

  “On your feet, ‘teeenShun,” Strauss barked, seeing Nevin fly up to his full height and stamp to attention as Johnson walked in the room. Nevin’s face registered many things; guilt, dread, remorse as well as fear that the Sergeant Major would hit him again.

  “Thank you, Harry,” he said, not taking his eyes off the trooper before him.

  “Sir,” sergeant Strauss answered, then left the room. Nevin’s eyes flickered towards the doorway, knowing that the last witness had just left him alone.

  “What am I to do with you, Nevin?” Johnson asked in a low voice, receiving no answer.

  “It occurs to me that you might be fucking up intentionally to try and avoid work,” he said as he took a step back and looked down on the man, “which I thought was the reason for your stunt in the Royal,” he mused out loud, meaning the Royal Arms where the fight had broken out, “Do you want to get locked up, Nevin? Do you want to get your arm broken so you don’t have to go out there and you can stay here, where it’s safe and no nasty Screechers want to bite your face off?”

  At the mention of biting faces, Nevin quailed and Johnson knew he had broken the façade.

  “Tell me what happened to Harris,” he ordered him in the same measured voice, “and in case you’re thinking about leaving any details out, I already know. I just want to hear it from you.”

  That bluff, a common one with senior NCOs, was one that no solider in their right mind would bet against. Men at that level seemed to have eyes in the back of their head, in addition to their ability to read minds and hear the faintest of whispers clearly over long distances.

  “I told Sergeant Strauss I needed a shit, Sir. He instructed Harris to go with me and I stalled for time to avoid the work detail,” he admitted in clear, confident sentences, “One of them came out of the woods and I tried to warn him. He didn’t believe me. It bit him, and I fired on it, but the fire was ineffective.”

  Johnson stepped closer again to interrupt him. Everything Nevin had said rang true with the story Strauss had told him.

  “So you avoided work, put another trooper in danger to cover your charade, then you were too much of a clown to warn the man that he was in said danger, and then,” he snarled, “then you panicked like a child and wasted ammunition until your sergeant had to save you. Tell me if I’m wrong?”

  “No, Sir,” Nevin said flatly.

  “No, Sir,” Johnson mocked him, as though Nevin had woken up and decided to play the soldier a little too late, “You’ve got a man killed, put a dozen others in jeopardy, shamed your unit and embarrassed us all in front of the regulars, the navy and the marines. You are a fucking liability.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Nevin said, his voice cracking.

  “Christ, man… a child is more worth to my squadron than you are.”

  FIVE

  Peter always wanted to be a soldier. He knew that he had to wait for his sixteenth birthday and that his parents had to sign a letter giving him permission to do so, effectively handing their child over to the army.

  Peter was fine with that, and he doubted if his parents would have missed him if, well if they had both still been alive.

  That was his plan to escape, to get away from them and the life he had endured, and it was nothing to do with seeing the world or learning a useful trade; it was just a means of escape.

  In many ways, the sudden change in his existence of having to hide from people who wanted to hurt him meant little variation to him, but instead of the abusive parents he’d had to contend with, he had to try not to get eaten. He kept to his new routine of resting up in the daytime and moving every second or third night, sometimes only half a mile and other times much, much further as the distances between villages could be vast for short legs.

  This decision to become partly nocturnal, like all the adaptations to his new life, was less of a cognitive process and more of a feeling that he acted upon. He probably couldn’t have articulated these decisions very well, but they had kept him safe and, more importantly, thriving. On one of the days when the sunlight was dancing off the tiny particles of dust floating in the air as the beam of yellow light streamed through the gap in the thin curtains he had drawn, noises brought him out of the sleep he had been in. He shuffled over to the edge of the mattress, crossing the distance on the soft double bed he was treating himself to sleeping in, and swung his legs down. Slipping his feet into the new trainers he had found in a previous house, he stepped lightly to the window and knelt down so that he wasn’t obviously visible, should anyone glance up at him.

  He told himself anyone instead of anything because, as far as he knew, the zombies didn’t drive cars.

  Peeking through the gap at the side of the curtains so that he didn’t move them, he watched as a dirty, dull blue coloured car drove up. It was about the same size as the one his parents had and it rocked slightly as it was stopped by the handbrake. The engine was off, and a man climbed out from behind the wheel to look around in all directions. He had a beard that didn’t seem right, didn’t seem deliberate somehow, like it didn’t suit him, and wide eyes in the gap between that beard and the unruly haystack of hair on top of his head. Those eyes scanned up and down the sparsely populated street they were on and evidently assured him that they were alone, because he reached back inside the car and took out a long crowbar, which he took with him to a house. He used it to stab into the wood near the lock of the door, then he turned back over his shoulder, calling out to the car and gesturing with his head. The sound of the car door opening drifted up to Peter, hidden by the small tree that obscured the rest of the vehicle from his view, and another man walked reluctantly over to join the first man, with his shoulders sagging, as though being forced out of the seat had annoyed him. He put his body next to the bearded man and they leaned their combined weight against the long edge of the metal bar, making the sounds of cracking and splintering wood echo up to the young boy watching them in secret. He watched them go into the house, heard the distant, muffled sounds of glass breaking, then it was his turn for his eyes to grow wide as a scream ripped out of the open door three times louder than the sound of the smashed glass.

  Peter stayed glued to the show, unable to move and freezing in some form of self-preservation response, and he watched in horror as the bearded man reappeared at the front door, dragging something behind him. The burden must have been heavy, because the thing he was dragging seemed to be dragging him back.

  Then it screamed again, spun around, revealing shoulder-length dark blonde hair plastered to its face, and began to hit at the hand locked onto the collar of her jacket. The other man, younger and smaller but now far more alert than he had been going in, enthusiastically followed her out and offered encouragement by way of light kicks to her legs and backside. She screamed and struggled, trying to get back inside the house at any cost.

  Peter’s eyes narrowed, and his heart grew cold.

  It was fifty-fifty which house he had decided on that morning, choosing the one he was in because the moonlight had
shone on it and it gave him a better view through the downstairs windows. He felt a mix of relief that they weren’t taking him, and guilt that he had chosen differently and someone else was suffering. And she was suffering. The man with the beard hit her, hard, two or three times before dragging her up and forcing her into the car. The door was shut on her, leaving her lying flat on the back seat as the screaming and struggling stopped. Peter thought that they must have hurt her badly or knocked her out, then gasped and moved back involuntarily from the window as he saw both men looking in his direction. Inching back towards the window, he looked down in horror as one of the men went out of sight under the mantle of the front door.

  Just as the thud of metal on wood echoed up the stairs.

  Peter rose to his feet carefully, his unfastened trainers slipping slightly as he reached for his jumper and bags. He never went to sleep undressed, not fully anyway, and his bags were never left in an unpacked state. He made for the doorway, stopping to look at the dark space under the bed and dismissing it instantly as too obvious. He knew, again not that he could articulate it, that getting downstairs and out via the back door was an impossibility as the sounds from the ground floor of the door breaking were already loud. Instead he turned, looked at the three doors in the upstairs landing, and selected the one that he knew would be the airing cupboard.

  Opening it, he placed his two bags on the lower shelf and slipped the sawn-off shotgun out of the top of his backpack. Climbing into the first partition, the one just below eye height, he rolled over the stack of folded sheets to a space behind them and pulled the door as far to being closed as he could from inside, where there was no handle. He clutched the handle of the shotgun, with the shortened pitchfork pressing uncomfortably into his back as he couldn’t bring it to bear in the cramped confines of the cupboard. The shelf above him blacked out the light as it was full of stacked towels, and he pulled a light pink sheet over him to complete the transformation. He drew in a breath, held it to absorb the smell of clean laundry, then let it out slowly just as the front door splintered inwards.

  Muffled sounds from downstairs made him think about the layout. The heavy, thudding sounds of boots moving over the wooden floors in the hallway and lounge. The almost sticky sounds of the soles of those boots on kitchen linoleum, then the near-silent footfalls betrayed by creaking steps as those boots came up to his level. He shifted the grip on the shotgun, the cold metal of the shortened barrels feeling slippery in his warm hand, and he concentrated on keeping himself still and quiet.

  A loud crash indicated the boot forcing its way into the bathroom. The sound of the cupboard being opened and slammed back closed painted a picture in Peter’s mind, and the footsteps going soft again told him that the search was continuing into the room he had just vacated. He closed his eyes, recalling the picture his mind had taken when he left and assuring himself that he had left no sign that anyone was there now. He heard the footsteps pause, heard the sound of the curtains being snatched open and then drawers being opened and closed roughly.

  The sound of a car horn from outside made Peter jump, biting his lip to keep quiet, as the man searching the house snarled just past the partly open door.

  “Fucking idiot,” he muttered.

  Peter held his breath, willing the swearing owner of the heavy boots to go back downstairs. Agonising seconds ticked by before he did, letting Peter allow himself precious seconds to breathe and slow his heaving chest. He listened to more shouts outside, unable to make out the words, but highly attuned as a natural empath to the moods of others, to know that the voice was angry. The car started, a belt in the engine shrieked in protest, and the sounds of the engine died away.

  Peter relaxed. That was a bizarre side-effect of his low standard of life before this happened; he could correctly recognise and detect a person’s mood in seconds, often without them even saying anything. It was how he survived his family. How he knew when to make himself scarce to avoid becoming the focus of unwanted attention.

  He climbed carefully out of the airing cupboard, gathered his belongings and crept down the stairs to peer into the sunlight to make sure that both men had left in the car. He felt bad for the woman, but some part of him was grateful that it was her and not him, as his young brain didn’t fully comprehend why she would be valuable to the men. He tightened the straps on his bag and looked up and down both sides of the road, expecting at least one of the things to have come to investigate the noises they had made. He saw none, but he knew that didn’t mean they weren’t coming. Just as he went to walk in the direction they hadn’t driven off in, a noise from the house opposite caught his attention.

  Stepping closer so that the roof line of the house blocked the sun that shone directly in his face, his eyes fixed on the source of the noise.

  Standing just beyond the broken front door, eyes rubbed red and nose streaming, was a girl who couldn’t have been more than four years old.

  Johnson used a commandeered car to visit the three sections of sandy beach on their tiny rock that had been deemed vulnerable to a sea-borne attack. Perhaps attack wasn’t the right word, but the little patches of smooth approach from the water were vulnerable if they considered how many Screechers might be milling about in the low tide and likely to wash up there by random chance. He watched the tall fence posts being driven deep into the sand and the wire being strung between the posts. Walking up to one strand snaking diagonally across the height of his chest, he reached out to twang the cord of viciously barbed, twisted metal and felt it give a few inches. Opening his mouth to ask why the wire was neither straight nor strung tightly, he closed it again.

  The design was intended to keep an unthinking human body wrapped up until such time as a man with a fixed bayonet could render it safe.

  He completed his rounds, finding the materials in place for the other defences, but the work not yet underway. He was pleased to see that three men were at the beaches, alert and confident. Being in a civilian vehicle allowed Johnson to drive past slowly and not interfere, and it also allowed the men to pretend that they hadn’t seen their commander and continue their vigil. He found the troop sergeants, giving them the written orders to reinforce the difficult words he said.

  “Jesus,” cursed the commander of the assault troop, Maxwell, “really?”

  “Afraid so, Maxwell,” Johnson answered solemnly, “anyone outside the wire from now on has to go to into quarantine for three hours, which we think is more than enough time to be sure there aren’t any infections.”

  Maxwell nodded his understanding, with his discomfort evident on his face.

  “I need you fit for the morning, Simon,” Johnson told him in a tone of voice that conveyed his confidence in the sergeant and his men. “I need two wagons from your troop to run the operation.”

  “Just two?” Maxwell asked him with a furrowed brow.

  “Yes, two Spartans and two Bedfords with the marines. Your men can help get a few Saracens up and running, hit the ammo dump, then everyone moves out.”

  “Everyone?” Maxwell asked, letting Johnson know that some communication between army and navy clearly existed.

  “Apart from a few who will be waiting for the helicopters to load another few tonnes of kit,” Johnson confirmed.

  “But you want the armour gone by that time, obviously?” Maxwell asked him, not imagining that his commander would risk having vehicles in the open with the sound of two helicopters attracting every Screecher inside a wide area directly onto them.

  “Indeed I do,” Johnson answered, “five a.m., if you please,” he finished, giving the time as a statement and not a question. Maxwell nodded, and the two men broke away.

  Johnson spoke with the officer commanding the marines, reiterated the plan, then checked the troop guarding the causeway and turned in for the night.

  Because he had won the argument to lead the mission leaving in the dark pre-dawn.

  Peter froze, almost unable to comprehend what his eyes were seeing. The child
was no longer crying, but simply staring at him and giving an occasional spasm of inward breath with a trembling lower lip, as her dark golden hair was stuck to one side of her face. The startling similarity between her and the woman he had seen being dragged away made it clear to him that there was an obvious family connection.

  Peter turned away, hearing a gasp and a small sob, so he turned back and took a step towards her, which made her whimper and take an involuntary step backwards. The sporadic gasps of inward breath that made her small chin convulse had slowed now, but her red-rimmed eyes still stayed locked on Peter, despite their puffy appearance. Slowly, Peter crouched to put down the pitchfork and bag, then slipped one arm out of the straps of his backpack and swung the bag to his front, all the while keeping his eyes on the girl in case she bolted. Reaching carefully inside, he found the thing he wanted near to the top and pulled it out.

  Holding out the sagging, tired-looking stuffed lamb towards her, he gave it a small shake as though trying to entice her with it. Its limp limbs wobbled comically when he shook it, and she rewarded him with a tiny giggle and took a hesitant half-step towards him. The two, both on the same eye level as Peter was still crouching down, were separated by only ten feet of open air and the threshold of the broken house when another noise sounded.

  It tore the air, making both of them jump as the hissing, screeching shriek struck fear into him and sheer terror into the girl. He snatched up his things as he moved forwards seeing her shrink away but not run; evidently her mind recognised that some things were more frightening than others. Peter thrust the lamb into her arms as he threw the bag back around onto his back, then readied his pitchfork after pushing the door closed without being able to shut it.