Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  As that amusement wore off, a sudden noise at the back door made both of them jump. Despite Amber’s young age, she didn’t cry out in fright, but Peter’s heart raced so that he was forced to slow his breathing down. He was the protector now, and he felt fear in a way like no other when he had only been responsible for his own life. He rose up, keeping his body low as he snatched up the pitchfork that was never far from his reach. Edging towards the back door, he paused to listen, hearing nothing, and just as he began to relax, something erupted from the dull light outside the window to launch itself through the gap.

  Claws scratched and scrabbled at the glass and the frame, and wide, yellow eyes bore into Peter’s own as he fell backwards with a strangled squawk of fear.

  Frozen in situ, half-in and half-out of the narrow gap, a mottled black and brown cat glared at him with accusatory indignation. It kept its eyes on him, squeezing the rest of its body through as it landed lightly on the kitchen worktop and let out a low yowling sound in his direction.

  As foolish as he felt, Peter got the impression that he was being asked a question, and as foolish as he sounded even to himself, he answered it.

  “We just needed somewhere safe to stay,” he told the cat in a low voice, then jumped again as the cat dropped down from the worktop without warning and paced past him to trot towards the settees. He turned to see it had its tail held high and vertical with the top curled around like it was a living question mark. Even from three paces away he could hear the deep, percussive rattle of the cat’s purring as it nuzzled Amber, before rising on its back legs to rub one side of its whiskers along her outstretched hand. She giggled lightly, and the cat turned to repeat the gesture on the other side of its face before hopping up effortlessly to nuzzle her face and knead the duvet on her lap.

  Feeling distinctly as though he was the intruder, the items he had discarded before in the kitchen came back to him. He had ignored the tins of cat food as an irrelevance, as though the thought of any animal surviving had been pushed from his mind, after the dog he had tried so hard to forget about.

  The obvious evidence to the contrary had now settled down and begun a rigorous washing process on Amber’s lap, pausing occasionally to lick her hand when it came close enough, and made her giggle again.

  Peter felt suddenly ashamed, as though he had broken into the house of someone who was still around, because the cat evidently lived there.

  He opened a tin from the kitchen and scraped out the foul-smelling contents onto a side plate. As soon as the can opener sang its metallic tune to cut off the top, the cat abandoned its cleaning ritual and bounded up onto the side, where it snaked its way in between Peter’s hands until the meal was prepared. Leaving the plate on the side, they both watched as the cat ate hungrily, purring the whole time and surprising him that such feline ventriloquism was even possible. Finishing the entire plate and licking the jelly residue clean, the cat promptly stepped back to the windowsill and leapt up to squeeze itself back outside.

  Peter glanced back to Amber, seeing her expression fall back into the sadness he had known previously. He tried to cheer her up with more chocolate, which didn’t work. He tried drinking more of the fizzy drink and pulled faces as he burped musically but she stayed crestfallen at the loss of something that had made her happy.

  Giving in, Peter settled down to sleep on the settee and drifted away trying to think of ways to keep her safe and happy.

  ELEVEN

  Life below the waves was a claustrophobic, dank, stifling existence of enforced silence. Any man over five and a half feet tall suffered from constant spinal issues given any amount of time spent on board a boat, but the long journey around the Horn of Africa and back north to British waters was made under the strictest insistence that the journey remained covert. That meant that the submarine could only surface when absolutely necessary, and the remainder of the time had to be spent running quietly.

  The four men who were the precious cargo of the route, all of them sporting wild beards beneath staring eyes, had little to do besides lay in their cramped berths and wait for the journey to be over, but then men of their experience were not known for complaining about hardship.

  Their commander, Major Clive Downes, was the newest man to the regiment and would be forced to rotate out at some point in the future, or at least he would have under normal circumstances, but he had no idea what would happen, given this latest development.

  He and his team had been in Afghanistan, unofficially of course, and had been teaching the rag-tag collection of goat herders and illiterate villagers the finer points of improvised explosive device manufacture and planning, in addition to delivering the manual on the American-made and supplied Stinger missile system.

  The Soviets had officially ceased hostilities in the country after a decade of vicious counter-insurgency had left the region a war-torn mess, and that war had cost the Russians dearly. It was already widely known amongst the military as Russia’s own Vietnam.

  The fighting of enemies via a proxy was nothing new, and it was a badly-kept secret that the west was supplying and supporting the insurgents as a way to chip away at the iron curtain without getting their own hands dirty. At least not publicly, anyway.

  Downes had received orders, bizarrely through the channels of the Royal Navy, and he had followed those orders, which led him and the three men under his command to be sharing the same stale air in a submarine compartment barely big enough for their equipment. Any questions he had thought to ask were cut off, as the orders were given with a resounding, “out” at the end. The four Americans working alongside them, each going by an obviously false moniker, were also extracted via the same strategy, but they saw little of them on the journey, and guessed they had been whisked away to report to their CIA masters as soon as they surfaced.

  Now, three weeks after those orders had led them to half suffocate and suffer from vitamin D deficiency, they arrived in a very unseasonably stormy English Channel.

  “Sergeant Major?” came the polite, well-mannered enquiry through the closed door.

  “Sir?” Johnson answered, thinking that his orders for the captain to be fetched had been followed, and instead finding that the man himself had not come, but had sent his younger brother.

  “Sergeant Major, I must ask after your health,” said Second Lieutenant Palmer, “Are you quite well?”

  “Fine, Lieutenant, thank you,” Johnson replied gruffly, “we’ll be out of here in an hour, don’t you worry.”

  “Quite,” Palmer chuckled, implying that Johnson’s welfare wasn’t the slightest bit concerning to him personally. “Compliments from the Captain, but when you’re ready he’d rather enjoy hearing from you about the events of this afternoon.”

  I bet he bloody would, Johnson thought to himself, biting back the retort that the Captain, last time he checked, had two working legs and was quite capable of walking his royal arse down there and asking the question in person.

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Johnson said instead, using the prinked boy’s lowly rank instead of inflating his ego further with another ‘Sir’.

  “Oh,” the officer said from outside in afterthought, “and how is our man?”

  Johnson took a breath again before answering, just in case the words he was thinking came out of his mouth instead of the words he should say.

  “Corporal Ashdown is stable, and there are no signs that he is infected,” Johnson said.

  “But we haven’t encountered, er, injuries such as this before, have we?” he responded, letting Johnson know that the facts must be common knowledge, but that Palmer was actually questioning why the injured man had been brought inside their cordon. “No,’ Johnson said, “we haven’t.”

  The sound of boots marching away in a relaxed tempo made the SSM’s blood boil, making him breach his own standing orders and leave the room with thirty minutes to go before the allotted time. Despite the fact that nobody else had been removed from quarantine, he was storming up the hill
unchallenged when he noticed the royal military police sergeant duck into a doorway to avoid having to lie if asked later if he had seen the SSM. Johnson banged into the headquarters building and startled the men inside, finding a scene of intense business and stress, instead of the relaxed atmosphere he was expecting.

  Captain Palmer was sitting in front of one of the radio sets, one earphone cupped to the side of his head and scribbling furiously with a pencil on a pad of paper before him. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he appeared red-eyed as though he hadn’t stopped to blink in the last two hours.

  Guiltily, Johnson regretted his malice towards the man for sending his younger brother when he clearly had important things to do. He was wordlessly handed a tin mug holding a hot drink so freshly made that it burned his hand and forced him to change his grip. He waited patiently as he watched Captain Palmer acknowledge transmissions curtly and efficiently, without pausing in his insistent writing. He finished the call and handed the headset back to corporal Mander, who was on duty. Climbing to his feet wearily and rubbing his eyes, the officer also accepted a drink but was staring at the paper before him so intently that he didn’t flinch at the heat of his own mug. Appearing to only just notice the Sergeant Major, he put down both paper and drink to shake his hand and place his left on the strong shoulder opposite him.

  “Mister Johnson, I’m glad you are safe,” he said with genuine gratitude for the man’s survival. “How is Ashdown? He’s Maxwell’s 2ic, isn’t he?” he asked, showing that he had either been passed that information recently or had rapidly absorbed this knowledge about his adopted and partly-manned squadron of Yeomanry. Johnson suspected it was the latter.

  “Stable, Sir, thank you,” he said, “he’s showing no sign of… of turning, and he’s under the care of one of the marines’ medics.”

  “Excellent,” Palmer said with passion behind his eyes, “I’m sure he’ll pull through. Now,” he said, changing the subject after sufficient time as to not appear callous regarding the lives of his men, “C.A.S. have been on the blower. They are calling themselves that now, Command at Sea, apparently, and it’s all above board with government and all branches of the military.” He paused to offer time for questions but continued as Johnson clearly had none. “They are in the process of consolidating military assets all over the place. It’s mostly bad news, I’m afraid…” he paused to blow on the surface of the drink he had picked up, only now seeming to find it hot to touch.

  “And what do they have for us?” Johnson asked, reading between the lines and guessing that the scribbled notes were the bones of a mission.

  “Nothing for now,” he said excitedly, “it seems as though we are one of the rare pockets with a good number of civilian refugees. They want to add to us here and are directing what personnel they can to get to our location. Others will be our responsibility to bring back.”

  “Okay,” Johnson said simply, feeling drained and unable to think about anything else, given the day’s activities so far.

  Graham Ashdown slept until the sky outside was fully dark.

  Everyone had endured their quarantine countdown in subdued quiet after the unexpected events of their arrival. The search process was simplified, given that soldiers had few qualms over being naked in front of their peers. Each man had stripped, ready to be examined and the method evolved organically so that the RMPs got all of the marines and soldiers through quickly, and they were able to get comfortable and settle in to wait.

  The story of what had happened ran through the men like only a rapidly-spreading rumour could, so that a convoluted version of events now lowered their mood and made for a depressing air. The men all shuffled out when the time was called, and none of them had manifested a fever or even a hint of an elevated temperature. They reported back to their individual billets with their heads down, despite the successes of the day, and the small house remained closed up, with the single soldier standing outside wearing his scarlet beret and an expression of stoic apology.

  That soldier was both startled and relieved in the same moment when the Yeomanry Sergeant Major returned. He ordered the door open but thanked him with a tired smile as he stepped inside.

  Johnson’s heart was heavy as he fully expected to find his man dead. He hoped to hear that he had gone in his sleep. He did not expect to walk in and see Ashdown sitting up, bandages wrapped around his neck, with a tin cup of steaming liquid in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He smiled, despite the pain he was clearly in, and looked at the contents of each hand as though his mind was juggling them to decide which one he should put down so he could stand up.

  “Jesus, Graham,” Johnson said with wide eyes, “how? What happened?”

  This last was directed at marine Sealey, who was stripped down to trousers and T-shirt, with the same contents in his own hand as Ashdown had.

  “Slept it off, Sir,” he said with a smile, “temperature never got up, even though he was talking a lot in his sleep, but he just came ‘round, like. You’re alright now, ain’t ya, mate?”

  Ashdown watched Sealey as he spoke, then turned back to Johnson wearing the same smile of almost fanatical relief to stutter his own explanation.

  “I thought I was a gonner, Sir,” he said, the slightest quiver in his chin, “I really thought the scratches would have…”

  He sniffed once, getting a grip of himself before the stress and realisation of almost dying and worse, threatened to unravel him, then carried on with bright eyes that tried to over-compensate.

  “The shoulder is sore as hell, but I’ll be back at it in a few days,” he finished.

  “You’ll be stood down for more than a few days, Ashdown,” Johnson chuckled at him, “we need to get you moved somewhere more comfortable. Give you some time off. Your family are here, aren’t they?”

  “My missus and my boy, yes, Sir,” he said as his face darkened slightly, and he coughed to clear his voice, “they’re billeted with Sergeant Maxwell’s family.”

  His face stayed shrouded in worry, as though the mention of his family gave a sharp reminder of what he had to lose. Johnson recognised that the man had been through enough, more than enough, and told him to rest up. His eyes met the marine’s and the slight flick of his head summoned him to follow outside.

  “Stay where you are, mate,” he told Ashdown as he set his drink on the table and slipped the rolled-up cigarette back in his mouth, “I’m going to see if any of my muckers are about to help.”

  Outside, and a good few paces away from the house, marine and warrant officer stood in momentarily awkward silence as both sought the appropriate words.

  “You have my thanks,” Johnson said, wincing at what he felt was an overly formal tone. He meant the words, however, and was truly grateful that his man wasn’t dead or worse.

  Marine Sealey shrugged away the heartfelt words nonchalantly, not sharing his own fears that the man he didn’t know wouldn’t wake and he would be forced to put him down. That would have potentially pushed the subtle enmity between marines and squaddies to boil closer to the surface, if only he and a dead man had known the truth of things. But luckily, that had not happened.

  “It must be only the teeth, I reckon,” he told Johnson.

  “The teeth?”

  “Yeah, I mean, the scratches didn’t infect him, not with the Screecher virus or whatever anyway, and the teeth didn’t break the skin, so I reckon it’s something about the teeth,” he explained simply before adding a warning, “But he’ll definitely need some antibiotics; God knows what shit has got into him otherwise.”

  “I’ll pass that up, thanks,” Johnson told him, then asked if he was okay to sort moving Ashdown to where his family was temporarily living.

  “I think your mate has ideas there, Sir,” he said, pointing to the approaching sergeant Maxwell, “If you don’t need me anymore, mind if I find my oppos?” he asked hopefully, meaning his friends and fellow marines.

  “No, thanks again, marine,” Johnson said and offered him a han
d.

  Sealey shook it, replying, “No problem, I’m hanging after lashing up your Pongo,” he finished with a goading grin before trotting off to find his ‘oppos’.

  Johnson smiled at the liberal use of marine slang, which he suspected was either partly for his benefit, or that marine Sealey had joined young and been transformed into the rare beast of a Royal Marine Commando and embraced their unique language as his own.

  Maxwell joined him and asked, “Did that Bootneck just call us Pongos?”

  “Yep,” Johnson replied with amusement, smirking at the marine’s name for the apparently foul-smelling soldiers of the British Army.

  “If it ain’t bad enough with the arabs…” Maxwell said, using their own inside terminology meaning Arrogant Regular Army Bastards. The rift between the regulars and the reservists, although not noticeable since the brief bar fight, had not come to a head for one simple reason in Johnson’s opinion; there were more reservists than regulars to make it a fair fight. He had hoped that the kind of territorial pissing contests of different military units and branches in one confined space wouldn’t affect them, given the unprecedented depth of shit they found themselves in, but it seemed that wasn’t to be the case.

  The marines were fine. They were led by a competent officer and sergeant and while they kept themselves to themselves, they weren’t hostile in the slightest.

  And besides, he thought to himself, I’d be worried if there wasn’t a bit of inter-service piss-taking.

  “Anyway,” Johnson said as he snapped out of his small reveries and changed the subject, “Ashdown says his family is with yours, that right?”

  “Yes,” he answered simply, then frowned and turned to Johnson with wide eyes, “What? He spoke?”

  “He’s fine, Simon,” Johnson told him, “said Bootneck reckons he’ll need antibiotics, but the thing didn’t manage to bite him. He’s still himself.”